In moments, he was back.
“Sorry, babe. I’ve got to go.”
“You’re leaving?” I was stunned.
“It’s a thankless business.”
“We haven’t eaten your pastry.”
The Irish blues would not meet mine.
“I’m sorry.”
A peck on the cheek.
The chef was alone with her uneaten surprise.
4
I AWOKE FEELING DOWN AND NOT KNOWING WHY.
Because I was alone? Because my only bed partner was a big white cat? I hadn’t planned my life that way. Pete and I had intended to grow old together. To sail married into the afterlife.
Then my forever-hubby shared Mr. Happy with a real estate agent.
And I enjoyed my own little fling with the bottle.
Whatever, as Katy would say. Life marches.
Outside, the weather was gray, blustery, and uninviting. The clock said seven-ten. Birdie was nowhere to be seen.
Pulling off my nightshirt, I took a hot shower, then blow-dried my hair. Birdie strolled in as I was brushing my teeth. I greeted him, then smiled into the mirror, considering whether it was a mascara day.
Then I remembered.
Ryan’s hasty retreat. The look in his eyes.
Jamming my toothbrush back into its charger, I wandered to the bedroom and stared at the frosted window. Crystalline spirals and snowflake geometrics. So delicate. So fragile.
Like the fantasy I’d constructed of a life with Ryan?
I wondered again what was going on.
And why I was acting the featured ditz in a Doris Day comedy.
“Screw this, Doris,” I said aloud.
Birdie looked up, but kept his thoughts to himself.
“And screw you, Andrew Ryan.”
Returning to the bathroom, I layered on the Revlon.
The Laboratoire de Sciences Judiciaires et de Medecine Legale occupies the top two floors of the Edifice Wilfrid-Derome, a T-shaped building in the Hochelaga-Maissoneuve district, just east of Centre-ville. The Bureau du Coroner is on the eleventh floor, the morgue is in the basement. The remaining space belongs to the SQ.
At eight-fifteen the twelfth floor was filling with white-coated men and women. Several greeted me as I swiped my security pass, first at the lobby entrance, then at the glass doors separating the medicolegal wing from the rest of the T. I returned their
As at most medical examiner and coroner facilities, each workday at the LSJML begins with a meeting of the professional staff. I’d barely removed my outerwear when the phone rang. Pierre LaManche. It had been a busy night. The chief was anxious to begin.
When I entered the conference room, only LaManche and Jean Pelletier were seated at the table. Both did that half-standing thing older men do when women enter a room.
LaManche asked about the Petit trial. I told him I thought my testimony had gone well.
“And Monday’s recovery?”
“Except for mild hypothermia, and the fact that your animal bones turned out to be three people, that also went well.”
“You will begin your analyses today?” asked LaManche in his Sorbonne French.
“Yes.” I didn’t mention what I thought I already knew based on my cursory examination in the basement. I wanted to be sure.
“Detective Claudel asked me to inform you that he would come today at one-thirty.”
“Detective Claudel will have a long wait. I’ll hardly have begun.”
Hearing Pelletier grunt, I looked in his direction.
Though subordinate to LaManche, Jean Pelletier had been at the lab a full decade when the chief hired on. He was a small, compact man, with thin gray hair and bags under his eyes the size of mackerels.
Pelletier was a devotee of
