Bones Are Forever (5 page)

“SIJ is shorthanded today.” Wanting practice, Lisa usually speaks English to me. “One photographer will float between us and Dr. LaManche.”

“That’s fine. We’ll do our own pics.”

Fortysomething, Lisa has been a diener since receiving certification at age nineteen. Clever and knowledgeable, with hands as adept as any surgeon’s, she is, far and away, the best autopsy tech at the LSJML.

Lisa is also the favorite of every cop in Quebec. I suspect that,
besides her skill and sunny disposition, her blond hair and large bra size figure in.

“They look so little.” Lisa was staring at the bags, sadness on her face.

“Let’s get a series of pics before we remove them.”

While Lisa filled out a case identifier and checked the Nikon, I entered information onto the first of my case forms.

Name:
Inconnu
. Date of birth: blank. Laboratoire de sciences judiciaires et de médecine légale number: 49277. Morgue number: 589. Police incident number: 43729. Pathologist: Pierre LaManche. Coroner: Jean-Claude Hubert. Investigator: Andrew Ryan. Section des crimes contre la personne, Sûreté du Québec.

As I added the date and began a form for the attic baby, Lisa took pictures of the two black pouches. Then she snapped on gloves, pulled a plastic sheet from a below-counter drawer, spread it across the autopsy table, and looked a question at me.

“Unzip them,” I said.

The rolled towels were as I remembered, one green, one yellow, both dappled brown by the liquids of death. Using two hands, Lisa transferred each to the table. I made notes as she shot more photos.

“We’ll start with the baby from the window seat.” I indicated the yellow bundle.

Using her fingertips, Lisa gently teased free and laid back the outer layer of toweling. Then she rolled the bundle sideways, slowly revealing its contents.

A human baby is a very small biomass. Following death, the scarcity of body fat may lead to mummification instead of putrefaction. Such had been the case in the window seat.

The little corpse was tightly compressed, the head down, the arms and legs flexed and crossed over each other. Desiccated skin, muscle, and ligament wrapped the thorax, abdomen, and limbs, and stretched across the delicate bones of the face. The empty orbits held masses that looked like shriveled grapes.

Lisa was reaching for the Nikon when Pomier stuck his head through the door and spoke to me. “Dr. LaManche has a question.”

“Now?” Slightly annoyed.

Pomier nodded.

Though anxious to begin my analysis, I knew the chief would never interrupt with anything trivial.

“Shoot from every angle, close-up and overview,” I said to Lisa. “Then get a full set of X-rays.”

“All the bones will be superimposed. There is nothing I can do about that.”

“Taking measurements from the X-rays may prove impossible. But do your best. If I’m not back when you finish, unroll and photograph the second baby. Any questions, you know where to find me.”

Lisa nodded.

“Let’s go,” I said to Pomier.

Every morgue is characterized by its own blend of odors, sometimes subtle, sometimes overpowering, but always present. These smells have been a part of my life for so long, I sometimes imagine them in my sleep.

Bodies recovered from water are among the most pungent. In the corridor, the stench of Santangelo’s drowning victim was overtaking the ever-present aromas of disinfectant and deodorizer.

The bludgeoning victim lay on the far table in room three. The woman’s face was swollen and distorted, her left side purpled due to livor mortis, the postmortem settling of blood in a corpse’s downside.

Robitaille was picking through the woman’s hair, searching her scalp section by section. Pelletier was examining her toes.

LaManche and the SIJ photographer were at the near table. She was very tall and very pale. A tag on her shirt said S. Tanenbaum. I didn’t know her.

Not so the third party. Andrew Ryan.

As we crossed to him, LaManche tucked the baby’s right hand back to her side, lifted and studied her left. He made no comment, jotted no note.

I knew where the chief’s thoughts were pointed. No defense wounds. Of course not. The infant was far too helpless to take action to save her own life, and the manner of death probably had not involved a blow. There would not have been even reflexive reaction.

One thing struck me right off. Everyone in the room was working quietly, talking in hushed tones when a question was posed or an instruction was given. No jokes. No quips. None of the irreverent humor used to ease tension at crime scenes and autopsies.

The baby looked far too vulnerable lying naked on the cold stainless steel.

“Temperance. Thank you.” Over his mask, LaManche’s eyes looked weary and sad. “The child measures thirty-seven centimeters long.”

Haase’s rule: during the last five months of gestation, fetal length in centimeters divided by five equals the number of months of pregnancy. I did a quick calculation.

“She’s small for a full-term baby,” I said.

“
Oui
. Crown-rump length. Biparietal diameter. Every measure. The detective and I are wondering with what accuracy you can determine her age.”

I knew what LaManche wanted. A fetus is considered viable after seven months of gestation. If born earlier, survival is possible but unlikely without medical intervention.

“In case you find no abnormality but the mother claims the baby was premature and stillborn,” I said.

“That’s usually their story. The kid was dead, I panicked and stashed the body.” Ryan’s jaw muscles bunched, relaxed. “Without a witness or evidence to the contrary, such cases are bastards to prosecute.”

I thought a moment. “I haven’t looked at the attic baby yet, but the one from the window seat is desiccated and contorted. The tissue is so adhered, it will be tough removing the bones without damaging them. And standard X-rays will be of limited use due to bone and tissue superimposition. I’m thinking the best approach with the mummified remains might be MSCT.”

Four blank looks.

“Multislice computed tomography. I suggest we use it for this baby, too. That way I can measure and observe the skeleton while it’s articulated by soft tissue. A big advantage of MSCT is that it gives an isotopic image and doesn’t distort the anatomical reality. I can measure the long bones on 2-D reconstructions and get anatomical length directly without need for a correction factor. After we view
the scans, you can proceed with your regular autopsy.”

As I spoke, my eyes roved the tiny girl on the table. She’d been brushed clean but not yet water-sprayed.

“It cannot hurt.” LaManche looked at Pomier. “The staff at St. Mary’s has been helpful in the past. Phone the radiology department. See if it is possible to use their scanner.”

In his haste to do as directed, Pomier pivoted too quickly. His shoe knocked a caster on a portable light snugged to one end of the table. The floor stand wobbled. Ryan grabbed and steadied the extension arm holding the halogen bulb.

As the light jumped, my eyes caught something my brain didn’t process.

What?

“Shift it again,” I said, leaning close to the baby.

Ryan did.

Yes. There. Where the right shoulder met the curve of the baby’s neck. Not so much a spot as an absence of luminosity, a dullness compared to the surrounding skin.

A few gray cells offered up a suggestion.

Hardly daring to hope, I crossed to the counter, grabbed a hand lens, and viewed the irregularity under magnification.

“Look at this,” I said.

“C
ÂLISSE,”
LAMANCHE WHISPERED.

“You’re thinking print.” Ryan’s tone was so flat, I wondered if he was dubious or simply trying to be objective.

“ALS?” Pomier asked.

“Please,” I said.

“I’ll get the powder,” Tanenbaum said.

Both techs left, reappeared shortly. Pomier was carrying goggles and a black box with a handle on top and a flexible wand projecting from one end. Tanenbaum had a fingerprint kit.

“May we go dark for a few minutes?” I called down to Pelletier.

“No problem. Madame is going for X-rays.”

As I pointed out the area in question, Tanenbaum dusted bright orange powder onto the baby’s neck.

Pomier hooked up the CrimeScope CS-16-500, an alternate light source capable of providing wavelengths ranging from infrared to ultraviolet. When done, he distributed orange-tinted plastic goggles. LaManche, Ryan, Tanenbaum, and I donned them.

“Ready?” Pomier asked.

LaManche nodded.

Pomier killed the overheads, slipped on his goggles, adjusted dials on the CrimeScope, then positioned the wand over the baby.

Slowly, the light crept up the pale little feet. It probed the hills
and valleys of the perfect toes, the knees, the groin, the belly. Lit the hollow from which the shriveled umbilical cord hung.

Here and there, filaments lit up like hot white wires. Hairs? Fibers? Maybe useful, maybe not. I tweezed and transferred each into a plastic vial.

Finally, the beam swept the gentle curve where the baby’s right shoulder met its neck. Pomier twisted a knob to return to the lower end of the green spectrum, then slowly moved up the wavelengths.

And there it was. An oval composed of concentric loops and whirls.

We all leaned closer.

“Bonjour,”
Pomier said in the darkness.

“I’ll be damned.”

Ryan’s voice at my ear made me aware of decidedly nonmorgue smells. Bay Rum cologne, starched cotton, a hint of male perspiration.

Feeling awkward, I straightened. “Because the skin is so soft and finely textured, it’s easier to get a latent from an infant than from an adult,” I said crisply.

I heard rattling and knew Tanenbaum was placing an orange filter over the lens of her digital camera. We all waited out a long series of clicks. The next sequence of noises told me she was using an adhesive lifter to transfer the print.

“Je l’ai,”
she said after several minutes. “I’ve got it.”

Though we worked another half hour in the dark, our efforts revealed nothing else of interest. Still, we were all pumped as hell.

Pomier restored the lights, then went to inquire about the use of the CT scanner at St. Mary’s Hospital.

Tanenbaum hurried off to run our prize through CPIC, the Canadian Police Information Center. Like the U.S.’s AFIS, the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, CPIC functions as a database for fingerprints and other information critical to police investigations.

LaManche resumed his external examination of the baby. Ryan headed upstairs to check for responses to queries he’d circulated about Amy Roberts/Alma Rogers/Alva Rodriguez and Ralph Trees.

When I returned to autopsy room four, Lisa had finished
photographing both LSJML-49277 and LSJML-49278. She’d also popped X-rays of the former onto light boxes ringing the room.

I moved through the films, pessimistic. I was right. The window-seat baby was so tightly constricted that overlap of the bones made assessment difficult and measurement impossible. Frustrated, I crossed to the table where LSJML-49278 now lay on its unrolled towel beside the window-seat baby.

The attic baby had been reduced to a skeleton and fragments of dry ligament. Lisa had arranged some of the bones to form a miniature person. Most lay to one side on the grimy green terry cloth.

I wasn’t surprised she’d failed to identify more. In a newborn, the cranial bones are unfinished and unfused. The vertebral arches are separate from the little disk bodies. Each pelvic half is composed of three disconnected bits. The long bones are amorphous shafts lacking the anatomical detail and joint surfaces that make femora, tibiae, fibulae, humeri, radii, and ulnae distinct. Ditto the teeny bones of the hands and feet.

Bottom line: most people wouldn’t recognize a fetal skeleton if it hit them on the head. Even with training in juvenile osteology, classification of specific elements can be tough.

I checked the clock. Already it was going on eleven.

“This will be slow,” I said to Lisa. “If you have things to do, I’m good working alone.”

She seemed undecided, then, “Call if you need me.”

I began by arranging the cranium in a pattern that looked like an exploded rose blossom. The frontal, the parietals, the sphenoid, the temporal and occipital segments. While sorting, I processed detail.

The occipital bone contributes to the back and the base of the skull. In a fetus, it consists of four pieces. The
pars squama
is the upper, rounded portion. The paired
pars lateralis
and the single
pars basilaris
lie down under, surrounding the foreman magnum, the hole through which the spinal cord enters the brain.

I used sliding calipers to measure the chunky little
pars basilaris
. Its width exceeded its length, placing the baby’s gestational age at over seven months.

I positioned the needles on each end of the left
pars lateralis
and
read the dial. Its length exceeded that of the
pars basilaris
. That nudged the gestational age to eight months.