Death Du Jour (8 page)

“Duh. Of course I’ll check it out. I’m not flat-ass stupid.”

No. She was not stupid. But when Harry wants something, she wants it intensely. And there is no dissuading her.

I hung up feeling a little shaken. The thought of Harry advising people with problems was unnerving.

Around six I made myself a dinner of sautéed chicken breast, boiled red potatoes with butter and chives, and steamed asparagus. A glass of Chardonnay would have made it perfect. But not for me. That switch had been in the off position for seven years and it was
staying there. I’m not flat-ass stupid either. At least not when I’m sober. The meal still beat the hell out of last night’s soda crackers.

As I ate, I thought about my baby sister. Harry and formal education have never been compatible. She married her high school sweetheart the day before graduation, three others after that. She’s raised Saint Bernards, managed a Pizza Hut, sold designer sunglasses, led tours in the Yucatán, done PR for the Houston Astros, started and lost a carpet-cleaning business, sold real estate, and, most recently, taken up riders in hot air balloons.

When I was three and Harry was one, I broke her leg by rolling over it with my tricycle. She never slowed down. Harry learned to walk while dragging a cast. Unbearably annoying and totally endearing, my sister offsets with pure energy what she lacks in training or focus. I find her thoroughly exhausting.

At nine-thirty I turned on the hockey game. It was the end of the second period and the Habs were losing four-zip to St. Louis. Don Cherry blustered about the ineptness of the Canadiens management, his face round and flushed above his high-collar shirt. He looked more like a tenor in a barbershop quartet than a sports commentator. I watched, bemused that millions listened to him every week. At ten-fifteen I turned off the TV and went to bed.

*   *   *

The next morning I got up early and drove to the lab. Monday is a busy day for most medical examiners. The random acts of cruelty, senseless bravado, lonely self-loathing, and wretched bad timing that result in violent death accelerate on weekends. The bodies arrive and are stored in the morgue for Monday autopsy.

This Monday was no exception. I got coffee and joined the morning meeting in LaManche’s office. Natalie Ayers was at a murder trial in Val-d’Or, but the other pathologists were present. Jean Pelletiér had just returned from testifying in Kuujjuaq, in far northern Quebec. He was showing snapshots to Emily Santangelo and Michel Morin. I leaned in.

Kuujjuaq looked as if it had been flown in and assembled the night before.

“What’s that?” I asked, indicating a prefab building with a plastic outer layer.

“The aqua center.” Pelletiér pointed to a red hexagonal sign with unfamiliar characters above,
Arrêt
below in bold white letters. “All the signs are in French and Inuktitut.” His upriver accent was so heavy, to my ear he might have been speaking the latter. I’d known him for years and still had trouble understanding his French.

Pelletiér pointed at another prefab building. “That’s the courthouse.”

It looked like the pool, sans plastic. Behind the town, the tundra stretched gray and bleak, a Serengeti of rocks and moss. A bleached caribou skeleton lay by the roadside.

“Is that common?” asked Emily, studying the caribou.

“Only when they’re dead.”

“There are eight autopsies today,” said LaManche, handing out the roster. He went over them all. A nineteen-year-old male had been hit by a train, his torso bisected. It happened on a barricaded trestle frequented by teens.

A snowmobile had gone through the ice on Lac Megantic. Two bodies recovered. Alcohol intoxication suspected.

An infant had been found dead and putrefied in its bed. Mama, who was downstairs watching a game show when authorities arrived, said ten days earlier God told her to stop feeding the baby.

An unidentified white male was found behind a Dumpster on the McGill campus. Three bodies were recovered from a house fire in St-Jovite.

Pelletiér was assigned the infant. He indicated that he might request an anthropology consult. While the baby’s identity was not in question, cause and time of death would be tough.

Santangelo got the bodies from Lac Megantic, Morin the train and Dumpster cases. The victims from the bedroom in St-Jovite were intact enough for normal autopsy. LaManche would perform them. I would do the bones from the basement.

After the meeting, I went to my office and opened a dossier by transferring the information from the morning etiquette sheet onto an anthropology case form. Name:
Inconnu
. Unknown. Date of birth: blank. Laboratoire de Médecine Légale number: 31013. Morgue number: 375. Police incident number: 89041. Pathologist: Pierre LaManche. Coroner: Jean-Claude Hubert. Investigators: Andrew Ryan and Jean Bertrand, Escouade de Crimes Contre la Personne, Sûreté du Québec.

I added the date and slipped the form into a file folder. Each of us uses a different color. Pink is Marc Bergeron, the odontologist. Green is Martin Levesque, the radiologist. LaManche uses red. A bright yellow jacket means anthropology.

I keyed in and rode the elevator to the basement. There I asked an autopsy technician to place LML 31013 in room three, then went to change into surgical scrubs.

The four autopsy rooms of the Laboratoire de Médecine Légale are adjacent to the morgue. The LML controls the former, the Bureau du Coroner the latter. Autopsy room two is large and contains three tables. The others have one each. Number four is equipped with special ventilation. I often work there since many of my cases are less than fresh. Today I left room four to Pelletiér and the baby. Charred bodies do not have a particularly offensive odor.

When I got to room three, a black body bag and four plastic containers lay on a gurney. I peeled the lid from a tub, removed the cotton padding, and checked the skull pieces. They had weathered the trip without damage.

I filled out a case identification card, unzipped the body bag, and pulled back the sheet that wrapped the bones and debris. I took several Polaroids, then sent everything for X-rays. If there were teeth or metal objects, I wanted to pinpoint them before disturbing the fill.

As I waited I thought of Élisabeth Nicolet. Her coffin was locked in a cooler ten feet from me. I was anxious to see what was in it. One of my messages this morning had been from Sister Julienne. The nuns were impatient, too.

After thirty minutes Lisa wheeled the bones back from radiography and handed me an envelope of films. I popped several onto a view box, starting with the foot end of the body bag.

“They’re O.K.?” asked Lisa. “I wasn’t sure what setting to use with all that rubble in there, so I did several exposures of each.”

“They’re good.”

We were looking at an amorphous mass surrounded by two tiny white railroad tracks: the bag’s contents
and metal zipper. The fill was speckled with construction debris, and here and there, a particle of bone appeared pale and honeycombed against the neutral background.

“What’s that?” Lisa pointed to a white object.

“Looks like a nail.”

I replaced the first films with three more. Soil, pebbles, scraps of wood, nails. We could see the leg and hip bones with attached charred flesh. The pelvis looked intact.

“Looks like metallic fragments in the right femur,” I said, indicating several white spots in the thigh bone. “Let’s be careful when we handle that. We’ll get another shot later.”

The next films showed the ribs to be as fragmented as I remembered. The arm bones were better preserved, though fractured and badly jumbled. Several vertebrae looked salvageable. Another metal object was visible to the left of the thorax. It didn’t look like a nail.

“Let’s watch for that, too.”

Lisa nodded.

Next we examined the X-rays of the plastic tubs. They showed nothing unusual. The mandible had held together well, the slender tooth roots still solidly encased in bone. Even the crowns were intact. I could see bright blobs in two of the molars. Bergeron would be pleased. If there were dental records, the fillings would be useful in establishing positive ID.

Then I noticed the frontal bone. It was speckled with tiny white dots, as though someone had seasoned it with salt.

“I’m going to want another shot of that, too,” I said softly, staring at the radiopaque particles near the left orbit.

Lisa gave me an odd look.

“O.K. Let’s get him out,” I said.

“Or her.”

“Or her.”

Lisa spread a sheet over the autopsy table and set a screen across the sink. I took a paper apron from one of the stainless steel counter drawers, slipped it over my head, and tied it around my waist. Then I placed a mask over my mouth, pulled on surgical gloves, and unzipped the body bag.

Starting at the feet and working north, I removed the largest and most easily identifiable objects and pieces of bone. Then I went back and sifted the fill to locate any small items or bone fragments I might have missed. Lisa screened each handful under gently running water. She washed and placed artifacts on the counter, while I arranged skeletal elements in anatomical order on the sheet.

At noon Lisa broke for lunch. I worked through, and by two-thirty the painstaking process was done. A collection of nails, metal caps, and one exploded cartridge lay on the counter, along with a small plastic vial containing what I thought could be a scrap of fabric. A charred and disconnected skeleton lay on the table, the skull bones fanning out like petals on a daisy.

It took over an hour to do an inventory, identifying each bone and determining if it came from the left or right side. Then I turned my attention to the questions Ryan would ask. Age. Sex. Race. Who is it?

I picked up the mass that contained the pelvis and thigh bones. The fire had cooked the soft tissue, turning it black and leathery hard. A mixed blessing. The bones had been protected, but it might be a bitch getting them out.

I rotated the pelvis. The flesh on the left had burned away, causing the femur to split. I could see a perfect cross section of the ball-and-socket hip joint. I measured the diameter of the femoral head. It was tiny, falling on the low end of the female range.

I studied the internal structure of the head, just below the articular surface. The spicules of bone showed the typical honeycombed pattern of an adult, with no thick line to indicate a recently fused growth cap. That was consistent with the completed molar roots I’d noticed earlier in the jaw. This victim was not a kid.

I looked at the outer edges of the cup that formed the hip socket, and at the lower border of the femoral head. On both the bone seemed to drip downward, like wax overflowing a candle. Arthritis. The individual was not young.

I already suspected the victim was a woman. What remained of the long bones were small in diameter, with smooth-muscle attachments. I shifted my attention to the cranial fragments.

Small mastoids and brow ridges. Sharp orbital borders. The bone was smooth at the back of the skull and in all the places male bone would be rough and bumpy.

I examined the frontal bone. The upper ends of the two nasal bones were still in place. They met at a high angle along the midline, like a church steeple. I found two pieces of maxilla. The lower border of the nasal opening ended in a sharp ledge with a spike of bone projecting upward at its center. The nose had been narrow and prominent, the face straight when viewed from the side. I located a fragment of temporal bone and shone a flashlight into the ear opening. I could see a tiny round opening, the oval window to the inner ear. All good Caucasoid traits.

Female. White. Adult. Old.

I returned to the pelvis, hoping it would allow me to confirm the sex and be more precise about the age. I was particularly interested in the region where the two halves meet in front.

Gently, I teased away charred tissue, revealing the joint between the pubic bones, the pubic symphysis. The pubes themselves were wide, the angle below them broad. Each had a raised ridge angling across its corner. The lower branch of each pubic bone was gracile and gently recurved. Typical female features. I noted them on my case form and took more Polaroid close-ups.

The intense heat had shrunk the connective cartilage and pulled the pubic bones apart along the midline. I twisted and turned the charred mass, trying to peer into the gap. It looked like the symphyseal surfaces were intact, but I couldn’t make out any detail.

“Let’s take the pubes out,” I said to Lisa.

I smelled burned flesh as the saw buzzed through the wings connecting the pubic bone to the rest of the pelvis. It took just seconds.

The symphyseal joint was singed, but easily readable. There were no ridges or furrows on either surface. In fact, both faces were porous, their outer edges irregularly lipped. Erratic threads of bone projected from the front of each pubic element, ossifications into the surrounding soft tissue. The lady had lived a long time.

I turned the pubes over. A deep trench scarred the belly side of each. And she had given birth.

I reached again for the frontal bone. For a moment I stood there, the fluorescent light showing in harsh detail what I’d first suspected in the basement, and what the metallic scatter on the X-ray had confirmed.

I’d held my feelings at bay, but now I allowed myself
to grieve for the ravaged human being on my table. And to puzzle over what had happened to her.

The woman had been at least seventy, undoubtedly a mother, probably a grandmother.

Why had someone shot her in the head and left her to burn in a house in the Laurentians?