AllFreeNovel
Share Us
On my fourth pass along rue Dufresne, I spotted the red flicker of a taillight halfway up the block, shot forward, and waited as a Ford Fiesta the size of my shoe maneuvered itself free. With much shifting and swearing, I managed to wedge my car into the vacated space.
Pleased with my small victory, and quite sweaty, I grabbed my laptop and briefcase and headed toward the Édifice Wilfrid-Derome, a thirteen-story glass-and-steel building renamed years ago to honor Quebec’s famous pioneer criminalist.
Not unreasonably, or out of stubbornness, many locals still call the structure the SQ building. The Laboratoire de sciences judiciaires et de médecine légale, the province’s combined medico-legal and crime lab, occupies the top two floors. The Bureau du coroner is on eleven. The morgue and autopsy suites are in the basement. All other footage belongs to the Sûreté du Québec, the provincial police. The SQ or QPP, depending on whether you lean francophone or anglophone. French or English.
Hurrying along the sidewalk, I could see theT-shaped behemoth looming over the quartier. Somehow, the brooding hulk looked wrong against the cheery blue sky.
And cheery it was.
Summer was in full command now, the days hot and muggy, the nights starry and sultry. After the long, bleak winter and the year’s heartless spring,les Montréalaiswere delighting in their town’s balmy rebirth.
Bare-shouldered women and pasty-legged men in Bermudas and sandals sipped endless iced coffees and drank pitchers of Molson at tables dragged onto walkways and patios by barpropriétairesandrestaurateurs. Cyclists and rollerbladers filled the bike paths paralleling the city’s thoroughfares and waterways. Pram-pushers, joggers, students, and dogwalkers formed colorful streams flowing in both directions along les rues Ste-Catherine, St-Denis, St-Laurent, and nearby boulevards.
Festivals had begun cascading in quick succession. Les Franco Folies de Montréal. The Formula 1 Grand Prix du Canada. The International Jazz Festival. The Festival International Nuits d’Afrique. Just for Laughs. Montréal Complètement Cirque.
The season had been a long time coming. Knowing it wouldn’t tarry, the populace was embracing it with a gusto lacking in my native North Carolina.
But there’d be no strolling, lemonade sipping, or picnicking for me today. I was heading to an autopsy room to examine dead babies.
Feeling melancholy. On the Fourth of July.
Don’t misunderstand. I enjoyed Canada Day and Saint-Jean-Baptiste—La fête nationale du Québec. Great fun. But neither was a star-spangled birthday party like the Fourth.
Get over it, Brennan.
Entering the lobby, I swiped my security pass, swiped it again in the elevator, at the entrance to the twelfth floor, and at the glass doors separating the medico-legal wing from the rest of theT. Tight security? You bet.
The corridor was quiet early on a Thursday morning. As I passed windows opening onto microbiology, histology, and pathology labs, I could see white-coated men and women working at microtomes, desks, and sinks. Several waved or mouthed greetings through the glass.Marcel, one of the new technicians, might have said “Joyeux quatre juillet.” Happy Fourth of July.
I returned their greetings with a quick wave and continued to the anthropology/odontology lab, the last in the row. After placing my laptop and briefcase on the desk and stowing my purse in a drawer, I slipped into a lab coat, collected the box of bones that I’d recently recovered, and carried it to my examination table.
Steeling myself for the upcoming task, and barring all thoughts of my daughter, Katy, when she was an infant, I arranged what was left of the first tiny skeleton. There was little to arrange. When finished, I began on the next.
I’d been sorting and rearticulating for almost two hours when I sensed, more than heard, a presence at my back. A skill I’ve developed over years of interaction, perhaps relying on the detection of olfactory cues, among them the faint smell of pipe tobacco. I turned.
“Bonjour,Temperance.” LaManche greeted me in his precise Parisian French. Of all my acquaintances, only he insists on using the formal version of my name. No shortening to Tempe for him.
“Bonjour,” I replied. “Comment ça va?”
“Ça va.”
From the look on his face, things weren’t going as well as he claimed. Maybe. The old man’s hound-dog features whittled deep by vertical creases made him hard to read.
A word about my boss.
Dr. Pierre LaManche has been a pathologist since God invented dirt,le directeurof the medico-legal section of the LSJML for as long as I’ve worked there. I couldn’t have guessed his age when we first met. Still can’t. He’s older now, obviously, a little more stooped, but still a man of impressive stature. And stealth.
Either by intent or habit, perhaps one having matured into the other, LaManche moves with a stillness that allows him to appear without notice. He wears crepe-soled shoes and keeps his pockets free of coins and keys. No squeaking. No jingling. Some find this lack of auditory forewarning unsettling.
“I’m about to begin on the infants from Sainte-Agathe,” I said, assuming LaManche was there for a preliminary report on my previous two days’ activities. Following a phone tip, he’d sent me with a team from Service de l’identité judiciaire, Division des scènes de crime, Quebec’s version of CSI, to search the basement of a farmhouse in a rural area in the Laurentians.
“There are four in all, correct?” LaManche asked glumly, arms folded across his chest.
I nodded. “Each was buried in some sort of small container. Maybe a shoe box. I was able to salvage several scraps of what appears to be cardboard.”
“Have you a rough estimate of when these poor babies perished?”
“My first impression is that the deaths occurred over time, with none being recent.” I hesitated. “But—”
