Bones to Ashes

More security. Good old-fashioned lock and key.

I’d been away a month. The place looked like I’d been gone since we occupied the building.

Window washers had displaced the framed pictures of my daughter, Katy, and all other memorabilia from the windowsill to a filing cabinet top. Floor polishers had then placed the wastebasket and two plants on the conveniently emptied sill. New CSU coveralls and boots had been heaped on one chair, clean lab coats draped on another. My laminated Dubuffet poster had nosedived from the wall, taking out a pencil holder.

My desk was mounded with materials forwarded from my mail slot in the secretarial office. Letters. Fliers. Ads. In addition, I could identify the following: an updated list of personnel telephone extensions; four packets of prints from Section d’identité judiciaire photographers; two sets of antemortem X-rays and two medical dossiers; a copy of Voir Dire, the LSJML gossip sheet; and three demande d’expertise en anthropologie forms. Three requests for anthropological analysis.

After collecting the upended pens and pencils, I dropped into my chair, cleared a small section of desktop, and scanned the first form asking for my expertise.

Pathologist: M. Morin. Investigating officer: H. Perron, Service de police de la Ville de Montréal. SPVM. Formerly known as the Service de police de la Communauté urbaine de Montréal, or SPCUM, the SPVM are the city boys. Same force, new spin. Nom: Inconnu. Name: Unknown. Skipping over the LSJML, morgue, and police incident numbers, I went straight to the summary of known facts.

Skeletal parts had been bulldozed up at a construction site west of centre-ville. Could I determine if the bones were human? If human, the number of persons? Time since death? If recent, could I ascertain age, sex, race, and height, and describe individuating characteristics for each set of bones? Could I establish cause of death?

Typical forensic anthropology stuff.

The second form was also SPVM, city police. Emily Santangelo was the pathologist, and therefore coordinating all expertise concerning the cadaver. This case involved a house fire, an incinerated corpse, and a denture melted beyond recognition. I was being asked to establish congruence between the charred remains and the ninety-three-year-old man reported living at the address.

Third form. A bloated and badly decomposed body had been dredged from Lac des Deux Montagnes, near L’Île-Bizard. Beyond the fact that the victim was female, the pathologist, LaManche, could determine little. Teeth were present, but there’d been no hit when dental information was entered into CPIC, the Canadian counterpart of the American NCIS. Could I ascertain age and racial background? Could I check the bones for signs of trauma?

Unlike the first two, LaManche’s case was SQ. The provincial cops.

One town, two police agencies? Sounds complicated. It’s not.

Montreal is an island, part of an archipelago trailing from the confluence of the Ottawa and St. Lawrence rivers. Its southern tip is wrapped by the fleuve Saint-Laurent, its northern by the Rivière des Prairies.

The small island is only fifty kilometers long, and varies from five to thirteen kilometers in width, narrowing at its ends and thickening at its center. Its dominant feature is Mont Royal, an igneous intrusion rising a proud 231 meters above sea level. Les Montréalais call this tiny bump la montagne. The mountain.

For policing purposes, Montreal is parceled out according to those particulars of geology. On the island: SPVM. Off the island: SQ. Assuming there is no local PD. Though rivalries exist, in general ça marche. It works.

My eye fell on the name of the investigating SQ officer. Detective-Lieutenant Andrew Ryan.

My stomach did a wee flip.

But more of that later.

Pierre LaManche is a large man in a grandpa-was-a-lumberjack hunched-forward sort of way. Favoring crepe soles and empty pockets, the man moves so quietly he can appear in a room with no warning of approach.

“I apologize for disturbing you at home last evening.” LaManche was standing in my doorway, clipboard in one hand, pen in the other.

“No problem.” Rising, I circled my desk, gathered the lab coats, and hung them on a hook on the back of my door.

LaManche lowered himself into the chair. I waited for him to begin.

“You know maître Asselin, of course.”

In Quebec, coroners are either physicians or attorneys. Odd system, but ça marche. It works. Michelle Asselin was a lawyer, thus the title maître.

I nodded.

“Maître Asselin has been a coroner for as long as I’ve been with this lab.” LaManche stroked his jaw, as though verifying he’d shaved that morning. “She is close to retirement.”

“The complicated case is hers?”

“Indirectly. Maître Asselin has a nephew who farms near Saint-Antoine-Abbé. Théodore Doucet. Théodore and his wife, Dorothée, have one child, a daughter. Geneviève is thirty-two, but has special needs and lives at home.”