prickle of fear. Maybe it wasn’t just a drunk. I squinted into the rearview mirror, trying to make out the driver. All I could see was a silhouette. It looked large. A man? I couldn’t tell. The lights were blinding. The car unidentifiable.
Hands slick on the wheel, I crossed Guy, turned left around the block, ignoring red lights, shot up my street, and dived underground into the garage of my building.
I waited until the electric door had settled, then bolted, key ready, ears alert for the sound of footsteps. No one followed. As I passed through the first-floor lobby, I peeked through the curtains. A car idled at the curb on the far side of the street, lights burning, its driver a black profile in the predawn dimness. Same car? I couldn’t be certain. Was I losing it?
Thirty minutes later I lay watching the curtain of darkness outside my window fade from charcoal to mourning dove gray. Birdie purred in the crook of my knee. I was so exhausted I’d pulled off my clothes and fallen into bed, skipping the preliminaries. Not like me. Usually I’m compulsive about teeth and makeup. Tonight, I didn’t care.
20
WEDNESDAY IS GARBAGE DAY ON MY BLOCK. I SLEPT THROUGH THE sound of the sanitation truck. I slept through Birdie’s nudging. I slept through three phone calls.
I woke at ten-fifteen feeling sluggish and headachy. I was definitely not twenty-four anymore. All-nighters took their toll, and it made me cranky to admit it.
My hair, my skin, even the pillow and sheets smelled of stale smoke. I bundled the linens and last night’s clothes into the washer, then took a long, sudsy shower. I was spreading peanut butter on a stale croissant when the phone rang.
“Temperance?” LaManche.
“Yes.”
“I have been trying to reach you.”
I glanced at the phone machine. Three messages.
“Sorry.”
“Oui. We will be seeing you today? Already Monsieur Ryan is calling.”
“I’ll be there within the hour.”
“Bon.”
I played the messages. A distraught graduate student. LaManche. A hang-up. I wasn’t up to student problems, so I tried Gabby. No answer. I dialed Katy and got her machine.
“Leave a short message, like this one,” it chirped cheerily. I did, not cheerily.
In twenty minutes I was at the lab. Stuffing my purse in a desk drawer, and ignoring the pink slips scattered across the blotter, I went directly downstairs to the morgue.
The dead come first to the morgue. There, they are logged in and stored in refrigerated compartments until assigned to an LML pathologist. Jurisdiction is coded by floor color. The morgue opens directly onto the autopsy rooms, the red floor of each morgue bay stopping abruptly at the autopsy room threshold. The morgue is run by the coroner, the LML controls the operatories. Red floor: coroner. Gray floor: LML. I do my initial examinations in one of the four autopsy rooms. Afterward, the bones are sent up to the histology lab for final cleaning.
LaManche was making a Y incision in the chest of an infant, her tiny shoulders propped on a rubber headrest, her hands spread at her sides as if poised to make a snow angel. I looked at LaManche.
“Secouée,” was all he said. Shaken.
Across the room Nathalie Ayers bent over another autopsy as Lisa lifted the breastplate from a young man. Below a shock of red hair his eyes bulged purple and swollen, and I could see a small, dark hole on his right temple. Suicide. Nathalie was a new pathologist at the LML, and didn’t yet do homicides.
Daniel put down the scalpel he was sharpening. “Do you need the bones from St. Lambert?”
“S’il vous plaît. In number 4?”
He nodded and disappeared into the morgue.
The skeletal autopsy took several hours, and I confirmed my initial impression that the remains were of one individual, a white female around thirty years of age. Though little soft tissue remained, the bones were in good condition and retained some fat. She’d been dead two to five years. The only oddity was an unfused arch on her fifth lumbar vertebra. Without the head, a positive ID would be tough.
I asked Daniel to transfer the bones to the histo lab, washed, and went upstairs. The pile of pink slips had grown. I phoned Ryan and gave him my summary. He was already working missing persons reports with the St. Lambert police.
One of the calls was from Aaron Calvert in Norman, Oklahoma. Yesterday. When I tried his number, a syrupy voice told me he was away from his desk. She assured me she was devastatingly sorry,