Bones to Ashes

Harry loves sex. Harry is also easily bored. I didn’t want to hear about Arnoldo’s violin.

“Why sell the house?”

“It’s too big.”

“It was too big when you bought it.”

Husband number something was an oil man. I never quite learned what that meant, but their brief nuptials left my sister well oiled, indeed.

“I need a change. Come help me look at real estate.”

“I really can’t.”

“Working on a juicy one?”

I considered, decided against mentioning the Rimouski skeleton. Once ignited, Harry is nonextinguishable. Besides, there was no evidence of an Évangéline Landry connection.

“It’s my busy season.”

“Need sisterly support?”

Please, God. “You know I love your visits, but right now I’m so slammed we wouldn’t be able to spend time together.”

Silence hummed across the line. Then, “What I said about Arnoldo’s not really true. Fact is, I caught the bastard coyoting around.”

“I’m sorry, Harry.” I was. Though I wasn’t surprised.

“Yeah. Me, too.”

After slipping into jeans and a polo, I fed Birdie and filled Charlie’s seed and water dishes. The bird whistled and asked me to shake my booty. I moved his cage to the den and popped in a cockatiel-training CD.

At the lab, there was nothing in my mailbox. No flashing light on the phone. A mini-avalanche had taken place on my desk. No pink message slip lay among the wreckage.

I called down to the morgue. No bones had arrived from Rimouski.

OK, buster. You’ve got until noon.

At the morning meeting I was assigned one new case.

The purchasers of a funeral home had discovered an embalmed and fully clothed body in a coffin in a basement cooler. The previous operators had closed their doors nine months earlier. The pathologist, Jean Pelletier, wanted my input on X-rays. On the request form he’d written: All dressed up and nowhere to go.

Returning to my office, I phoned a biology professor at McGill University. She didn’t do diatoms, but a colleague did. I could deliver the Lac des Deux Montagnes specimens late the next afternoon.

After packaging the sock and bone plug, and preparing the paperwork, I turned to Pelletier’s lingering corpse case.

Antemortem-postmortem X-ray comparisons showed the deceased was a childless bachelor whose only living brother had moved to Greece. The man’s funeral had been paid for by money order two years earlier. Our ID chucked the ball into the coroner’s court.

Back at my lab, Geneviève Doucet’s bones had finally come out of the cooker. I spent the rest of the morning and well into the afternoon examining each with my new Leica stereomicroscope with magnified digital display. After years of bending over a dinosaur that I’d had to herniate myself to position, I was now equipped with state of the art. I loved this scope.

Nevertheless, magnification revealed little. Lipping of the interphalangeal joint surfaces of the right middle toe. An asymmetrical raised patch on the anterior midshaft of the right tibia. Other than those healed minor injuries, Geneviève’s skeleton was remarkably unremarkable.

I phoned LaManche.

“She jammed her toe and banged her shin,” he summarized my findings .

“Yes,” I agreed.

“That didn’t kill her.”

“No,” I agreed.

“It is something.”

“Sorry I don’t have more to report.”

“How do you like the new microscope?”

“The screen resolution is awesome.”

“I am happy you are pleased.”

I was disconnecting when Lisa entered my lab carrying a large cardboard box. Her hair was pulled into a curly ponytail, and she was wearing blue surgical scrubs. Wearing them well. Firm glutes, slim waist, breasts the size of the Grand Tetons, Lisa is very popular with cops. And the best autopsy tech at the lab.

“Say you’re bringing me a skeleton from Rimouski.”

“I’m bringing you a skeleton from Rimouski.” Lisa often used me to practice her English. She did that now. “It just arrived.”

I flipped through the paperwork. The case had been assigned morgue and lab numbers. I noted the latter. LSJML-57748. The remains had been confiscated from agent Luc Tiquet, Sûreté du Québec, Rimouski. In the case overview cell, Bradette had written: adolescent female, archaeological.

“We’ll see about that, hotshot.”

Lisa looked a question at me.

“Jerk thinks he can do my job. Are you busy downstairs?”

“All autopsies are finished.”

“Want to take a look?” I knew Lisa liked bones.

“Sure.”

As I collected a case report form, Lisa set the box on the table. Joining her, I removed the cover, and we both peered inside.

Bradette was right about one thing. This wasn’t a grown-up.

“It looks very old,” Lisa said.

OK. Maybe two things.

The skeleton was mottled yellow and brown and showed lots of breakage. The skull was misshapen, the face badly damaged. I could see spidery filaments deep in the orbits and in what remained of the nasal opening.

The bones felt feather-light as I lifted and arranged them in anatomical alignment. When I’d finished, a small partial-person lay on my table.