IT WAS A NIGHT OF BAD COFFEE DOWNED WHILE SITTING ON BUTT-numbing chairs. Ryan and I watched Adamski/Keith/O’Keefe by monitor as Claudel spun his magic two doors down.

The story came out slowly, with Claudel doing empathetic, Adamski veering between boastful and whiny.

By two he’d owned Marilyn Keiser. By four he’d rolled on the Villejoins.

This was the creep’s story.

Adamski’s boating mishap was real. After capsizing, he managed to drag himself ashore. Lying soaked and exhausted, he’d had an epiphany. His current life sucked. Loathing lawyers and paperwork, he decided to turn the mishap to his advantage.

After seeding the lake with belongings, Adamski hitched a ride to Nova Scotia. In Halifax, he looked up a fellow businessman, invested in a new identity, and set out for greener pastures south of the border.

Life in America wasn’t the dream Adamski had envisioned and, in 2006, he returned to Quebec. Using an old alias, Bud Keith, he got a kitchen job at the auberge near Sainte-Marguerite. During his tenure at the inn, an alcoholic old lady wandered off and vanished.

Eventually bored with scraping plates and scouring pans, Adamski headed for the bright lights of Montreal. Still living as Bud Keith, he met a waitress named Poppy from Saint-Eustache. Soon they were living together.

At first things were dandy. In due course, Poppy began nagging Adamski to contribute to the cost of their cohabitation. Offering use of her Honda, she suggested door-to-dooring for handyman jobs.

Adamski spent the early part of May 4 in a bar, drinking beer and debating the merits of personal freedom versus a free roof and steady pussy. Pumped on Moosehead and self-pity, he then followed route 344 into Pointe-Calumet, and picked a house with a dead pine in the yard. Anne-Isabelle, his first mark, agreed to his tree-removal proposal, then paid from an oatmeal tin dug from her pantry.

Angry that the job had taken longer than anticipated, Adamski asked for more than the agreed-upon sum. Anne-Isabelle refused. An argument ensued, was concluded by Adamski grabbing the old woman’s cane and clubbing her to death.

Hearing the commotion, Christelle came to investigate. Out of control with rage, Adamski demanded more cash. When Christelle produced a bank card, Adamski shoved her into Poppy’s Honda, drove into the city, and forced her to make a withdrawal.

But time behind the wheel had a sobering effect. Afraid to hit other ATMs as he’d initially intended, and afraid to return to Pointe-Calumet, Adamski stopped to purchase a garden spade. He then killed and buried Christelle in Oka.

Adamski then ditched the Villejoins’ bank card, scrubbed the Honda, and hightailed it to Poppy’s condo in Saint-Eustache. For several months he worked odd jobs, followed coverage of the Villejoin investigation, and lay low.

As time passed and Johnny Law failed to come knocking, Adamski grew increasingly confident he’d gotten away with murder. As was his pattern, he also grew increasingly disenchanted with his living arrangement.

During this period, Adamski logged a lot of couch time with Poppy’s TV. And bless her, she had cable. Along with hockey and reruns of The Rockford Files and Miami Vice, he followed news of a series of home invasions across the border in upstate New York. He learned that, over a two-year span, three senior citizens had been robbed and beaten to death.

Adamski began thinking about the old lady who’d disappeared from L’Auberge des Neiges. About the Villejoins. Though it had been years since he’d seen his former wife, he thought of her, too. He remembered Keiser’s threats to pull her money from the bank, wondered if she’d followed through.

He’d married Keiser for financial gain. But the old lady was nuts, still wanted sex. Living with her was intolerable. As with everything in his life, the plan hadn’t worked out. Like Poppy wasn’t working out.

Adamski did some calculation. Marilyn Keiser would be seventy-two. He’d killed the Villejoins and skated. The women were feeble, provided little challenge.

Adamski established that Keiser still lived in the same building. For weeks he sat in Poppy’s Honda on Édouard-Montpetit, watching his former wife’s comings and goings. He followed her to a synagogue, a market, a community center, a yoga studio.

One Friday, Keiser emerged with an overnighter and drove to Memphrémagog. Adamski followed. To his surprise, she went to his old hunting shack.

Three times he observed this weekend routine. When Keiser wasn’t there he checked security. Visibility. The proximity of neighbors.

Slowly, a plan took shape. He’d break into the cabin, hide Poppy’s car in the shed, and wait. When Keiser arrived he’d demand her stash. If it was hidden at the cabin, perfect. If it was at the apartment, he’d drive her back to town and kill her there. Either way, he’d make it look like a home intrusion.

Except Keiser didn’t surrender as easily as expected. When she finally broke, Adamski was so furious he doused her body with kerosene and tossed a match.

According to Adamski, the women were mostly to blame for their own deaths. His reasoning ran thus. He has problems with rage. They shouldn’t have crossed him. Flawless.

After nearly ten hours of watching the sleazy bastard, I was ready to burst my skin. Or shed it in disgust. Partly the coffee? Maybe.

My brain was still ragged from staring first at the microfilm, then at the grainy image on the closed-circuit TV. Exhaustion had scrambled my emotions, and I had no desire to sort my psyche. I felt sadness, sure. Repugnance. Anger. Yeah, a boatload of anger.

Anyway, by four I’d had it.

With Ryan’s promise to keep me looped in, I headed home.

That night I dreamed again of moths and skeletons and incinerated corpses. Ryan was there, Ayers, Chris Corcoran. Others, too murky to name.

I awoke at eight, again sensing a missed shoulder-tap from my subconscious.

What? The Jurmain, Villejoin, and Keiser cases were closed. The Lac Saint-Jean bones would soon be identified. Nothing remained but Edward Allen’s accuser. Was that the cause of the psst! from my id?

While feeding the cat, I realized I’d failed to tell Ryan about my discovery of the Sainte-Monique boating accident. No biggie. He’d call shortly with an update on Adamski.

“Big day today, Bird.”

Birdie kept crunching his little brown pellets.

“First, I’m going to resolve the Lac Saint-Jean case. Then I’m going to nail the rat bastard who smeared my name.”

Bird shot me the cat equivalent of a reproachful glance. At my use of language? The rodent reference?

I left him to breakfast alone.

At Wilfrid-Derome, a small tan envelope lay on my lab desk. Finally, Joe had taken postmortem X-rays of all the teeth recovered with the Lac Saint-Jean remains.

Sliding the little black films onto a light box, I examined each tooth.

The spot of dullness on the second upper baby molar glowed white and radiopaque. A restoration. Interesting, but of little value without antemortem dental records.

Next, I reexamined each of the Lac Saint-Jean skeletons. Then I called Labrousse, the gynecologist-coroner in Chicoutimi.

After describing my library microfilm find, I asked Labrousse to see what he could dig up locally on the drowning victims. He agreed to look for surviving family members, medical, and dental records. He also offered to check the coroner archives, but doubted anything would remain from 1958.

Agreeing that retention of fifty-year-old files was unlikely, I asked Labrousse to query three things. Was Richard Blackwater First Nations? Was Claire Clemenceau given antibiotics as an infant? Did she have any fillings?

Labrousse said he’d get back to me.

Next, I called the chief coroner.

To describe Hubert’s reaction as skeptical would be akin to calling Bull Run a minor skirmish. Or maybe he hated to admit that my skepticism was justified. Whatever.

His parting remarks: Valentin Gouvrard took tetracycline at age seven months. The kid from the lake had defective baby molars. Quelle coincidence!

Coincidence is right, I thought, hand lingering on the cradled receiver. A coincidence the size of Yankee Stadium.

Sometimes you just know. Call it intuition. Call it deductive reasoning based on experience and subconscious pattern recognition.

I was certain in my gut that the people from Lac Saint-Jean were the Sainte-Monique picnickers. I simply had to prove it.

I searched my brain. Was there anything to indicate the gender of the juvenile skeletons? Given the condition of the bone, measurement was impossible.

I came up blank.

I was gnawing on the problem when Ryan called. He sounded as tired as I felt. That didn’t surprise me. His update did.

“Adamski’s copping to Keiser and the Villejoins, coughing up detail like he’s writing a novel. But he’s adamant about having nothing to do with Jurmain.”

“Do you believe him?”

“Why own three murders and lie about the fourth?”

“You did suggest a little American custom called capital punishment.”

“Adamski lawyered up. He now knows extradition’s not on the table.”

“Is that little trick going to come back to haunt you?”

“No one told Adamski he’d go to the States. It’s not our fault if the moron misinterpreted reference to Jurmain’s citizenship. We were just placing her death in context.”

I thought a moment. Rose Jurmain’s bones had no signs of violence.

“Maybe being at the auberge was nothing more than bad luck for Adamski,” I said.

“Meaning the initial finding was correct. Jurmain wandered off drunk and froze to death.”

“There was no trauma to her skeleton.”

“Except for the bears.”

“Except for that. And her body wasn’t buried or hidden in any way.”

“Speaking of trauma, here’s another kicker. Adamski swears he gut-punched Keiser to death.”

“Why lie about shooting her?”

“Beats me. But the story skews right with his history.”

“But I saw the bullet track. Ayers showed me photos.”

“Maybe Adamski has self-image issues. You know, guns are for sissies, that sort of thing. Or maybe the gun belongs to someone he’s trying to protect. We’re still working him. It’s harder now that he’s hired a mouthpiece.”

I told Ryan about the ’58 boating accident on Lac Saint-Jean.

“Did you ask Jacquème about his brother-in-law’s ancestry?”

“Yes, ma’am. Achille Gouvrard was pure laine.”

Pure laine. Pure wool. Translation: old-line white Québécois.

“And Jacquème remembered something else. Gouvrard fought at the battle of Scheldt in ’forty-four. Came home with shrapnel in his right thigh. Complained of bone pain when temperatures dropped.”

After disconnecting, I got up and popped an X-ray onto the light box. There wasn’t a trace of metal in the male’s right femur.

I studied his broad cheekbones and shoveled incisor.

More than ever I was convinced the man was not Achille Gouvrard.

My eyes shifted to the younger child’s discolored molars.

Again, shame burned my chest.

Briel spotted the tetracycline staining. I did not.

I looked away, out the window. At the scene I’d found calming for so many years. The river. The bridge. The drivers and pedestrians pursuing their everyday lives.

A moth lay on the sill, legs crimped, wings museum-mummy dry. Dead since this summer?

The little corpse triggered recall of my nighttime visitations. The moths. The skeletons. The burned corpses.

Something sat up deep in my brainpan.

I looked back at the bones.

Briel found the staining.

The something rippled the surface of my subconscious.

Briel found the bullet track.

The bullet track.

The something broke through into conscious thought.