I’D BEEN IN MONTREAL A FULL HOUR WHEN LAMANCHE PHONED. Until then, my June rotation to the recently thawed tundra on the St. Lawrence had gone swimmingly.

The flight from Charlotte and the connection from Philadelphia had both operated on time. Birdie had given me minimal grief, protest-meowing only during takeoffs and landings. My luggage had touched down with me. Arriving home, I’d found my condo in reasonably good shape. My Mazda had started on the very first try. Life was good.

Then LaManche rang my mobile.

“Temperance?” He, alone, rejected the more user-friendly “Tempe” employed by the rest of the world. My name rolled off LaManche’s tongue as a high Parisian “Tempéronce.”

“Oui.” My brain kicked into French mode.

“Where are you?”

“Montreal.”

“So I thought. Your trip was good?”

“As good as it gets.”

“Air travel is not what it was.”

“No.”

“You will come early tomorrow?” I sensed tension in the old man’s voice.

“Of course.”

“A case has arrived that is…” Slight hitch. “…complicated.”

“Complicated?”

“I think it best to explain personally.”

“Eight o’clock?”

“C’est bon.”

Disconnecting, I felt a vague sense of trepidation. LaManche rarely phoned me. When he did, it was never good news. Five bikers torched in a Blazer. A woman facedown in a senator’s pool. Four bodies in a crawl space.

LaManche had been a forensic pathologist for over thirty years, directed our medico-legal division for twenty of that. He knew I was scheduled back today, and that I’d report to the lab first thing in the morning. What could be so complicated that he felt the need to double check my availability?

Or so gruesome.

As I unpacked, shopped, stocked the fridge, and ate a salade Niçoise, my mind conjured up scenarios, each worse than the last.

Climbing into bed, I decided to bump my arrival to 7:30 A.M.

One upside to air travel is that it wears you out. Despite my apprehension, I drifted off during the eleven o’clock news.

The next day dawned as if auditioning for a travel brochure. Balmy. Breezy. Turquoise skies.

Having commuted to Quebec for more years than I care to admit, I was certain the climatic fluke would be short-lived. I wanted to bike in the country, picnic on the mountain, Rollerblade the path along the Lachine canal.

Anything but face LaManche’s “complicated” issue.

By seven-forty I was parked at the Édifice Wilfrid-Derome, a T-shaped high-rise in a working-class neighborhood just east of centre-ville. Here’s how the place works.

The Laboratoire de sciences judiciaires et de médecine légale, the LSJML, is the central crime and medico-legal lab for the entire province of Quebec. We’ve got the building’s top two floors, twelve and thirteen. The Bureau du coroner is on ten and eleven. The morgue and autopsy suites are in the basement. The provincial police, La Sûreté du Québec, or SQ, occupies all other space.

Swiping my security card, I passed through metal gates, entered the restricted LSJML / Coroner elevator, swiped again, and ascended with a dozen others mumbling “Bonjour” and “Comment ça va?” At that hour, “Good morning” and “How’s it going?” are equally perfunctory no matter the language.

Four of us exited on the twelfth floor. After crossing the lobby, I swiped a second security card, and passed into the lab’s working area. Through observation windows and open doors I could see secretaries booting computers, techs flipping dials, scientists and analysts donning lab coats. Everyone mainlining coffee.

Past the Xerox machines, I swiped again. Glass doors swooshed, and I entered the medico-legal wing.

The board showed four of five pathologists present. The box beside Michel Morin’s name said: Témoignage: Saint-Jérôme. Testimony in Saint-Jérôme.

LaManche was at his desk, assembling the case list for that morning’s staff meeting. Though I paused at his door, he remained hunched over his paperwork.

Continuing along the corridor, I passed pathology, histology, and anthropology/odontology labs on my left, pathologists’ offices on my right. Pelletier. Morin. Santangelo. Ayers. Mine was last in the row.

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.”

LaManche seemed to study the placement of my wastebasket. I waited for him to go on.

“Dorothée was a regular churchgoer, but stopped attending. No one is certain of the exact date. Though the family was known to be reclusive, neighbors grew worried. Yesterday two parishioners visited the Doucet farm. They found Dorothée and Geneviève dead in an upstairs bedroom. Théodore was downstairs playing Silent Hunter on his computer.”

LaManche mistook my quizzical look. “It is a computer game. One does something with submarines.”

I knew that. I was surprised LaManche did.

“You went to the scene?” I asked.

LaManche nodded. “The house was a nightmare, rooms crammed with useless trash. Oatmeal cartons. Newspapers. Tin cans. Used tissues. Feces in ziplock baggies.”

“Théodore is being held for psychiatric evaluation?”

LaManche nodded. He looked tired. But, then, the old man usually looked tired.

“Both women were fully dressed, lying on their backs with bedding pulled to their chins. Their heads were tilted and touching, and their arms were entwined.”

“Posed.”

“Yes.”

I was wondering what this had to do with me. Unless dismembered, mutilated, or stripped of identifiers such as fingerprints or teeth, fresh corpses were rarely my domain.

“My feeling is that Dorothée has been dead for at least two weeks,” LaManche continued. “I will confirm that today. Geneviève is the problem. Her body was lying beside a heat vent.”

“With the fan blowing on her,” I guessed. I’d seen it before.

LaManche nodded. “PMI will be difficult.”

Mummified corpse. Uncertain postmortem interval. Yep. That would be me.

“Signs of trauma?” I asked.

“I saw nothing during my external examination of Dorothée. Geneviève’s body is far too dehydrated. I saw nothing on the X-rays of either mother or daughter.”

“Top priority?”

LaManche nodded. Then the hound-dog eyes locked onto mine. “I’m confident this can be handled discreetly and compassionately.”

Unlike the Doucet women, few who rolled through our doors had died in their beds. Ours were the murdered, the suicides, those whose lives were cut short by bad timing, bad judgment, or bad luck.

LaManche understood my commitment to the dead and to those left behind. He’d witnessed my interactions with families, and with journalists seeking footage for the five o’clock news.

LaManche knew the words he’d spoken did not need saying. The fact that he’d voiced them revealed an uncharacteristic level of emotion. The old man cared deeply for Michelle Asselin.

Administrative issues discussed, cases assigned, staff meeting wrapped up by nine. Returning to my office, I donned a lab coat and crossed to the anthropology lab. The bones found at the construction site covered two worktables.

One glance told me the case wouldn’t need detailed analysis. After eyeballing each element, I wrote a one-line report.

Les ossements ne sont pas humains. The bones are not human. Twenty minutes. Done.

Next, I instructed my lab technician, Denis, concerning cleaning of Santangelo’s incinerated cadaver. Burned bodies can be fragile, requiring careful disarticulation of the skeleton and removal of soft tissue by hand.

Then it was on to the morgue.

Clipboard. Calipers. Skeletal autopsy forms.

I had my hand on the doorknob when the phone rang. I almost ignored it. Should have, perhaps.