I AWOKE FEELING DOWN AND NOT KNOWING WHY.

Because I was alone? Because my only bed partner was a big white cat? I hadn’t planned my life that way. Pete and I had intended to grow old together. To sail married into the afterlife.

Then my forever-hubby shared Mr. Happy with a real estate agent.

And I enjoyed my own little fling with the bottle.

Whatever, as Katy would say. Life marches.

Outside, the weather was gray, blustery, and uninviting. The clock said seven-ten. Birdie was nowhere to be seen.

Pulling off my nightshirt, I took a hot shower, then blow-dried my hair. Birdie strolled in as I was brushing my teeth. I greeted him, then smiled into the mirror, considering whether it was a mascara day.

Then I remembered.

Ryan’s hasty retreat. The look in his eyes.

Jamming my toothbrush back into its charger, I wandered to the bedroom and stared at the frosted window. Crystalline spirals and snowflake geometrics. So delicate. So fragile.

Like the fantasy I’d constructed of a life with Ryan?

I wondered again what was going on.

And why I was acting the featured ditz in a Doris Day comedy.

“Screw this, Doris,” I said aloud.

Birdie looked up, but kept his thoughts to himself.

“And screw you, Andrew Ryan.”

Returning to the bathroom, I layered on the Revlon.

The Laboratoire de Sciences Judiciaires et de Médecine Légale occupies the top two floors of the Édifice Wilfrid-Derome, a T-shaped building in the Hochelaga-Maissoneuve district, just east of Centre-ville. The Bureau du Coroner is on the eleventh floor, the morgue is in the basement. The remaining space belongs to the SQ.

At eight-fifteen the twelfth floor was filling with white-coated men and women. Several greeted me as I swiped my security pass, first at the lobby entrance, then at the glass doors separating the medicolegal wing from the rest of the T. I returned their “bonjour”s and continued to my office, not in the mood to chat. I was still upset from last night’s encounter with Ryan. Make that nonencounter.

As at most medical examiner and coroner facilities, each workday at the LSJML begins with a meeting of the professional staff. I’d barely removed my outerwear when the phone rang. Pierre LaManche. It had been a busy night. The chief was anxious to begin.

When I entered the conference room, only LaManche and Jean Pelletier were seated at the table. Both did that half-standing thing older men do when women enter a room.

LaManche asked about the Pétit trial. I told him I thought my testimony had gone well.

“And Monday’s recovery?”

“Except for mild hypothermia, and the fact that your animal bones turned out to be three people, that also went well.”

“You will begin your analyses today?” asked LaManche in his Sorbonne French.

“Yes.” I didn’t mention what I thought I already knew based on my cursory examination in the basement. I wanted to be sure.

“Detective Claudel asked me to inform you that he would come today at one-thirty.”

“Detective Claudel will have a long wait. I’ll hardly have begun.”

Hearing Pelletier grunt, I looked in his direction.

Though subordinate to LaManche, Jean Pelletier had been at the lab a full decade when the chief hired on. He was a small, compact man, with thin gray hair and bags under his eyes the size of mackerels.

Pelletier was a devotee of Le Journal. I knew what was coming.

“Oui.” Pelletier’s fingers were permanently yellowed from a half century of smoking Gauloises cigarettes. One of them pointed at me. “Oui. This angle is much more flattering. Highlights your lovely green eyes.”

In answer, I rolled my lovely green eyes.

As I took a chair, Nathalie Ayers, Marcel Morin, and Emily Santangelo joined us. “Bonjour”s and “Comment ça va”s were exchanged. Pelletier complimented Santangelo on her haircut. Her look suggested the subject was best left alone. She was right.

After distributing copies of the day’s lineup, LaManche began discussing and assigning cases.

A forty-seven-year-old man had been found hanging from a cross-beam in his garage in Laval.

A fifty-four-year-old man had been stabbed by his son following an argument over leftover sausages. Mama had called the St-Hyacinthe police.

A resident of Longueuil had slammed his all-terrain vehicle into a snowbank on a rural road in the Gatineau. Alcohol was involved.

An estranged couple had been found dead of gunshot wounds in a home in St-Léonard. Two for her, one for him. The ex-to-be went out with a nine-millimeter Glock in his mouth.

“If I can’t have you no one can.” Pelletier’s dentures clacked as he spoke.

“Typical.” Ayers’s voice sounded bitter.

She was right. We’d seen the scenario all too often.

A young woman had been discovered behind a karaoke bar on rue Jean-Talon. A combination of overdose and hypothermia was suspected.

The pizza basement skeletons had been assigned LSJML numbers 38426, 38427, and 38428.

“Detective Claudel feels these skeletons are old and probably of little forensic interest?” LaManche said it more as a question than a statement.

“And how could Monsieur Claudel know that?” Though it was possible this would turn out to be true, it irked me that Claudel would render an opinion entirely outside his expertise.

“Monsieur Claudel is a man of many talents.” Though Pelletier’s expression was deadpan, I wasn’t fooled. The old pathologist knew of the friction between Claudel and me, and loved to tease.

“Claudel has studied archaeology?” I asked.

Pelletier’s brows shot up. “Monsieur Claudel puts in hours examining ancient relics.”

The others remained silent, awaiting the punch line.

“Really?” Why not play straight man?

“Bien sûr. Checks his pecker every morning.”

“Thank you, Dr. Pelletier.” LaManche traded deadpan for deadpan. “Along those lines, would you please take the hanging?”

Ayers got the stabbing. The ATV accident went to Santangelo, the suicide/homicide to Morin. As each case was dispensed, LaManche marked his master sheet with the appropriate initials. Pe. Ay. Sa. Mo.

Br went onto dossiers 38426, 38427, and 38428, the pizza basement bones.

Anticipating a lengthy meeting with the board that reviews infant deaths in the province, LaManche assigned himself no autopsy.

When we dispersed, I returned to my office. LaManche stuck his head in moments later. One of the autopsy technicians was out with bronchitis. With five posts, things would be difficult. Would I mind working alone?

Great.

As I snapped three case forms onto a clipboard, I noticed that the red light on my phone was flashing.

The minutest of flutters. Ryan?

Get over it, Doris.

Responding to the prompts, I entered my mailbox and code numbers.

A journalist from Allô Police.

A journalist from the Gazette.

A journalist from the CTV evening news.

Disappointed, I deleted the messages and hurried to the women’s locker room. After changing into surgical scrubs, I took a side corridor to a single elevator tucked between the secretarial office and the library. Restricted to those with special clearance, this elevator featured buttons allowing only three stops. LSJML. Coroner. Morgue. I pressed M and the doors slid shut.

Downstairs, through another secure door, a long, narrow corridor shoots the length of the building. To the left, an X-ray room and four autopsy suites, three with single tables, one with a pair. To the right, drying racks, computer stations, wheeled tubs and carts for transporting specimens to the histology, pathology, toxicology, DNA, and odontology-anthropology labs upstairs.

Through a small glass window in each door, I could see that Ayers and Morin were beginning their externals in rooms one and two. Each was working with a police photographer and an autopsy technician.

Another tech was arranging instruments in room three. He would be assisting Santangelo.

And I was on my own.

And Claudel would be here in less than four hours.

Having begun the day down, my mood was descending by the moment.

I continued on to room four. My room. A room specially ventilated for decomps, floaters, mummified corpses, and other aromatics.

As do the others, room four has double doors leading to a morgue bay. The bay is lined with refrigerated compartments, each housing a double-decker gurney.

Tossing my clipboard onto the counter, I pulled a plastic apron from one drawer, gloves and mask from another, donned them, snagged a small metal cart from the corridor, and pushed backward through the double doors.

Bed count.

Six white cards. One red sticker.

Six in residence, one HIV positive.

I located those cards with my initials. LSJML-38426. LSJML-38427. LSJML-38428. Ossements. Inconnu. Bones. Unknown.

Normally, I would have taken the cases sequentially, fully analyzing one before beginning another. But Detective Delightful was due at one-thirty. Anticipating Claudel’s impatience, I decided to abandon protocol, and do a quick age-sex assessment of each set of remains.

It was a mistake I would later regret.

Moving from one stainless steel door to a second, then a third, I selected the same bones I’d viewed in the pizza parlor basement, and wheeled them to room four.

After jotting the relevant information onto a case form, I began with 38426, the bones from Dr. Energy’s crate.

First the skull.

Gracile muscle attachments. Rounded occiput. Small mastoids. Smooth supraorbital ridges ending in sharp orbital borders.

I switched to a pelvic bone.

Broad, flaring hip blades. Elongated pubic portion with a tiny, elevated ridge coursing across the belly side. Obtuse subpubic angle. Wide sciatic notch.

I checked off these features on the “gender evaluation” page, and penned my conclusion.

Female.

Flipping to the “age evaluation” section, I noted that the basilar suture, the gap between the occipital and sphenoid bones at the base of the skull, had recently fused. That told me the girl was probably in her mid to late teens.

Back to the pelvis.

Throughout childhood, each pelvic half is composed of three separate elements, the ilium, the ischium, and the pubis. In early adolescence, these bones fuse within the hip socket.

This pelvis had seen puberty come and go.

I noted furrows running across the pubic symphyses, the faces where the two pelvic halves meet in front. I flipped the bone.

The superior border of the hip blade showed squiggles, indicating the absence of a finishing crescent of bone. Squiggles were also evident on the ischium, near the point at which the body is supported when sitting.

I felt the familiar cold creep into my belly. I would check the teeth and long bones, but all indicators supported my initial impression.

Dr. Energy’s stowaway was a girl who had died in her mid to late teens.

Replacing 38426 on the cart, I turned to the bones I’d selected from 38427. Then 38428.

The world retreated into a different dimension. Phones. Printers. Voices. Carts. All disappeared. Nothing existed but the fragile remains on my table.

I worked straight through lunch, my sense of sadness mounting with each observation.

I am often accused of feeling more warmth toward the dead than toward the living. The charge isn’t true. Yes, I grieve for those on my table. But I am also keenly aware of the sorrow visited on those left behind. This case was no exception. I felt great empathy for the families who had loved and lost these girls.

At exactly one thirty-four the phone shrilled. Lowering my mask, I crossed to the desk.

“Dr. Brennan.”

“You have finished?” Though he did not identify himself, I knew the voice.

“I have some preliminary information. Room four.”

“I am waiting in your office.”

Sure, Claudel. That’s fine with me. Make yourself at home.

“Would you like to observe what I’ve found?”

“That will not be necessary.”

Claudel’s aversion to autopsies is legendary. I used to play on this, think up ruses to force him belowdecks. I no longer bothered.

“I’ll need a few minutes to clean up,” I said.

“This is probably pointless, anyway.”

“I sincerely hope so.” I hung up.

Easy. It’s Claudel. The man is a throwback.

Drawing a sheet over the table, I stripped off my gloves, scrubbed, and headed upstairs, a growing dread hanging heavy on my mind.

I knew my bones. I knew I was right.

Despite his sanctimonious arrogance, I hoped to God Claudel was right, too.