Pelletier shrugged and extended his hand. LaManche placed a red ?Pe? on his list, then passed him the forms. They were accompanied by a plastic bag full of prescription and over-the-counter drugs. Pelletier took the materials, making a wisecrack which I missed.

My attention was turned to the stack of Polaroids accompanying the baby case. Taken from several angles, they showed a shallow creek with a small footbridge arching across it. A little body lay among the rocks, its tiny muscles shriveled, its skin yellowed like old parchment. A fringe of fine hair floated round its head, another rimmed its pale blue eyelids. The child?s fingers were splayed wide, as if grasping for help, for something to cling to. He was nude, and lay half in and half out of a dark green plastic bag. He looked like a miniature pharaoh, exposed and discarded. I was beginning to dislike plastic bags intensely.

I returned the photos to the table and listened to LaManche. He?d finished his summary, and was marking ?La? on the master sheet. He would do the autopsy, I would narrow the age range by assessing skeletal development. Bergeron would have a go at the teeth. Nods all around. There being no further discussion, the meeting broke up.

I got coffee and returned to my office. A large brown envelope lay on the desk. I opened it and slipped the first of the baby?s X rays onto the light box. Withdrawing a form from the drawer in my worktable, I started my survey. Only two carpals were present in each hand. No caps at the ends of the finger bones. I looked at the lower arms. No cap on either radius. I finished with the upper body, listing on my inventory sheet those bony elements that were present, and noting which had not yet formed. Then I did the same for the lower body, shifting from film to film to be sure of my observations. The coffee grew cold.

An infant is born with its skeleton incomplete. Some bones, such as the carpals in the hand, are absent at birth, appearing months, or even years later. Other bones lack knobs and ridges that will eventually give them their adult form. The missing parts emerge in predictable succession, allowing for fairly accurate age estimates for very young children. This baby had lived only seven months.

I summarized my conclusions on yet another form, placed all the paperwork in a yellow file folder, and dropped it on the stack for the secretarial pool. It would come back with the report typed in my preferred format, with all supporting materials and diagrams duplicated and assembled. They would also polish my French. I made a verbal report to LaManche. Then I moved on to my clumps.

The clay hadn?t dissolved, but had softened enough to allow me to pry out the contents. After fifteen minutes of scraping and teasing, the matrix yielded eight vertebrae, seven long bone fragments, and three chunks of pelvis. All showed evidence of butchering. I spent thirty minutes washing and sorting the mess, then cleaned up and jotted a few notes. On my way upstairs, I asked Lisa to photograph the partial skeletons of the three victims: two white-tailed deer and one medium sized dog. I filled out another report form and dropped this folder on top of the earlier one. Odd, but not a forensic problem.

Lucie had left a note on my desk. I found her in her office, back to the door, eyes shifting between a terminal screen and an open dossier. She typed with one hand and held her place in the dossier with the other, her index finger moving slowly from entry to entry.

?Got your note,? I said.

She raised the finger, typed a few more strokes, then laid a ruler across the file. Pivoting and thrusting in one motion, she rolled to her desk.

?I pulled up what you asked for. Sort of.?

She dug through one stack of paper, shifted to another, then returned to the first, searching more slowly. Finally she withdrew a small stack of papers stapled at the corner, scanned a few pages, then extended the collection to me.

?Nothing before ?88.?

I leafed through the pages, dismayed. How could there be so many?

?First I tried calling up cases with ?dismemberment? as my key word. That?s the first list. The long one. I got all the people who threw themselves in front of trains, or fell into machinery and had limbs ripped off. I didn?t think you wanted that.?

Indeed. It seemed to be a list of every case in which an arm, leg, or finger had been traumatically severed at or even near the time of death.

?Then I tried adding ?intentional,? to limit the selections to cases in which the dismemberment was done on purpose.?

I looked at her.

?I got nothing.?

?None??

?That doesn?t mean there weren?t any.?

?How come??

?I didn?t enter this data. Over the past two years we?ve had special funding to hire part-time workers to get historical data on-line as quickly as possible.? She gave an exasperated sigh and shook her head. ?The ministry dragged its heels for years getting computerized, now they want everything up to date overnight. Anyway, the data entry people have standard codes for the basics: date of birth, date of death, cause of death, and so on. But for something that?s odd, something that occurs only rarely, they?re pretty much on their own. They make up a code.?

?Like a dismemberment.?

?Right. Someone might call it an amputation, someone else might use the term disjointing, usually they just use the same word the pathologist put in the report. Or they might just enter it as cutting or sawing.?

I looked back at the lists, thoroughly discouraged.

?I tried all of those, and a few others. No go.?

So much for this idea.

??Mutilation? brought up the other really long list.? She waited while I turned to the second page. ?That was even worse than ?dismemberment.?

?Then I tried ?dismemberment? in combination with ?postmortem? as a limiter, to select out the cases in which the?-she turned her palms upward and made a scratching motion with her fingers, as if trying to tease the word from the air-?the event took place after death.?

I looked up, hopeful.

?All I got was the guy with his dick chopped off.?

?Computer took you literally.?

?Huh??

?Never mind.? Another joke that didn?t travel.

?Then I tried ?mutilation? in combination with the ?postmortem? limiter, and . . .? She reached across the desk and displayed the last printout. ?Bango! Is that what you say??

?Bingo.?

?Bingo! I think this may be what you want. You can ignore some of it, like those drug things where they used acid.? She pointed to several lines she?d penciled out. ?Those are probably not what you want.?

I nodded absently, totally absorbed by page three. It listed twelve cases. She?d drawn lines through three of them.

?But I think maybe some of the others might be of interest to you.?

I was hardly hearing her. My eyes had been drifting through the list, but were now riveted on the sixth name down. A tingle of uneasiness passed through me. I wanted to get back to my office.

?Lucie, this is great,? I said. ?This is better than I?d hoped for.?

?Anything you can use??

?Yes. Yes, I think so,? I said, trying to sound casual.

?Do you want me to call these cases up??

?No. Thanks. Let me look this over, then I think I?d rather pull the complete files.? Let me be wrong on this one, I prayed to myself.

?Bien s #251;r.?

She took off her glasses and began polishing a lens on the hem of her sweater. Without them she looked incomplete, wrong somehow, like John Denver after he switched to contacts.

?I?d like to know what happens,? she said, the pink rectangles back flanking the bridge of her nose.

?Of course. I?ll tell you if anything breaks.?

As I walked away I heard the wheels of her chair gliding across the tile.

In my office, I laid the printout on my desk and looked at the list. One name stared at me. Francine Morisette-Champoux. Francine Morisette-Champoux. I?d forgotten all about her. Stay cool, I told myself. Don?t jump to conclusions.