“We’ll do it another day. You help Cukura Kundze.”

Reverting to French, Ryan delivered my first bad news of the day.

“Remember the old lady bludgeoned in her home a year and a half back?”

“In Pointe-Calumet?”

Ryan nodded. “Anne-Isabelle Villejoin. She was eighty-six. Lived with her eighty-three-year-old sister, Christelle. Christelle was never found.”

Though I hadn’t been involved, I remembered the case. All of Montreal was horrified by the brutality of the crime. And by the cold-blooded killing of such elderly victims. The search for Christelle had been exhaustive but fruitless.

“I got a call about an hour ago,” Ryan continued. “Last night a guy named Florian Grellier was pulled doing one-forty on the TransCanada. A records check showed Monsieur Grellier had skipped the formality of actually purchasing the Volvo XC90 he was piloting.

“Grellier lawyered up with a courthouse crawler name of Damien Abadi. Abadi claimed his client had information on a missing old lady. After heated negotiation, in exchange for the crown prosecutor’s absolute ‘maybe,’ Grellier decided it was in his best interest to share what he knew.

“Long story short, this morning they ran a nose around a field near Parc d’Oka.”

Oh, no.

“The dog alerted?”

“Brayed like a goat in a grate.”

“Cadaver dogs don’t bark. They sit.”

“OK. Fido parked his ass on the snow and signaled foul.”

Please, no. I’d just left Montreal. I wanted to go to Charlotte. To see Katy and Birdie. To walk gloveless and bootless and need sunblock on my face.

“Did my name come up?”

“I was told Hubert would be contacting you.”

Jean-Claude Hubert is Quebec’s chief coroner and, currently, my main point of contact. If there was to be a disinterment, I knew Hubert would want me to direct it.

“What do you have going today?” Ryan switched topics.

“I plan to finish at the CCME. If the quarry skeleton is Lassie, I’ll visit Cukura Kundze and Mr. Tot to break it to them personally. Then I’ll drive up to Winnetka to see what I can charm out of Old Man Jurmain.”

“Would you like company?”

“Oprah’s tied up.”

“I can be very charming.” Ryan actually winked.

“Haven’t you and your new best friend scheduled a field trip?” A creeping certainty that I wouldn’t be going home to Charlotte was making me churlish.

“I fly out at six.” Ryan also knew what Hubert would request. “Here’s what I’m thinking. While you look at bones, I deal with changing your airline ticketing. Then, after visiting Cukura Kundze, we charm the jockeys off Jurmain, and head straight to O’Hare.”

After breakfast I phoned the Bureau du coroner. We were both right.

Damn.

On the way to the car, I snatched the Tribune from the front steps.

My mood was so black, I allowed Ryan to drive. Wanting to avoid conversation, I unrolled the paper and glanced through the headlines.

And got my second wallop of bad news.

THE WHY-WOULD-ANY-RATIONAL-BEING-LIVE-HERE COLD RECEDED. The breath-fogged windows. The heater blasting arctic air at my feet.

Nothing existed but the print in front of my eyes.

“You’re going to draw blood.”

Ryan’s voice snapped me back.

“Jurmain’s dead.” Unclamping my upper incisors from my lower lip.

“Edward Allen?”

“Front page, local section.”

“What happened?”

“They found him yesterday at the bottom of his basement stairs.” My voice sounded brittle. “The family doc is saying stroke.”

“Autopsy?”

“There’s none mentioned.”

“Schechter did say Jurmain was not in good health.”

“The old buzzard could have hung on another two days.”

Ryan ignored that. “What else?”

“The story’s mostly a tribute piece.”

I read excerpts.

“Former president and CEO of Jurmain Foods, later Smiling J. Blah blah blah. Well-known personality in the snack food industry from the forties through the eighties. Blah blah blah. Died at his home in Winnetka at the age of eighty-one. Blah blah blah. Received some award for his service to SFA.”

“SFA?”

“Snack Food Association. It’s an international trade association representing over four hundred companies worldwide.”

“The lowly Cheez Doodle has its own lobby?”

“According to the article, cheese snacks share representation with potato chips, tortilla chips, cereal snacks, pretzels, popcorn, snack crackers, meat snacks, pork rinds, snack nuts, party mix, corn snacks, pellet snacks, fruit snacks, snack bars, granola, snack cakes, and cookies.”

“Who knew.”

“The annual convention is called SNAXPO.”

“Of course it is.”

I read aloud. “Jurmain’s association with the snack food industry began in 1946 after service with the Seventy-ninth Infantry Division in World War Two. Following-”

“That’s probably more than I need to know.”

“Damn, Ryan. How am I going to find the bastard who placed that call?”

“Maybe Schechter knows more than he let on.”

“Maybe.”

“How about this. I’ll hunt lawyer while you examine Lassie. When you’re done, we’ll ambush Schechter instead of Jurmain.”

“If the guy practices with a big firm, we’ll never get past the receptionist. Those people are like samurai warriors guarding the king.”

“Shogun.”

“What?”

“They guarded the shogun. But you really mean the hatamoto, the higher-ranking warriors. Only the hatamoto served as the shogun’s personal guard.”

“Whatever.” I wiggled my toes to generate warmth. “We’ll never get to Schechter.”

“You forget the old Ryan charm.” Ryan winked at me.

“And when that fails?”

“I’ll flash my badge.”

“You have zero jurisdiction here.”

“I’ll flash it very fast.”

We were in luck. The navy had hedged its bets, and the CCME still had Laszlo Tot’s records on file.

Corcoran and I began by comparing Lassie’s antemortem dental, chest, and right lower-arm films with postmortem X-rays made upon 287JUL05’s arrival at the morgue. Despite the missing teeth, the skull damage, and the fractured ribs, we were able to establish positively that the man found in Thornton Quarry was, in fact, the missing seaman apprentice.

Maybe because intake was slow. Maybe because 287JUL05 now had a name. I didn’t ask, just accepted my upgrade from the storage room to an autopsy suite at the back of the facility.

By ten I had Lassie laid out on stainless steel. Corcoran had disappeared to phone the Chicago PD missing persons unit and authorities at the Great Lakes Naval Base. Ryan had gone to ferret out Perry Schechter.

One by one I viewed skeletal parts under magnification. Arm, leg, hand, and foot bones. Ribs. Vertebrae. Pelvis. Clavicles. Scapulae. Sternum. Now and then I’d stretch, walk the room, compose in my head the sad news I’d deliver to Cukura Kundze and Mr. Tot.

Ryan and Corcoran returned together around noon. I was glad to see them. Though I was pretty certain by then how Lassie had died, I needed answers to several questions.

“Describe the Thornton Quarry,” I said to Corcoran.

“It’s big.”

“How big?

“Really big.”

I gave him the steely look. He blushed.

“Thornton’s a mile and a half long and a half mile wide, one of the world’s largest quarries. In addition to producing stone or gravel or something, it’s used to prevent stormwater from overwhelming Chicago’s sewage system.”

“How so?” Ryan asked.

“There’s a water control plan in the works called the Deep Tunnel Project. As part of it, the Thornton Quarry will serve as a reservoir to reduce the backflow of runoff and sewage from area rivers into Lake Michigan. I read somewhere that the Thornton reservoir already contributes a three-billion-gallon capacity, and is expected to contribute around eight billion when the system is completed.”