The Gouvrard records made the Villejoin file look rich in comparison. There wasn’t a single X-ray. The medical and dental data were negligible. The typed reports were faded and smeared, probably the product of carbon copying. The handwritten notes were barely legible.

After three and a half hours of squinting and magnifying and translating from colloquial French, I had nothing more than when I’d started.

Achille, the father, had suffered from hypertension and eczema, conditions for which he’d taken medication. He’d stood five feet nine inches tall. Useless. I had no complete long bones. He’d broken three toes in an industrial accident at age thirty-seven. I had no foot bones.

An absence of dental records suggested Daddy wasn’t into regular checkups.

Vivienne, the mother, had no medical condition that would have affected her skeleton. She’d had trouble with what would now be called acid reflux. She’d suffered from migraines. She’d lost a baby two months into a pregnancy three years prior to her elder son’s birth. No height was recorded.

Mommy had undergone root canals in her first and second lower left molars. Both those teeth had been lost postmortem.

Serge, the elder brother, had fractured his right ulna at age six. That bone had not been recovered. He’d had measles at seven and chicken pox at nine. On his eleventh birthday, he’d suffered a mild concussion by falling from a tree.

Though the boy had visited a dentist and been treated for cavities, I had none of his teeth.

I looked at the clock. One ten.

Across the lab, Solange was still sorting and studying dentition. The neon lips made me think of the print they’d leave on a glass.

I tried Schechter again, left a third message.

Then I headed to lunch.

Natalie Ayers was in the cafeteria. She pointed to an empty chair opposite hers. I sat. Sensitive to the earlier brush-off, I avoided the subject of staff morale.

“Done with Keiser?”

Ayers nodded, teeth embedded in an egg salad sandwich.

“I assume it was Keiser.”

“Yeah. Thanks to decomp and burning, her face and dentition were history. Fortunately, she wore a bridge. That survived. We got the antemorts. The thing was a match.”

“What killed her?”

“Who knows? The internal organs were mush. X-rays showed no fractures, bullets, or foreign objects. I sent samples to tox, but I’m not optimistic.”

“Did you find smoke in the lungs or trachea?”

Ayers waggled a hand. Maybe yes, maybe no. So it was unclear if Keiser was alive when the fire started.

“Was she a smoker?”

“According to Claudel, yes.”

Ayers worked on the second half of her sandwich. I ate the remainder of my salad, then switched subjects.

“Briel’s student is here but Briel’s in Laval educating young minds.”

Ayers snorted air through her nose. “No she’s not. Our wunderkind is downstairs educating herself.”

“Oh?”

“She came in as I was leaving, asked if she could look at Keiser. For the experience.”

“She’s something.” I laughed.

“She is.” No trace of a chuckle.

Ayers stirred her coffee. Tapped the rim of her cup. Laid down her spoon. “Sorry about earlier.”

“No problem,” I said.

“You’re right, though. The atmosphere in our section has turned to shit.”

“Because LaManche is gone?”

Ayers considered. “No. That’s not it.”

“Then why?”

“I don’t want to tell tales. But I will say office tension is the reason Emily quit to work for the coroner.”

“What do you mean?”

Ayers shook her head. “Ask Emily.”

“She called me last week. Told me about Briel and Joe going back out to Oka, then urged me to get back up here fast. Never mentioned leaving the lab.”

“Talk to her.”

I vowed to do that as soon as possible.

Then events started crashing and the world seemed to veer off its orbit.

WHEN I RETURNED TO MY LAB, YOUNG SOLANGE DUCLOS WAS gone. Either Briel had corralled her, or the kid had left for the day. I didn’t much care. I had tables full of bones and a coroner with a shortage of patience.

Naturally, it was an afternoon of interruptions.

I’d hardly stowed my purse when Claudel appeared. Anxious to resume my analysis of the Lac Saint-Jean vics, I asked few questions, just let him talk.

“L’équipe du service d’incendie has finished with Keiser’s cabin.”

Claudel referred to the arson boys, members of the chemistry section who determined cause and point of origin in suspicious fires.

“They picked up traces of accelerant on the carpet and sofa.”

Arson.

“What was used?”

“They’re working on it.”

“Ayers couldn’t tell if Keiser was breathing when the place went up,” I said.

“This is not my first homicide. Dr. Ayers and I have discussed her findings.”

Well, hot damn for you. I didn’t say it.

I was settling with the Lac Saint-Jean vics when my cell phone buzzed in my lab coat pocket. I checked caller ID.

Perry Schechter. So badgering can pay off.

Unfortunately, the lawyer’s “confidential information” was not the breakthrough for which I’d been hoping. While sorting Edward Allen’s papers, Schechter had found a scribbled note containing a phone number beginning with a 514 area code. The accompanying message consisted of one word. Rose.

After disconnecting, I did a reverse look-up using [http://whitepages.com] whitepages.com. The number came back “unpublished or unlisted.”

I called a contact at the SQ. He said he’d run the line and get back to me.

Ten minutes later he did. The number traced to a pay phone at the gare Centrale on rue de la Gauchetière Ouest.

Great. Montreal’s downtown railroad station.

But Schechter’s info wasn’t totally useless. It told me two things.

Thing one: la gare Centrale accommodated both long-distance VIA rail routes and hookups to city and suburban metro lines. So my accuser could be a commuter, an out-of-towner, or a local desiring anonymity. Now I was getting somewhere.

Thing two: pay phones still exist. Who knew?

It was four fifteen when I finally got to refocus on the Lac Saint-Jean vics.

The lull didn’t last.

I was opening the file of the younger son, Valentin, when male laughter razored into my concentration.

Ryan.

Joe.

Since the pathology, histology, and anthropology-odontology labs are all interconnected, I figured Ryan had entered at the far end and was cutting through toward my domain.

Rustling over the past hour had signaled that Joe was doing paperwork at his desk, directly in Ryan’s path. I assumed the two were discussing carburetors or sports scores, or enjoying one of those frat-boy jokes that elicit the singularly annoying conspiratorial Y-chromosome guffaw.

The younger Lac Saint-Jean child, perhaps Valentin Gouvrard, was represented by two vertebrae, three partial long bones, a calcaneous, a handful of cranial fragments, and three isolated teeth. Ignoring the buddy-boy sniggers drifting in from next door, I arranged the sparse little collection.

Preservation was awful. A combination of soaking and wave action had removed most identifiable anatomical landmarks, and breakage had rendered accurate measurement impossible.

But the teeth allowed confirmation of my age estimate of six to eight. Here’s why.

Unlike sharks or gators, humans are granted only two sets of choppers. Kids sport twenty. Grown-ups expand the assemblage to thirty-two by adding premolars and wisdom teeth.

Replacement goes thus. Around age six, the first permanent molars join the kiddy lineup. Around eleven or twelve the eight baby molars give way to eight adult premolars. During the teens and early twenties, two more adult molars join the back of each arch. No need to describe the incisor and canine action up front. We all know how that mess unfolds.