KATHY REICHS - 206 BONES

“Your behavior is totally inappropriate.”

“You’re not the first woman to tell me that.”

“Yo. Andy.” Gordie was standing in the doorway. “Glass of wine?”

“A woman drove me to drink.” Ryan opened the quote.

“I never had the courtesy to thank her.” Gordie closed it.

“W. C. Fields,” I said to an empty room.

Dinner went as you’d imagine.

When I retired at eleven, Gordie and Ryan were smoking cigars and doing stand-up. Vecamamma was flashing numbered signs to score their performances.

I descended at eight the next morning. Ryan was already in the kitchen, eating French toast as fast as my mother-in-law could slap it on his plate. Both he and she greeted me with Bonjour .

As we ate, I told Ryan about 287JUL05. In French. I wasn’t yet ready to share what I suspected concerning Lassie Tot, and doubted Vecamamma’s newly acquired linguistic skills would allow her to comprendre .

“You’re convinced it’s him?”

“Everything fits. Age, sex, race, height, time of disappearance. How many twentysomething white males standing six foot one vanish in any given year?”

I heard tsking from the vicinity of the range.

“Who did the original anthropology?”

“Corcoran didn’t know.”

“How’d the kid die?”

“I don’t know. There are multiple fractures, but they may all be explained by the fall.”

“How deep is the quarry?”

“I don’t know.”

“How’d he end up in it?”

“I don’t know.”

Tsk. From the stove.

I switched to English.

“This is delicious, Vecamamma.”

“Pot roast tonight.”

“Wouldn’t miss it.” I poured syrup on the refill she’d spatulaed onto my plate. “I’m really sorry about the photo albums.” Too late for cookies. She’d made a zillion on her own.

“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.”