KATHY REICHS: 206 BONES

I lunged again. Made contact. Sediment cascaded into my eyes and mouth .

Spitting and blinking, I rolled onto my right side and shoved backward with one arm and both feet. The rough ground abraded the skin on my elbow and heels. One ankle screamed in protest. I didn’t care. I had to move. Had to get out .

I’d advanced a very short distance when I encountered a wall. Rectangular contours surrounded by mortar. Brick .

Heart hammering, I rolled to my other side and inched in the opposite direction. Again, I soon hit a wall .

Adrenaline flooded my body as terror piggybacked onto terror. My gut curdled. My lungs drew great heaving breaths .

My prison was no more than thirty inches high and six feet wide! Its length didn’t matter. Already I felt the walls pressing in .

I lost control .

Scooching forward, I began yelling and beating the brick with my fists. Tears streamed down my cheeks. Over and over I called out, hoping to attract the attention of a passerby. A worker. A dog. Anyone .

When my knuckles grew raw I attacked with the heels of my hands .

When I could no longer flail with my arms, I rolled and lashed out with my feet .

Pain ripped from my ankle. Too much pain. My calls for help morphed into agonized moans .

Defeated, I fell back, panting, sweat cooling on my icy flesh .

A parade of faces marched through my mind. Katy. Ryan. My sister, Harry. My cat, Birdie. My ex-husband, Pete .

Would I never see them again?

Great heaving sobs racked my chest .

Perhaps I lost consciousness. Perhaps not. My next awareness was of sound .

A noise outside my body. Not of my making .

I froze .

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick .

A cerebral crack opened .

Memory slipped through .

ANOTHER WRISTWATCH CHECK. ANOTHER SIGH. MORE SHIFTING feet.

Above us, a wall clock ticked steadily, indifferent to Ryan’s restlessness. It was the old-fashioned analog kind, round, with a sweep second hand that jumped in one-second increments with sharp little clicks.

I surveyed my surroundings. Same plastic plant. Same bad print of a street scene in winter. Same half-empty mugs of tepid coffee. Phone. LCD projector. Screen. Laser pointer. Nothing new had magically appeared since I last looked.

Back to the clock. A logo identified the manufacturer as Enterprise. Or perhaps that was a name for this particular model.

Did people christen timepieces? Arnie Analog? Reggie Regulator?

OK. I was as edgy as Ryan. And very, very bored.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Old Enterprise said it was ten twenty-two. Oh-six. Oh-seven. Oh-eight. We’d been waiting since nine o’clock.

Finger-drumming recommenced on the tabletop. Ryan had been performing off and on for thirty minutes. The staccato beat was getting on my nerves.

“He’ll meet with us as soon as he can,” I said.

“Our coming here was his idea.”

“Yes.”

“How do you lose a stiff in a morgue?”

“You heard Corcoran. They’ve got over two hundred bodies. The facility is overstretched.”

While I have been described as impatient, Lieutenant-détective Andrew Ryan, Section des crimes contre la personne, Sûreté du Québec, takes the term to a whole new plane. I knew the routine. Soon he’d be pacing.

Ryan and I were in a conference room at the Office of the Cook County Medical Examiner, on Chicago’s West Side. We’d flown from Montreal at the request of Christopher Corcoran, a staff pathologist with the CCME.

More than three years earlier, a fifty-nine-year-old woman named Rose Jurmain had taken a trip from Chicago to Quebec to view the fall foliage. On the fourth day of her visit she’d left her country inn for a walk and never returned. Her belongings remained behind in her room. No one saw or heard from her again.

Thirty months later remains were discovered in a forested area half a mile north of the inn. Decomposition was advanced and animal damage was extensive. I’d done the ID. Ryan had led the investigation. Now he and I were bringing Rose home.

Why the personal service? For me, friendship with Corcoran and an excuse to visit the old hometown. For Ryan? A free trip to the Windy City.

For Chris Corcoran and his boss? That would be one of my very first questions. Surely a CCME employee could have come to Montreal to collect the remains. Or a transport service. Until now the family had shown no interest in what was left of Rose Jurmain.

And why the request for our presence in Chicago nine months after resolution of the case? The Bureau du coroner had ruled Rose’s death an accident. Why the special interest now?

Despite my curiosity, so far there’d been no time for questions. Ryan and I had arrived to find media vans lining Harrison Street and the facility in lockdown.

While parking us in the conference room, Corcoran had provided a quick explanation. The previous day, a funeral home had attempted to collect a body for cremation. Inexplicably, the corpse was nowhere to be found.

All hands were engaged in crisis control. The chief was spinning for the press. A frantic search was under way. And Ryan and I were cooling our heels.

“I suppose the family is going ballistic,” Ryan said.

“Oooh, yeah. And the media is loving it. Lost bodies. Shocked loved ones. Embarrassed politico. It’s the stuff of Pulitzers.”

I’m a news junkie. At home I read, or at least skim, each day’s paper from front to back. On the road, I tune in to CNN or a local station. Earlier, in my hotel room, I’d flipped between WFLD and WGN. Though aware of the story, I’d not anticipated the resulting chaos. Or the impact on us.

Sure enough, Ryan got up and began pacing the room. I checked my pal Enterprise. Inspector Irritable was right on schedule.

After logging roughly thirty yards, Ryan dropped back into his chair.

“Who was Cook?”

I was lost.

“Cook County?”

“No idea,” I said.

“How big is it?”

“The county?”

“My aunt Dora’s fanny.”

“You have an aunt Dora?”

“Three.”

I stored that bit of familial trivia for future query.

“Cook is the second most populous county in the U.S., the nineteenth largest government in the nation.” I’d read those facts someplace.

“What’s the largest?”

“Do I look like an almanac?”

“Atlas.”

“Some almanacs contain census data.” Defensive. After the trip from Montreal, I was no longer in the mood for teasing.

Though generally cheerful, Ryan is not a good traveler, even when the aviation gods are smiling. Yesterday they’d been grumpy as hell.

Instead of two hours, our flight from Pierre-Elliot Trudeau International to O’Hare had taken six. First a weather delay. Then a mechanical complication. Then the crew went illegal for dancing naked on the tarmac. Or some such. Annoyed and frustrated, Ryan had passed the time nitpicking everything I said. His idea of jolly good banter.

Several moments passed.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.

Ryan was pushing to his feet when the door opened and Christopher Corcoran entered, dressed in lab coat, jeans, and sneakers. With his pale skin, green eyes, red hair, and freckles, Corcoran was a walking Irish cliché. And decidedly nervous.

“I’m really sorry for the delay. This missing body thing turned into an Italian opera.”

“I hate it when corpses go walkabout.” The old Ryan wit.

Corcoran gave a mirthless smile. “Especially when the decedent’s under your care.”

“It was your case?” I asked.