KATHY REICHS - 206 BONES

LaManche isn’t old . Agitated, I swiped my card, missed, swiped again. The glass panels whooshed open. It’s not fair .

Life’s not fair . Gran’s favorite retort zinged at me from the past.

Screw capricious fate. I couldn’t imagine the LSJML without LaManche. Didn’t want to.

Though the lounge was deserted, the puddled floor told me others had already been there. Dropping coins into an honor box, I poured coffee translucent as smoky quartz.

Back in the medico-legal wing, I hurried to the far end of the corridor. My watch said nine ten. Morning meeting usually kicks off at nine.

Our section’s conference room is exactly what you’d envision in a government building. Algae green walls. Gray tile floor. Window blinds. Phone credenza. Gunmetal table and chairs. A blackboard/projection screen hangs at one end, a door opens to an audiovisual closet at the other.

Two pathologists sat with their backs to the windows. Sunlight warmed Ayers’s chestnut hair and glinted off Morin’s freckled brown dome. A third sat at the far end. Santangelo’s slumping shoulders suggested fatigue.

Facing the old-timers was Marie-Andréa Briel, the new kid on the LSJML block. Briel had joined the staff the previous fall, during a period when I was away in Charlotte. Lab policy is that, for their first year, new pathologists do no homicide cases, so I hadn’t really worked with Briel. Though I’d seen her in the halls, and we’d nodded across the table at staff meetings, we’d had virtually no personal interaction. I knew little about her from firsthand experience. What snippets I’d been given weren’t golden.

One late afternoon, exhausted, LaManche had confided that an offer had been extended and accepted. In his opinion, the applicant wasn’t the pick of the litter. But old Jean Pelletier had been gone for over a year and he and the others had been doing the work of five.

Though he’d yet to reveal it, the chief probably knew he was looking at surgery in the not too distant future. Another pathologist had to be hired.

Why such a prolonged search? The pay is low, and the LSJML requires fluency in French. You guessed it. The litter wasn’t that big.

Ayers and Morin smiled when I entered. Santangelo flicked a wave.

“ Bonjour , Tempe.” Morin’s French was that of the islands. “ Comment ça va? ”

“ Ça va bien. ” I’m doing fine.

“Couldn’t stay away from our Montreal weather, eh?” Ayers knew my feelings on snow.

“No comment.” I took a seat.

Briel glanced in my direction.

I nodded. Smiled.

Briel looked down at her notepad, vertical lines creasing the gap where heavy dark brows reached for each other over her nose.

I looked at Ayers. She shrugged. Who knows?

I tried again with my newest colleague. “I hope you’re now feeling comfortable here.”

Briel’s face rose, frown lines in place. “ Oui. ”

“Not letting these old goats get on your nerves.”

Ayers bleated softly.

“I can handle difficulties.”

Marie-Andréa Briel was not blessed with beauty. Perhaps thirty-two, she had a substantial fundament, frizzy black hair, and skin the color of fluoridated teeth. That skin now went incandescent.

“I’m not implying that anyone is difficult. That’s not what I meant. I’m very happy here. Thankful for the chance to learn.”

Though grammatically flawless, Briel’s French was oddly without accent or inflection. Definitely not Québécois or European. I made a mental note to ask about her origins.

Morin reached over and patted Briel’s hand. “You’re doing fine.”

The frown lines relaxed. A micron.

“The old lady from Oka is downstairs?” Morin asked me.

“Yes. I started my analysis on Saturday, hope to finish today.”

“Then outa here for a Dixie Christmas?” Ayers.

“That’s the plan.”

“Put elf hats on the hunting dogs?” Ayers loved to tease about my Southern roots.

“Yep. Then the cousins gather in my trailer to drink hooch and eat pork skins.”

“ Bon. ” Morin distributed photocopied rosters of the day’s cases. “Then let’s not waste time.”

I skimmed the daily morgue sheet. Eight autopsies. A typical Monday. Busy as hell.

Morin went over each case.

A Ski-Doo had slammed into a tree near Sainte-Agathe. A second snowmobile had then plowed into the first. Two dead. Alcohol intoxication was suspected.

An Argentine seaman had died in a home-rigged sauna in the Gay Village. The presumed host was in critical condition at the General. Alcohol and drug intoxication were suspected.

Two men and a woman had been discovered dead in their beds in Baie-Comeau. Carbon monoxide poisoning was suspected.

A man had been gunned down outside a convenience store in Longueuil.

A woman had been stabbed in her home in Lac-Beauport. The estranged husband was in custody.

Only the Longueuil shooting victim’s identity was unknown. Prints were being run and a photo was being shopped to known gang members.

Nothing for the anthropologist. Hot damn. I’d be free to work on the Oka lady.

Though Briel offered, Morin assigned himself the stabbing victim. Mo went onto the roster beside that case.

Santangelo got the snowmobilers. Sa .

Ayers volunteered for the sailor and the gunshot death. Again Briel offered, but was refused. The shooting was clearly a homicide. The sautéed sailor was a foreign national. That meant potential diplomatic issues. Ay .

Briel’s brow-pucker deepened as Morin wrote Br beside the chalet vics then tossed her a ziplock filled with vials of prescription drugs.

“Christelle Villejoin’s antemortem records,” he said, handing me an envelope whose size did not look encouraging.

“No X-rays?”

Morin shook his head.

“Dentals?”

“Apparently les soeurs Villejoin were not fond of medical professionals. Everything in the file looks pretty old.”

Great.

Morin turned to budget matters. Additional cuts had been demanded by the ministry. Nothing new. Each year funding grew more spartan. The joke was that soon autopsies would be billed by the pound.

We were pushing from the table when Briel spoke up.

“I have taken on a student.”

We all paused.

“A student?” Morin raised a questioning brow.

“I am beginning a new project and need a new research assistant.”

“A project?” The brow floated higher.

“Montreal remains the last U.S. or Canadian city with a population over one million that does not fluoridate its water. Some communities in the West Island do fluoridate. Pointe-Claire, Dorval, Beaconsfield, Baied’Urfé, Kirkland, and parts of Dollard-des-Ormeaux and Sainte-Anne-de-Bellevue.”

Ayers groaned softly. It was an old issue.

Briel ignored her.

“Though the Quebec government endorses and has offered to subsidize fluoridation in Montreal, the city refuses. I have read statistics stating that Montreal children have seventy-seven percent more cavities compared to children in areas of Quebec where fluoride is added to the water. The dichotomy on the Island of Montreal provides a natural laboratory. My assistant and I will be comparing the decay rates of unfluori-dated city children to those of their fluoridated surburban counterparts.”

“All costs will have to-”

“I have a grant.”

“What happened to your old student?”

“I had to let her go.”

“Who is the new student?” Santangelo asked.

“Solange Duclos. She is a fourth-year biology major at l’Université de Montréal. She will come for six hours each week beginning next Tuesday.”