Кэти Райх - Death Du Jour

I spent the rest of the weekend unpacking, cleaning, shopping, and grading exams. My sister called late Sunday to say she’d sold her hot air balloon. I felt relieved. I’d spent three years inventing excuses to keep Katy on the ground, dreading the day she’d finally go up. That creative energy could now be turned elsewhere.

“Are you at home?” I asked.

“Yep.”

“Is it warm?” I checked the drift on the windowsill. It was still growing.

“It’s always warm in Houston.”

Damn her.

“So why are you selling the business?”

Harry has always been a seeker, though her grail has never been in focus. For the past three years she’d been gung-ho buggers over ballooning. When not floating safaris over Texas, she and her crew packed an old pickup and zigzagged the country to balloon rallies.

“Striker and I are splitting.”

“Oh.”

She’d also been gung-ho buggers over Striker. They met at a rally in Albuquerque, married five days later. That had been two years ago.

For a long time no one spoke. I cracked first.

“What now?” I asked.

“I may go into counseling.”

That surprised me. My sister rarely did the obvious.

“It might help you get through this.”

“No. No. Striker’s got Kool-Aid for brains. I’m not crying over him. That just makes me puffy.” I heard her light a cigarette, draw deeply, exhale. “There’s this course I’ve heard about. You take it, then you can advise people on holistic health and stress relief and stuff. I’ve been reading about herbs and meditation and metaphysics and it’s pretty cool. I think I’ll be good at this.”

“Harry. That sounds a little flaky.” How many times had I said that?

“Duh. Of course I’ll check it out. I’m not flat-ass stupid.”

No. She was not stupid. But when Harry wants something, she wants it intensely. And there is no dissuading her.

I hung up feeling a little shaken. The thought of Harry advising people with problems was unnerving.

Around six I made myself a dinner of sautéed chicken breast, boiled red potatoes with butter and chives, and steamed asparagus. A glass of Chardonnay would have made it perfect. But not for me. That switch had been in the off position for seven years and it was staying there. I’m not flat-ass stupid either. At least not when I’m sober. The meal still beat the hell out of last night’s soda crackers.

As I ate, I thought about my baby sister. Harry and formal education have never been compatible. She married her high school sweetheart the day before graduation, three others after that. She’s raised Saint Bernards, managed a Pizza Hut, sold designer sunglasses, led tours in the Yucatán, done PR for the Houston Astros, started and lost a carpet-cleaning business, sold real estate, and, most recently, taken up riders in hot air balloons.

When I was three and Harry was one, I broke her leg by rolling over it with my tricycle. She never slowed down. Harry learned to walk while dragging a cast. Unbearably annoying and totally endearing, my sister offsets with pure energy what she lacks in training or focus. I find her thoroughly exhausting.

At nine-thirty I turned on the hockey game. It was the end of the second period and the Habs were losing four-zip to St. Louis. Don Cherry blustered about the ineptness of the Canadiens management, his face round and flushed above his high-collar shirt. He looked more like a tenor in a barbershop quartet than a sports commentator. I watched, bemused that millions listened to him every week. At ten-fifteen I turned off the TV and went to bed.

The next morning I got up early and drove to the lab. Monday is a busy day for most medical examiners. The random acts of cruelty, senseless bravado, lonely self-loathing, and wretched bad timing that result in violent death accelerate on weekends. The bodies arrive and are stored in the morgue for Monday autopsy.

This Monday was no exception. I got coffee and joined the morning meeting in LaManche’s office. Natalie Ayers was at a murder trial in Val-d’Or, but the other pathologists were present. Jean Pelletiér had just returned from testifying in Kuujjuaq, in far northern Quebec. He was showing snapshots to Emily Santangelo and Michael Morin. I leaned in.

Kuujjuaq looked as if it had been flown in and assembled the night before.

“What’s that?” I asked, indicating a prefab building with a plastic outer layer.

“The aqua center.” Pelletiér pointed to a red hexagonal sign with unfamiliar characters above, Arrêt below in bold white letters. “All the signs are in French and Inuktitut.” His upriver accent was so heavy, to my ear he might have been speaking the latter. I’d known him for years and still had trouble understanding his French.

Pelletiér pointed at another prefab building. “That’s the courthouse.”

It looked like the pool, sans plastic. Behind the town, the tundra stretched gray and bleak, a Serengeti of rocks and moss. A bleached caribou skeleton lay by the roadside.

“Is that common?” asked Emily, studying the caribou.

“Only when they’re dead.”

“There are eight autopsies today,” said LaManche, handing out the roster. He went over them all. A nineteen-year-old male had been hit by a train, his torso bisected. It happened on a barricaded trestle frequented by teens.

A snowmobile had gone through the ice on Lac Megantic. Two bodies recovered. Alcohol intoxication suspected.

An infant had been found dead and putrefied in its bed. Mama, who was downstairs watching a game show when authorities arrived, said ten days earlier God told her to stop feeding the baby.

An unidentified white male was found behind a Dumpster on the McGill campus. Three bodies were recovered from a house fire in St-Jovite.

Pelletiér was assigned the infant. He indicated that he might request an anthropology consult. While the baby’s identity was not in question, cause and time of death would be tough.

Santangelo got the bodies from Lac Megantic, Morin the train and Dumpster cases. The victims from the bedroom in St-Jovite were intact enough for normal autopsy. LaManche would perform them. I would do the bones from the basement.

After the meeting, I went to my office and opened a dossier by transferring the information from the morning etiquette sheet onto an anthropology case form. Name: Inconnu. Unknown. Date of birth: blank. Laboratoire de Médecine Légale number: 31013. Morgue number: 375. Police incident number: 89041. Pathologist: Pierre LaManche. Coroner: Jean-Claude Hubert. Investigators: Andrew Ryan and Jean Bertrand, Escouade de Crimes Contre la Personne, Sûreté du Québec.

I added the date and slipped the form into a file folder. Each of us uses a different color. Pink is Marc Bergeron, the odontologist. Green is Martin Levesque, the radiologist. LaManche uses red. A bright yellow jacket means anthropology.

I keyed in and rode the elevator to the basement. There I asked an autopsy technician to place LML 31013 in room three, then went to change into surgical scrubs.

The four autopsy rooms of the Laboratoire de Médecine Légale are adjacent to the morgue. The LML controls the former, the Bureau du Coroner the latter. Autopsy room two is large and contains three tables. The others have one each. Number four is equipped with special ventilation. I often work there since many of my cases are less than fresh. Today I left room four to Pelletiér and the baby. Charred bodies do not have a particularly offensive odor.

When I got to room three, a black body bag and four plastic containers lay on a gurney. I peeled the lid from a tub, removed the cotton padding, and checked the skull pieces. They had weathered the trip without damage.

I filled out a case identification card, unzipped the body bag, and pulled back the sheet that wrapped the bones and debris. I took several Polaroids, then sent everything for X-rays. If there were teeth or metal objects, I wanted to pinpoint them before disturbing the fill.