Bones Are Forever Read Online Free PDF Page A

fleas on a hound.”
    “Anything new on Roberts?”
    “Demers doubts he got any useful prints. Those he lifted willtake time to process. If Roberts isn’t in the system, that’s a dead end anyway. The landlord paid the utilities. There’s no phone. No computer. No paper trail of any kind. If Mama’s in the wind, it could take a while to find her.”
    “And the baby can’t help us.”
    Turned out I was dead wrong.

T HE NEXT MORNING I SPENT TWENTY MINUTES SNAKING UP and down the narrow streets of Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, a working-class neighborhood a bump east of centre-ville . I passed iron staircase–fronted two-flats, convenience stores, a school, a small park. But no curbside usable at eight A.M . on a Tuesday in June.
    Don’t get me started. One needs a degree in civil engineering to understand when and where it is legal to park in Montreal, and the luck of a lotto winner to find footage that qualifies.
    On my fifth pass down Parthenais, a Mini Cooper pulled out half a block up. I shot forward and, with much shifting and swearing, wedged my Mazda into the vacated space.
    The clock on the dash said 8:39. Great. Morning meeting would begin in about six minutes.
    After gathering my laptop and purse from the backseat, I got out and assessed my handiwork. Six inches in front, eight behind. Not bad.
    Pleased with my achievement, I headed toward the thirteen-story glass-and-steel structure recently renamed Édifice Wilfrid-Derome in honor of Quebec’s famous pioneer criminalist. Famous by Quebec standards. In forensic circles.
    Hurrying along the sidewalk, I could see the T-shaped black hulk looming over the quartier. Somehow, the brooding structure looked wrong against the cheery blue sky.
    Old-timers still refer to Wilfrid-Derome as the QPP or SQ building. Quebec Provincial Police for Anglophones, Sûreté du Québec for Francophones. Makes sense. For decades the provincial force has laid claim to most of the square footage.
    But the cops aren’t alone in the édifice. The Laboratoire de sciences judiciaires et de médecine légale, Quebec’s combined medico-legal and crime lab, occupies the top two floors. The Bureau du coroner is on eleven. The morgue and autopsy suites are in the basement. Hail, the gang’s all here. Makes my job easier in many ways, harder in some. Ryan’s office is just eight floors below mine.
    I swiped my security pass in the lobby, in the elevator, at the entrance to the twelfth floor, and at the glass doors separating the medico-legal wing from the rest of the T. At eight-forty-five the corridor was relatively quiet.
    As I passed windows opening onto microbiology, histology, and pathology labs, I could see white-coated men and women working at microtomes, desks, and sinks. Several waved or mouthed greetings through the glass. I returned their bonjour and hustled to my office, not in the mood to chat. I hate being late.
    I’d barely dumped my laptop and stowed my purse when my desk phone rang. LaManche was eager to begin the meeting.
    When I entered the conference room, only the chief and one other pathologist, Jean Pelletier, were seated at the table. Both did that half-standing thing older men do when women enter a room.
    LaManche asked about events following his departure from the apartment in Saint-Hyacinthe. As I briefed him, Pelletier listened in silence. He is a small, compact man with thin gray hair and bags under his eyes the size of catfish. Though subordinate to LaManche, Pelletier had been at the lab a full decade when the chief hired on.
    “I will begin the baby’s autopsy as soon as we adjourn,” LaManche said to me in his perfect Sorbonne French. “If the other infants have been reduced to bone, as you suspect, those cases will be assigned to you.”
    I nodded. I already knew they would be.
    Hearing Pelletier sigh, I looked in his direction.
    “So sad.” Pelletier drummed the tabletop with his fingers, thefirst two permanently yellowed from half a century of smoking