Page 46 of The Bone Code

Accepting a hand up to ground level, I gave the word.

One of the SIJ techs snapped pics while the other shot video. When they’d finished, Gaston and his partner lifted LSJML-41208 and gently placed her on a stretcher.

The backhoe cranked to life.

As the second exhumation began, I tracked the coroner’s team to their van and watched them slide the stretcher inside. Saw and heard the rear doors slam shut.

Beyond our parked vehicles, Carrot Hair was still at the cross-shaped headstone, seemingly deep in thought. Prayer? Long time for a visit with the dead, I thought.

Peeling off my dirty gloves, I crossed to the cooler. Was straightening, water bottle in hand, when my eyes again drifted across the road.

My spine tensed, and my pulse spiked.

Carrot Hair’s phone was pointed directly at me.

Seeing my reaction, the woman dropped the mobile into her shoulder bag, hurried to the Hyundai, and drove off.

Had Carrot Hair been filming me? Was it my imagination?

Better question: Why the hell hadn’t I noted her plate?

The whole operation took six hours. I left Arbour yelling instructions about refilling the graves.

Arriving at the lab, I called downstairs. The disinterred remains were there and had been logged. I asked that both cases be brought tosalle quatre, a space outfitted with special ventilation. While I anticipated minimal odor, I like working in the “stinky” room, the farthest down the hall of the four autopsy suites. More solitude, less interruption.

I keyed in and descended in the coroner’s elevator. At morgue level, the basement, I changed into scrubs, then hurried tosalle quatre.

Two stainless-steel gurneys sat snugged to opposite walls. Each held a mud-coated body bag. An extra gurney was parked beside the floor-bolted table at the room’s center.

After filling out separate case ID cards, I unzipped each pouch and shot backup Polaroids. Lisa arrived as I was setting down the camera.

A word about Lisa Savard. Bright and self-motivated, Lisa anticipates and doesn’t require direction at every step. Having worked with many morgue techs over the decades, she remains my favorite.

Blond and endowed with a legendary rack, Lisa is also a favorite with the cops. At least, with the male demographic.

“Do you want X-rays?” A Francophone, Lisa always practices her English with me.

I nodded. “If there’s anything suspicious in there, I want to know about it.”

Lisa was back in thirty minutes. Together we viewed the films. Spotted no surprises.

While Lisa spread sheets across the autopsy table and the empty gurney and balanced a screen on the sink, I took a paper apron from a drawer, slipped it over my head, and tied it around my waist. Then I masked, pulled on surgical gloves, and began removing skeletal elements from the bag labeled LSJML-41207.

Starting at the feet and working toward the head, I arranged the bones in anatomical order. Lisa sifted the fill, screening each handful of soil under gently running water.

Three hours later, the painstaking process was done.

One dirt-crusted skeleton lay on the table. Another much smaller one lay on the gurney.

A collection of insect casings and pebbles sat drying on the countertop, along with one plastic button and one rusted safety pin. The presence of a partial mouse skeleton solved the riddle of the man-made items, puzzling since both sets of remains had been buried nude. We couldn’t guess the appeal of these objects to the late burrowing rodent.

The wall clock said nine forty-six. I was exhausted, suspected Lisa was equally tired. And hungry. We’d eaten nothing but a vending-machine sandwich around six.

I thanked Lisa and told her to go home. While she wheeled the adult victim into the morgue cooler, I quick-scanned the child. Skull. Pelvis. Long bones. It was 2006 all over again.

Charleston all over again.

Tomorrow I’d do a full inventory and confirm both bio-profiles. But I knew what my conclusion would be. We’d unearthed the right people—the woman and child found in a container near Saint-Anicet.