Monday Mourning

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"As at most medical examiner and coroner facilities, each workday at the LSJML begins with a meeting of the professional staff. I’d barely removed my outerwear when the phone rang. Pierre LaManche. It had been a busy night. The chief was anxious to begin.

When I entered the conference room, only LaManche and Jean Pelletier were seated at the table. Both did that half-standing thing older men do when women enter a room.

LaManche asked about the Pétit trial. I told him I thought my testimony had gone well.

“And Monday’s recovery?”

“Except for mild hypothermia, and the fact that your animal bones turned out to be three people, that also went well.

“You will begin your analyses today?” asked LaManche in his Sorbonne French.

“Yes.” I didn’t mention what I thought I already knew based on my cursory examination in the basement. I wanted to be sure.

“Detective Claudel asked me to inform you that he would come today at one-thirty.”

“Detective Claudel will have a long wait. I’ll hardly have begun.

Hearing Pelletier grunt, I looked in his direction.

Though subordinate to LaManche, Jean Pelletier had been at the lab a full decade when the chief hired on. He was a small, compact man, with thin gray hair and bags under his eyes the size of mackerels.

Pelletier was a devotee of Le Journal. I knew what was coming.

“Oui.” Pelletier’s fingers were permanently yellowed from a half century of smoking Gauloises cigarettes. One of them pointed at me. “Oui. This angle is much more flattering.

In answer, I rolled my lovely green eyes.

As I took a chair, Nathalie Ayers, Marcel Morin, and Emily Santangelo joined us. “Bonjour”s and “Comment ça va”s were exchanged. Pelletier complimented Santangelo on her haircut. Her look suggested the subject was best left alone. She was right.

After distributing copies of the day’s lineup, LaManche began discussing and assigning cases.

A forty-seven-year-old man had been found hanging from a cross-beam in his garage in Laval.

A fifty-four-year-old man had been stabbed by his son following an argument over leftover sausages. Mama had called the St-Hyacinthe police.

A resident of Longueuil had slammed his all-terrain vehicle into a snowbank on a rural road in the Gatineau. Alcohol was involved.

An estranged couple had been found dead of gunshot wounds in a home in St-Léonard. Two for her, one for him. The ex-to-be went out with a nine-millimeter Glock in his mouth.