Monday Mourning

”

“Alert Claudel?” Gilbert asked.

“Make his day.”

Four hours later all my digits were ice. Though I’d tuqued my head and scarved my neck, I was shivering inside my one-hundred-percent-microporous-

polyurethane-polymerized-coated-nylon-guaranteed-

to-forty-below-Celsius Kanuk parka.

Gilbert was moving around the cellar, snapping and filming from various angles. Racine was watching, gloved hands thrust into his armpits for warmth. Both looked comfy in their arctic jumpsuits.

The two homicide cops, Claudel and Charbonneau, stood side by side, feet spread, hands clasped in front of their genitals.

Each wore a black woolen overcoat and black leather gloves. Neither wore a happy face.

Eight dead rats adorned the base of the walls.

The plumber’s pit and the two depressions were open to a depth of two feet. The former had yielded a few scattered bones left behind by the plumber and owner. The depression trenches were a different story.

The skeleton under grid one lay in a fetal curl.

It was unclothed, and not a single artifact had turned up in the screen.

The individual under grid two had been bundled before burial. The parts we could see looked fully skeletal.

Flicking the last particles of dirt from the second burial, I set aside my paintbrush, stood, and stomped my feet to warm them.

“That a blanket?” Charbonneau’s voice sounded husky from the cold.

“Looks more like leather,” I said.

He jabbed a thumb at Dr. Energy’s crate.

“This the rest of the dude in the box?”

Sergeant-détective Michel Charbonneau was born in Chicoutimi, six hours up the St.

Lawrence from Montreal, in a region known as the Saguenay. Before entering the CUM, he’d spent several years working in the West Texas oil fields. Proud of his cowboy youth, Charbonneau always addressed me in my mother tongue. His English was good, though “de”s replaced “the”s, syllables were often inappropriately accented, and his phrasing used enough slang to fill a ten-gallon hat.

“Let’s hope so.

”

“You hope so?” A small vapor cloud puffed from Claudel’s mouth.

“Yes, Monsieur Claudel. I hope so.”

Claudel’s lips tucked in, but he said nothing.

When Gilbert finished shooting the bundled burial, I dropped to my knees and tugged at a corner of the leather. It tore."

"Changing from my warm woolies to surgical gloves, I leaned in and began teasing free an edge, gingerly separating, lifting, then rolling the leather backward onto itself.