Next I?d gone to the central files and pulled the jacket for Trottier. I spent the rest of the afternoon poring over police accounts, autopsy findings, toxicology reports, photos. Something lingered in my memory cells, nagging at me, insisting the cases were linked. Some forgotten detail hovered just beyond recall, coupling the victims in a way I didn?t understand. Some stored memory that I couldn?t access told me it wasn?t just the mutilation and bagging. I wanted to find the connection.

I readjusted my towel and wiped sweat from my face. The skin on my fingertips had gathered into little puckers. Everywhere else I was slick as a perch. I was definitely a short-timer. I couldn?t take the heat for more than twenty minutes, no matter what the alleged benefits. Five more.

Chantale Trottier had been killed less than a year ago, in the fall of my first year full time at the lab. She was sixteen. I?d spread the autopsy photos on my desk this afternoon, but I didn?t need them. I remembered her vividly, remembered in crisp detail the day she?d arrived at the morgue.

October 22, the afternoon of the oyster party. It was a Friday and most of the staff had quit early to drink beer and shuck their way through the crates of Malpeques that are an autumn tradition.

Through the crowd in the conference room I noticed LaManche talking on the phone. He held a hand over his free ear as a barricade against the party noise. I watched him. When he hung up he did a visual sweep of the room. Spotting me, he signaled with one hand, indicating that I should meet him in the hall. When he located Bergeron and got his attention, he repeated the message. In the elevator, five minutes later, he explained. A young girl had just come in. The body was badly beaten and dismembered. A visual ID would be impossible. He wanted Bergeron to look at the teeth. He wanted me to look at the cuts on the bones.

The mood in the autopsy room was in sharp contrast to the gaiety upstairs. Two SQ detectives stood at a distance while a uniformed officer from the identity section took photos. The technician positioned the remains in silence. The detectives said nothing. There were no jokes or wisecracks. The usual banter was completely stilled. The only sound was the click of the shutter as it recorded the atrocity that lay on the autopsy table.

What was left of her had been arranged to form a body. The six bloody pieces had been placed in correct anatomical order, but the angles were slightly off, turning her into a life-size version of those plastic dolls designed to be twisted into distorted positions. The overall effect was macabre.

Her head had been cut off high on the neck, and the truncated muscles looked bright poppy red. The pallid skin rolled back gently at the severed edges, as if recoiling from contact with the fresh, raw meat. Her eyes were half open, and a delicate trail of dried blood meandered from her right nostril. Her hair was wet and lay plastered against her head. It had been long and blond.

Her trunk was bisected at the waist. The upper torso lay with her arms bent at the elbows, the hands drawn in and resting on her stomach. Coffin position, except her fingers were not intertwined.

Her right hand was partially detached, and the ends of the creamy white tendons jutted out like snapped electrical cords. Her attacker had been more successful with the left. The technician had placed it beside her head, where it lay alone, the fingers drawn in like the legs of a shriveled spider.

Her chest had been opened lengthwise, from throat to belly, and the pendulous breasts drooped downward toward each side of the rib cage, their weight drawing apart the two halves of divided flesh. The lower section of torso extended from her waist to her knees. Her lower legs rested side by side, positioned below their normal points of attachment. Unfettered by union at the knee joint, they lay with the feet rotated far to the sides, the toes pointed outward.

With a stab of pain, I?d noticed that her toenails were painted a soft pink. The intimacy of that simple act had caused me such an ache that I wanted to cover her, to scream at all of them to leave her alone. Instead, I?d stood and watched, waiting for my turn to trespass.

I could still close my eyes and see the jagged edges of the lacerations on her scalp, evidence of repeated blows with a blunt object. I could recall in minute detail the bruises on her neck. I could visualize the petechial hemorrhages in her eyes, tiny spots left by the bursting of small blood vessels. Caused by tremendous pressure on the jugular vessels, they are the classic sign of strangulation.

My gut had recoiled as I?d wondered what else had happened to her, this woman-child so carefully composed and nurtured by peanut butter, Scout leaders, summer camps, and Sunday schools. I?d grieved for the years she wouldn?t be allowed to live, for the proms she?d never attend, and the beers she?d never sneak. We think we are a civilized tribe, we North Americans in the last decade of the second millennium. We?d promised her three score years and ten. We?d allowed her but sixteen.

Shutting out the memories of that painful autopsy, I wiped perspiration from my face and shook my head, whipping my soggy hair back and forth. The mental images were liquefying so that I could no longer separate what I was recalling from the past from what I?d seen in the detail photos that afternoon. Like life. I?ve long suspected that many of my memories of childhood are actually drawn from old pictures, that they are a composite of snapshots, a mosaic of celluloid images reworked into a remembered reality. Kodak cast backward. Maybe it?s better to recall the past that way. We rarely take pictures of sad occasions.

The door opened and a woman entered the steam room. She smiled and nodded, then carefully spread her towel on the bench to my left. Her thighs were the consistency of a sea sponge. I gathered my towel and headed for the shower.

Birdie was waiting when I got home. He watched me from across the entrance hall, his white form reflected softly in the black marble floor. He seemed annoyed. Do cats feel such emotions? Perhaps I was projecting. I checked his bowl and found it low, but not empty. Feeling guilty, I filled it anyway. Birdie had adjusted well to the move. His needs were simple. Me, Friskies Ocean Fish, and sleep. Such wants find no impediment in borders and relocate easily.

I had an hour before I was to meet Gabby so I stretched out on the sofa. The workout and steam had taken their toll, and I felt as if major muscle groups had gone off duty. But exhaustion has its rewards. I was physically, if not mentally, relaxed. As usual at such times I really wanted a drink.

Late afternoon sunlight flooded the room, its effect muted by the bleached muslin sheared across each window. It is what I love most about the apartment. The sunlight melds with the pale pastels to create a bright airiness I find soothing. It is my island of tranquillity in a world of tension.

The apartment is on the ground floor of a U-shaped building, which wraps around an inner courtyard. The unit takes up most of one wing and is free of immediate neighbors. On one side of the living room, French doors open to the courtyard garden. A set opposite gives way to my own small yard. It is an urban rarity-grass and flowers in the heart of Centre-ville. I?ve even planted a small herb garden.

At first I?d wondered if I?d like living by myself. I?d never done it. I?d gone from home to college to marriage with Pete, raising Katy, never the mistress of my own estate. I need not have worried. I love it.

I was drifting on the boundary between sleep and wakefulness when the phone yanked me back. Headachy from a nap interrupted, I spoke into the receiver. I was rewarded by a robotic voice trying to sell me a cemetery plot.