?That?s him. I saw him when he came to ID the deceased.?

The card read: Parker T. Bailey, Ph.D., Professeur de Biologie, Universit #233; du Qu #233;bec #224; Montr #233;al, and gave e-mail, telephone, and fax numbers, along with an address.

?What was the story?? I asked.

?The gentleman keeps monkeys at the university for his research. One day he came in and found one less subject.?

?Stolen??

?Stolen? Liberated? Escaped? Who knows? The primate was AWOL.? The expression sounded odd in French.

?So he read about the dead monkey in the paper and called here??

?C?est #231;a.?

?What happened to it??

?The monkey??

I nodded.

?We released it to . . .? He gestured at the card.

?Dr. Bailey,? I supplied.

?Oui. There were no next of kin. At least, not in Quebec.? Not a twitch.

?I see.?

I looked at the card again. This is nothing, my left brain said, while at the same time I heard myself asking, ?May I keep this??

?Of course.?

?One other thing.? I laid the trap for myself. ?Why do you call it the case of the terminal monkey??

?Well, it was,? he answered, surprised.

?Was what??

?The monkey. It was terminal.?

?Yes. I see.?

?Also, that?s where it was.?

?Where??

?The terminal. The bus terminal.?

Some things do translate. Unfortunately.

For the rest of the afternoon I pulled details from the four principal files and entered them into the spreadsheet I?d created. Color of hair. Eyes. Skin. Height. Religion. Names. Dates. Places. Signs of the Zodiac. Anything and everything. Doggedly, I plugged it in, planning to search for links later. Or perhaps I thought the patterns would form by themselves, the interconnecting bits of information drawn to each other like neuropeptides to receptor sites. Or maybe I just needed a rote task to occupy my mind, a mental jigsaw puzzle to give the illusion of progress.

At four-fifteen I tried Ryan again. Though he wasn?t at his desk, the operator thought she?d seen him, and reluctantly began a search. While I waited, my eye fell on the monkey file. Bored, I dumped out the photos. There were two sets, one of Polaroids, the other of five-by-seven color prints. The operator came back on to tell me Ryan was not in any of the offices she?d rung. Yes, sigh, she?d try the coffee room.

I thumbed through the Polaroids. Obviously taken when the remains arrived in the morgue. Shots of a purple and black nylon gym bag, zipped and unzipped, the latter showing a bundle in its interior. The next few showed the bundle on an autopsy table, before and after it was unrolled.

The remaining half dozen featured the body parts. The scale on the ID card confirmed that the subject was, indeed, tiny, smaller than a full-term fetus or newborn. Putrefaction was advancing nicely. The flesh had begun to blacken and was smeared with something that looked like rancid tapioca. I thought I could identify the head, the torso, and the limbs. Other than that, I couldn?t tell squat. The pictures had been taken from too far away, and the detail was lousy. I rotated a few, looking for a better angle, but it was impossible to make out much.

The operator came back with resolve in her voice. Ryan was not there. I?d have to try tomorrow. Denying her the opportunity to launch the argument she?d prepared, I left another message, and hung up.

The five-by-seven close-ups had been taken following cleaning. The detail that had escaped the Polaroids was fully captured in the prints. The tiny corpse had been skinned and disjointed. The photographer, probably Denis, had arranged the pieces in anatomical order, then carefully photographed each in turn.

As I worked my way through the stack, I couldn?t help noting that the butchered parts looked vaguely like rabbit about to become stew. Except for one thing. The fifth print showed a small arm ending in four perfect fingers and a thumb curled onto a delicate palm.

The last two prints focused on the head. Without the outer covering of skin and hair it looked primordial, like an embryo detached from the umbilicus, naked and vulnerable. The skull was the size of a tangerine. Though the face was flat and the features anthropoid, it didn?t take Jane Goodall to know that this was no human primate. The mouth contained full dentition, molars and all. I counted. Three premolars in each quadrant. The terminal monkey had come from South America.

It?s just another animal case, I told myself, returning the pictures to their envelope. We?d get them occasionally, because someone thought the remains to be human. Bear paws skinned and left behind by hunters, pigs and goats slaughtered for meat, the unwanted portions discarded by a roadside, dogs and cats abused and thrown in the river. The callousness of the human animal always astounded me. I never got used to it.

So why did this case hold my attention? Another look at the five-by-sevens. Okay. The monkey had been cut up. Big deal. So are a lot of animal carcasses that we see. Some asshole probably got his jollies tormenting and killing it. Maybe it was a student, pissed off at his grade.

With the fifth photo I stopped, my eyes cemented to the image. Once again, my stomach muscles knotted. I stared at the photo, then reached for the phone.

23

THERE?S NOTHING EMPTIER THAN A CLASSROOM BUILDING AFTER hours. It?s how I imagine the aftermath of a neutron bomb. Lights burn. Water fountains spew forth on command. Bells ring on schedule. Computer terminals glow eerily. The people are absent. No one quenching a thirst, scurrying to class, or clicking on keyboards. The silence of the catacombs.

I sat on a folding chair outside Parker Bailey?s office at the Universit #233; du Qu #233;bec #224; Montr #233;al-UQAM. Since leaving the lab, I?d worked out at the gym, bought groceries at the Provigo, and fed myself a meal of vermicelli and clam sauce. Not bad for a quick and dirty. Even Birdie was impressed. Now I was impatient.

To say the biology department was quiet would be like saying a quark is small. Up and down the corridor every door was closed. I?d perused the bulletin boards, read the graduate school brochures, the field school announcements, the offers to do word processing or tutoring, the notices announcing guest speakers. Twice.

I looked at my watch for the millionth time-9:12 P.M. Damn. He should be here by now. His class ended at nine. At least, that?s what the secretary had told me. I got up and paced. Those who wait must pace-9:14. Damn.

At 9:30 I gave up. As I slung my purse over my shoulder, I heard a door open somewhere out of sight. In a moment a man with an enormous stack of lab books hurried around the corner. He kept adjusting his arms to keep the books from falling. His cardigan looked as if it had left Ireland before the potato famine. I guessed his age at around forty.

He stopped when he saw me, but his face registered nothing. I started to introduce myself when a notebook slipped from the stack. We both lunged for it. Not a good move by him. The better part of the pile followed, scattering across the floor like confetti on New Year?s Eve. We gathered and restacked for several minutes, then he unlocked his office and dumped the books on his desk.

?Sorry,? he said in heavily accented French. ?I-?

?No problem,? I responded in English. ?I must have startled you.?

?Yes. No. I should have made two trips. This happens a lot.? His English was not American.

?Lab books??

?Yeah. I just taught a class in ethological methodology.?

He was brushed with all the shades of an Outer Banks sunset. Pale pink skin, raspberry cheeks, and hair the color of a vanilla wafer. His mustache and eyelashes were amber. He looked like a man who?d burn, not tan.