ACK IN TOWN, RYAN AND I GRABBED LUNCH AT A LA BELLE Province. I had little appetite. The wet-wipes and disinfectant had gone only so far. I just wanted to shampoo and scrub the remaining dirt from under my nails. But Ryan was resolute. He often showed a bubbe streak, insisting I eat when I least wanted food.

Ryan ordered poutine, a Quebec delicacy that I’ve always found baffling. Take fries, top with cheese curds, cover with tasteless brown gravy. Yum.

I had pea soup and a salad.

We went directly from the restaurant to the Édifice Wilfrid-Derome in the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve district just east of centre-ville. The Laboratoire des sciences judiciaires et de médecine légale occupies the top two floors of the T-shaped structure, the Bureau du coroner is on eleven, the morgue is in the basement. The remaining footage belongs to the SQ.

Ryan took an unsecured elevator to four. I took a restricted one servicing only the LSJML, the coroner, and the morgue.

Any weekday the labs, offices, and corridors would have been swarming with white-coated scientists and technicians. That afternoon the place was quiet as a tomb. God bless Saturday.

Swiping my security pass for the fourth time since entering the building, I passed through glass doors separating the medico-legal wing from the rest of the twelfth floor, and proceeded down a hall with offices on the right and labs on the left. Microbiology. Histology. Pathology. Anthropology-Odontology.

During my absence in Chicago, window frames, bookshelves, cabinet doors, and refrigerators had been transformed. Each work area now reflected the sugarplum vision of its decorator. Plastic pine garlands. Lace doily snowflakes. Père Noël with his sack of goodies, reindeer, and sleigh.

My desk was heaped and my phone was flashing. Ignoring the hysterical red message light, I slipped my purse into a drawer and headed for the locker room.

Showered and dressed in surgical scrubs, I returned to the lab for case forms, calipers, and a clipboard. Then I took another elevator offering the same limited choices: LSJML, coroner, morgue.

In the basement, through another secure door, a long, narrow corridor shoots the length of the building. To the left are an X-ray room and four autopsy suites, three with single tables, one with a pair. To the right are drying racks, computer stations, and wheeled tubs and carts for transporting specimens to the various departments on high.

Through a small glass window in each door, I could see that here, too, nothing was happening. No police photographers, no autopsy techs, no pathologists. Some of the bulletin boards were decked out like the labs upstairs.

’Tis the season, I thought glumly, wishing I were home with Katy and Birdie.

I went directly to salle d’autopsie number four—my salle, specially ventilated for decomps, floaters, mummified corpses, and other aromatics.

As does each of the others, autopsy room four has double doors leading to parallel morgue bays divided into refrigerated compartments. Small white cards mark the presence of temporary residents.

But I didn’t have to go there. The Oka victim lay on a gurney on the autopsy room side of the doors. Paperwork peeked from below the body bag.

A quick glance showed that the remains had been assigned LSJML and morgue numbers, and that Hubert had filled out a request for an anthropology consult.

I began by entering pertinent information into my anthropology case form. Numéro de morgue: 38107. Numéro de LSJML: 45736. Coroner: Jean-Claude Hubert. Enquêteur: Lieutenant-détective Andrew Ryan, Section des crimes contre la personne, Sûreté du Québec. Nom: Inconnu. Unknown.

Last, I wrote the date and a brief summary of facts.

Tossing my clipboard onto the counter, I located a camera and checked to be sure the battery was charged. Next I pulled a plastic apron from one drawer, gloves and a mask from another, and put them on. Costumed and ready, I rolled the gurney to one side of the stainless steel table floor-bolted in the center of the room.

As a precaution, I took shots of the body bag closed, then unzipped with contents revealed. The bra and panties were visible, folded and tucked into one corner.

I checked undie labels, but the printing was faded beyond legibility. After measuring waist and chest circumferences and shooting a few more pics, I spread the garments on the counter.

Prelims finished, I began reassembling the skeleton. I’d completed an inventory at graveside, distinguishing lefts from rights, so the process went quickly until I got to the fingers and toes. Since individuation is so dreadfully tedious, those bones I’d merely counted and bagged.

A normal adult human has fifty-six phalanges. The thumbs and halluces, or big toes, have two rows each, proximal and distal. Every other digit has three rows, proximal, middle, and distal.

First, I separated hands from feet. Piece of cake for les premiers. Big toe phalanges are distinctly shaped and heftier than those in a thumb.

The reverse is true for pointer, middleman, ringman, and pinky. In those digits, finger phalanges are larger than toe phalanges. They are also flatter on their palm surfaces and more rounded on their backs, and their shafts are shorter and less laterally compressed.

Row position is all about joints. At its proximal end, a first-row phalange has a single facet, or concave oval surface for articulation with a metatarsal in the foot or a metacarpal in the hand. At its distal end are double knobs. A second-row phalange has double knobs at the distal end and double facets at the proximal end. A third-row phalange has a double facet at the near end, a tapered point at the far.

Setting the twenty-eight finger bones aside, I sorted toe phalanges by position. That done, I determined specific digits, two through five. Then I separated lefts from rights.

See what I mean by tedious?

By the time I finished with the feet my back was kinked and my face was itchy from the mask. I was doing overhead arm stretches when I thought I heard movement somewhere down the hall.

I checked the wall clock. 6:40.

I peered out the door in both directions.

Not a soul.

Back to the table.

Saturday-night loser. Scrooge neurons taunted from deep in my brain.

“Fa la la la la.” My song rang cheerless in the empty room.

After another muscle stretch, I dived into the hand bones. Proximal, middle, distal.

I was sorting digits when I heard the muted clink of metal on metal. Again, I checked the hall.

Again, it was empty.

Printer recalibrating? Cooler kicking on?

The ghost of Christmas future coming to kick butt?

Achy and cranky, I turned back to the phalanges. I wanted to finish as quickly as possible. To go home, eat supper, maybe read a good book. Alexander McCall Smith. Or Nora Roberts. A story distant from this parallel universe of death.

Then I remembered. I didn’t have a car because I’d ridden with Ryan. I’d have to take the metro.

Crap.

And it was probably a billion degrees below zero.

Crap. Crap.

As I worked, my mood grew blacker and blacker. I remembered there was no food at the condo. Dinner would be a frozen tourtière.

And I’d eat it alone. Birdie was in North Carolina. So was Katy. Since I wasn’t supposed to be in Montreal, Ryan had Charlie at his place.

Where was Ryan? Probably out wining and dining with friends. Or maybe cocooned by a fire with his ex.

But Ryan swore he and Lutetia were history again. Were they?

Didn’t matter. That ship had sailed.

Had it?

My eyes were burning and my back was seriously cramped. I had to force myself to concentrate.

Unbidden, lyrics came winging through my brain.

I’ll have a blue Christmas without you….

My eyes swept the room. Not a stocking or jolly Saint Nick in sight.

I was alone in a morgue ten days before Christmas.

I’d be alone at home.

Screw that. I vowed to call Ryan in the morning to ask for my bird. A cockatiel was better than no company at all. Maybe he and I could carol together.

“Four calling birds, three French hens …” I sang.

Screw tinsel and holly. What did Dickens say? Honor Christmas in your heart. Fine. I’d follow Old Charlie’s advice.

Whoa.

Charlie. Charlie.

Until that moment, I hadn’t noticed the coincidence.

Charlie, my cockatiel. Charlie, my old high school crush, now a lawyer in the Mecklenburg County Public Defender’s office in Charlotte.

Charlie and I had barely started seeing each other when I left North Carolina for my late-November rotation in Montreal. And, to be honest, our first date had not gone well.

That’s being charitable. I’d nose-dived from the wagon, binged on Merlot, then blown the guy off for a week.

I pictured Charlie Hunt, NBA tall, cinnamon skin, eyes the color of Christmas holly.

The vision did nothing to improve my mood.

Why was I stuck in this basement slogging through bones? What could I possibly accomplish tonight? I couldn’t establish ID. Hubert hadn’t bothered to provide Christelle Villejoin’s antemortem records.

“Weenie’s probably out swilling eggnog. Parked under mistletoe waiting for a mark.”

I was now in full self-pity mode.

“Two turtle doves …”

Sighing, I snatched up another phalange.

Both joint surfaces were dense and polished, their edges lacy with bony overgrowth. Arthritis. Moving that finger would have hurt like hell.

My mind shot to the same tableau as in the woods. An old woman, trembling by a pit in her skivvies and bare feet.

The image morphed. I saw Gran’s face the day she got lost at South-Park Mall. The panic in her eyes. The relief upon seeing me.

Guilt drop-kicked self-pity into the night.

“So this is Christmas,” I sang Lennon. “… and what have you done?”

I positioned the phalange.

I was selecting another when my mobile shattered the silence. I jumped, and the phalange flew from my hand.

My eyes flicked to the clock. Eight ten.

I checked caller ID.

Ryan.

Removing one glove, I snatched up the phone and clicked on.

“Brennan.”

“Where are you?”

“Where are you?”

“I called your condo.” Did Ryan sound annoyed?

“I’m not there.”

There was a beat of silence. I listened but could hear no background noise.

“Are you still here?” Ryan asked.

“My answer would require knowledge of your present location.” I retrieved the phalange and placed it on the table.

“You’re in the morgue, right?”

“Technically, no. I’m in an autopsy room.”

Rationally, I knew my discontent was not due to Ryan. But he was on the line, so he was taking the hit.

“It’s Saturday night,” Ryan said.

“Just eleven days left, Kmart shoppers.”

Ryan ignored my sarcasm. “You’ve been here since three.”

“And?”

“You working the Oka ID?”

“No, I’m knitting the old gal a sweater.”

“You can be an Olympic pain in the ass, Brennan.”

“Practice pays.”

Pause.

“What’s so urgent it can’t wait a day?” Ryan asked.

“Once I finish the skeletal inventory, I can construct the biological profile and analyze the trauma. Then I can hike my hiney to a latitude where the mercury stands tall.”

“Have you eaten?”

Ryan’s question goosed my already significant irritation.

“Why this sudden interest in my diet?”

“Have you?”

“Yes,” I lied.

“Would you like a ride home?”

I did.

“No, thanks.”

“It’s snowing.”

“Joy to the friggin’ world,” I said.

“I’m upstairs.”

“So I’m not the only loser lacking a life.”

“What would it take to get you to ride with me?” Patient.

“Chloroform.”

“Good one.”

“Thanks.”

There was a long silence before Ryan spoke again.

“I’m now primary on Villejoin, so I’ve been going through the file. I can fill you in.”

I said nothing.

“Fatigue fosters sloppy thinking,” he added.

Ryan’s point was a good one. And I did want background on the Villejoin investigation.

I glanced at the disarticulated skeleton. Of the two hundred and six bones, only the hand phalanges remained unincorporated.

Tomorrow was Sunday. Barring a major disaster, the table would not be needed. The room was a secure area. I’d left remains overnight before.

And I was tired.

“I’ll meet you in the lobby in ten,” I said.

It was a decision I’d come to regret.