Grave Secrets [Temperance Brennan 5] by Kathy Reichs

Author:Kathy Reichs
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Montreal (Quebec), Mystery & Detective, Montréal (Québec), Political, American, Women Forensic Anthropologists, Fiction, Pizza Industry, Detective and Mystery Stories, Mystery Fiction, Women Sleuths, Brennan, Thrillers, Suspense, General, Temperance (Fictitious Character), Restaurants
ISBN: 9780099556541
Publisher: Heinemann
Published: 2002-06-14T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

By seven the next morning I was racing through the asphalt underbely of Montreal. Above me, the city yawned and stretched to life. Around me, the Vile-Marie Tunnel looked as gray as my mood.

Quebec was in the grip of a rare spring heat wave. When I'd arrived home near midnight, my patio thermometer stil topped eighty, and the temperature inside felt like nine hundred Celsius.

The AC was indifferent to my preference for sleeping cool. Ten minutes of clicking buttons, pounding, and swearing had done nothing to coax it to life. Sweating and angry, I'd finaly opened every window and falen into bed.

The street boys had been equaly unconcerned about my comfort and need for sleep. A dozen were en fête on the back stoop of a pizza joint ten yards from my bedroom window. Yeling did not dampen their party mood. Neither did threats. Or curses.

I had slept badly, tossing and turning under limp sheets, awakened repeatedly by laughter, song, and angry outbursts. I had greeted the dawn with a pounding headache.

The Bureau du Coroner and the Laboratoire de Sciences Judiciaires et de Médecine Légale are located in a thirteen-story glass and concrete T in a neighborhood east of Centre-vile. In deference to its principal occupant, the provincial police, or Sûreté du Québec, over the decades the structure has been dubbed the SQ building.

Several years back, the Gouvernement du Quebec decided to pump milions into law enforcement and forensic science. The building was refurbished, and the LSJML was expanded and moved from the fifth to the twelfth and thirteenth floors, into space formerly occupied by a short-term jail. In an official ceremony, the tower was reborn as the Edifice Wilfrid-Derome.

Old habits die hard. To most it remains the SQ building.

Exiting the tunnel at the Molson brewery, I passed under the Jacques Cartier Bridge, shot across De Lorimier, turned right, and wound through a neighborhood where neither the streets nor the people are beautiful. Three-flats with postage-stamp yards and metal staircases spiraling up their faces. Gray stone churches with silver spires. Corner dépanneurs. Storefront businesses. The Wilfrid-Derome/SQ looming over al.

After ten minutes of searching, I located a spot that appeared, through some bureaucratic loophole, to be legal, without permit, during the precise period I planned to park.

I rechecked the monthly, hourly, and daily restrictions, maneuvered into place, grabbed my laptop and briefcase, and headed up the block.

Children were dribbling toward a nearby school in twos and threes, like ants converging on a melting Popsicle. Early arrivals miled in the playground, kicking bals, jumping ropes, screaming, chasing. A smal girl peered through the wrought-iron fence, fingers clutching the uprights like those of the child at Chupan Ya. She watched me pass, face expressionless. I did not envy her the next eight hours, trapped in a hot classroom, summer freedom stil a month away.

Nor did I envy the day facing me.

I was not looking forward to a mummified head. I was not looking forward to a putrefied torso. I dreaded mediating the reunion between Chantale and her mother.

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