While Ryan held the ladder, Demers climbed the rungs and tested the grate with one finger. It wiggled, and plaster dust cascaded down.

Demers pulled a screwdriver from his belt. A couple of twists, and the screws came loose. More plaster dropped as he removed and handed down the grate. He drew a mask up over his mouth, then reached a hand into the dark rectangle in the ceiling. Palm flat, he gingerly explored. “There’s a beam.”

I held my breath as his arm went this way and that.

“Insulation.” Finally, Demers shook his head. “I’ll need the camera.”

Gioretti handed up the snakelike tool. The tip held a fiber-optic image sensor with a lens under four millimeters across. The tiny camera would take pictures inside the wall and allow us to view images in real time.

Demers thumbed a switch, and a bright beam shot into the darkness. After adjusting its curvature, he inserted the snake into the recess. A blurry gray image appeared on the monitor down below.

“We’re reading you.” Gioretti turned a dial, and the gray blur crystallized into a wooden beam. Below the beam was what looked like old-fashioned vermiculite insulation.

“Must be a ceiling joist,” Ryan said.

We watched the camera inch right along the joist, on-screen.

“Try the other way,” Ryan said. “You should hit a wall stud and a rafter.”

Demers reversed direction.

Ryan was right. Two and a half feet beyond the vent’s left end, beams joined the joist from below and above.

Tucked in the upper V was another towel-wrapped bundle.

“Sonofabitch,” Gioretti said.

* * *

Ninety minutes later, the closet ceiling was gone, and the third baby lay zipped inside its thirty-six-by-ninety-inch pouch.

Fortunately, the small attic produced no other infants.

Pepper had not alerted outside the building.

The three body bags lay side by side in the hearse, each with a pitifully small bulge in the middle.

Up the block, the journalists were practically wetting themselves. They maintained their distance. I wondered what Ryan had threatened to keep them in check.

I stood at the hearse’s back bumper. I’d removed my jumpsuit, and the sun felt warm on my shoulders and head.

Though it was past two and I’d eaten nothing since dawn, I had no appetite. I kept staring at the bags, wondering about the woman who had done this thing. Did she feel remorse over murdering her newborns? Or did she proceed with her life, not reflecting at all on the enormity of her crimes?

Images kept intruding from my past. Unbidden. Unwanted.

My baby brother, Kevin, dead of leukemia at age three. I wasn’t allowed to see Kevin’s body. To my eight-year-old mind, his death had somehow seemed unreal. One day he was with us, then he wasn’t.

In my child’s way, I’d understood that Kevin was sick, that his life would end too soon. Still, when it happened, I was left bewildered. I’d needed to say good-bye.

Up the street, Ryan was talking to Bédard. Again.