Past the black girders of the pont Champlain, the skyscrapers of centre-ville cut sharp silhouettes against the early summer dusk. I recognized Place Ville-Marie, Complexe Desjardins, the Centre-Mont-Royal, the Marriott Château Champlain.

The streets I’d searched for parking spaces that morning were clogged with traffic. Parents returning to the burbs for dinner and homework with the kids, lovers hurrying to nocturnal trysts, night-shifters dragging themselves to punch clocks on which time would seem to stand still.

How often Ryan and I had driven together from Wilfrid-Derome, discussing victims, suspects, aspects of a case. I can’t share my work with those close to me who are not on the job—Pete, Katy, Harry, my best friend, Anne. I can’t tell them what I’ve seen lying in a Dumpster or buried in a shallow grave. Can’t describe the congealed blood, the bloated body, the seething maggots. I missed having someone to talk to, someone who understood. Ryan had kept me balanced. Kept me caring.

I wondered at Ryan’s current coolness. Yes, we’d always danced around emotion, kept our innermost feelings to ourselves. Even in the good times.

Yes, the slaughter of innocents outraged him. Women. Children. The elderly. I knew that. But this current moodiness seemed different. More than me. More than dead babies.

Whatever. He’d tell me when he was ready. Or not.

While changing into street clothes, I decided on dinner at home before heading to St. Mary’s.

And remembered.

“Damn.”

I detest grocery shopping. Irrational, but there it is. I’ll make any excuse to avoid the supermarket. Then I pay the price. Like tonight. I hadn’t bought food since arriving in Montreal two days earlier.

As I tossed my soiled scrubs into a biohazard bin, another thought heightened my melancholy.

When I’d departed Charlotte, Birdie had been recovering from a urinary tract infection. Knowing he hated air travel, and feeling the trip might compromise his wee bladder, I’d left him in Dixie. The cat offered no protest.

Frozen dinner. Alone.

As I walked up the corridor, my spirits went subterranean. I was considering take-out options when, through the window, I noticed a figure in my lab.

I froze. Then recognition.

Ryan. Jabbing digits on a cell phone.

At six-thirty? What the hell?

Ryan turned when I pushed through the door. Before I could speak, he cut me off. “We got her.”

“Amy Roberts et cet?”

Ryan nodded.

“And?”

“You won’t believe it.”

“HER REAL NAME IS ANNALIESE RUBEN. SHE WAS POPPED TWICE for prostitution, once in 2005, again in 2008. Both arrests were in Edmonton. First time she got probation. Second time she was a no-show for the court date.”

Ryan handed me three printouts.

The first was a response to the fingerprint search. Skipping the part about points of correspondence, I skimmed the physical descriptors. Annaliese Ruben had black hair, brown eyes, stood five feet tall, and weighed 195 pounds.

The second printout was a report on Ruben’s criminal history. The third provided her most recent mug shot, obtained using the fingerprint system number. Ruben’s thumbnail showed a woman with a moon face and dark tangled hair that badly needed grooming.