The face was army mule long with deep, vertical creases. When he raised his brows in a question, the furrows paral eling his eyes elongated and veered toward the midline.

"Yes. Of course."

"You might want to begin with the X-rays."

He indicated the envelopes, then swiveled to his desk.

"And here are the scene and autopsy photos." He handed me a stack of smal er brown envelopes and a videocassette.

"The two bikers carrying the bomb to the Vipers' clubhouse were pulverized, their remains scattered over an enormous area. A lot of what the recovery team is finding is stuck to wal s and caught in bushes and tree branches. Amazingly, the largest fragments retrieved so far have come from the clubhouse roof. One chunk of thorax has a partial tattoo that wil be useful for establishing identity."

"What about the driver?"

"He died in the hospital this morning."

"The shooter?"

"He is in custody, but these people are never helpful. He wil go to jail rather than give anything to the police."

"Even information about a rival gang?"

"If he talks, he is probably a dead man."

"Are there stil no dentals or prints?"

"Nothing."

LaManche ran a hand over his face, raised and lowered his shoulders, then laced his fingers in his lap.

"I fear we wil never get al the tissue sorted out."

"Can't we use DNA?"

"Have you heard the names Ronald and Donald Vail ancourt?"

I shook my head.

"The Vail ancourt brothers, Le Clic and Le Clac. Both are ful patch members of the Heathens. One was implicated a few years back in the execution of Claude 'Le Couteau' Dube. I don't remember which."

"The police think the Vail ancourts are the victims?"

"Yes."

The melancholy eyes looked into mine. "Clic and Clac are identical twins."

By seven that evening I'd examined everything but the video. Using a magnifier I'd gone over scores of photos showing hundreds of bone fragments and bloody masses of varying shapes and sizes. In shot after shot arrows pointed to red and yel ow globs lying in grass, entangled in branches, and flattened against cinder blocks, broken glass, tar-paper roofing, and corrugated metal.

The remains had arrived at the morgue in large black plastic bags, each containing a col ection of Ziploc bags. Each bag was numbered and held an assortment of body parts, dirt, fabric, metal, and unidentifiable debris. The autopsy photos moved from the unopened bags, to shots of the smal plastic sacks grouped on autopsy tables, to views of the contents sorted by categories.