"The biker's idea of women's lib is to take the cuffs off after he's through. Maybe." Kuricek.

"That's pretty close. Women are definitely used and abused." Roy.

"Used how?" I asked.

"Aside from sex, there's what we might cal wage sharing. They get the women into exotic dancing, drink hustling, street-level drug trafficking, prostitution, then rake back the earnings. One hooker from Halifax claimed she had to turn over forty percent of her take to the Hel s Angel who pimped for her."

"How do they find these women?" I felt a knot forming in my stomach.

"The usual. They pick them up in bars, hitchhiking, runaways."

"Wanna ride my Harley, sweet thing?" Kuricek.

I pictured the skul and shunt.

"Amazingly, there's never a shortage," Roy continued. "But don't get me wrong. While many are victimized, some held against their wil s, a good number of these ladies embrace the lifestyle with gusto. Macho men, drugs, alcohol, guns, round-the-mountain sex, It's a wild ride and they go along gladly.

"The women also make themselves useful in ways not strictly sexual or economic. Often it's the ladies who carry concealed drugs or weapons, and they're very good at ditching when a bust comes down. Some make very effective spies. They hire on with government agencies, the phone company, records offices, any place they might have access to useful information. Some ole ladies have guns or property registered in their names, either because hubby is prohibited, or to protect his assets from seizure by the government.

Roy glanced at his watch.

"On that note, I think we'l cal it a day. Some folks have just joined us from the CUM, so I may hold one more of these sessions.

CUM. Communauté Urbaine de Montréal Police. I wondered why Claudel had not been present at today's meeting

"If so, I'l post the date."

As I drove to the lab my thoughts went back to the teenager from St-Basile, and to Russel 's explanation. Could the girl have been a victim of this biker insanity? Something about her resonated in me, and I tried again to piece together what I knew about her.

She died in her teens, no longer a child but not yet a woman. Her bones revealed nothing about how she had died, but they did disclose something of how she had lived. The hydrocephalus might help identify her.

The wel -healed burr hole suggested that the shunt had been there awhile. Did she hate the shunt? Did she lie in her bed at night and palpate the tube running under her skin? Was she plagued by other physical problems? Did her peers torment her? Was she an honor student? A dropout? Would we find medical records associated with a missing girl that would help identify this skul ?

Unlike many of my nameless dead, I had no sense of who she was. The Girl. That's how I'd come to think of her. The Girl in the Viper pit.