For policing purposes, the Communaute Urbaine De Montreal is divided into four sections, each with a headquarters housing intervention, analysis and investigation divisions, and a detention center. Suspects arrested for murder or sexual assault are held at a facility near place Versail es, in the far eastern end of the city Al others await arraignment at one of the four sectional jails. For possession of methamphetamine, Dorsey went to his local facility, Op South.

The Op South headquarters is located at rue Guy and boulevard René Lévesque, on the outskirts of Centre-vil e. This section is predominantly French and English, but it is also Mandarin, Estonian, Arabic, and Greek. It is separatist and federalist. It holds the vagrant and the affluent, the student and the stockbroker, the immigrant and the plainer québecois.

The Op South is churches and bars, boutiques and sex shops, sprawling homes and walk-up flats. The murders of Emily Anne Toussaint and Yves Cherokee Desjardins had taken place within its borders.

As I turned off Guy into the lot, I passed through a group carrying placards and wearing signs. They'd spread down the sidewalk from the building next door, blue-col ar workers picketing for higher pay. Good luck, I thought. Perhaps it was the political instability, perhaps the Canadian economy in general, but Quebec Province was in a financial squeeze. Budgets were being cut, services curtailed. I hadn't had a raise in seven years.

I entered at the main door and stepped to a counter to my right.

"I'm here to see George Dorsey," I said to the guard on duty. She put down her snack cake and eyed me with boredom.

"Are you on the list?"

"Temperance Brennan. The prisoner asked to see me."

She brushed chubby hands together, checked for crumbs, then entered something into a keyboard. Light reflected off her glasses as she leaned forward to read the monitor. Text scrol ed down each lens, froze, then she spoke again without raising her eyes.

"Carcajou?" Ralph Nader couldn't have sounded more dubious.

"Mm." LeJournal thought so.

"Got an ID?"

She looked up and I showed her my security pass for the SQ building.

"No badge?"

"This was handy."

"You'l have to sign in and leave your things here."

She flipped pages in a ledger, wrote something, then handed me the pen. I scribbled the time and my name. Then I slipped my purse off my shoulder and handed it across the counter.

"It'l be a minute."

Ms. Cupcake secured my bag in a metal locker, then picked up a phone and spoke a few words. Ten minutes later a key turned in a green metal door to my left, then it opened and a guard waved me in. He was skeletal, his uniform drooping from his bones like clothes on a hanger.