At nine-thirty I turned on the hockey game. It was the end of the second period and the Habs were losing four-zip to St. Louis. Don Cherry blustered about the ineptness of the Canadiens management, his face round and flushed above his high-col ar shirt. He looked more like a tenor in a barbershop quartet than a sports commentator. I watched, bemused that mil ions listened to him every week. At ten-fifteen I turned off the TV and went to bed.

The next morning I got up early and drove to the lab. Monday is a busy day for most medical examiners. The random acts of cruelty, senseless bravado, lonely self-loathing, and wretched bad timing that result in violent death accelerate on weekends. The bodies arrive and are stored in the morgue for Monday autopsy.

This Monday was no exception. I got coffee and joined the morning meeting in LaManche's office. Natalie Ayers was at a murder trial in Val-d'Or, but the other pathologists were present. Jean Pel etier had just returned from testifying in Kuuj uaq, in far northern Quebec. He was showing snapshots to Emily Santan-gelo and Michael Morin. I leaned in.

Kuuj uaq looked as if it had been flown in and assembled the night before.

"What's that?" I asked, indicating a prefab building with a plastic outer layer.

"The aqua center." Pel etier pointed to a red hexagonal sign with unfamiliar characters above, Arret below in bold white letters. "Al the signs are in French and Inuktitut." His upriver accent was so heavy, to my ear he might have been speaking the latter. I'd known him for years and stil had trouble understanding his French.

Pel etier pointed at another prefab building. "That's the courthouse."

It looked like the pool, sans plastic. Behind the town, the tundra stretched gray and bleak, a Serengeti of rocks and moss. A bleached caribou skeleton lay by the roadside.

"Is that common?" asked Emily, studying the caribou.

"Only when they're dead."

"There are eight autopsies today," said LaManche, handing out the roster. He went over them al . A nineteen-year-old male had been hit by a train, his torso bisected. It happened on a barricaded trestle frequented by teens.

A snowmobile had gone through the ice on Lac Megantic. Two bodies recovered. Alcohol intoxication suspected.

An infant had been found dead and putrefied in its bed. Mama, who was downstairs watching a game show when authorities arrived, said ten days earlier God told her to stop feeding the baby.

An unidentified white male was found behind a Dumpster on the McGil campus. Three bodies were recovered from a house fire in St-Jovite.

Pel etier was assigned the infant. He indicated that he might request an anthropology consult. While the baby's identity was not in question, cause and time of death would be tough.

Santangelo got the bodies from Lac Megantic, Morin the train and Dumpster cases. The victims from the bedroom in St-Jovite were intact enough for normal autopsy. LaManche would perform them. I would do the bones from the basement.