Canadian cold is the most profound kind, and the afternoon light seemed to shiver as it filtered through the treelimbs outside of the morgue. Hoar frost stood like fur on the ambulance, the porch railings of the mortuary, and the window-frames. The light that filtered in from the narrow windows above the work-table and on the West side of the room was blue accordingly. It lay in slats across the delicacy of a cadaver, ribs curling above the edges of the body bag like a set of grasping, emaciated fingers. A flip of the toggle and the powerful overhead drove the blue slats into the corner of the room. Didn't do much for the ambience, however.
Katya, hands looped behind her back, bent at the waist was peering over the body on her table. Taking notes in her head for later, her lips moved as if she were already speaking the words into the battered recorder's microphone. She glanced up at her brother. "……a cougar….?"
It was a human body, but you could have just as well called it a carcass, as little as there was left of it. The wolves had gotten to it a good while ago, being that the cadaver had been cleaned from the inside out and the bones were already starting to bleach. What made it interesting was the skull. There was a very clear set of three claw marks on it, scoring deeply across the forehead. Stretched, ragged skin still clung to the edges, dry and curling.
"Well, we didn't see any tracks but….maybe? I mean, that we have this is improbable as is… Why wouldn't we have seen tracks?" Sasha cocked one bushy brow and stayed where he stood. His sister had been known to throw scalpels at people who breathed on her cadavers and he was not exempt. The staff had left the last scalpel-blade buried in the aluminum doorpost as a reminder. You don't fuck with a genius at work.
"Because, Sashenka, your people do not pay attention to detail. Not only that, but he's been lying in a hollow for the last three weeks….at the very least. They had time to clean him out."
"Him?"
"Da. Narrow hips, broader shoulders, longer femur, larger bones in general….male. Big male."
Did she ever speak in complete sentences?
"I heard that, Sasha."
'Bitch,' he thought very clearly. He smiled, took a sip from his coffee thermos, and exited stage right out the swinging doors of the mortuary. The clatter off of the door behind him suggested something like a tray instead of her usual choice of projectiles.
Sasha Arkady Pavlovich was a law-man. His sister Katya Irina Pavlovna was a (nerd with a sick sense of humor) medical examiner. They were fraternal twins, which was bad enough, and one half Russian, which made things that much worse. Co-morbid, as it were. The meth cookers were terrified of Sasha, and even more so of his father Pavlov before him. The doctors had a healthy respect for Katya and her scalpel.
Deep Canada was a good place for defectors of the Soviet Union, and when Irina Andreiovna fled, pregnant and widowed into the back forty of Alberta during the spring of 1948, the mountains around her did her trust good. Canada never really tolerated Soviet organisms anyway, and the rolling ground preceding the Canadian Rockies were true to that. Grande Cache, which barely rated a dot on the map, became her home.
The baby's name was Pavlov, and he spoke English with the same stubborn attention to detail that he insisted on speaking Russian. Canadian citizen that he was, Pavlov attended school in Huddle all the way through high school, and then earned his law degree from the University of Ottawa. He wasn't a rider, he wasn't a cowman, he was a brain. And sometimes a trapper. Something about his Russian heritage had led the boy to suck up to the nearest trapper he could find and left his mother redolent in good mink, fox, and beaver pelts for the rest of her life. The point, though, was that Alberta was cow country, and while he appreciated the fact, Pavlov did better with a pen in his hand than he did with a rope. He had assumed that this would be the case with his children. It was not.
Not that they weren't bright. But Ottawa was not where they belonged. Sasha was a brawler, and Katya…well, she attacked her science with the same fervor she put into throwing things. You can only break so many noses on the softball team before they don't let you play anymore. Pavlov blamed it on their Irish mother, who in turn blamed it on Irina Andreiovna. Russian genetics proved more useful out here than did Irish ones. The twins were leaning on that whenever they took Rt. 40 south out of Grande Prairie down to Huddle in a 1978 Chevy Nova and began their. Irina Andreiovna did not live much longer after the return of her grandchildren, but she glowed throughout that last period of her life. These bright stars of hers belonged in the small town, south and west of Grande Prairie, and here they bloomed.
As her brother's boot-steps receded, Katya switched on her recorder and began to speak. She began removing the cranial cavity from the jaw, dismantling the skull.
"Dr. Katya I. Pavlovna, Exam Room Three, Grand Cache, Alberta, Canada. Date 2009, October 15. Time….," she looked at the clock. "Time 19:45 PM. Skeletal remains of an adult male, somewhere between thirty-five and fifty, dental records forthcoming. Body discovered in the extreme southwest corner of Willmore Wilderness Park yesterday morning. Worth noting that it's been a steady 18 below for the last week……. COD appears to be a broken neck cause by sharp-force trauma to the front of the skull with a three pronged object."
She paused, hefted the dome up to face level, staring into the empty sockets. "You STINK," she said, addressing the skull. "Something we're going to have to talk to the biologists about is the width of this set of claw marks, Katya-me-love. I mean, they're deep enough for a cougar but are they wide enough….…..?"
Just to satisfy her own curiosity, she placed a gloved hand across it, matching her fingers to the scores across the skull's brow.
"Yeah, that'll make a whole lot of sense. 'Unidentified male, clawed to death with a set of fake nails.' Wait, no, it was a garden trowel! A frog gig! A broken trap?"
She paused at that one, looked at the curvature of the claw pattern and rejected it. "Not even in Grand Cache, darling. Not even here. And sure as hell not in Willmore. At least, not the garden trowel or the fake nails…." Willmore Wilderness Park was a thousand square miles of mainly alpine and sub-alpine ground, and people with fake nails were not likely to frequent it this time of year. Waaaaaay too much chance of freezing that nice manicure off.
She took measurements of the width and depth of the scores, their length, and groped for the math to figure what kind of force was required. Not coming up with it, she made a note to call her ex, Peter, and pass off her measurements. He was a mathematician, an adjunct professor, and a total lush. Odds were good that he'd have results for her by the end of the week. It was probably trickier stuff than she was already imagining, and Petra always did like a challenge.
Then it hit her and she cursed herself for her flight of fancy. Skulls aren't thick, (despite all of Sasha's behavior toward the contrary). The only way a set of scratches could have not punched through was if they were done post-mortem. She said as much aloud, but chose not to comment that the idea still nagged her.
"We STILL have to talk to the biology people. Different reason, but still."
Katya always ran an examination until she was through. In this case, that meant she put the body in a tray and slid it into the freezer at 3:30 AM. She popped the tape out of the recorder, and locked it in a filing cabinet against the wall. Swinging by her office, she downed the last of the thick, greasy coffee in the pot and headed for the door, praying that she had remembered to hook her car up so it would start.
The cadaver's ribs were now closed away in the body-bag, lifting it about eight inches off of the shelf it lay on and suggesting the possibility that the heavy plastic could burst at any point in time and the skeletal remains would drag themselves out of the bag and stand up like some walking A&P study-aid. Even if the skeletal system could become self-aware and get out of the body-bag, there remained the problem that it was locked on a shelf in a refrigerated cabinet and technically could not move any more than nine or ten inches up or down. No one had ever put any thought to what it would be like to wake up in a morgue cabinet, nor what it would take to be able to get out.
