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Dr Abner McGovern sat at his desk, stared thoughtfully at the cadaver stretched on the stainless steel table, and casuallysandwich

McGovern was perplexed The lifeless for Most of the tests on the corpse had been run four and five times He and his assistants had analyzed the lab data endlessly, studied and restudied the results obtained by the police coroner of Quebec And still the exact cause of death eluded him

McGovern was one of those stubborn people who refuse to give up, the kind who stays up all night to finish a novel or add the last pieces of a jigsaw puzzle He refused to give up now A life did not simply cease without a reason

Guerrier had been in pitiful physical condition But the man was known to have a treuished like a lamp at the flick of a switch

It had to be so other than a breakdown of bodily functions It had to be fro induced

Every test for poison had been run, even the exotics All had proven negative Nor was there evidence of the tiniest puncture from an injection needle under the hair or the nails, between fingers and toes, inside the orifices

The possibility of suffocation kept returning to McGovern Expiration frons

In the forty years he had served on the Mounties' forensic pathology staff, he could recall only a handful of cases where the victims were murdered by suffocation

He slipped on a new pair of gloves and approached the stiff, as he referred to it For the third time that afternoon he scrutinized the interior of the mouth All was as it should be No bruises, no paleness behind the lips

Another dead end

He returned to his desk and collapsed in the chair dejectedly, hands hanging loosely in his lap, eyes staring vacantly at the tile floor Then he noticed a slight discoloration on the thulove Idly he smear

ed it on a piece of paper, leaving a greasy pink se

Quickly he bent again over Guerrier Cautiously he rubbed a towel between the inner lips and outer gulass

"Ingenious," hewith the corpse "Positively ingenious"

Sarveux felt terribly tired His stand on noninterference with Quebec independence had lish-speaking loyalists in the west The Parliament nant over his break with national unity Their anger was to be expected The new Quebec nation isolated them from the rest of Canada