“We fought,” he said, sounding astonished. “She was like a crazy woman. I’ve never seen her like that before. We never fight.”
He rubbed his hands across his tired, drawn face and told Ruth that he’d requested a transfer. That he was going back to Delaware. That he was sorry.
“It’s for the best. The kids. You know.”
He walked away and left her sitting in the booth, and Pete watched her take in the loss of her job, her lover, whatever comfort he’d given her. He watched her order a beer, then another, and he watched her swallow and refuse to cry.
And for the first time, seeing this vulnerable side that she showed to no one else, he wanted to take care of her. She began to pick at her cuticles, and then worried at the torn skin with her teeth. Blood smudged onto her lip and she wiped her mouth in disgust, hard and impatient with the back of her hand, and her eyes were fierce and desperate.
This was the image of her he carried with him for a while. Blood. Revulsion at herself. A complete absence of tenderness.
That night, he watched her walk back into Callaghan’s in a defiantly short dress and tall heels, drinking Scotch Mists fast and hard and flirting with a kind of feverish wildness that he hadn’t seen before.
She recognized the two guys by the door as cops before Pete did. She stalked over to their table and stood squarely in front of them, hands on her hips, shoulders back.
“Having fun, boys? Like what you see?”
Their eyes crawled over her like ants.
“Some job you guys have. Some fucking job you’re doing.”
They just laughed.
“I know you bugged my apartment. You get off on listening to me and my friends? You’re a bunch of sickos. All of you.”
They kept laughing.
Two bright spots appeared on her cheeks and she spat out, “You’ll never find out who killed my kids. You’ll never find out the truth.”
Then she turned her back on their startled faces and made her way unsteadily to the dance floor, grabbing an arm on the way, pulling the man along with her, holding him tight.
Pete was at home, lying on the rug, a beer beside him, rain spattering against the windows. He got up, wrapped a blanket around his shoulders, and began to read the report Devlin had given him.
The body is that of a young Caucasian female, approximately 4 years old. Well-nourished, weighing 36 pounds and measuring 39 inches in length. Hair blond, eyes blue.
They were just words. Just numbers.
He closed his eyes. Swallowed hard. Imagined white tiled walls, a row of shining steel gurneys. The smell of chemicals overlaying a faint hint of decay.
Lividity.
Congestion.
Abrasions.
Ecchymosis.
Petechiae.
Hemorrhages.
They were just words. The reality was a little girl lying as flat and white as the tiles surrounding her; her hands and feet purple, her cheek scratched and her neck covered in a circle of bruises.
Both lungs are congested with edema, surface dark red with mottling. The tracheobronchial tree contains no aspirated material or blood. Multiple sections of the lungs show congestion and edematous fluid along the cut surface. No suppuration noted. The mucosa of the larynx is gray-white.
The last photographs of Cindy showed her forever flat-chested, smooth-skinned, wearing a pink undershirt, yellow panties, a patterned pajama top. Pete tried not to think about how she would never choose an outfit for her prom, would never have her nails painted or her hair set.
Esophagus empty, lined by gray-white mucosa. Stomach contains fragmented pieces of undigested food particles (identified as green-leaved vegetables and pasta). Proximal portion of the small intestine contains yellow to brown apparent vegetable or fruit material. No hemorrhage identified. Remainder of small intestine is unremarkable. Large intestine contains soft fecal material. The appendix is present.
For all its undignified slicing and probing and weighing and measuring, the autopsy hardly gave up any secrets at all. There was no evidence of sexual assault. There was no skin found under her nails, no foreign fibers, no bruises other than those on her neck indicating that she had been strangled. She hadn’t fought; she’d died helpless.
Pete knew from the cops’ official statement that the autopsy on Frankie had yielded even less information. He’d been out in the open for over a week, and the animals had done their work.
There were no answers, no real clues. Cindy had died between six and eighteen hours before she had been found at one-thirty p.m. The assumption was that Frankie had been killed in the same way and at roughly the same time.
All that the autopsy report said was that there was nothing clear-cut to say. There was no way of proving exactly when they’d been killed. And Pete could see no way of proving whether Ruth Malone was lying about the time she said she fed the kids, the time she said she checked on them, the last time she said she saw them.
He could see no clues in there at all about who had killed them, or why.