Little Deaths(45)

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.


Pete rolled onto his back, tucked his hands behind his head. Tried to piece it together. But his head was a jumble of beer and tiredness and medical jargon. He dozed off and woke up hours later, sweating through his clothes, a foul taste in his mouth.

He got up, drank some water, stared at his reflection in the dark window. He had a feeling he wouldn’t sleep again tonight.

He sat on his bed, put the autopsy report back into the envelope, took out the photos of Ruth Malone’s home. They didn’t show much: it was just an ordinary apartment where a mother and two kids lived. In the kitchen, there were plates stacked in the dish rack, toys on the floor. Piles of folded laundry on a couple of the chairs.

Then he came to a photo of Ruth’s bedroom, and stopped. It was neater than the other rooms: the surfaces were uncluttered, polished. The large bed dominated the room. It was covered in patterned throw pillows; a satin comforter hemmed with ribbon lay across the foot.

Why had Devlin given these to him? There was nothing relevant here.

He tucked them back into the envelope, slid the interview tape into his cassette player. He lay down and listened to it clicking around, and then to Devlin’s low, deliberate voice filling the air. There was something different about him on this tape. That rasping voice, those thick vowels, were the same—but he sounded like he was hurrying to get where he wanted to go.

“Interview restarting . . . September seventeenth, nineteen sixty-five, eleven twenty-two a.m. Okay. Uh . . . Mrs. Malone. What did you feed your children on the evening of July thirteenth?”

“I already told you. Twice.”

“Tell us again.”

“I fried veal, I opened a can of beans. They drank milk, I had iced tea.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Of course I’m sure. You asked me for the first time just the day after. It was the last meal I . . .”

There was a pause. A cough.

“Did you give them pasta? Macaroni? Anything like that?”

“I told you. We ate meat. String beans. They had milk. That’s it.”

Her voice was measured, emphatic.

“So, no pasta.”

“Jesus Christ! How many times? We didn’t have any fucking pasta!”

Another pause.

“So who put the empty box of macaroni in your garbage?”

“What?”

“We found a box of macaroni in your garbage.”

She gave a harsh half-laugh. “So? Maybe a neighbor used our garbage can if theirs was full. Maybe it was me, I don’t know. It could have been there for days! I don’t remember everything I fed them that week.”

“You don’t?” He made it sound like a crime. Paper rustled.