* * * * *
Her red-blond hair was stained and discolored when they found her in
the sewer, and her lungs were choked with muck because her killer
hadn't bothered to see whether she was really dead when he dumped her
body into the manhole, so she had breathed the stuff in with her last
gasping breaths. Her face was bruised, covered with great blotches,
and three of her ribs had been broken. Her thighs and abdomen had been
bruised and lacerated.
[Illustration]
If she had lived for three more days, Angela Frances Donahue would
have reached her seventh birthday.
I didn't see her until she was brought to the morgue. My phone chimed,
and when I thumbed it on, the face of Inspector Kleek, of Homicide
South, came on the screen. His heavy eyelids always hang at half mast,
giving him a sleepy, bored look and the rest of his fleshy face sags
in the same general pattern. "Roy," he said as soon as he could see my
face on his own screen, "we just found the little Donahue girl. The
meat wagon's taking her down to the morgue now. You want to come down
here and look over the scene, or you want to go to the morgue? It
looks like it's one of your special cases, but we won't know for sure
until Doc Prouty does the post on her."
I took a firm grip on my temper. I should have been notified as soon
as Homicide had been; I should have been there with the Homicide
Squad. But I knew that if I said anything, Kleek would just say,
"Hell, Roy, they don't notify me until there's suspicion of homicide,
and you don't get a call until there's suspicion that it might be the
work of a degenerate. That's the way the system works. You know that,
Roy." And rather than hear that song-and-dance again, I gave myself
thirty seconds to think.
"I'll meet you at the morgue," I said. "Your men can get the whole
story at the scene without my help."
That mollified him, and it showed a little on his face. "O.K., Roy,
see you there." And he cut off.
I punched savagely at the numbered buttons on the phone to get an
intercommunication hookup with Dr. Barton Brownlee's office, on the
third floor of the same building as my own office. His face, when it
came on, was a calming contrast to Kleek's.
[Illustration]
He's nearly ten years younger than I am, not yet thirty-five, and his
handsome, thoughtful face and dark, slightly wavy hair always make me
think of somebody like St. Edward Pusey or maybe Albert Einstein. Not
that he looks like either one of them, or even that he looks saintly,
but he does look like a man who has the courage of his convictions
and is calmly, quietly, but forcefully ready to shove what he knows to
be the truth down everybody else's throat if that becomes necessary.
Or maybe I am just reading into his face what I know to be true about
the man himself.
"Brownie," I said, "they've found the Donahue girl. Taking her down to
the morgue now. Want to come along?"
"I don't think so," he said without hesitation. "I'll get all the
information I need from the photos and the reports. The man I do want
to see is the killer; I need more data, Roy--always more data. The
more my boys and I know about these zanies, the more effectively we
can deal with them."
"I know. O.K.; I've got to run." I cut off, grabbed my hat, and headed
out to fulfill my part of the bargain Brownlee and I had once made.
"You find 'em," he'd once said, "and I'll fix 'em." So far, that
bargain had paid off.
* * * * *
I got to the morgue a few minutes after the body was brought in. The
man at the front desk looked up at me as I walked in and gave me a
bored smile. "Evening, Inspector. The Donahue kid's in the clean-up
room." Then he went back to his paper work.
The lab technicians were standing around watching while the morgue
attendant sluiced the muck off the corpse with a hose, watching to see
if anything showed up in the gooey filth. Inspector Kleek stood to
one side. All he said was, "Hi, Roy."
The morgue attendant lifted up one small arm with a gloved hand and
played the hose over the thin biceps. "Good thing the rigor mortis has
gone off," he said, "these stiffs are hell to handle when they're
stiff." It was an old joke, but everybody grinned out of habit.
The clear water from the hose flowed over the skin and turned a
grayish brown as it ran down to the bottom of the shallow, waist-high
stainless-steel trough in which the body was lying.
One of the lab techs stepped over and began going through the long
hair very carefully, and Doc Prouty, the Medical Examiner, began
cleaning out the mouth and nose and eyes and ears with careful hands.