In the condo, the bedroom walls are painted green. The bed has flannel sheets printed with Scotch terriers. All you can smell is an aquarium full of lizards.

When someone presses a pillow over the face of a child, the medical examiner calls this a "gentle homicide."

My fifth dead child is in a hotel room out by the airport.

With the farmhouse and the condo, there's the book Poems and Rhymes... Open to page

27. The same book from the county library with my pencil mark in the margin. In the hotel room, there's no book. It's a double room with the baby curled up in a queen-size bed next to the bed where the parents slept. There's a color television in an armoire, a thirtysix-inch Zenith with fifty-six cable channels and four local. The carpet's brown, the curtains, brown and blue florals. On the bathroom floor is a wet towel spotted with blood and green shaving gel. Somebody didn't flush the toilet. The bedspreads are dark blue and smell like cigarette smoke. There's no books anywhere. I ask if the family has removed anything from the scene, and the officer at the scene says no. But somebody from social services came by to pick up some clothes. "Oh," he says, "and some library books that were past due."

Chapter 5

The front door swings open, and inside is a woman holding a cell phone to her ear, smiling at me and talking to somebody else.

"Mona," she says into the phone, "you'll have to make this quick. Mr. Streator's just arrived."

She shows me the back of her free hand, the tiny sparkling watch on her wrist, and says, "He's a few minutes early." Her other hand, her long pink fingernails with the tips painted white, with her little black cell phone, these are almost lost in the shining pink cloud of her hair.