Chapter 2

IT LOOKED LIKE A particularly grisly suicide, except that the spray paint can was nowhere around. I heard Charlie Clapper and his CSU team arrive and begin to unpack forensic equipment in the outer room. I stood aside as the photographer took his shots of the victim, then I yanked the extension cord out of the wall.

Charlie changed the fuse. “Thank you, Jesus,” he said as light flooded the god-awful place.

I was rifling through the victim’s clothes, finding not a scrap of ID, when Claire Washburn, my closest friend and San Francisco’s chief medical examiner, walked through the door.

“It’s pretty nasty,” I told Claire as we went into the bathroom. Claire is a center of warmth in my life, more of a sister to me than my own. “I’ve been having an impulse.”

“To do what?” Claire asked me mildly.

I swallowed hard, forcing down the gorge that kept rising in my throat. I’d gotten used to a lot of things, but I would never get used to the murder of children.

“I just want to reach in and pull out the stopper.”

The victim looked even more stricken in the bright light. Claire crouched beside the tub, squeezing her size-sixteen body into a size-six space.

“Pulmonary edema,” she said of the pink foam in the dead boy’s nasal and oral orifices. She traced the faint bruising on the lips, around the eyes. “He was tuned up a bit before they threw the switch on him.”

I pointed to the vertical gash on his cheekbone. “What do you make of that?”

“My guess? It’s going to match the push-down lever on the toaster. Looks like they clocked this child with that Sunbeam before they chucked it into the tub.”

The boy’s hand was resting on the bathtub’s rim. Claire lifted it tenderly, turned it over. “No rigor. Body’s still warm and lividity is blanching. He’s been dead less than twelve hours, probably less than six. No visible track marks.” She ran her hands through the boy’s matted hair, lifted his bruised top lip with her gloved fingers. “He hadn’t seen a dentist in a while. Could be a runaway.”