Okeke had asked few questions, viewed the tiny bones in silence. Then he’d interviewed Devereaux, who swore she knew zip. She hadn’t met Ruben, had never had reason to pry the panel from the wall.

Forex also knew nothing. Or so she claimed. Her shocked expression suggested she was probably being straight.

Ollie had waited for Devereaux to stuff her closet sparklies into the second suitcase, then he drove her to a women’s shelter. I suspected the gesture came partly out of compassion but mostly out of a desire to avoid an up-close-and-personal with the bones of a newborn.

Ryan, Okeke, and I had watched the techs enlarge the opening with a handheld power saw, then search inside the wall. Other than a nest of startled roaches, their efforts produced zilch.

Leaving the techs to photograph and process the scene, Okeke transported the remains in the Escalade. Ryan and I rode with him to the ME office on 116th Street. On the way, we learned that Okeke was from Kenya and that he studied medicine in the UK. That was it. The guy wasn’t a talker.

And here we were.

As with the Saint-Hyacinthe attic baby, nothing was left of this infant but a skeleton and fragments of desiccated tissue. Lacking flesh to hold it together, the skull had fallen apart. The individual cranial bones lay spread like an illustration in an anatomy text.

“Please clarify.” Okeke’s voice was deep, with a Masai Mara lilt reshaped by years of British schooling.

“The baby was at least seven gestational months at the time of its death.”

“Not full-term?”

“It may have been. If so, it was in a very low percentile for size. But the fetus was definitely viable.”

As I explained my measurements and observations, Okeke jotted notes. The clipboard looked like a child’s toy in his enormous hands. “Gender?”

“I can’t determine that from the bones.”

When Okeke nodded, the scalp above his neck rippled, then smoothed.

“Trauma?”

“None,” I said. “No fractures or indications of physical abuse.”

More jotting. “Cause of death?”

“The bones and X-rays show no evidence of malnutrition, disease, or deformation.” I thought of the wadded tissue in the throat of the window-seat baby. “No intrusions or foreign objects.”

“What of ancestry?”

“The cheeks may have been quite wide, but it’s hard to tell with nonarticulated bones. And I may have seen slight shoveling on an upper central incisor.”

“Suggesting what was once called Mongoloid racial background.”

“Yes.” I told him about Simone’s DNA finding for the bathroom-vanity baby.

“So this child may be of aboriginal heritage?”

“Assuming it is a sibling or half sibling of the baby that was tested.”

“Is there any question the infants are of the same mother?”

I looked at Ryan. So did Okeke.

“We have no proof,” Ryan said. “Yet. But we believe Annaliese Ruben gave birth to all four babies.”

“Why would a mother kill her own children?”

Oh, yeah. Okeke was new at the game.

“It happens.”