I know detectives who learn the knack of unfocusing their eyes at the bad parts of post-mortems. Cooper violates dead children searching for signs of violation, and the investigating officer stares intently at nothing but a blur. I watch. I don’t blink. The victims didn’t get to choose whether or not to endure what was done to them. I’m spoiled enough, next to them, without claiming to be too delicate even to endure looking.

Emma was worse than Patrick not just because she was so young, but because she was so unblemished. Maybe this sounds twisted, but the worse the injuries, the easier the autopsy. When a body comes in macerated to something from an abattoir, the Y incision and the grating snap as the top of the skull comes off don’t pack much punch. The injuries give the cop in you something to focus on: they turn the victim from a human being into a specimen, made out of urgent questions and fresh clues. Emma was just a little girl, tender-soled bare feet and freckled snub nose, sticking-out belly button where her pink pajama top had ridden up. You would have sworn that she was only a hairsbreadth from alive; that if you had just known the right words to say in her ear, the right spot to touch, you could have woken her. What Cooper was about to do to her in our name was a dozen times more brutal than anything her murderer had done.

The assistant took off the paper bags tied over her hands to preserve evidence, and Cooper bent over her with a palette knife to take fingernail scrapings. “Ah,” he said suddenly. “Interesting.”

He reached for tweezers, did something finicky at her right hand, and straightened up holding the tweezers high. “These,” he said, “were between the index and middle fingers.”

Four fine, pale hairs. A blond man crouched over the pink ruffled bed, that tiny girl fighting— I said, “DNA. Is there enough there for a shot at DNA?”

Cooper shot me a thin smile. “Control your excitement, Detective. Microscopic comparison will, of course, be necessary, but judging by color and texture, there appears to be every probability that these hairs come from the head of the victim herself.” He dropped them into an evidence bag, pulled out his fountain pen and bent to scribble something on the label. “Assuming the evidence bears out the preliminary theory of suffocation, I would theorize that her hands were trapped beside her head by the pillow or other weapon, and that, unable to claw at the attacker, she pulled at her own hair in her final moments of consciousness.”

That was when Richie left. At least he managed not to put a fist through the wall, or puke his guts onto the floor. He just turned on his heel, walked out and closed the door behind him.

The assistant sniggered. Cooper gave the door a long, chilly stare. “I apologize for Detective Curran,” I said.