Francis grimaced as the coroner pulled a slender metal rod from his pocket and pointed at one of the girl’s nails. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she bit him, too. She put up quite a fight, this brave little girl,” Dr. Phipps murmured. “That’s why there’s more evidence of trauma to her windpipe and throat.”

“Yet no one heard this?” Francis shook his head. “Where the hell was Paterno?”

Captain Hickey bristled. “One sergeant in a theater that accommodates a thousand people? Paterno’s job is to keep kids from sneaking in. The usher might have prevented this, if he hadn’t been shooting craps in a storage room.”

“This is what I find most interesting,” said Dr. Phipps.

He opened his medical bag and withdrew a small, flat wooden box, opened it to remove a pair of tweezers, and reached into his pocket for a stoppered glass vial. He prized the cork loose and tilted the vial, using the tweezers to grasp something inside it.

“Here.” He moved to the end of the table where Gilda lay, and from another pocket removed a small square of black cloth. He smoothed this onto the table and beckoned Francis to come closer. “Take a look. I’ve already shown the captain.”

Dr. Phipps opened the tweezers, and something dropped onto the cloth. Francis stooped to scrutinize what resembled a bead of hardened pine resin, murky yellow, the size and roughly the same shape as a beetle’s carapace. He looked up at the coroner.

“What is it?”

“A lemon drop. I found it lodged in the back of her throat.” Dr. Phipps used the tweezers to pick it up again and held it out to Francis. “Smell it.”

Francis complied. It smelled of lemons, but also something he couldn’t place. “Do you think she might have choked on this?”

“No.” The coroner dropped the lozenge back inside the vial and corked it. Turning to Gilda Belascu’s corpse, he pointed at her lips.

“See how her mouth has turned purple? I thought at first that was because she’d been smothered. Blood pooling in her lips and face. But after I found the lemon drop, I checked again, and…”

He lowered his head to sniff delicately at the dead child’s mouth, then gestured for Francis to do the same. “You’re a detective. Tell me what you think.”

Francis leaned down until his face almost grazed the dead girl’s. A distinct odor of something sweet hung about her mouth. It reminded him of cherry compote. He looked at Dr. Phipps. “Another kind of candy? Ice cream?”

“No. It’s some kind of anodyne syrup. The government’s outlawed them, but they still end up on the market because some pharmacists refuse to pull them from their shelves. The chemical agents are always a form of opium—codeine, morphine. Sometimes chloral hydrate or chloroform.”

“You think she was poisoned?”