Her name was Holly Ruche and she sat hunched atop a tree stump, one of a dozen or so massive, chain-sawed segments taking up a good portion of the run-down backyard. Breathing hard and clutching her belly, she clenched her eyes shut. One of Milo’s cards rested between her right thumb and forefinger, crumpled beyond recognition. For the second time since I’d arrived, she waved off help from the paramedics.

They hung around anyway, paying scant attention to the uniforms and the coroner’s crew. Everyone standing around looking superfluous; it would take an anthropologist to make sense of this.

Milo had phoned the EMTs first. “Priorities. It’s not like there’s any emergency to the rest of it.”

The rest of it was an assortment of brown bones that had once been a baby’s skeleton, scattered on an old blanket. Not a random toss, the general shape was of a tiny, disarticulated human body.

Open sutures in the skull and a couple of dental eruptions in the mandible made my guess four to six months, but my Ph.D.’s in the wrong science for that kind of prophecy. The smallest bones—fingers, toes—weren’t much thicker than toothpicks.

Looking at the poor little thing made my eyes hurt. I shifted my attention to details.

Beneath the blanket was a wad of newspaper clippings from 1951 lining a blue metal box around two feet long. The paper was the L.A. Daily News, defunct since 1954. A sticker on the side of the box read Property Swedish Benevolent Hospital and Infirmary, 232 Central Avenue, Los Angeles, Ca.—an institution just confirmed by Milo to have shut down in ’52.

The homely, squat Tudor house fronting the yard looked to be older than that, probably from the twenties when so much of L.A. had taken shape.

Holly Ruche began crying.

A paramedic approached again. “Ma’am?”

“I’m fine …” Swollen-eyed, hair cut in an off-kilter bob mussed by nervous hands, she focused on Milo, as if for the first time, shifted to me, shook her head, stood.

Folding her arms across her occupied abdomen, she said, “When can I have my house back, Detective?”

“Soon as we finish processing, Ms. Ruche.”

She regarded me again.

Milo said, “This is Dr. Delaware, our consulting psychologist—”

“Psychologist? Is someone worried about my mental health?”

“No, ma’am. We sometimes call Dr. Delaware in when—”

“Thanks but I’m fine.” Shuddering, she glanced back to where she’d found the bones. “So horrible.”

Milo said, “How deeply was the box buried?”