Sweet and innocent. Innocence shouldn’t end at the age of four, he thought.

He followed the blood trail to the kitchen and stood there, looking from the pool of dried blood on the floor to the blood-streaked telephone on the wall. The little girl had to have climbed onto the chair against the wall and from the chair to the counter to reach the phone.

She had to have made the call either during the attack on her mother or just after, while the killer had been busy searching the house for whatever he had been so desperate to find. Vince could picture him coming back into the room to see little Haley on the phone, could see him grabbing the little girl and choking her, then smothering her, then dropping her seemingly lifeless body like a piece of garbage next to the body of her mother.

If Gina Kemmer didn’t come through, that left Haley as the only key to the crime.

Vince recalled the picture from the night before: his wife holding the sobbing child in her arms, trying to console the inconsolable.

Innocence shouldn’t end at the age of four. It would have been better for Haley if her mind simply blocked out everything that had happened. But it wouldn’t have helped the case. They needed to catch a killer. And the child would be the key.

Chapter 27

27

“Maureen Up-chuck,” Franny said with as much disdain as he could manage and still keep his voice down. “I would call her a stupid cow, but that would be offensive to cows everywhere.”

They sat at the far end of Haley’s hospital room while the little girl slept quietly. Franny had brought tea and tea cakes from the Mad Hatter tea shop and bakery on Via Verde near the college.

“I had her nephew in my class a few years ago—right before you came back to teach,” he went on. “Thank God she, herself, hasn’t reproduced. Somebody burn the nest before that can happen!”

Anne chuckled under her breath, appreciative of the distraction from the day’s tensions. “You’re terrible.”

“I’m terrible?” he said, incredulous. “She reported me to the school board because her nephew was a weenie wagger!”

“Oh my God!” Anne covered her mouth to stifle her laughter. “How was that your fault?”

Franny was delighted, of course. “She claimed it was my ‘gay influence’ that made him do it. But the kid had a well-documented history of weenie wagging from day care on, and she knew it. He got expelled from Sunday school for whipping it out during the Christmas pageant right in front of the Virgin Mary, for God’s sake!

“She was just pissed off at me because I had told her sister her kid was going to grow up to be a pervert flasher if she didn’t make him stop it.”

“And that made her angry. Go figure,” Anne said.