“Sweetheart,” Kateri says. She hears Joel Hurt’s voice from the yard, directing techs to look farther along the trail. “What’s your name, honey?” she asks.

“Birdie,” the girl says, and Kateri says it back to her.

“Birdie, did someone put you in the closet?”

Her face is blank until Kateri asks her again. “Birdie, who were you waiting for?”

“Him,” she says.

Kateri waits.

“The angel,” Birdie says. “The angel was coming to get me.”

She doesn’t appear to be a flight risk, so Kateri lets her sit where she is, on the beanbag in the closet, with the door open, and goes to get her a cup of water and to step outside to find Hurt.

“I need medical,” Kateri says when she sees him on the edge of the yard. Hurt takes his phone out to begin, but Kateri stops him. “I’ll call,” she says.

She had a case with two young sisters. One had been killed. One had survived. Both had been raped. They were little girls, ten and twelve. It was the ten-year-old who survived. When they sent the ambulatory unit, with lights flashing and sirens screaming, the girl flew into a panic. She thrashed and reopened a wound on her belly. Her vagina was bruised and still bleeding. Kateri was covered in blood trying to keep her still. She ended up restraining the girl the best way she knew how, from behind, with her arms crossed over the girl’s and the girl’s head bashing backward into Kateri’s face, giving her a fat, bloodied lip. The medics were all men. The girl was traumatized all over again. All those blank faces. So many big hands. The roar from inside the moving medical unit, barreling down a highway to a hospital she’d never been to. Her sister, dead in a separate van.

Kateri was twenty-five.

She remembers the estranged father of the two girls, living like her own estranged father in a dark, dirty apartment thick with smoke. He had a ponytail. Was never without a lit cigarette. Sometimes he had two, one in the ashtray, one in his mouth. His eyes went from top to bottom and lingered at Kateri’s chest.

“Little-girl cop,” he said. “Give me a fucking break.”

Dispatch sends a small van, marked, but without its lights going, and two medics, a wiry woman in her fifties and a younger man, baby-faced and soft around the edges. Kateri meets them between the trees. The deputies have put police tape around the house, fluttering.

“Detective Fisher,” she introduces herself. “She may be in shock,” she tells the woman medic. “She’s almost certainly a witness to something brutal, quite possibly a murder,” Kateri says, “and she may be a victim as well. I can’t tell what condition she’s in, physical or mental. She might be badly hurt.”

She looks at the woman’s badge.

“Maggie,” the woman says. “This is Rick.”

“She goes by Birdie,” Kateri says.

“How old?” Maggie asks.

“No more than five or six,” Kateri says. “She’s small. She still has baby teeth. Please,” Kateri says, though she knows she doesn’t have to, “be very, very gentle.”