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gulps a double while looking at additional scene shots. From a different angle, she sees there is a mattress only a few feet from the bodies.
    Wondering why the perp didn’t put them there, she’s again struck by the incongruity of the tenderness with which the kids were placed on a garbage pile. She surmises it is dark when he dumps the bodies, and though he may be familiar with the lot’s location, he’s not intimate with the interior. He doesn’t know the mattress is there.
    Boards, flattened boxes and sections of large appliances wedged between the remaining 2x4s create partial walls. The pseudo walls are covered inside and out with tags, taunts and warnings to stay out. Frank particularly likes TRESPASERS WILL BE SMOKT. Because the graffiti is amateurish and lacks authority, she thinks wannabe bangers with no established ties are using the gutted site as a hangout.
    She writes this down even though the Pryce case doesn’t appear gang-related. With a fresher case she might not bother with least likely scenarios, but on this one she has nothing to lose. On the contrary, eliminating as many possibilities as she can will narrow her search field of suspects.
    Delivering Frank’s second drink, the waitress warns, “Okay. Time to order dinner.”
    Frank has promised Nancy she’ll eat after her first drink. Frank settles on a BLT and Nancy is satisfied. She’s made a career of fussing over Frank.
    Finished for the time being with the crime scene, Frank starts on the autopsy reports. Trevor Pryce is a normally developed six-year-old boy. He has numerous scrapes, scabs and contusions but none relative to his cause of death, which the reporting coroner listed as gross disarticulation at the first and second cervical discs. Torn ligaments and spiral fractures indicate the boy’s head was twisted until his neck snapped.
    Nancy brings Frank’s sandwich, returning a moment later with a Coke. Frank would rather have a beer but doesn’t want Gail to smell it on her. She picks at her French fries while searching the document for an entry that might indicate signs of a struggle or fall. There’s nothing—no evidence of assault, no cranial laceration or contusions, no twist fractures. Just a broken neck.
    Scandalous, Frank mocks. She tackles her sandwich, refusing to engage this case with anything other than professional interest. While she is actually admiring a perp with the grapes to kill so intimately and dispassionately, it nags her that his MO so completely contradicts how he left the bodies.
    The girl’s autopsy report adds to this discrepancy, reinforcing that Ladeenia Pryce is the focus of the murders. Her child’s body shows further inconsistencies—a fresh, half-inch burn on the outside of her right thumb, a swollen, rounded contusion on her right breast, horizontal stripes indented on the back of her left thigh. Frank finds the closeup of the leg markings. The edges of the impression are blurry, but it is clearly composed of straight, parallel lines. She concentrates on the pattern but it remains indecipherable.
    Frank squints at what could be bruises mottling the girl’s arms. Where the skin has blanched on the back of the arms, the bruising is more vivid. A couple contusions dot her legs. They all appear fresh. The ME cited cause of death as asphyxia resulting from manual strangulation, and Frank studies the telltale choke marks circling her neck. The bruising is too indistinct to determine if the perp choked her from the front or the rear. Frank finishes her sandwich while reading clinical descriptions of brutal vaginal and anal assaults.
    Deciding to risk Gail’s wrath, she signals for one more double, then bends her head back over the autopsy pictures. Lividity in the girl is pronounced posteriorly. The skin on the back of her torso and extremities is pale where contact pressure excluded the settling blood, yet the photos indicate anterior blanching on her torso as well. Her face and anterior extremities