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He’d looked over the porch railing and seen a kid yanking the end of a long, thin stick for all he was worth.
    He remembered how amused he was, watching as the kid wrestled a large catfish from the river and then had to chase its flopping body around the bank.
    â€œTimmy,” Jack said. “His name was Timmy.”
    â€œLast name?” Carmodi asked.
    Jack thought about it, but didn’t think he had ever asked. “Just Timmy,” he said. “That’s all he told me.”
    Then Jack told them everything he knew about Timmy. How he had found him fishing on the riverbank below his cabin, and how the kid never seemed to run out of questions once he found out Jack was a cop.
    â€œHe was always asking things like, ‘Have you got a gun?’ ‘Have you ever shot anyone?’ ‘Have you ever killed any bad guys?’ You know stuff like that,” Jack said. “I lied to him and told him it was mostly boring paperwork, but he saw my scar and started asking questions about that.”
    While he spoke, Jack absent-mindedly began going through the pockets of the muddy jeans. In the right pocket he felt something mushy, but grittier than mud. He pulled out his gloved hand and saw something yellowish on the fingers.
    â€œWhat’s that?” Liddell asked.
    â€œFish bait,” Jack said and looked at what was left of what had once been several cornmeal balls. He had taught the kid how to mix cornmeal with a little egg white and roll it into balls. Overnight it would harden and make bait that catfish couldn’t resist.
    â€œAh shit,” Jack said, and left the room.
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    Jack stood in the hallway near the coroner’s office. He pulled the latex gloves off and pitched them in a biohazard container. He had never walked out during an autopsy before, but this one was getting to him. There were other things he could do.
    Jack almost laughed at that thought. “What to do next?” he said in the empty hallway. There was a long list of what needed to be done. None of it would bring back the curious little boy who would rather hang around a broken-down cop and ask questions, or fish in the river with a long stick and fishing line he’d found along the riverbank. Why couldn’t he just go to school like other kids his age?
    He needed to make a bathroom stop. Then he would call the motor patrol lieutenant at the crime scene and juvenile detectives to tell them who he suspected the deceased child might be. They could get busy shaking the bushes again. He had only a first name for the kid, but he knew Timmy lived somewhere in the area of the museum. There were a lot of large, older homes that had been divided into apartments around there. Juvenile detectives would canvass the schools. Maybe they’d get lucky and find the kid’s folks.
    I need a quiet place to make a call, he thought, and remembered that the closest phone was in the office of the chief deputy coroner—a diminutive woman named Lilly Caskins whom everyone called “Little Casket.” It was a nickname that suited her well, for she was evil looking, with large dark eyes staring out of extra thick lenses, and horn-rimmed frames that had gone out of style during the days of Al Capone. But the thing that bothered Jack was her bluntness at death scenes. For a woman, she had absolutely no compassion for the dead, or the living.
    He decided he didn’t want to run into Lilly. At the other end of the building there was a bathroom, and after going there, he could take his cell phone out into the garage.
    He headed in that direction, and as he passed the conference room he spotted the pale face of the rookie cop that had thrown up at the crime scene. He was little more than a kid, and Jack guessed his age at barely twenty-one, just old enough to be hired by the police department. He was shirtless and sipping ginger ale from a can. His uniform shirt lay stretched across a couple of chairs,