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expectant. She wasn’t cutting him any slack because he worked under her. Probably less because of it. There were enough internal investigations always going on, everybody suspicious of the guys who worked kid cases. They were right to be.
    He gave her the report down to the smallest detail. The house. Nuddin in the cage. The plunge onto the ice, the dog refusing to leave, awakening to a puffy god. Even the way his thoughts seemed to be skittering a little too loosely. He had Marianne on his mind again, for the first time in a couple of years.
    “Now tell me where the girl and her uncle are,” he said.
    “With me.”
    That wasn’t the way it was done. Sierra already had five foster kids, but none of them came from cases she worked. Not even ones she was peripherally involved with. “What? Why?”
    “No other family members have been tracked down yet. The police are taking their time on that house. They found the cage in the basement. Your story is checking out, but they’re still worried you may have instigated the whole situation. I figured I’d watch over them to make sure nobody separated Kelly and Nuddin. They could easily get split up in the system.”
    “How are they doing?”
    Sierra plucked at her wig the way any woman might toy with her hair when she was keyed up. She didn’t show it but Flynn almost dying had left another lasting mark. The case had her knotted up. “The girl’s acting all right, for the time being, but Dale says she’s still in shock. It’ll be a few days before the upheaval begins to display itself. He expects her to go into fits, the way any normal kid would. Right now she’s on vacation. She’s having fun, playing with the other kids. I taught her to make pasta last night. When she realizes she has no home left to go back to, that her mother’s gone forever, she’ll either shut down or act out. He thinks she’s in for some bouts of rage.”
    “Who the hell isn’t?”
    Dale Mooney was the head CPS shrink. Flynn and Mooney didn’t like each other, which didn’t matter much except during the semiannual psych review. Mooney loved to project. He’d take Flynn to task for handling cases wrong because, Mooney said, fifteen years down the line the kids might evidence severe emotional scars because of something Flynn had done poorly or hadn’t done at all. Flynn thought Mooney was mostly full of shit.
    “Nuddin?”
    “He’s low-functioning autistic,” Sierra told him. “So separated from the world that it hardly affects him. I wonder if he even felt any of the torture he was going through. He walks on the balls of his feet because there’s more pressure exerted on the nerves that way. He likes to be hugged hard. He can stare into a mirror for hours, unable to fully realize he’s looking at himself. There are certain treatments that can help but he’s too old for most of them. Jackets lined with weights so they can feel the form of their own torso. Heavy boots so they can feel the ground under them.”
    “He sings, though. And in the car he understood when I said he had to roll down the window. Can he talk at all?”
    “No. I’m not sure how much he understands, but it’s not much. Maybe at a four-or five-year-old level.”
    Flynn shut his eyes and a dark wrapping of cool exhaustion tried to take him under again. His eyes snapped open. He had a lot more questions.
    “And the husband? I heard the shot. Did he buy it?”
    “No,” Sierra said, “he’s at Stonybrook. The bullet wedged under his heart, but it’s one of those things where he’s able to move all right until they open up his chest and go after it.”
    “He was the tipster. Has he been talking?”
    “He won’t shut up. He talks about the wife, their happy, beautiful home, his job on Wall Street. But when it gets to the dicey stuff, he winds it down and says he wants to talk to you. And he won’t say why. But he seems scared.”
    Flynn thought he already knew the answer. He’d learned a lot on the