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smell of frying bacon. A large bag of sour-cream-and-onion-flavored potato chips and a six pack of Dr Pepper sat on the counter.
    “Very nice.”
    “They came here in 1902. From Oklahoma.” She made it sound like an apology.
    There was an unfinished wooden door and from behind it came the sound of sudden laughter and applause, bells and buzzers. A game show.
    “She’s watchin’ back there.”
    “That’s just fine, Mrs. Quinn. We’ll let her be until we’re ready for her.”
    The woman nodded her head in assent.
    “She don’t get much chance to watch the daytime shows, bein’ in school. So she’s watchin’ ’em now.”
    “May we sit down, ma’am?”
    “Oh yes, yes.” She flitted around the room like a mayfly, tuggingat the towel on her head. She brought in an ashtray and set it down on the end table. Milo and I sat on the sofa and she dragged in a tubular aluminum-and-Naugahyde chair from the kitchen for herself. Despite the fact that she was thin her haunches settled and spread. She took out a pack of cigarettes, lit one up and sucked in the smoke until her cheeks hollowed. Milo spoke.
    “How old is your daughter, Mrs. Quinn?”
    “Bonita. Call me Bonita. Melody’s the girl. She’s just seven this past month.” Talking about her daughter seemed to make her especially nervous. She inhaled greedily on her cigarette and blew little smoke out. Her free hand clenched and unclenched in rapid cadence.
    “Melody may be our only witness to what happened here last night.” Milo looked at me with a disgusted frown.
    I knew what he was thinking. An apartment complex with seventy to one hundred residents and the only possible witness a child.
    “I’m scared for her, Detective Sturgis, if someone else finds out.” Bonita Quinn stared at the floor as if doing it long enough would reveal the mystic secret of the Orient.
    “I assure you, Mrs. Quinn, that no one will find out. Dr. Delaware has served as a special consultant to the police many times.” He lied shamelessly and glibly. “He understands the importance of keeping things secret. Besides—” he reached over to pat her shoulder reassuringly. I thought she’d go through the ceiling “—all psychologists demand confidentiality when working with their patients. Isn’t that so, Dr. Delaware?”
    “Absolutely.” We wouldn’t get into the whole muddy issue of children’s rights to privacy.
    Bonita Quinn made a strange, squeaking noise that was impossible to interpret. The closest thing to it that I could remember was the noise laboratory frogs used to make in Physiological Psych right before we pithed them by plunging a needle down into the tops of their skulls.
    “What’s all this hypnotism gonna do to her?”
    I lapsed into my shrink’s voice—the calm, soothing tones that had become so natural over the years that they switched on automatically. I explained to her that hypnosis wasn’t magic, simply a combination of focused concentration and deep relaxation, that people tended to remember things more clearly when they were relaxed and that was why the police used it for witnesses. That children were better at going into hypnosis than were adults because they were less inhibited and enjoyed fantasy. That it didn’t hurt, and was actually pleasant for most youngsters and that you couldn’t get stuck in it or do anything against your will while hypnotized.
    “All hypnosis,” I ended, “is self-hypnosis. My role is simply to help your daughter do something that comes natural to her.”
    She probably understood about 10 percent of it, but it seemed to calm her down.
    “You can say that again, natural. She daydreams all the time.”
    “Exactly. Hypnosis is like that.”
    “Teachers complain all the time, say she’s driftin’ off, not doing her work.”
    She was talking as if she expected me to do something about it.
    Milo broke in.
    “Has Melody told you anything more about what she saw, Mrs. Quinn?”
    “No, no.” An emphatic shake of