The Lesson of Her Death

her ankle and there was a thick streak of mud along a leg and arm.
    “Sarrie!”
    My sweet Lord!
His own daughter. He’d had his hand on his gun and he’d been five seconds away from drawing on her!
    “Oh, Sarah! What are you doing here?”
    “I’m sorry, Daddy. I felt all funny. I got to school and I thought I was going to be sick.” Rehearsed, the words stumbled out in a monotone.
    Jesus Lord
.…
    Corde crouched down to her. He smelled the scent of the shampoo she had received in her Easter basket not long ago. Violets. “You should never,
never
be where Daddy’s working. You understand that? Never! Unless I bring you.”
    Her face looked puffy with contrition. She glanced at her leg then held up her dirty forearm. “I fell.”
    Corde took out his sharp-ironed handkerchief and wiped the mud off her limbs. He saw there were no cuts or scrapes and looked back into her eyes. There was still anger in his voice when he demanded, “Did you see anyone there? Were you talking to anybody in the woods?”
    The fall had not bought the sympathy she’d expected. She was frightened by her father’s reaction.
    He repeated, “Answer me!”
    What was the safest answer? She shook her head.
    “You didn’t see
anyone?”
    She hesitated then swallowed. “I got sick at school.”
    Corde studied her pale eyes for a moment. “Honey, we talked about this. You don’t get sick. You just
feel
sick.”
    A young reporter lifted a camera and shot a picture of them, Corde stroking a slash of blond hair out of her eyes. Corde glared at him.
    “It’s like I have pitchforks in my tummy.”
    “You have to go to school.”
    “I don’t want to! I hate school!” Her shrill voice filled the clearing. Corde glanced at the reporters, who watched the exchange with varying degrees of interest and sympathy.
    “Come on. Get in the car.”
    “No!” she squealed. “I’m not going! You can’t make me.”
    Corde wanted to shout with frustration. “Young lady, get in that car. I’m not going to tell you again.”
    “Please?” Her face filled with enormous disappointment.
    “Now.”
    When Sarah saw her plan wasn’t going to work she walked toward Corde’s squad car. Corde watched, half expecting her to bolt into the forest. She paused and scanned the woods intently.
    “Sarah?”
    She didn’t turn her head. She climbed into the car and slammed the door.
    “Kids,” Corde muttered.
    “Find yourself something?” Slocum asked.
    Corde was tying a chain of custody card to the bag containing the newspaper clipping he had found. He signed his name and passed it to Slocum. The brief article was about last night’s killing. The editor had been able to fit only five paragraphs of story into the newspaper before deadline. The clipping had been cut from the paper with eerie precision. The slices were perfectly even, as if made by a razor knife.
    Auden Co-ed Raped, Murdered
was the headline.
    The picture accompanying the story had not been aphoto of the crime scene but was a lift from a feature story the
Register
had run several months ago about a church picnic that Corde had attended with his family. The cut line read, “Detective William Corde, chief investigator in the case, shown here last March with his wife, Diane, and children, Jamie, 15, and Sarah, 9.”
    “Damn, Bill.”
    Slocum was referring to the words crudely written in red ink next to the photograph.
    They read: JENNIE HAD TO DIE. IT COULD HAPPEN TO THEM .

T hey climbed the stairs slowly, one man feeling the luxurious carpet under his boots, the other not feeling a single thing at all.
    Outside the wind howled. A spring storm enveloped this lush suburb, though inside the elegant house the temperature was warm and the wind and rain seemed distant. Bill Corde, hat in hand, boots carefully wiped, watched the man pause in the dim hallway then reach quickly for a door knob. He hesitated once again then pushed the door inward and slapped the light switch on.
    “You don’t have to be here,” Corde said gently.
    Richard Gebben did not answer but walked into the middle of the pink carpeted room where his daughter had grown up.
    “She’s going to be all right,” Gebben said in a faint voice. Corde had no idea whether he meant his wife, who was in the downstairs bedroom drowsy from sedatives, or his daughter, lying at the moment on a sensuouslyrounded enamel coroner’s table two hundred miles away.
    Going to be all right
.
    Richard Gebben was a crew-cut businessman with a