"That's the third murder this month," Sergeant Olliver said. Across the street, the coroner pulled a white sheet over the small form on the gurney. One pigtail hung pathetically over the metal edge of the cart, like a doll's braid of yarn.
Sergeant Olliver had seen a lot of things in his fifty-seven years, all of which were spent exclusively in Derry. But he'd never seen anything like this. When they had found Jessica Camson's lifeless body, she had been facedown in the plugged-up sink of their modest kitchen, still dressed in play clothes smudged with mud from the fresh rain that had been falling outside. She was kneeling on a stepstool with her arms flung around the sink in a gesture of embrace. Olliver had seen a glimpse of her face as they carried her out toward the ambulance. There was fear in those eyes. Fear frozen so deep down that even death couldn't fade it out.
"Not murder," Officer Green said. Green was a lanky young man easily twice Olliver's height, although he was less than half his age. He chewed incessantly on a wad of cinnamon gum and had the coolly critical eyes of someone who thought he was a lot more intelligent than he actually was. Together, the two of them looked like a comedy duo from an old movie. The only thing shattering the illusion was the dead child wrapped up in a sheet on the gurney less than ten feet away. "Suicide."
"You want me to believe a five-year-old drowned himself in a stopped-up bathroom sink?"
"That's what the coroner says. All the signs match up. The sink seemed to have been stopped up deliberately and there was no struggle..." Green sighed and gave a weary chomp on his ever-present glob of cinnamon gum. Then, sounding more world-weary than he had a right to, "Kids do crazy things this day and age."
"Oh, yeah? And where does this little piece of evidence fit into your philosophy, Green?" Olliver said. He held up a balloon-animal dog that glinted translucent orange in the sleepy afternoon sunlight. It had been found bobbing alongside Jessica's drowned corpse.