Streets of Fire

He snapped the radio back into its cradle, then paused a moment, staring out once again into the field. Perhaps a hundred yards away, he could see groups of children gathering under the goalpost. They looked as if they were dressed in their Sunday best, the girls in clean white dresses, the boys in dark trousers and plain white shirts. For a moment, Ben thought it might be some kind of memorial service for the murdered girl, some strange Bearmatch rite which no outsiders knew about. Then, suddenly, a tall young man in a dark blue suit stepped from their midst and shouted something. Instantly a smattering of placards shot into the air. They were made of white poster-paper tacked to spindly wooden slats, and they were the sort Ben had seen a great many of since the demonstrations had begun. The thick, black lettering conveyed the same protests and demands, and as the children filed silently off the littered field, two abreast, holding hands, smiling with what seemed to him an odd and unknowable happiness, Ben wondered if, under different circumstances, the murdered girl might have been among them, her hand in someone else’s, her buckled shoes skipping lightly across the parched ground, her face emboldened with the same bright smile.

Patterson was going through a stack of files in the outer office when Ben arrived.

‘Well, they got to you pretty fast,’ he said.

‘What do you have?’ Ben asked.

‘I wish I had more, to tell you the truth,’ Patterson told him. ‘You find out who the girl was yet?’

‘No.’

‘Well, I probably can’t help you much with that,’ Patterson said. ‘But I did find something you might want to see.’ He smiled slyly. ‘Especially since the front office is so hot for the Coroner’s Office to work this case.’ He pushed himself back from the desk slightly and opened the top drawer. ‘I vacuumed her dress, and while I was doing that, I found something.’ He drew a plastic bag from the desk drawer and handed it to Ben. ‘It was in one of her pockets. I’m surprised you guys didn’t find it when you dug her up.’

Ben lifted the bag up to the light. He could see a metal ring. The plated imitation gold was already turning green. Its setting contained a large, purple oval of cut glass.

‘Not exactly a priceless piece, is it?’ Patterson said softly. ‘But what with her being from Bearmatch, it probably meant something to her.’

Ben continued to look at the ring. ‘Where’d you find it?’

‘It was tucked inside one of her pockets,’ Patterson said. He shrugged. It’s just a piece of old costume jewelry, but the little girl probably thought it was worth a lot.’

Ben turned the bag slowly before his eyes. ‘Then why wasn’t she wearing it?’ he asked. Then he looked at Patterson. ‘Where is she?’

‘Still in the freezer,’ Patterson said. ‘We’re not burying her until late this afternoon.’

‘I’d like to see her again.’

‘She didn’t come back to life overnight,’ Patterson said. ‘We can’t do that for her.’

Ben turned abruptly and walked into the adjoining room. The girl was still in Compartment 7. He opened the door, pulled out the carriage and drew back the sheet.

‘What are you doing?’ Patterson asked as he stepped up beside him.

Ben did not answer. He took the ring out of the bag, lifted one of the girl’s hands from the carriage and inserted the ring onto her little finger. It was too large to hold it. He tried the index finger, the middle finger and finally the thumb. The ring was far too large to fit any of them.

‘She wasn’t wearing it because it wasn’t hers,’ he said as he dropped the ring back into the bag.

Patterson nodded. ‘Boyfriend’s, maybe?’ he asked hesitantly.

Ben looked at him. ‘I don’t know. She could have worn it on a chain around her neck. She could have picked it up on the street.’ He walked over to the small metal desk at the rear of the room and looked at the ring under the desk lamp, turning it slowly in his fingertips. ‘No name,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘No initials.’ He dropped it back into the plastic bag and handed it to Patterson. ‘Send it over to be dusted,’ he told him, ‘and tell them to let me know what they find.’

‘Okay,’ Patterson said with a slight edge of sarcasm. Whatever they want in the front office, that’s what we do.’

Ben did not seem to hear him. ‘Where’s her dress?’

Patterson pointed toward a plain cardboard box which rested beneath a long wooden table. ‘Over there.’

Ben walked over to the box, took out the dress and spread it across the table. ‘Which pocket did you find it in?’

Patterson pointed to a single shallow breast pocket. ‘Right there.’

Ben gazed steadily at the dress. In addition to the one on the right front of the dress, it had two side pockets, and he inserted his hands into each of them. ‘They’re a lot deeper,’ he said.

Patterson looked at him oddly. ‘So what?’

‘Well, I was just thinking,’ Ben said. ‘If I were a little girl who wanted to keep from losing my ring, I’d put it in one of my side pockets.’ He looked at Patterson pointedly. ‘Wouldn’t you, Leon?’