plodding way of city bureaucracy, many years might go by before anyone visited here again, and then no probate clerk would ever figure out what the detective had done.
In the squad-room mythology of Mallory the Machine, she had no shred of sentiment, neither empathy nor sympathy, and the young woman showed no emotion as she sat down amid the detritus of a small family’s life, her cold eyes passing over their belongings to focus on an orphan sock.
Mallory laid the box of ashes on the mattress. And now that she had put him to bed, she switched off the light. ‘Good night, Ernie.’
A child had made a stand, he had suffered and died. And then, though long gone, the little boy had snagged his unsentimental paladin with a kindred lament scrawled in a diary:
