'What about penetration?'
'No sign of it, vaginal or anal. We'll take swabs, of course. But I doubt we'll find anything.'
'Any guesses?'
Touching one side of the girl's face, Shelton extended her forefinger and gently opened an eyelid. At the edge of the sightless brown eye were starbursts of red.
'Like she was strangled,' Monk observed.
Gently, Shelton removed her hand from the child's face, closing her eyelid again. 'Except that there's no external evidence of that. It's like she maybe choked on a sandwich. That's why we perform autopsies.'
Monk nodded. 'I'll call the parents,' he said. 'See if they can ID her.'
Shelton emitted a sigh. She was new on the job, Monk thought.
* * *
Monk and his partner, Rollie Ainsworth, sat in Shelton's office with Thuy Sen's father, mother, and the police translator, a petite young woman who had fled the Cambodian killing fields.
As had the Sen family, Monk learned in the ghastly form of small talk which occupied their anxious waiting. The mother, Chou, had lost her parents to the murderers of the Khmer Rouge; the brother and two sisters of Meng, the father, had been taken by the government and never seen again. Both seemed traumatized anew—the woman trembled, and the father, sitting stiffly in a chair, stared at the wall with foreboding.
'How did they get to the Bayview?' Monk asked the translator.
The young woman, reluctant, turned to the father and uttered words which sounded to Monk like a question. After a moment, Meng Sen answered in a monotone.
'His great-aunt was already there,' the translator told him. 'She wanted family around her.'
* * *
When Liz Shelton was ready, Monk led the Sens to the glass window. The translator lingered behind.
The window was covered with curtains. Though it was intended to minimize shock and cut off the odor of death, neither, in Monk's experience, was much help at moments like this.
From inside, Shelton slowly drew back the curtains. The child lay on a gurney, draped in a white sheet.
The parents gazed at her. It was the mother who broke first, emitting a muted shriek, hands covering her face. For what seemed a long time, the father did not react. Then he closed his eyes, still silent, and nodded.
* * *
Thuy Sen did not play near the shore, Monk learned through the translator. She did not swim, and did not like the bay. The water was too cold.
After a few minutes, Monk told the woman to take them home.
* * *
It was midmorning before Shelton finished the autopsy, and Monk had barely slept before returning to her office.
'She choked to death,' the medical examiner said baldly. 'But not on a sandwich. On semen.'
Monk said nothing. Briefly, it struck him that Thuy Sen's older sister was in for a lifetime of guilt and anguish.
'We found semen in her mouth and throat and airways,' Shelton continued. 'One male can ejaculate three to five milligrams. More than enough to choke a nine-year-old girl.'
Monk considered this. 'Anything to show she didn't volunteer?'
'No. But judging from what you know, how likely does that seem? Even over there.'
Monk answered with a shrug. 'What else?' he inquired.
With a tentative air, Shelton steepled her fingers, resting them against her chin. 'There was a hair snagged in her barrette. For all we know, it came from the bay, and hair identification by ethnicity is hardly an exact science. But more likely than not it's Negroid.'
Again Monk said nothing. Neither needed to comment on the inflammatory images this might summon, even in San Francisco—a nine-year-old girl choking to death during forcible oral copulation with a black man. Whoever the sperm donor turned out to be, Monk's job was to find him.
* * *
For some moments, Terri had not touched her coffee.
' 'Him' turned out to be 'them,' ' Monk said with quiet emphasis. 'We found them both.'
FOUR
MONK STUDIED THE LEMON RIND FLOATING IN THE TINY CUP OF espresso, incongruous in his paw of a hand. 'Should have ordered a double,' he observed. 'Less rind, more caffeine.'
Terri emptied her own cup, cold now, its contents bitter on her tongue. 'Tell me about Flora Lewis.'
* * *
They didn't find a witness for two fruitless days, spent going door-to-door in the crack-ridden streets of Bayview, hilly and sunny and stark, where black kids loitered on the pavement from childhood until, in their twenties, half the boys were dead or in jail. To outsiders, it was a foreign country—taxi drivers wouldn't go there, cops blew off domestic violence calls rather than stick their necks out, and the whole mess was sitting on a
