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someone else, some guy in her church. And old Joe winds up bald-headed and sour, pushing papers on city desk and giving people a bad time.”
    “How’d he hear about her in the first place?”
    “Same way you hear about everything. Knew somebody who knows somebody at Radio City. Um, here he comes.”
    “How’s it going?” Kanin said, He looked at Woodford suspiciously.
    “Fine,” Walker said. “I’m pretty well settled in. I can get started in the morning.”
    Kanin nodded and looked at Woodford. “How you hanging on the fire story?”
    Woodford shrugged. “Two more people died about an hour ago. That makes seventeen for tomorrow’s piece.”
    “You coming in early tomorrow to put it together?”
    “What else?” Woodford said. “Pretty cut-and-dried stuff,” he said to Walker. Then, to both of them, “There is one funny angle. One little girl. They haven’t identified her yet.”
    Walker met Woodford’s eyes.
    “They got all the adults named?” Kanin asked.
    “Yeah, that’s the odd part. This kid must have come in with somebody who survived the fire.”
    “How could that happen?” Kanin’s tone was short, impatient.
    “Hey, don’t ask me, Joe. I just put ’em together, I don’t make ’em up.”
    “Well, why hasn’t the mother turned up to claim the body?”
    “That’s what the coroner wants to know.” Woodford shrugged. “People. Jesus, you never know what they’ll do.”
    Walker leaned across the desk on a propped-up arm. “That’s a pretty strange angle, don’t you think?”
    “It’s interesting,” Woodford agreed. “We’ll keep after it till they find the mother.”
    “What if they don’t?”
    “They will. Hell, they’ve got to.”
    Walker looked at them for almost a full minute. “Well, I can’t imagine anything more important to a woman than claiming her dead daughter’s body. Any way you cut it, it’s a helluva story.”
    “Maybe the mother doesn’t know yet. Maybe there isn’t any mother.”
    “Everybody in town knows by now. And if there isn’t any mother, then what’s the rest of it? Who brought the kid to the circus and left her there dead?”
    Woodford shrugged. “Look, all I do is put ’em together. I’ll let you guys play Hollywood dick.”
    “Walker’s already got a story,” Kanin said.
    “This one’s better,” Walker said.
    “Believe me,” Kanin said. “They’ll find the kid’s mother by tomorrow morning. It’ll be an old-fashioned sob story, routine and quite ordinary.”
    “If it is, I’ll buy you a lunch,” Walker said. “And I’ll get on over to Radio City.”
    Kanin glared at Woodford, daring him to say anything. “I’d like you to get on over to Radio City anyway.”
    Walker met his eyes. “We’ll see,” he said.

Two
    S OMETIMES THERE ARE CASES that no one can solve. Any coroner with a few years’ experience will tell you that. Depending on the size of his case load, there will usually be, in a year’s time, three or four or eight or ten bodies for which there are no easy answers. There is no identity, no past. Occasionally not even a cause of death.
    Somehow Walker knew, from the moment Woodford opened his mouth, that the little girl’s case was going to be one of those strange ones. When there were still no leads on the little girl by noon of the next day, he knew he was right. The story slipped off the front page and became another tragedy soon forgotten, and Woodford went on to other things. But it hung there like a ripe plum. Walker thought about it at night, alone in his apartment, sipping bourbon and listening to Bach. The bare facts of the case made no sense at all. Even if there was no mother, seven-year-old kids do not lose themselves in the society. There are records, foster homes, places for kids like that; they do not exist independent of the society. In many ways, it would have been easier to trace an orphan than to locate a natural mother. The coroner tried. He was determined that he would not bury a