Monster in Miniature Read Online Free Page A

man, I took my time and looked (gulping) not only at his body but around the porch, thinking something might jog my memory about the victim or about the Fergusons. When had I last seen any of the family? I recalled that Lillian attended a miniatures show I organized and bought a dollhouse. It had been almost a year ago, but I remembered the enormous Victorian being carried out of the school hall by her twin boys. I hadn’t seen Sam to talk to in a while.
    I looked at the position of the gun, still in the victim’s hand. I hoped the LPPD could do some magic or trigonometry (which amounted to the same thing to my math-challenged brain) and determine whether the man could have killed himself.
    Everything on the porch seemed related to Halloween, from the stubby orange battery-operated candles to the fake hay strewn around the floorboards. The two-seater metal swing held rag dolls dressed to look like farmers and farmers’ wives and children. Although they were the size of regular toddlers’ dolls, I had to resist the temptation to poke them to verify that they were indeed dolls and not more, if tiny, victims.
    I walked past the body again, holding my breath all the way. Nothing came to me. Back on the sidewalk, when I finally exhaled, a wave of exhaustion washed over me. My stomach felt nauseous, as if I’d eaten a whole bowl of the chocolate candy.
    “It’s going to be hard for you to get an investigation going with no identification of the victim,” I said to Skip.
    “Oh, we know who he is,” he said. “The techs gave me his wallet right away. His name is Oliver Halbert. He’s a building inspector with the city, lives in an apartment right around the corner on Hanks. Has a wife and two daughters, if you can go by the photographs he was carrying.”
    I grunted in surprise. “If you already had all that information, why did you put those children though that dreadful rigmarole?”
    Skip slapped his notebook against his hand. “For one thing, it tells me something about the kids, who, after all, were at the crime scene. For another—well, you never know what you can learn even when you think you already know it.”
    Words of wisdom, widely applicable, I thought.
    Maddie got out of the patrol car when she saw me back on the sidewalk. Her face had gotten more and more drawn and pale. “Maddie and I have things to do,” I told Skip. “Can we go? You know where to find us.”
    Skip’s “sure” was hardly out of his mouth before Maddie headed for my car. A far cry from normal, when Maddie would be clinging to her uncle Skip, offering to help him, and suggesting that she ride home in a patrol car for safety.
    Maybe her oft-expressed desire to follow in his footsteps had been squelched at last. Not that I wasn’t proud of Skip and his career, but his mother and I both would have preferred not to worry every time he left for work.
    If being this close to a corpse was enough to dissuade Maddie from a profession that involved a gun, maybe it was fortuitous that we’d come by when we did.
     
     
    A call to Maddie’s parents when we arrived home was our first order of business. I listened to Maddie’s end of the conversation, her tone alternating between matter-of-fact and excited. I could tell she was trying to sound casual, lest she be summoned home, away from the action.
    “The victim is no one we know,” I told Maddie’s mother, Mary Lou. “And Maddie was nowhere near him.”
    “These things happen, and I know she’s in good hands when it comes to the explanations and support you give her,” Mary Lou said. “I’m not at all worried.”
    I was glad I didn’t have to speak to my son, the conservative parent who would keep his daughter locked in her room until she was thirty if he could get away with it. I attributed the peculiarities in Richard’s and Mary Lou’s parenting style to their chosen careers: Richard was an orthopedic surgeon; Mary Lou a professional artist holding to the ideals of her