Baby Doll Games Read Free

uniformed men from the precinct finally arrived. Those who claimed no personal connection with Emmy Mion were allowed to leave after giving their names and addresses and showing some proof of identity to the officers who guarded the door.
More officers came in, plainclothes now, who spread out across the stage, measuring, photographing, examining everything in minute detail. Among them, directing their activity, was- a woman with watchful gray eyes and short dark hair She wore a loose off-white corduroy jacket, badly tailored gray slacks, and a nondescript black shirt. Although there was nothing particularly prepossessing about her, she seemed to be the still, quiet center from which order radiated. Her cool voice was seldom raised, yet when she did speak, the others listened.
Dr. Christa Ferrell paused as she gave her name to the officer at the door. “Who's that woman up there on the stage?”
“The tall skinny one? Lieutenant Harald.”
“Sigrid Harald?”
“Yeah. You know her?”
“It’s been years,” Christa replied. Her mind raced with the possibilities this chance meeting might produce, “Look, Tm the doctor who first examined the body of-” Abruptly she became aware of Calder s stricken face. “I have to take my nephew home first,” she said, “but I think I ought to come back and speak to the lieutenant.”
“Sure, Dr. Ferrell,” said the officer He made a notation by her name. “Remind me when you get here and I’ll pass you back in.”
Up on the stage, Lieutenant Sigrid Harald and her team had quickly debriefed Officer Papaky. They listened to his account of the dance performance, his observations about Emmy Mion’s fall, and what he’d heard the other dancers say. Then, while the others fanned out to process the scene in their usual routine, the lieutenant watched quietly as an assistant medical examiner completed his examination of the young dancer. Officer Guidry had already photographed the tom body from every angle and now pointed her cameras at potentially significant details turned up by the other detectives.
Lieutenant Harald’s eyes swept over the stage, noting exits, the position of the curtains and lights, and the sketchy scenery, but she kept coming back to that iron fence and skeleton tree.
The ten-feet-long, six-feet-tall section of cast-iron railing ran parallel to the front of the stage and was bolted securely to the floor at both ends. Vertical stability had been increased by anchoring it to the “tree,” a rectangle of open steel scaffolding four feet square and approximately eight feet tall, which had been transformed with cardboard limbs and twigs, then spray-painted black.
All the stage lights were on now and Detectives Lowry and Eberstadt had patiently begun dusting the steel scaffold. The matte black paint should yield usable fingerprints, but Sigrid pessimistically expected to learn that every dancer in the troupe had swarmed over those rungs today.
Unlike the tree, the iron fence seemed less a part of make-believe than something scavenged from a real turn- of-the-century graveyard. A narrow band of ornamental cast-iron flowers and ivy twined across the bottom and each paling was tipped with an exceedingly sharp point.
As she watched, Dr. Cohen turned to her. “If you’ve got all you need, Lieutenant, I’ll take her now.”
“Eberstadt?” she asked.
Matt Eberstadt, a tall, heavyset officer entering middle age, looked up from his task. “I already got her prints, Lieutenant.”
“Guidry?”
“Right here,” answered the young photographer, reappearing from the left wing of the stage with her cameras. She waited until Emmy Mions body had been gently lifted down and placed on a stretcher, then took several close-ups of the wounds.
As ambulance attendants wheeled the sheeted form up the short aisle, Sigrid noted that the remaining members of the dance company had been dispersed in separated seats around the theater and that Detectives Bernie Peters