Emily may have been forced to drink salt water. She would have begun to vomit, which would only have served to make her mother madder. The child would have gone into hypematremia, finally a coma, and she would have been near death or already dead when Mrs. Steiner carried her down to the basement. Such a scenario would explain Emily's seemingly contradictory physical findings. It would explain her elevated sodium and lack of vital response to her injuries.
As for why the mother chose to emulate Eddie Heath's murder, I could only imagine that a woman suffering from Munchausen's syndrome by proxy would have been intensely interested in such a notorious case. Only Denesa Steiner's reaction would not have been like someone else's. She would have imagined the attention a mother would get if she lost a child in such a ghastly fashion.
It was a fantasy that would have been exciting for her, and she might have worked it out in her head. She might have deliberately poisoned and killed her daughter that Sunday night to carry out her plan. Or she might have carried out her plan after accidentally poisoning Emily while enraged. I would never know the answer, but at this point it did not matter. This case would never see a courtroom.
In the basement, Mrs. Steiner placed her daughter's body in the tub. I suspected it was at this point she shot her in the back of the head so blood would go down the drain. She undressed her, which would explain the coin Emily had not tithed that night because she had left her meeting before the boy she loved had taken up the collection. The quarter inadvertently slipped out of Emily's pocket when her pants were being pulled off, and her bare buttock rested on top of it for the next six days.
I imagined it was night when, almost a week later, Mrs. Steiner retrieved Emily's body, which essentially had been refrigerated all this time. She might have wrapped it in a blanket, explaining wool fibers we found. She might have placed it in plastic leaf bags. The microscopic traces of pith wood made sense, too, since Mr. Steiner had used pith buttons in the basement for years when he worked on clocks. So far, the blaze orange duct tape Mrs. Steiner had torn off in strips to tape her daughter and herself had not turned up, nor had the22-caliber gun. I doubted they ever would. Mrs. Steiner was too smart to hold on to those items, for they were incriminating.
In retrospect, it all seemed so simple, in many ways so obvious. For example, the sequence in which the duct tape was torn off the roll was exactly right for what had happened. Of course, Mrs. Steiner would have bound her daughter first, and there would have been no need to tear off all the strips and stick them on the edge of a piece of furniture. Her mother did not need to subdue her, since Emily wasn't moving. Both of Mrs. Steiner's hands, therefore, would have been free.
But when Mrs. Steiner bound herself, that was a little trickier. She tore off all the strips at once and stuck them on her dresser. She made a token effort of taping herself, so she could get out, and she did not realize she used the strips out of sequence, not that she would have had reason to know it mattered.
In Charlotte, I changed planes for Washington, and from there I took a taxi to the Russell Building, where I had an appointment to see Senator Lord. He was on the Senate floor voting when I arrived at half past three. I waited patiently in the reception area while young women and men answered telephones nonstop, for everyone in the world wanted his help. I wondered how he lived with the burden. He walked in soon enough and smiled at me. I could tell from his eyes he knew everything that had happened.
"Kay, it's so good to see you."
I followed him through another room with more desks and people on more telephones; then we were in his private office, and he shut the door. He had many beautiful paintings by very fine artists, and it was clear he loved good books.
"The Director called me earlier today. What a nightmare. I'm not sure I know what to say," he said.
"I'm doing all right."
"Here, please." He directed me to the couch and faced me from an unimposing chair. Senator Lord rarely put his desk between himself and others. He did not need to, for as was true with every powerful person I had known, and there were but a few, his greatness made him humble and kind.
"I'm walking around in a stupor. A weird state of mind," I went on.
"It's later I'll be in trouble. Posttraumatic stress and that sort of thing. Knowing about it doesn't make you immune."
"I want you to take good care of yourself. Go someplace and rest for a while."
"Senator Lord, what can we do about Lucy? I want her name cleared."
"I believe you've already managed to do that."
"Not entirely. The Bureau knows it couldn't have been Lucy's thumb scanned into the biometric lock system. But this doesn't entirely exculpate my niece. At least that's the impression I've gotten."
"Not so. Not so at all." Senator Lord recrossed his long legs and stared off.
"Now, there may be a problem in terms of what circulates throughout the Bureau. The gossip, I mean. Since Temple Gault has become part of the picture, there is much that cannot be discussed."
"So Lucy will just have to hold up under everybody's stare because she won't be permitted to divulge what happened," I said.
"That's correct."
"Then there will be those who do not trust her and will think she shouldn't be at Quantico."
"There may be those."
"That's not good enough." He regarded me patiently.
"You can't protect her forever, Kay. Let her take her licks and suffer her slights. In the long run, she will be the better for it. Just keep her legal." He smiled.
"I'm going to do my best to do that," I said.
"She still has a DUI hanging over her head."
"She was the victim of a hit-and-run or even an attempted murder. I should think that might change the scenario a bit in the eyes of the judge. I also will suggest she volunteer to perform some sort of community service."
"Do you have something in mind?" I knew he did or he would not have mentioned it.
"As a matter of fact I do. I wonder if she would be willing to return to ERF? We don't know how much of CAIN Gault has tampered with. I'd like to suggest to the Director that the Bureau use Lucy to follow Gault's tracks through the system to see what can be salvaged."
"Frank, I know she would be thrilled," I said as my heart filled with gratitude.
"I can't think of anyone better qualified," he went on.
"And it will give her a chance for restitution. She did not willingly do anything wrong, but she used poor judgment."
"I will tell her," I said. From his office I went to the Willard and got a room. I was too tired to return to Richmond, and what I really wanted to do was fly to Newport. I wanted to see Lucy, even if only for an hour or two. I wanted her to know what Senator Lord had done, that her name was cleared, her future bright. Everything was going to be just fine. I knew it. I wanted to tell her how much I loved her. I wanted to see if I could find words that for me were so hard. I tended to hold love hostage in my heart because, if expressed, I feared it might abandon me as many people in my life had.
So it had been my habit to bring what I feared upon me. In my room I called Dorothy and got no answer. Next I called my mother.
"Where are you this time?" she asked, and I could hear water running.
"I'm in Washington," I said.
"Where's Dorothy?"
"It just so happens she's right here helping me with dinner. We're having lemon chicken and salad-you should see the lemon tree, Katie. And the grapefruits are huge. I'm washing the lettuce even as we speak. If you would visit your mother once in a blue moon, we could eat together. Normal meals. We could be a family. "
"I would like to speak to Dorothy."
"Hold on." The phone clunked against something, then Dorothy was on.