MY HEART LURCHED when I saw the little girl. Her hair was singed to an inch of frizzed, black fuzz sticking out from her scalp. Her eyebrows and lashes were gone, and her skin looked painfully pink. We approached her bed, which seemed to float under a bower of shiny helium balloons.

  Molly didn’t look at me or Conklin, but two Chinese women moved aside and a white-haired woman in her seventies with rounded features and sapphire blue eyes stood up and introduced herself as Molly’s psychiatrist, Dr. Olga Matlaga.

  The shrink spoke to the little girl, saying, “Some police officers are here to see you, sweetheart.”

  Molly turned toward me when I said her name, but her eyes were dull, as if the life had been sucked out of her, leaving only a stick-figure representation of a child.

  “Have you found Graybeard?” she asked me, her voice whispery and slowed by painkillers.

  I cast a questioning look at Dr. Matlaga, who explained, “Her dog, Graybeard, is missing.”

  I told Molly that we would put out an APB for Graybeard and told her what that meant. She nodded soberly and I asked, “Can you tell us what happened in your house?”

  The child turned her face toward the window.

  “Molly?” Conklin said. He dragged over a chair, sat so that he was at the little girl’s eye level. “Have lots of people been asking you questions?”

  Molly reached a hand toward the swinging arm of the table near her bed............