"Daddy’s snake bites me," the little girl cried to 911, but when police kicked the door down, they discovered the monster had no scales, only a human face.

The pediatric floor at St. John’s Hospital was called 3-North, but everyone in the Seventh Judicial District called it the Nest.

It had sixteen beds, twelve of which had high, clear Lucite sides that looked like commercial aquarium tanks, and the walls had been painted by the Junior League with scenes from the Sangamon River: large, two-dimensional blue herons with yellow beaks, three-foot cattails with velvet brown heads, and green turtles sitting on logs that had no bark.

Emily Miller lay in the bed by the window.

She had been stripped of the strawberry flannel. She wore an oversized white cotton hospital gown with small blue geometric diamonds printed on the fabric, the sleeves rolled up four turns to keep the cuffs off the dressings.

Her right arm was immobilized from the knuckles to the bicep in a light fiberglass half-cast, lined with blue gauze and wrapped with three-inch Ace bandage. The puncture wounds had been debrided under light ketamine forty minutes after midnight; the resident from Southern Illinois University School of Medicine had spent fifteen minutes with an eighty-gauge needle, irrigating the eight-millimeter tracks with four hundred milliliters of sterile saline and a three-percent betadine wash.

"The teeth were dirty," Dr. Alan Geller had told Daniel in the hall. "Reptile mouths have three strains of Salmonella and four different anaerobic bacteria that live on the tooth enamel. If we hadn't opened those tracks before three a.m., she’d have had cellulitis by daylight and the compartment syndrome by lunch."

María López sat on the low vinyl armchair beside the bed.

She had unbuttoned her tactical carrier, letting the heavy Kevlar vest hang loose over her grey duty shirt, and she had taken her duty belt off and laid it on the floor behind her heels where the child couldn't see the holster.

In her hands, María held the one-eyed hare.

A nurse’s aide had taken the grey wool into the utility laundry on 2-South, washed it in warm borax, dried it on the air-cycle with three clean tennis balls to fluff the ears, and sewn a three-eighths-inch navy blue plastic button over the empty right socket.

Emily’s left hand was hooked into María’s belt loop.

Not her hand—just two fingers, the index and the middle, hooked through the double-thick nylon webbing between the magazine pouch and the handcuff case.

"Emily," María said. The room was dark, save for the green numbers on the Baxter IV pump that was ticking fifty milliliters of ampicillin into the back of the child’s hand every four hours. "Your aunt is coming down from Peoria. She’s your mother’s sister. Aunt Clara."

The girl’s eyes didn't move from the window.

Outside, the streetlights along Ninth Street were turning pink in the morning mist that was coming off the rail yard. A switch engine from the Norfolk Southern let out two short, flat blasts of its horn—toot-toot—as it cleared the crossing at Cook Street.

"Does she have a box?" Emily asked.

"No," María said. "She has a house with a porch and three red cats that sleep in the sun on the kitchen chairs."

"Does she have a lock on the door?"

"Only the little turn-button on the handle," María said. "The one you use when you go to the bathroom so your cousins don't walk in while you’re brushing your teeth."

The child let out her breath. It was long, slow, and had the deep, shuddering cadence of a horse that has come in from three hours in the trace chains and felt the collar come off its withers.

"Daddy said the snake was my fault," Emily said. Her eyes were still on the window, watching a starling sit on the copper gutter of the nurses' residence across the asphalt.

"Why did he say that, Emily?"

"He said... he said when Mama died, I stayed small."

María didn't move. She didn't squeeze the child’s fingers. She knew that if you squeeze an eight-year-old who has spent twenty-four months in a silent house, she will pull her hands back into her sleeves like a turtle into its carapace.

"He said a real daughter would have grown up faster," Emily whispered. "He said a woman knows how to keep the kitchen clean and doesn't cry when the wind comes through the lath. He said if I was going to act like an animal, I could have an animal in the room to teach me how to keep my ribs still."

The door to 3-North opened with that soft, rubbery sigh that hospital doors have when the magnetic latch is released from the nurses' station.

Daniel Harris stood in the opening.

He had been at the county building on Ninth Street for five hours. He had six carbon copies of the felony complaint in his breast pocket, his shirt was wrinkled at the armpits, and his eyes were red from three cups of courthouse chicory and four packs of Chesterfield Kings he had smoked on the granite steps behind the Lincoln monument while the state’s attorney was drafting the information.

He looked at María.

He didn't ask how the child was. He knew how the child was. He had seen three generations of them come through the doors of the municipal building—some from the old brick tenements along the Sangamon, some from the ranches out by the airport, all of them with that same sixty-yard gaze that looks right through six inches of plaster into the dirt behind the wall.

"Harris," María said.

"State’s Attorney took the whole package," Daniel said, his voice flat as an oak board. "No bond. Judge Miller signed the capias at six-fifteen. He’s booked on aggravated battery to a child, unlawful restraint, and two counts of criminal neglect. The grand jury sits on Tuesday."

Emily’s fingers moved against María’s belt.

She looked at Daniel’s Stetson, which he was carrying by the brim in his left hand.

"Mister?"

Daniel stopped two feet from the Lucite rail. He didn't smile; children who have lived with men like Thomas Miller don't trust a man who smiles before he sits down.

"Emily," Daniel said.

"Where did the man take it?"

"The snake?"

"Yes."

Daniel set his hat on the bedside table, right beside the plastic cup with the bent paper straw.

"He took her to the big park by the lake," Daniel said. "He put her in a room with four glass walls and three heat lamps that stay on day and night. She has forty pounds of dry cedar bark to sleep in, and nobody goes in that room without three feet of iron between their hands and the scales."

The child looked down at her fingers where they were looped into the nylon.

"Does she have a lock?"

"She has an iron bar," Daniel said. "With two padlocks that take two different keys. And the only man who has the keys is the old man with the white hair who carries the snake hooks."

Emily Miller let go of the belt.

She didn't reach for the rabbit. She laid her small, yellow-white palm flat on the clean cotton of the hospital sheet, spread her five fingers until they touched the hem of the mattress, and closed her eyes.

"That's good," she said.