“That’s not surprising. Most brothers and sisters wish the others would die so they’d be the only child. That doesn’t mean she stuck a knife in Emilia’s neck.” She was making this entirely too easy.

She got up. He thought maybe she was going to get him another piece of pie, but instead she picked up something wrapped in wrinkled paper that had been lying on top of her ice box and slapped it down on the table in front of him.

“What’s this?” he asked suspiciously.

“Open it.”

Gingerly, he peeled back the paper and saw… a hat pin.

“I told you,” she said. “I found the murder weapon.”

He looked up in surprise, but she seemed perfectly serious. He looked at the pin again. “How could this be the murder weapon?”

“Because,” she said, sitting down again, “this is the hat pin that Emilia was wearing the morning she was killed. It was in the bag with the rest of her clothing at the morgue.”

The morgue? Frank got a very uneasy feeling. “How did you get it?”

“I went down to the morgue to make arrangements to have her buried,” she said, as if that was the most natural thing in the world for her to do.

“What?” he shouted again.

She didn’t blink again. “Her family certainly can’t afford to do it. You know that as well as I do. I even asked her priest if the church would pay for it, but he refused. Did you know that the Irish priests don’t even allow the Italians to worship in the sanctuary? They make them go to the basement!”

Frank hadn’t been in a church since Kathleen died, but he wouldn’t doubt this was true. Nobody liked the Italians. He had to run a hand over his face to clear his mind. “Let me understand this. You went to a priest and asked him to pay to have Emilia buried?”

“Yes, and when he wouldn’t, I decided I’d pay for it myself. I went down to the morgue to tell them so they wouldn’t put her in a pauper’s grave before I could make the arrangements.”

He had to run a hand over his face again and take a deep breath so that he wouldn’t raise his voice. Yelling at her for going to the morgue now wouldn’t make any difference, since she’d already done it. “Now tell me again what this hat pin has to do with anything.”

“The attendant at the morgue – and by the way, that horrible man wasn’t there anymore – told me I could take the hat and the shoes Emilia was wearing, because they don’t bury people in hats and shoes. I thought someone at the mission might want them, so I took them, and the hat pin, too. When I looked at it, I thought it must be rusty, because it was brown. But when I gave it to Gina, I realized it wasn’t rusty at all.”

“Who’s Gina?”

“One of the girls at the mission. Look at the pin, Malloy,” she said impatiently. “What do you see?”

Frank picked up the pin, holding it by the end that was shaped like a flower. He saw the brown residue near the base. He rubbed it with a finger and realized she was right. It wasn’t rust.

“Remember we thought Emilia was stabbed with a stiletto because that was the thinnest blade we could think of?” she asked. “But she wasn’t stabbed with a knife at all. Someone came up behind her, pulled the pin out of her hat, and used that to kill her.”

Frank stared at the pin, easily picturing what must have happened. The sharp end of the sturdy pin would have gone in easily and neatly, and the shaft was more than long enough to do terrible damage once inside the girl’s head. As much as he hated to admit it, Sarah was probably right. “Her hat was off when we found her,” Frank murmured. “I thought it must’ve gotten knocked off when she fell.”

“But it came off because someone took the pin out,” Sarah said. He knew that tone. She was excited because she was right.

“Then the killer wiped the worst of the blood off of it on her back and dropped it,” he said. “We found the pin in the leaves beside her body. Nobody even noticed the blood.” He hated making a mistake like that.

“Nobody knew she’d been stabbed then,” she reminded him, trying to make him feel better, he knew. “Besides, a man would never even consider a hat pin a weapon.”

A man would never consider a hat pin a weapon. The truth of the words seemed to echo in his head. He certainly wouldn’t have.

“Would a woman consider it a weapon?” he asked.

“Of course! I’ve used it myself on the train, when some masher thinks he can take advantage of a crowded car to press a little too close. A woman with a hat pin is never defenseless.”

Frank laid the pin down carefully on the paper while he considered what she’d told him.

“Malloy, do you know what this means?” she asked when he didn’t say anything.

He looked up. “Yeah, it means we were looking in the wrong direction.”

“That’s right. We figured Emilia had been stabbed by one of the men she’d been involved with.”

“Because they’re Italians and because we thought she’d been stabbed with a stiletto,” he said.

“But it wasn’t a stiletto, which means it probably also wasn’t a man.”

He hated being wrong, but he hated her being right more. At least she wasn’t gloating yet.

“The girls also told me they’re sure Emilia wouldn’t have gone to meet a man that morning,” she continued. “They said Emilia hated men, especially Ugo, for what he did to her.”

“Not only wouldn’t a man have thought of stabbing someone with a hat pin, he also wouldn’t have bothered to wipe off the blood.”

Her eyes widened. “I hadn’t thought of that! It seemed such a natural thing to do, or at least I thought it was natural.”

“Because you’re a woman.” He stared at her for a moment. “So what woman wanted her dead?”

She didn’t want to say the words, even though she knew they were true. “It had to be one of the girls at the mission.”

“Do you have any idea which one?”

“No, but I know how to find out.”

“No!” he said, slamming his fist onto the table and making her jump. “You’re not going to confront somebody who might be a killer.”

Her smile was sad. “I don’t have to confront anybody. All I have to do is ask Mrs. Wells which one of the girls said Emilia wanted Ugo to see her new dress. She’s the one who was creating an alibi for herself because she’s the one who killed Emilia.”

Frank had to resist the urge to storm the Prodigal Son Mission as he walked down Mulberry Street on his way back to Police Headquarters. It was only a few more blocks away, and he knew Emilia Donato’s killer was inside. The problem was that he couldn’t just go barging into the mission asking questions, and certainly not this late in the evening. Mrs. Wells wouldn’t like being disturbed by the police, and she especially wouldn’t like him accusing her little angels of murder. She’d complain to his superiors, and Frank would draw their wrath for that and for continuing to investigate the case when he’d been ordered to stop. Besides, he couldn’t possibly expect to get the kind of cooperation from Mrs. Wells that he’d need to identify the killer. As much as he hated to admit it, only Sarah Brandt could do that.

So Frank had reluctantly agreed to let her ask her questions and then notify Frank of what she learned. At least she had sense enough to agree with him that she shouldn’t try confronting the killer herself – especially not a killer who could turn a harmless hat pin into an instrument of death. A girl who killed just for the opportunity to get a new dress or a little additional attention was dangerous indeed.

Trying not to think about that, Frank climbed the narrow steps to Headquarters. He had a prisoner to question.

Twenty-four hours in the cellar cells had softened Danny considerably. He wasn’t completely broken yet, but Frank hoped he was smart enough to realize he soon would be if he didn’t tell Frank what he wanted to know.

He had the guards bring the boy into an interrogation room. Frank pulled a small loaf of stale braided bread he had bought from an old Italian woman on the corner out of his pocket and laid it on the table in front of the boy. Danny looked up warily, afraid to trust an apparent act of kindness.