Free Liberty Falling-pigeon 7 by Nevada Barr

the length of the child's hair by a chopping motion in the vicinity of her butt as she flopped into a comfortless government-issue armchair, not unlike those in the ICU at Columbia-Presbyterian.
    "There's talk of suspending Hatch. The Chief Ranger was in the Super's office half the afternoon."
    Anna eased down on the sofa and put her feet up on a coffee table that looked as if it had been custom-made for George Jetson, a sixties version of the future. The gash on her thigh had clotted and the torn flesh was pulling tight. Each place she'd banged in her fall was reasserting its need for sympathy. She took another pull on her beer. "Why? What happened?" If nobody else heard the kid saying Hatch had pushed the girl, Anna wasn't going to volunteer the information without talking with him first. He didn't strike her as the type who went around chucking strange children off parapets.
    "This is all second and third-hand," Patsy said. "But according to Hatch, this kid had been acting strange. Somebody'd reported her or something. Hatch got to watching her and thought maybe she was picking pockets. We get our share of that. Tourists. Crowds. The pickings can be pretty good. For the price of one ticket a thief can work the boats and monuments all day. She--Hatch thought it was a boy too--evidently started acting really peculiar on the top of the pedestal where you can go outside. Hatch thought she was stuffing things in her backpack. He was going to talk to her and--again according to him--she just took off out the doors. He ran after her. The way he tells it, he was trying to catch hold of her to stop her from jumping, was a second too late--and splat.
    "Hi, Mandy, we're talking about Hatch." Patsy broke off as her housemate came in. Mandy was young and round of face, eyes and tummy--everywhere but where a woman might choose to be round. Her hair was baby-fine and cut in a bowl shape, like most depictions of Joan of Arc. Anna had found no call to either like or dislike her. But she was about to.
    "Hatch should be fired," Mandy said, as if what she thought mattered. "This Keystone Kop routine. Chasing a kid! This is an island, for chrissake. Where did he think she was going to go?" The condemnation was delivered with scathing finality.
    Anna was tired, and somewhere between 1975 and the present, she'd ceased caring what the Mandys of the world thought, but out of loyalty to Hatch and the brotherhood, she roused herself. "You've got to chase 'em," she said. "You don't know why they're running. Maybe they'll hurt somebody. Hurt themselves. You let 'em go, it turns out you knew, you'd been told they were acting fishy. You tried to talk to them. They ran and you just said, 'Oh well, win some lose some,' then they pull out a forty-five and start shooting visitors--or worse, damage the resource. Try explaining that to the Chief Ranger. Not to mention John Q. Public. That's the luxury of not being in law enforcement. You don't have to engage. Hatch did. He had point two seconds to figure out what to do."
    "Okay. Sure. Whatever." Mandy looked around the room, vaguely peeved, then pushed her stubby bangs off her forehead with the edge of her hand. "Anybody want the bathroom? I'm going to have a soak." Finding no takers, she stumped off down the hall.
    "My junior year in college I took third place in the state finals for persuasive speaking," Anna said. "Evidently I've lost my touch."
    "Mandy suffers from arrested development," Patsy whispered after checking to see that the bathroom door had closed. "She views the world from a training bra."
    Patsy's own form was a fifties wet dream, movie stars before anorexia and gym memberships became fashionable. Anna laughed. "Another beer?" Patsy offered, further endearing herself.
    "There was no backpack," Anna remembered suddenly as Patsy came back with two more Bud Lights. "Hatch said she was stuffing something in her backpack? When I checked the boy--the girl--after she fell, she didn't have a pack, not