Free The Price of Innocence by Lisa Black

man.’
    ‘
Hah
!’ Christine exclaimed, so loudly that Theresa jumped away from the steel table and nearly stabbed herself with the tweezers. ‘Sorry, I’ll stifle myself. What man? What is he like? Where did you meet him?’
    ‘Down, girl, down. I didn’t mean it like that. I meant—’ Theresa discovered she didn’t know exactly what she meant, so instead she started from the beginning, and told Christine about David Madison. Then she added what Frank had told her about David Madison’s wife.
    ‘Eww. Weird.’ The doctor wiggled a sharp object from behind the dead man’s shin bone.
    ‘Finding a sliver of concrete wedged between his tibia and fibula?’
    ‘Having an affair with a thirteen-year-old. The concrete is clean, it probably got in there during excavation. It’s one thing to have your wife leave you for another guy, but a kid? What does that say about you? Is he some kind of hulking brute that made her think of herself as helpless, so that she started to see this kid as a peer?’
    ‘He struck me as a big teddy bear. Of course, I only talked to him for about three minutes. How do you sleep with someone who’s the same age as your own child?’
    ‘Men do it all the time,’ Christine pointed out. ‘Though we hope they’re at least over forty and their daughters are grown. So you have to ask yourself, how much sympathy does this guy warrant? How many women have had to face the fact that their husband is sleeping with a student, or the office intern, or the babysitter? No one ponders what that does to
their
self-esteem.’
    ‘Maybe his self-esteem is OK. He probably just wonders what to tell his boys. The older they get, the more questions they’re going to have, if they haven’t asked them already. He must cringe every time he sees a news camera.’
    Christine hadn’t left the topic of cheating men. ‘It’s not surprising men are attracted to younger women. Biology and society trains them for that. But when they cross the line from “younger” to “child”, then—’
    ‘They’ve crossed the line from scumbag to pedophile.’
    ‘Exactly. And there’s such a double standard for boys and girls, of course. Some people actually claim that early sexual activity isn’t as damaging to boys because they can’t get pregnant. Granted, it’s not going to disrupt their life like having a baby at twelve would, but their minds aren’t just going to brush it off because their bellies don’t grow.’ Christine warmed to her subject as she took a rubber hose and washed off a spot on the dead man’s wrist. ‘All I know is, kids have a right to be kids and grow at the same rate as their peers, and if that was my boy I’d show up at that woman’s house with a two-by-four and not a jury in the world would convict me.’
    Theresa opined, ‘I say reverse the genders. If you would put a man in jail for molesting a thirteen-year-old girl, and of course we would, then you have to do the same for this woman. I just feel sorry for the ones she left in her wake. What do you have there?’
    ‘He’s got a deformity on the outer edge of his ulna.’ She pointed at the bone that ran on the outside of the arm, from the left hand to the elbow. It had an indentation, like a rough crater, just above the wrist.
    ‘An old break?’
    ‘No, not a break, not a calcium deposit … it almost looks like a burn.’
    Theresa raised her eyebrows. ‘Burn? The man’s entire body is
crispy
.’
    ‘Don’t get cute with me, missy. I mean an old burn. The bone healed around it.’
    ‘Oh.’ Theresa leaned in closer. The campfire smell of the body competed with the scent of iodine and ammonia until she had to back up again, or sneeze.
    ‘Maybe not a burn,’ Christine muttered aloud. ‘But I don’t know what else could cause this, a cut would have … too bad I don’t have any flesh to see … we’ll have to get his medical records, ask his next of kin if he had an injury to his arm. OK, I’m going to hose the rest.