Free Over Tumbled Graves by Jess Walter

through the kitchen, a pan of cold macaroni and cheese on the table along with parts of countless other meals, sandwiches and bags of potato chips and beer cans. A diaper. “Kitchen’s clear,” Caroline said into the radio.
    The back bedroom was off the kitchen and had been at one time a back porch or eating nook. Even before she turned the loose door handle, Caroline had a terrible feeling. The crying was clearer here, the smell precise, and before she stepped through the door, Caroline knew what she would find.
    He was maybe six months old, lying on his side, running his fingers over the bars of his crib, his voice nearly gone from crying. He was naked, and Caroline could smell before she could see that he had been lying in his own waste for some time now. Someone had taped a pacifier onto his mouth but he had gotten it partway off and it hung from his cheek by a square of duct tape. His crying was steady and throbbing, like a record that’s finished playing, but keeps spinning under the needle. Caroline doubted the cry was for attention anymore. This baby didn’t know what other sound to make.
    She grabbed a flannel shirt off a chair in the kitchen and returned to the crib, wrapped it around the boy, and lifted him from the soaked and soiled bed. He weighed as much as her purse. He didn’t seem to notice that he was in someone’s arms.
    Caroline carefully took the taped pacifier off his cheek.
    She held him beneath her chin and rocked back and forth, but he just kept crying. Through the kitchen and down the hallway, she could see the Kevlar-vested detectives wrestling with Thick Jay, Chase, and the woman. She opened her mouth to let someone know what she’d found, but nothing came. The baby lay limp against her shoulder, not hugging or resisting, just lying there. Caroline could hear her own breath in her head.
    Sergeant Lane stepped through the kitchen, covering his mouth because of the stench. It took a moment for the flannel lump on Caroline’s shoulder to register, but when it did, the sergeant removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Her hand shaking, Caroline held out the tape and the pacifier. “I’ll call CPS,” he whispered.
    While Sergeant Lane called Child Protective Services, Caroline looked for a bottle. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the cupboards—half-eaten chips and two black bananas in this one, a box of rice and a photo album in that one. No baby supplies anywhere. She finally found a bottle in the refrigerator, but it was empty, just stained with old milk, the rubber on the nipple old and flaking.
    The whimpering hadn’t changed and so Caroline stuck her pinkie in the boy’s mouth, the way she’d seen her sister-in-law do when Chelsea was crying. He began suckling her finger, pausing every few seconds to rest, then starting in again on her finger. After a few tugs at this he stopped crying, and after a few more was asleep.
    She walked gingerly through the house, trying not to wake the baby. The other detectives slumped when they saw what she held, when they recalled the whimpering dog. Caroline moved into the living room, where the suspects were laid out on their stomachs, being questioned. She pushed the clothes and garbage aside and set the baby down on the couch, taking the ratty flannel shirt away and replacing it with a T-shirt that would be softer on his little body. But without the feel of her, the baby began crying, more softly this time, reaching out with clawed fingers for her.
    On the floor across the room, Thick Jay lifted his head at the sound. “Hey, what are you doing with my kid?”
    Caroline didn’t even realize she had crossed the room. She grabbed one handcuffed arm, and with her other hand grabbed Thick Jay’s hair. She pulled equally on them and he screamed as he was lifted by the shoulder and the hair to a standing position. Detectives and uniformed cops came into the room and saw Thick Jay balanced on the balls of his feet, his face