I believed she hurried home before her meeting ended and got into a fight with her mother. This may have happened over dinner, when I suspected Mrs. Steiner may have punished Emily by heavily salting her food. Salt ingestion is a form of child abuse that, horrifically, is not uncommon.
Emily may have been forced to drink salt water. She would have begun to vomit, which would only have served to make her mother madder. The child would have gone into hypematremia, finally a coma, and she would have been near death or already dead when Mrs. Steiner carried her down to the basement. Such a scenario would explain Emily’s seemingly contradictory physical findings. It would explain her elevated sodium and lack of vital response to her injuries.
As for why the mother chose to emulate Eddie Heath’s murder, I could only imagine that a woman suffering from Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy would have been intensely interested in such a notorious case. Only Denesa Steiner’s reaction would not have been like someone else’s. She would have imagined the attention a mother would get if she lost a child in such a ghastly fashion.
It was a fantasy that would have been exciting for her, and she might have worked it out in her head. She might have deliberately poisoned and killed her daughter that Sunday night to carry out her plan. Or she might have carried out her plan after accidentally poisoning Emily while enraged. I would never know the answer, but at this point it did not matter. This case would never see a courtroom.
In the basement, Mrs. Steiner placed her daughter’s body in the tub. I suspected it was at this point she shot her in the back of the head so blood would go down the drain. She undressed her, which would explain the coin Emily had not tithed that night because she had left her meeting before the boy she loved had taken up the collection. The quarter inadvertently slipped out of Emily’s pocket when her pants were being pulled off, and her bare buttock rested on top of it for the next six days.
I imagined it was night when, almost a week later, Mrs. Steiner retrieved Emily’s body, which essentially had been refrigerated all this time. She might have wrapped it in a blanket, explaining wool fibers we found. She might have placed it in plastic leaf bags. The microscopic traces of pith wood made sense, too, since Mr. Steiner had used pith buttons in the basement for years when he worked on clocks. So far, the blaze orange duct tape Mrs. Steiner had torn off in strips to tape her daughter and herself had not turned up, nor had the22-caliber gun. I doubted they ever would. Mrs. Steiner was too smart to hold on to those items, for they were incriminating.
In retrospect, it all seemed so simple, in many ways so obvious. For example, the sequence in which the duct tape was torn off the roll was exactly right for what had happened. Of course, Mrs. Steiner would have bound her daughter first, and there would have been no need to tear off all the strips and stick them on the edge of a piece of furniture. Her mother did not need to subdue her, since Emily wasn’t moving. Both of Mrs. Steiner’s hands, therefore, would have been free.
But when Mrs. Steiner bound herself, that was a little trickier. She tore off all the strips at once and stuck them on her dresser. She made a token effort of taping herself, so she could get out, and she did not realize she used the strips out of sequence, not that she would have had reason to know it mattered.
In Charlotte, I changed planes for Washington, and from there I took a taxi to the Russell Building, where I had an appointment to see Senator Lord. He was on the Senate floor voting when I arrived at half past three. I waited patiently in the reception area while young women and men answered telephones nonstop, for everyone in the world wanted his help. I wondered how he lived with the burden. He walked in soon enough and smiled at me. I could tell from his eyes he knew everything that had happened.