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"Was he a friend of Jean’s?"

"I doubt it, but he’d probably knoas"

As it turned out, David Poletti was a children’s dentist who spent Wednesday afternoons in the office, catching up on his paperwork I waited briefly in a pastel-painted reception suite with scaled-down furniture and tattered issues of Highlights for Children stacked on low tables, along with Jack and Jill and Young Miss Of special interest to me in the last was a coluly related es I’d done not that long ago Knocking a full cup of Coke off a balcony railing was one The people down below really yell, don’t they?

Dr Poletti’s office staff was composed of three wo eyes, sweet s about the music oozed out of the walls like whiffs of nitrous oxide By the time I was ushered into his inner office, I would al to sit in a tot-sized dental chaise and havehooks

When I shook hands with Dr Poletti, he was still wearing a white jacket with an alarht of it about the sa it across a chair with a soft, apologetic s a dress shirt and a sweater vest He indicated that I should take a seat while he shrugged into a broeed sport coat and adjusted his cuffs He was maybe thirty-five, tall, with a narrow face His hair frizzed in tight curls already turning gray along the sides I knew, froh school basketball and I i over him in the cafeteria He wasn’t technically handsoentleness in his de to wohtly at the corners, the color a ht metallic frames

He sat down at his desk A color studio portrait of his wife and two young boys was prominently displayed, probably to dispel any fantasies his staff ht entertain about his availability "Tawna says you have soh school class it’s Jean Timberlake"

"Hoell did you know her?"

"Not very well I kneho she was, but I don’t think I ever had a class with her" He reached for a set of plaster-of-Paris impressions that sat on his desk, upper plate positioned above the lower in a jutting overbite He cleared his throat "What sort of infor for?"

"Whatever you can tell me Bailey Fowler’s father hired ht I’d start with Jean and work forward from there"

"Why come to gestion that heless suspicious, though a certain wariness remained Idly he lifted thethe crowded lower incisors If I had banged a fist down on the ht"I’ve been thinking a lot about theJust terrible"

"Were you in that group of kids who found her, by any chance?"