It was precisely one of those atrocities that I was railing against when I finally did make it into Gloria’s office sometime that afternoon.
“It was long-term, continued abuse over years, and the girl’s mother knew about it.” I all but spat out the last words, pacing back and forth the six paces across my boss’s office in front of her desk. “She didn’t want to lose her boyfriend—or more likely, her access to whatever he had her strung out on.” I heaved a sigh and flung myself down into one of the upholstered chairs against the wall, scrubbing across my face with my hands.
“Any word from the bio-dad?” Gloria asked.
“Nothing. No one has heard from him since the child was an infant.”
She nodded, her blond curls bouncing as she made a note. People who didn’t know her often made the mistake of thinking she was soft, simply because she looked like some artist’s idea of a sweet, round, cookie-baking mama.
Gloria was all of those things.
Also, she was one of the toughest women I’ve ever met when it came to confronting child-abusers. Our District Attorney loved it when he could call on her to testify in a case. She was precise and clear and harsh when it came to dealing with people who hurt kids.
“How is your friend who was attacked yesterday?” she asked as she finished her comments in the case file we had been discussing.
“Okay. Kade and his team went ahead and delivered the baby. A girl. They’re both still in intensive care, but Kade said I could go by and visit tonight.”
“Is this someone you’ve talked about?”
I gave a quick shake of my head. “Probably not.”
Definitely not. No. This is the woman who was carrying Scott’s weresnake rape-baby I didn’t tell you about.
“She’s a fairly new friend,” I added. “I met her through Kade.”
More or less.
Thankfully, Gloria didn’t follow up on that line of questioning. “That’s still going well, I take it?”
I couldn’t help but smile at the thought of my relationship with Kade. “Very.”
Gloria laughed aloud. “So I see.”
I smiled but shook my head. “I actually didn’t come in to talk about any of that.”
“Not even the Kavanaugh case?”
“No. I wanted to see if you had heard anything else from Moreland about that weird recording.” What I didn’t say was that something about it was bothering me, but I couldn’t pinpoint why, exactly. I suppose I could have brought up an intuition—Gloria wouldn’t have seen anything particularly odd in that—but out of long habit, I kept quiet about anything that might be attributable to my unusual nature.
“Not as of this morning, but I haven’t checked my messages lately.” Her voice trailed off as she tapped at her phone. Then she shook her head. “No. Nothing. I’ll see if I can reach him.”
I checked my own phone while she was occupied, though I suspected Kade was at home asleep between his hospital shifts, and Moreland would let Gloria know of any breaks in that case.
Eduardo, though, had sent a text. It had only a time—10 p.m.—and coordinates. I assumed I was supposed to track down the coordinates and meet him there at the designated time.
I huffed a sigh, and Gloria raised an eyebrow in my direction, but I shook off the implied question.
The week before I had found my Shield mentor’s spy vs. spy missions mildly amusing.
Today, I was simply irritated.
Again.
At least he left me enough time to go visit Marta and the baby.
I wondered if the baby had been given a name.
Marta had never intended to keep the child—but we had never discussed who would name it, either.
As with everything else, we had all assumed we had months left.
Oh, hell. Was I supposed to name the baby?
My eyes flew wide open, and I must have jumped, because Gloria said, “Is everything okay?”
“I’m fine. I just remembered that I have a client due in about ten minutes and I haven’t looked over his file. A parent made the appointment for depression, if I’m remembering right, so it’s probably something I can refer to a private practitioner.” Not a lie, exactly. It simply wasn’t the real reason I had flinched. At Gloria’s nod, I hauled myself up out of her chair and headed back to my office to prepare to deal with adolescent angst.
Thirty minutes later, I had finally ushered Orlando’s tightly wound parents into the waiting room so I could talk to the thirteen-year-old alone. I found that working my way through the standard questionnaire without parental influence could be invaluable when making an initial assessment. Much as I might have wanted to, I couldn’t simply say that living with those two people would turn me into a depressive, too.
“So you say that sometimes you think about hurting yourself?” Honestly, I didn’t think this was fair to ask as a yes-or-no question. Luckily, there was a follow-up.
“Do you have a plan for it?” We sat in matching wing-back chairs across from one another, just far enough that I could lean in and out of his space as necessary to help develop rapport.
Orlando nodded, his shifty-eyed glance flicking up toward the ceiling.
“Would you be willing to tell me about that plan?”
“Right here in my backpack,” he said, his hand twitching down toward the floor.
Without even consciously thinking that he might be reaching for a weapon, I moved shifter-fast to intervene in between him and the bag, crouching protectively over it on the floor so that his questing fingers brushed against my shoulder blades before he jerked his hand away. When I glanced up, his brown eyes had grown huge and round.
“You’re really quick,” he said in tones of awe.
“Why don’t you tell me about the plan for now?” I suggested. “Maybe you can show me later.”
“Okay. Sure.”
When I moved back into my seat, I dragged the backpack toward me, keeping one hand on the fabric loop at the top.
“So what’s your plan?” I asked again.
Orlando’s face scrunched up and he hunched his shoulders up around his neck. “I’ve got this hot dog.”
He paused, and I blinked several times. “A hot dog?”
“Yeah. You know. Like a wiener?”
“Okay.” I drew the word out, trying not to sound too incredulous.
“It’s in a baggie, in my backpack, somewhere down at the bottom.”
I fell back on the repetition technique of counseling. “A hot dog wiener in a baggie in your backpack.”
“I took it from the school cafeteria a couple of weeks ago. I had it wrapped in a napkin, but it was getting all squashed, so I got a baggie from home.” He paused. “You want to see it?”
Not until I figure out how it connects to your death-plan, kiddo. “Not yet. Just keep telling me about this hot dog.”
“So. I figure, once it’s been in my backpack for long enough, it’ll go bad, right?”
Oh, no. I was beginning to see where this was heading. I was going to have to draw on every serious counseling face I had ever made.
Poker-face time.
“And then, when I’m ready, I will eat it and it will poison me,” he finished triumphantly.
“Mmmhmm,” I managed to murmur noncommittally, jotting a few incoherent notes down on the legal pad in my lap.