Presumption of Guilt

  He grabbed his keys off the desk and rushed back out to the truck. He had to go back. He had to see if Lisa was back yet or if they were still claiming she was at the party. He had to make sure she was okay. If something had happened to her today, he would never forgive himself.

  And Jimmy and Beth would never forgive him, either.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Bill Brandon was getting angry with him, but Nick didn’t care. Bill glared at him from across the lawn as Nick walked toward Cottage, where he had learned Lisa was assigned. Some children were playing in a playground behind the cottage, and the required number of B adults were on hand to supervise. He walked to the fence and scanned the faces.

  Stella, the woman who had spirited Lisa off earlier, was sitting in a lawn chair watching the children. She looked up at him as he approached the fence. “Business sure must be slow at HRS, to warrant this much attention from you in one day.”

  “I thought I might have left something here,” he said. “I can’t find my favorite pen. It was a Mont Blanc that I got as a gift. You didn’t happen to find it, did you?” Actually, he really had been given one as a college graduation gift, and it had been lost—for over two years.

  “Nope. Sorry.”

  “So how was that birthday party?” he asked, his eyes still sweeping across the children, looking for Lisa.

  “Fine,” she said. Her tone was defensive, questioning.

  He spotted Lisa now, sitting alone in a corner of the fenced area, leaning her head against one of the posts and peering out to the street, as if watching for someone. Was she looking for Jimmy?

  “I was thinking I might have dropped my pen over there,” he said, pointing to the area where Lisa was sitting. “Mind if I check?”

  She got up then, and looked back over his shoulder. Bill was approaching him from behind.

  “Nick, I know you’re supposed to do surprise inspections,” Bill Brandon said as he got closer, “but don’t you think two in one day is a little ridiculous?”

  “He left something,” Stella said. “A pen.”

  “A Mont Blanc. I wanted to look around and see if I could find it.” As he spoke, he started walking around the fence to where Lisa sat. “I was thinking that I might have dropped it when I came out here—”

  Lisa looked up at him as he drew closer. He looked down at her legs and arms, searching for some sign of a bruise or scrape, any indication that she may have been beaten or abused.

  Bill was right on his heels, trying to distract him from her. “If you’d dropped it, I’m sure we would have found it by now. If it turns up, we’ll call.”

  Nick bent over the fence. “But I was right over here, and I may have bent over. It could have fallen out of my pocket.” He pretended to look on the ground around the fence, then acted surprised as his eyes collided with Lisa’s. “Hey, you’re the little girl who went to the birthday party. What was your name again?”

  She started to answer, but Bill interrupted. “Susan. Her name’s Susan.”

  “Hi, Susan,” Nick said. “How was that party?”

  Lisa had the same pale, wide eyes as Jimmy. “Fine.”

  “Good. I love birthday parties. Did you have cake and ice cream?”

  She glanced up at Bill, waiting for him to prompt her. Nick couldn’t see him, since Bill stood behind him, but he must have signaled for her to say yes. She nodded.

  There was no point in pushing it. He was obviously making Lisa uncomfortable. She was here, and she wasn’t hurt—at least not that he could see.

  Frustrated, he turned and started back toward his car. Bill followed. “Call if you find it, will you? It’s a valuable pen. I hate to think I lost it.”

  “Sure. I’ll call,” Bill said suspiciously.

  Nick headed back around the fence, his eyes scanning the other children, reading their expressions—He froze as he saw Chris and Matt, the two little boys he’d placed in the Millers’ home just last night. They sat huddled together in a corner of the yard, watching the other children with wan, miserable faces.

  Nick swung back toward Bill. “Those two boys over there. When did you get them?”

  Bill glanced over at them. “They’re temporaries. Sheila Axel-rod brought them this afternoon.”

  “Sheila?” Nick asked. “But I put them in a foster home last night.”

  “Take it up with her, Nick. She brought them to us, and we took them in.”

  He turned back toward the two boys, fighting the urge to leap over the fence and tell them that he hadn’t meant for this to happen. The older boy, Chris, caught his gaze, and his face hardened. He muttered something to his little brother, and they both glared at him.

  They think I betrayed them.

  With an aching heart, Nick got back into his car and drove away.

  But before he’d gone two miles, he pulled over and tried to decide what to do now. Bill and his employees were onto him. Maybe that was good. They wouldn’t hurt Lisa as long as they knew he was watching. And maybe they wouldn’t hurt Chris or Matt.

  But that wasn’t good enough. He had to get them all out.

  He leaned back on the headrest and looked up at the ceiling. His eyes misted as angry sorrow rose within him. “Lord, you’ve got to help me. Right now I’m so mad at Sheila Axelrod I could strangle her. How could she have put those two boys there? And why? They were fine with the Millers.”

  He wrapped his arms around the steering wheel and rested his forehead on them. “This is too much for me,” he said. “I can’t handle it—without you.”

  A turbulent peace fell over him—peace that fighting for the kids was the right thing to do, but turbulent because he couldn’t rest. God wasn’t going to take that anger away from him, not yet. Maybe he was supposed to use it.

  He pulled his car back out into traffic and headed to the HRS building. Sheila’s car was there, and as he got out, his rage escalated.

  She was at her desk, talking on the telephone. She looked up as he entered, and he strode toward her and bent over her desk. “Want to tell me what’s going on with the kids I placed last night?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Let me call you back, okay?” she said into the phone. She hung up and looked up at Nick, unintimidated. “You got a problem?”

  “Yeah. Those kids were welcome in the Millers’ home. Why did you take them out?”

  “Because the Millers weren’t ready for three kids. They still have the baby.”

  Nick’s teeth came together. “I didn’t want those kids in SCCH, and you know it.”

  “And I told you that we’re not going to quit placing children there just because you don’t like Bill Brandon. I am the supervisor of this office, and I have the final word. If you can’t live with that, Nick, you know where the door is.”

  “And where would that leave you, Sheila? You can’t handle this office alone.”

  “Watch me.”

  They stared each other down for a long moment. Nick thought of quitting, of insulting her, of reaching across the desk and throttling her. But if he resigned, he couldn’t help Beth; he could do nothing for the kids. Working from the inside, he could help bring Bill Brandon down. When Beth’s story hit the streets, Sheila would understand.

  He straightened and massaged his temples. He was getting a headache. “Sheila, those kids were scared to death. The Millers were nurturing. They made them feel protected.”

  “It’s not my job to make them feel protected, Nick. It’s my job to make sure they have a secure place to stay for as long as they’re wards of the state.”

  “It’s not just about paperwork, Sheila!”

  She laughed bitterly as she got up. “Don’t tell me about paperwork, Nick. I’ve been at this longer than you’ve been an adult. I’ve seen cases that would curl your hair.”

  “You’ve seen too many,” Nick said. “You’ve lost your compassion.”

  “Well, maybe it wouldn’t hurt for you to do the same. That compassion will kill you, Nick. It’ll turn you
r hair gray and keep you awake nights. And for what? For the peanuts the state pays us?”

  “Then why are you still here?”

  “Because this is what I was trained to do, and in case you haven’t noticed, jobs aren’t easy to come by in this state. After a while, you stop worrying. You stop losing sleep. Those things don’t help the kids anyway—they just make you miserable. You find ways to stretch a dollar, or you supplement your income selling catalog makeup or magazine subscriptions. And you go on.

  You do the job, because you’re the only one here to do it.”

  “There’s got to be more to it than that, Sheila,” Nick said. “I came into this because I believed it was a calling from God.”

  “Right,” she said on a laugh. “Let me tell you something, Nick. If there were a God, there wouldn’t be a need for social workers.”

  Nick’s anger faded as he realized how little Sheila understood. “Maybe we are the way God’s solving the problem. Maybe you and I are like angels to these miserable, abused children.”

  She snorted. “Yeah, well, I lost my halo a long time ago.” She dropped back into her chair and picked up the phone. “This conversation is wearing me out, Nick. And I have about a million phone calls to return.”

  He watched as she dialed a number and began talking, ignoring him. His anger was gone, but in its place was a sad frustration, so deep that he didn’t know how to combat it. Breathing out a defeated sigh, he headed out of the building and got back into his car.

  There was nothing he could do for Matt and Chris right now.

  But there had to be something he could do for Lisa.

  He pulled her file out of his briefcase. He hadn’t finished studying it earlier. Now he flipped through the many forms that had been filled out to make Lisa and Jimmy wards of the state.

  Someone else—one of his coworkers who had long ago quit for a less stressful job—had removed them from the home. Then Nick had taken over the case, moving them from temporary foster care into SCCH, so he had never really studied their past.

  They were not orphans. The forms revealed that the original social worker had been unable to locate their father. But they still had a mother.

  He read intently about the woman who had voluntarily abandoned her children to the state.

  Her name was Tracy, and she’d been twenty-five years old at the time. HRS had received reports of neglect, investigated, and found that she was a heavy drug abuser. Shortly after the investigation began, she had left the children, ages four and seven then, home alone for two days while she reveled in an ecstasy binge. The state had taken the children.

  Nick ached for the pain those kids must have endured. He sat back in his seat. What would make a mother have such disregard for her children? That precocious little boy, that beautiful little girl—no wonder Jimmy distrusted adults. After a history of abandonment and neglect, Nick—who should have gotten things right—had dumped him from the frying pan into the fire. How many other times had he made the same mistake?

  He closed his eyes and leaned his head back against his headrest. Where was that mother now? The papers said she was a resident of St. Clair, but she could have moved on since then. He wondered if her life was still controlled by drug abuse.

  He closed his eyes and tried to think. He couldn’t get any of the kids out of the home on his own, not until Bill was exposed tomorrow and charges filed. And plenty of things could go wrong. The state could get caught in a mire of bureaucracy and fail to act immediately. That could be a fatal mistake, because as soon as Bill Brandon read Jimmy’s quotes in the article, he would be sure to take his vengeance out on Lisa.

  Unless . . .

  It was a long shot, but—he could at least try to track down their mother.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Beth spent the afternoon writing the story of a little girl neglected and abused, then placed in what was considered the nicest, most stable home in the state. She wrote of how that child was forcefully recruited into a crime ring at the age of eight, how she was taught to pick locks, slip into small openings in windows, crawl into homes through crawl spaces with garage entrances. She told how the girl learned to unlock jewelry boxes, search for cash, unhook VCRs, TVs, computers. She explained how she had worked for hours each night in her young life of crime, only to fall asleep in class the next day and suffer punishment at the hands of teachers and principals—and then again from Bill Brandon on returning home. And she told of the “tapes” that still played in her mind, tapes of Brandon’s voice telling her that she was the thief, not he, that she had the dirty hands, that if she ever told this story, she would have to fear not only prison, but death at his vicious hands.

  The sun was low in the sky behind the trees when she finished. Just writing this anonymous confession had exhausted her.And it might not even be enough. Phil would want substantiation. He would want a name, and she wasn’t ready to give hers.

  Drained and depressed, she called her editor. He sounded rushed as he answered. “Yeah, Beth. What’s up?”

  “Phil, it’s about the article. I’ve finished it, but—”

  “But what?”

  “But the other source I got. It’s anonymous. It’s a woman who used to live in Brandon’s home and worked in his crime ring . . . but she doesn’t want me to use her name.”

  “You realize, don’t you, that we’re making some fierce allegations here? If we intend to accuse an upstanding citizen of charges this serious, we have to be prepared to defend them in court, Beth. I can’t take the chance of getting the paper sued, because we made allegations that we can’t back up.”

  “We can back them up, Phil. It’s not my fault that Marlene was murdered, and that Jimmy is a little boy.”

  “I know that. But you’re putting me between a rock and a hard place here.”

  She slammed her hand on the table, waking Dodger who slept at her feet. “Phil, someone’s going to get hurt if we wait! Bill Brandon already knows I’m working on the story. He’s going to do everything he can to stop me. The longer we put off printing this story, the more danger I’m in, and the more danger those kids are in.”

  “You’re asking me to ignore my legal counsel.”

  “I’m asking you to have a little courage, Phil. Get some guts, for heaven’s sake!”

  He hesitated. “Beth, are you sure that you’ve gotten the facts right? Are you positive?”

  “Phil, I’d stake my life on it. In fact, that’s exactly what I’m doing.”

  She could tell from his sigh that she’d made her point. “All right. Send the story in, and I’ll take a look.”

  She closed her eyes. “Do more than take a look, Phil. Please. This could be the biggest story of the year.”

  “Sure, it could. It could win you an award. We could also get our pants sued off.”

  “Forget the awards, Phil. Don’t even give me a byline. I don’t care. Just print it.”

  “I’ll read it, Beth. We’ll see.”

  “Call me as soon as you decide,” she said.

  “I will.”

  She hung up and rested her face in her hands. She’d done her part. Now, if Phil printed the story, her career—even her life—might be ruined. Or Bill might decide to go out in a blazing act of vengeance, and come after her.

  She just hoped God hadn’t forgotten to record this in her scorebook.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Nick found the woman’s apartment building, an old structure with peeling paint, busted-out windows, and trash and old furniture on the front lawn. He found it hard to believe that people lived here; it looked as if it should be torn down.

  A toddler played at the bottom of a staircase, wearing nothing but a filthy diaper. As Nick walked from his car across the lawn, he looked for some sign of an adult nearby. Seeing none, he leaned down, hands on knees, and smiled at the child. The baby’s face was dirty and sticky, and his nose was runny. He smiled back and reached up to hand Nick a cigarette butt that he’d, no doubt, pick
ed up from the clutter at his feet. His fingers were crusted with filth.

  “Hi there.” Nick took the butt. “Where’s your mommy?”

  “Who wants to know?” a hoarse voice said from behind the broken staircase.

  Taking a couple of steps, Nick peered around the staircase and saw a girl of no more than fifteen sitting on a cracked slab of concrete, smoking a cigarette. “Hi,” Nick said. “I didn’t see you there. I thought the baby was out here alone.”

  “What’s it to you?”

  He shrugged. “Just worried me, that’s all. There are a lot of things around here that could hurt him.”

  “So what do you want, anyway?” the girl demanded.

  “Uh . . .” He looked back down at the dirty toddler. His instinct was to scoop the baby up and take it away to a place where it would be cared for. But he reminded himself, as he had to several times a day, that not every child was his responsibility, and that things weren’t always as bad as they seemed. “I was looking for a woman named Tracy Westin. I think she lives upstairs. Do you know her?”

  “Yeah, I know her.”

  “Is she home?”

  “I haven’t seen her come out.”

  He looked up the broken staircase. “So she’s in that apartment up there?”

  “Give the man an award.”

  Annoyed, Nick started to respond in kind—and then realized that she was, herself, a child, unable to handle the weight of hopelessness that so obviously held her down.

  He looked at the baby again, then back at the girl. Sister? Mother? One could never tell. He only hoped that she was a better caretaker than his first impression suggested. He could only hope that she had a better caretaker for herself.

  He went up the staircase, stepping over the broken steps. A garbage bag with trash spilling out of a gnawed-out hole sat at the top of the steps, and a cat prowled in the refuse. He stepped over it, ignoring the stench, and knocked on the door.