Chapter 4
When she had been added to the on-call list, Bridget had tried to warn her supervisor that she wasn’t ready.
There was too much that she didn’t know.
However, her boss, Leticia Graves, insisted that after a couple more senior case workers quit, she was up.
Now Bridget stood at the foot of the bed in the ER and typed out a message to her boss.
This had to count as an emergency requiring waking the woman, but Bridget would try a text first.
What was she supposed to do?
Leave?
Stay?
How could she find the family for medical decisions when she had zero information?
She was stumped and couldn’t imagine feeling less prepared for the questions that confronted her. There had to be a guide for situations like this, but she didn’t know where to find it, and, frankly, didn’t have it in her, even if she knew where it was.
Barely a minute passed after she hit send before her phone vibrated with an incoming call.
“What have you done, Ellis?”
“Nothing. I’m at the ER with a Jane Doe.” What do I do was her unspoken question.
“And you were the lucky person on call?” Leticia Graves sighed. “Silly question. No one has any idea who the girl is?”
“No.”
“And the officer who brought her in?”
“Detective Westmont.”
“Okay, he’s one of the good ones. He still there?”
“Yes. Hasn’t left line of sight of the room.”
“Good.” There was a tapping sound as if Leticia drummed on a surface.
“Stay with her tonight and in the morning, we’ll work through missing child reports and get the media involved.
If we haven’t had anyone reach out to us, then the media is our best way to spread the word quickly that we have an unidentified minor who needs her family. ”
“Okay.” Maybe she could give Dani a heads-up now. “Do you want me to reach out to an acquaintance at Channel 13 now?”
“No, it can wait until the morning when we have a better idea what we’re dealing with. The evening news is behind us anyway. Nothing they can do now.”
“Other than get it on their social accounts.”
“And then we spend all night weeding through those rather than seeing what we know first. Better to wait. Give ourselves a chance to go through reports from the last couple weeks.”
Bridget glanced at the girl who still lay unmoving on the bed. As thin as she was, she might have been in trouble for longer than the last couple hours, but she didn’t have a better plan to offer Leticia. “All right. I’ll come in first thing tomorrow.”
“No, hang tight until I say differently. We’ll need to keep someone with her until she wakes. Those first impressions may be telling in important ways.”
After Leticia ended the call, Bridget stepped back into the hall. She waved Detective Westmont over. “Could you stay in the room for a minute?”
“Sure, but where are you going?”
“To my car. Looks like I get to stay all night, so I need to grab my bag. Then I can at least start looking through reports while I wait, since I doubt I’ll sleep much tonight.”
“Makes sense.” He sank onto the squeaky plastic-covered recliner in the corner of the room. “I won’t go anywhere.”
“Thanks.” Twenty minutes later she returned with her backpack and two cups of bad vending machine coffee. “It’s black and hot, that’s about all I can say that’s positive.”
“Appreciate it.” His stomach grumbled, and she dug around in her bag until she pulled out a Larabar.
“This should help.” She handed the bar to him.
He took it with a small smile. “Thanks. This one of those healthy treats?”
“Something like that. If you don’t want it…” She waved her fingers in front of his face.
“No, I’m good.” He ripped it open before she could snag it and then took a bite. His eyes widened as if he couldn’t believe that something that looked so unappetizing could taste good. “Thanks.”
“Welcome.” She sat on the corner of the bed and looked down at Jane Doe. “I’ve got it from here.”
Todd didn’t leave, but his jaw tightened, though Bridget doubted he noticed. A moment later he grinned, but it looked forced. “How long are you staying?”
“All night.” She tried not to sound grumpy, but she wasn’t exactly thrilled.
Yes, someone needed to stay with the girl, but she’d appreciate the assignment more if she had the authority to do something.
Instead, if the doctor asked anything, she’d have to relay the question to her boss.
It wasn’t like she could decide for someone else’s daughter.
She wasn’t a parent and felt singularly unprepared to pretend she was.
Yet that was the position she’d been put in.
“I’ll spend my time looking through the reports I can access from here. If there’s nothing reasonable, then we’ll get the media involved. We should probably do that anyway, so we speed up our Jane Doe reunion with her family.”
“And if that doesn’t work?” Todd had shoved his hands in his pockets, rocking back and forth on his heels.
She tried to ignore the way his hair flopped into his eyes. It was endearing—and she needed to focus on anything but that fact. Desperately needed to avoid the thought of the word endearing and this man. She was too tired and overwhelmed to let herself be distracted by anything else right now.
No, she was going to sit and run through the reports she could find. That would be a much better use of her time than focusing on this man, the one who had rescued the girl in the bed.
Bridget couldn’t think about how she wanted someone to rescue her, because it wasn’t true. She could handle her challenges on her own.
The moment she thought it, she felt a breeze of conviction.
She couldn’t be an island. She needed to remember that God had placed her in community and that fundamentally, He was her source.
That didn’t mean Todd Westmont was someone she could and would rely on during this night.
They would work together to find this child’s family, then he would return to his work and she to hers.
The chances they’d interact again outside a few social events were slim, and that was good.
He could be too distracting if she let him.
He leaned against the sink and studied her as she pulled out her laptop and started clicking to log into the VPN and find the right database with the reports she needed to screen. “How long have you known Dani?”
She didn’t bother looking up. “Danny?”
“Caleb Jamison’s wife. He’s my partner.”
“I knew that. It’s already been a long night.” She glanced up briefly before returning to the files on her laptop. “Not long. She’s friends with my former boss Sydney Sims. They’ve been nice enough to pull me into their circle.”
“Ah, so the connection is Logan.”
“And Tricia.”
“Makes sense. So that makes you and me inextricably linked.”
She didn’t bother to remind him they had met, even as it stung that she’d made so little of an impression.”
“Why haven’t you come to more events at Caleb and Dani’s?”
“Sydney’s my connection.” She kept right on ignoring him, refusing to make it easy on him.
He grimaced, as if picking up her frustration. “Sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“So what about them Huskers?”
His comment startled her. “What?”
He chuckled as he mimed throwing something. “You were so into that basketball game. I’ve never seen anyone yell at the refs like that.”
“We’d never made it that far into the NCAA tourney before.”
“Really?” He looked genuinely perplexed.
That made her laugh. “You need to pay more attention.”
“The Huskers haven’t always been this good.”
“The world is a little upside down right now. We’re great at basketball and so-so at football.”
“This will be our year.”
“Sure, it will. My mom’s been saying that for the last ten.” She glanced back at the bed, refusing to let herself be distracted by one of her favorite non-work topics or the fun she would have bantering with him. “How old do you think she is?”
“Hmm?”
“Jane Doe. How old?”
He shrugged. “I’m not good with kids’ ages. I tend to think girls are older than they are and boys are younger. I don’t have nieces and nephews, so my guesser is off.”
“Interesting way of framing it.” But it made sense, too. “I think she looks younger than she really is because she’s either malnourished or sick. Maybe both. And the combination makes her look young.”
The detective shrugged again. “I’ll take your word for it.” He stifled a yawn with his hand.
“You don’t need to wait here. As I said, I’m staying all night.”
He looked around as if something concerned him.
He was good-sized and muscular, like maybe he’d played football at one point in time.
“I think I’ll stick around. I don’t like not knowing why she ended up in the alley.
The airport isn’t far from the interstate, and that’s a main artery for trafficking.
There are too many questions and not enough answers. ”
She hadn’t considered trafficking. “Why not leave her at a truck stop if trafficking was involved?”
There were several near the exits surrounding the airport.
“Maybe that would have been too traceable.”
She raised an eyebrow as she looked at him.
“More cameras in those locations. The fact that she’s unconscious means they couldn’t just leave her when she was using the restroom and take off.
In theory, we could use cameras to backtrack to whoever left her, but now, that’s not available.
We don’t know when she was left or really anything.
” He scrubbed his hands over his head, ruffling his hair until some of it stood on end.
“Did anyone check her clothes?” Bridget really should have asked that the moment she arrived, but if there had been information there surely someone would have mentioned it.
He gestured to the pile by the sink. “Feel free to check it for yourself, but neither the nurse nor I spotted anything that would indicate anything helpful. It’s like she dropped into the alley from nowhere.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Yep. But that’s what it seems like happened.” He pushed away from the sink. “I’ll ask someone to search the alley, see if they can find anything or locate the kid.”
“Wouldn’t there be a forensics team scrubbing the area?”
“Not if there’s no crime. At this point, it doesn’t look like there is one.”
“But it’s not clear there isn’t one.” She didn’t bother to hide her frustration.
Then she rubbed her face with her hands.
“I wish we could do something useful like find the evidence that this,” she gestured to the girl in the bed, “is a crime and we could make someone pay. Ideally before something happens to potential evidence.”
“I could go back out there, but I’m concerned someone might come looking for her.”
“Why?” She bit down on her lower lip. “No one has missed her.”
“Maybe there’s no one to miss her.”
“Don’t say that so loud.” She felt tears forming, and she wanted to hide them.
“What?”
“What if she can hear you?”
“Maybe she’ll come back to us faster because we need her help.” He fisted his hands and thrust them on his hips. He glared at her, and she glared right back, matching heat with heat.
Bridget tried to ignore the electricity leaping between them before he nodded once.
“Fine. But know the moment I’ve cleared the area, I’ll return, because I don’t like anything about this.”
“Good.” Because neither did she. She simply couldn’t identify why.