She stared, then realized she did, in fact, have room for some more. “I’ll never sleep after this.”
“I doubt you were planning on sleeping anyway,” he said. “Let’s get real. You’re all about this case.”
She sat back down and glared at him. “You don’t know me,” she said. “You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know you are incredibly driven. You look after the children first. You can’t stand injustice, and you hate criminals,” he said. “What more is there to understand?”
“A hell of a lot more,” she said. “That describes most of the cops in the city.”
“No, it doesn’t,” he said. “It doesn’t describe a lot of them.” He shook his head. “And you’ve clawed your way up to where you are now, and something about you says you have to prove yourself.”
“I’ve only been there for three months,” she admitted.
“Ah,” he said. “So you still feel like you have to prove you belong.”
“I do feel that way,” she said. She looked down at her phone and said, “Crap. I was supposed to go to the hospital, and I forgot.” She pinched the bridge of her nose.
“It could wait,” he said.
“No,” she said, “I need to know.”
“Then call them,” he said. “Just use the phone.”
“I don’t know about that,” she said.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “You’re making too much of this.”
“Not true,” she said, but she continued to stare at her phone, as she munched her way through one of the vegetable dishes that he’d dumped on her plate. “It’s a sad world out there,” she said. Shaking her head, she tried to take her gaze off her phone.
He pushed it toward her. “Being obsessive is one thing, but not allowing yourself to make a simple decision is another.”
“You shouldn’t be hearing my conversations,” she said.
He snorted at that. “In case you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m hearing way more than I would like to about you, whether you’re right in front of me or not,” he said.
“Oh.” With that, she snatched her phone off the table and called the hospital. When she got one of the nurses, she asked about the status of the little girl. The nurse quickly came back on the line.
“Detective Morgan? The child is still in a drugged state, but, healthwise, she appears to be okay. We are monitoring her, as we try to sort out the drugs. I don’t think the doctors have analyzed what she’s been given yet.”
“Are you in her room right now, or can you go there?” she asked. “I need a picture of the inside of her wrist.”
“Her wrist?”
Kate heard the footsteps as the nurse headed down the hallway. “Have you heard any news on locating family for her?”
“No,” the nurse said. “And that’s breaking all our hearts.”
“Yeah, ours too, but hopefully somebody will pop up soon,” she said.
“Maybe. But how long has this little girl been in the system?” the nurse asked with bitterness.
“I don’t know. It could be quite a while to sort it all out. We’ll run her DNA, of course, but that, in itself, takes time.”
“Seems like everything takes longer than it should. I know,” the nurse said. “Okay, I’m in her room right now. She’s not showing any signs of change.”
“That won’t necessarily hurt her right now.”
“You think she’s been living like this for a long time?”