“An inheritance,” the young woman said.
Susan turned and said, “Shut the fuck up!”
“Ah, so the inheritance falls to this little girl, is that it?” Kate asked. “So whoever gets to look after the child in that hospital bed gets a hold of the money?”
“So much more for us to figure out now,” Susan said, with a groan, acting like it was all too much.
“Nothing to figure out at all,” said one of the other men. “I don’t know anything about an inheritance, but that little girl, she was family.”
“Was?” Kate raised her head, her gaze pinning the other man in place. “Why do you saywas?”
He tried to backtrack, but it wasn’t working.
Shaking her head, Kate said, “All right. Every one of you stretch out your left hand, please. I want to see your wrist.” They all looked at her in confusion. She popped her own out and held her wrist so that they saw. “Like this.” Frowning, they all did it. She was pretty sure the women wouldn’t be involved, but she’d seen the lesser dregs of society and didn’t want to make an assumption here. Then she went through each of the men. Not one of them had the mark. She nodded. “Good.”
By the time she had everybody’s names and address, she asked Susan, “Who is the lawyer handling the inheritance?”
“Terry something or the other,” Susan said, with an angry shrug, just getting angrier.
Kate faced Susan, her feet planted apart. “What’s his name?” she repeated. “Now.”
Susan just glared at her.
Then Kate said, “Fine. Let me do a full rundown on your history and see what else we’ll come up with.”
“It’s Terry Masters,” Susan said, “but I don’t know anything about an inheritance. It’s just my daughter making up shit. She’s always doing that stuff. She’s pissed off at me right now because I wouldn’t let her boyfriend sleep over last night.”
Kate wasn’t too worried about their reasons because it was usually deception like that which brought out the truth. “I’ll be checking it out regardless,” she said.
“You don’t have to,” she said. “It’s all bullshit.”
“Maybe. And one other thing,” she said, “we need DNA from everyone here.”
Silence.
Kate gave a brief smile. “I know how absolutely thrilled you all are,” she said, “but not one of you could claim to be family in this case without a DNA match. Particularly if an inheritance is involved. The lawyer should have mentioned that to you in the first place.”
“It’s my sister’s daughter,” Susan said, her tone consistently angry and frustrated, but no fear was there.
“Understood,” Kate said. “That’s why we do DNA testing to ensure she is. A lot of children go missing. The fact that we have found one with no family we can hand her off to means that we must be very careful that she goes home with the right people,” she said quietly. “Anybody here have a problem with that?”
“You don’t need to test all of us,” the big belligerent guy said. “The only one you need to test is Susan.”
The others nodded in agreement and stepped back a little.
Kate smiled. If anything set corrupt people’s back on edge, it was DNA testing. It had a way of revealing all kinds of shit about people. She looked at Susan. “Is that a problem?”
She shook her head. “No, it’s not a problem at all.”
“So, you’ll be here when I get back in five minutes with the DNA kit from the doctor, correct?”
Susan gave her a solemn nod. “As long as you’re fast,” she said.
“Five minutes isn’t fast enough for you, huh?” With that, Kate turned and strolled to the front reception area. She got a kit and headed back to the little girl’s room. Thankfully they were still out in the hallway, not inside the girl’s room, because not one of them seemed like family at this point in time. At least not as far as Kate was concerned. She would talk with the doctor to see what he’d said to them too.
As soon as she collected the DNA from Susan, she put it back into the tube and labeled it. “Thank you,” she said. “I will get this tested, along with that of the little girl.”
“How long?”