Jeffery Deaver - Hard News

"May I help you?" the woman asked.

"You're Ms Johnson?"

The woman smiled and they shook hands. "Sit down. You're…?"

"Rune."

"Right. You called last night." Paper appeared and civil servant Johnson uncapped a Bic pen. "What's your address?"

" West Village."

Johnson paused. "Could you be more specific than that?"

"Not really. It's hard to explain."

"Phone number?"

Rune said, "No."

"Beg pardon?"

"I don't have a phone."

"Oh." So far she hadn't written anything. "Is this Courtney?"

"That's right."

"We're going to the zoo," the little girl said.

"What it is is this: I have a roommate I mean, had a roommate – her mother – and I don't know her last name and she left me with Courtney. She just took off – can you believe it? I mean, I woke up and she was gone."

Johnson was frowning painfully, more mom than civil servant for the moment.

"Anyway, she went to Boston and what she did, she…" Rune's voice fell. "… ditched you know who. And I'm like, what am I going to do? See, I wouldn't mind if I wasn't working, which is usually what I'm doing – not working, I mean – only now I-"

Johnson had stopped writing. "Apparent abandonment. Happens more often than you'd think."

Courtney said, "Rune, I'm hungry."

Rune dug into her shoulder bag and pulled out a can of sardines. Johnson watched her. A can opener appeared and Rune began cranking. "I liked it better when they had that little key on them."

Courtney watched the process hungrily.

Rune looked at a bewildered Ms Johnson. "You know, the key. On the cans? Like in the cartoons you always see."

"Cartoons?" Johnson asked. Then: "You think those are good for her?"

"Water-packed. I wouldn't give her oil." She held up the can.

Rune tucked a napkin into Courtney's collar then handed her a plastic fork. "Anyway, her mother's gone and I don't know how to find her."

"You don't have any idea? No last name?"

"Nope. Just know she's in Boston."

"Bawden."

Johnson said, "Usually what happens in cases like these is the police get involved. They'll contact the Boston Police and do a standard missing person search. First name, C-L-A-I-R-E?"

"Right. I just don't have any leads. Claire took everything with her. Except this too-disgusting old poster and some underwear. You could fingerprint it, maybe. But they probably wouldn't beher fingerprints on it."

"Who's Courtney's father?"

Rune frowned and shook her head.

Johnson asked, "Unknown?"

"Highly."

"Describe her mother to me."

"Claire's about my height. Her hair's dark now but we're talking it started life pretty light. Kind of dirty brownish." Rune thought for a minute. "She's got a narrow face. She isn't pretty. I'd say more cute-"

"I'm really more interested in a general description that'll help the police locate her."

"Okay, sure. Five-three, jet-black hair. About a hundred and ten. Wears black mostly."

"Grandparents or other relations?"

"I can't even find her mother – how'm I going to know the aunts and uncles?"

Johnson said, "She's really adorable. Does she have any health problems? Is there any medicine she takes?"

"No, she's pretty healthy. All she takes is vitamins in the shape of animals. She likes the bears best but I think that's only because they're cherry-flavored. You like bears, don't you, honey?"

Courtney had finished the sardines. She nodded.

"Okay, well, let me tell you a little about the procedure from here on out. This's the Child Welfare Administration, which is part of the city's Human Resources Administration. We've got a network of emergency foster homes where she'll be placed for a week or so until we can get her into a permanent foster home. Hopefully, by then we'll have found the mother."

Rune's stomach thudded. "Foster home?"

"That's right."

"Uhm, you know what you hear on the news…"

"About the foster homes?" Johnson asked. "It's the press that made up most of those stories." Her voice was crisp and Rune had a flash of a different Ms Johnson. Beneath the ruby lipstick and pseudo Ann Taylor did not beat a delicate heart. She probably had a tattoo of a gang's trademark on the slope of her left breast.

The woman continued. "We spend weeks investigating foster parents. If you think about it, who scrutinizes natural parents?"

Good point, Rune thought. "Can I visit her?"

The answer was no – Rune could see that – but Johnson said, "Probably."

"What happens now?"

"We have a diagnostic caseworker on call. She'll take Courtney to the emergency home tonight."

"I don't have to do anything else?"

"That will be the end of your involvement."

Rune hated civil-servant language. As if they took the words and quick-froze them.

She turned to Courtney and said, "Will you miss me?"

The girl said, "No."

No?

Johnson said to her, "Honey, would you like to go stay with a nice mommy and daddy? They have some children just like you and they'd love for you to visit."

"Yeah."

Rune said to her, "You'll be happy there."

Why isn't she sobbing?

Johnson said, "I'll take her now. You have her things?"

Rune handed over the bag containing the ratty stuffed animals and her new clothes. Johnson looked at Rune's face and said, "I know how you feel, but believe me, you did the right thing. There wasn't any choice."

Rune squatted down and hugged the girl. "I'll come visit you."

It was then that Courtney sized up what was happening. "Rune?" she asked uncertainly.

Johnson took her by the hand and led her down the corridor.

Courtney started to cry.

Rune started to cry.

Johnson remained dry-eyed. "Come on, honey."

Courtney looked back once and called, "Zoo!"

"We'll go to the zoo, I promise."

Rune left the ugly slab of a building, feeling an intense freedom.

And feeling too the weight of a guilt that matched her own 102 pounds ounce for ounce. But that was okay. She had a story to do.

Spring in prison is like spring in the city. Weak, almost unnoticeable. You only sense it because of the air. You smell it, you taste it, you feel an extra portion of warmth. It flirts with you once or twice, then that's it. Back to work, or back to the prison yard. Crocuses can't break through concrete.

Randy Boggs was waiting for Severn Washington in the prison gym when the smell of spring hit him. And, damn, it made him feel bad. He'd never been to college. School for him meant high school and this battered prison gym reminded him a lot of the one at Washington Irving High where, twenty years earlier, he'd have been working out on the parallel bars or struggling to do an iron cross on the rings, and, bang, there would be that smell in the air that meant they'd soon be out of school and he'd have a summer ahead of him – along with a couple of weeks' pure freedom before the job at the Kresge warehouse or.

Damn, what a smell spring has…

He thought about a dozen memories released by that smell. Girls' small boobs and hot grass and the chain-saw rumble of a 350 Chevy engine. And beer. Man, he loved beer. Now as much as then, though he knew there was no taste like the taste of beer when you were a teenager.

Randy Boggs squinted across the gym and could see the loping figure of Severn Washington, two hundred thirty pounds' worth, a broad face in between a scalp of tight cornrows and a neck thick as Boggs's thigh.

Washington had laughed and told Boggs not long after they met that he'd never had a white friend in all of his forty-three years. He'd missed Nam because of his eyesight and always stayed pretty close to home, which in his family's case had been a Hundred and Thirty-seventh Street, where there were not many whites at all, let alone any that he'd befriend.