“Dr. Silver,” he said, clipping his pen to the chart and shaking her hand.
“Why are you letting her scream like this?” she asked. “Isn’t there something you can give her to help her calm down?”
“She’s just coming out of a coma. She hasn’t responded to anyone. It’s as if we aren’t here. This sometimes happens with brain injury patients,” he explained. “She probably doesn’t even realize she’s doing it.”
Anne looked from the doctor to the child and back. “I’m sorry,” she said calmly. “You’re an idiot.”
She didn’t bother to care that Dr. Silver was offended. She didn’t bother to introduce herself to the well-dressed older woman standing frozen in shock along the wall. She went alongside the bed to the head of it, where Haley Fordham was curled into a ball, shrieking.
“Haley?” she said softly, reaching her hand out to the little girl. “Haley, sweetheart, you’re all right. I know you’re scared. You don’t need to be afraid, honey. We’re all here to help you.”
Still screaming, the child looked up at her. Her eyes were entirely bloodred, petechial hemorrhages filling the whites of her eyes around the dark iris and pupils. It was a result of the strangulation, but even knowing that, Anne was startled at the sight.
“It’s okay,” Anne murmured, brushing the girl’s damp dark curls back from her forehead. “It’s okay, Haley. You’re not alone. I’m here for you.”
The screams subsided as the little girl looked up at her. Her breath caught and hiccupped and stuttered in her throat. She was trembling, dressed only in a flimsy hospital gown. White tape held an IV catheter in place in her tiny arm.
The bruises on her throat were purple. Anne felt her own throat tighten. She knew exactly how it felt to be choked, to look up into the face of the person trying to take her life away from her. Had Haley known the person doing that to her? How confused and terrified she must have been.
Her mother had to have been dead by then. No mother would have stood by and allowed someone to harm her child this way, no matter how dire the circumstances. Haley had been all alone with her killer.
“I’m so sorry, sweetheart,” she whispered, continuing to stroke the girl’s hair. “I’m so sorry.”
Slowly Haley came up on her knees and reached her arms out. Her lips moved, but no sound came out. She tried again, croaking out a scratchy sound.
“I can’t hear you, honey,” Anne said, bending down close.
Haley wrapped her arms around Anne’s neck and the word came out in a whisper as the tears began again.
“Mommy.”
Anne’s heart broke for the little girl. She held her close and rubbed her back and kissed the top of her head, offering as much comfort as she could.
Finally the woman draped in Gucci and reeking of Chanel moved forward.
“Thank God someone has a magic touch,” she said softly. “I had no idea what to do. I’ve never seen anything like that.”
“She’s terrified,” Anne said, irritated that neither this woman nor the doctor seemed to have been able to figure out something so simple.
“She wouldn’t even look at us,” Bordain said. “It was like she was in her own world.”
In her own world where she was watching her mother be butchered and was helpless to escape the killer, Anne thought.
“Did you know Marissa?”
Anne glanced at her. “No. I never met her.”
“But Haley went to you,” the woman said, bemused.
Milo Bordain, Anne realized, doyenne of Oak Knoll society. Anne had seen her picture in the paper many times—photographs from various charity fund-raisers and the summer music festival. She was a tall, handsome woman in her fifties. Her features were just a couple of steps this side of masculine, but perfectly made up. Marissa Fordham’s sponsor, Vince had said.
A woman who had probably spent time with Haley—at least in proximity to her. But not quality time, Anne guessed. She had not one hair out of place, but scraped back against her skull and pulled into a flawless, tight chignon at the base of her skull. She wore a beautifully patterned silk scarf draped artfully around her broad shoulders over the top of her camel-hair blazer, pinned in place with a jewel-encrusted brooch. Chocolate brown kid gloves and a pair of perfectly pressed black slacks completed the picture.
“Mommy!” Haley wailed, burrowing her face into Anne’s shoulder.
Anne rocked her and shushed her, and stroked her hair.
“I don’t understand,” Bordain said, hurt. “I’ve known Haley since she was a baby. She’s like a granddaughter to me. It was like she didn’t even recognize me.”
Haley’s cries were building toward another crescendo.
Anne cut the woman a look. “If you don’t mind,” she said. “I’m a little busy here.”
Offended, Milo Bordain drew herself up to her full height—she had to be six feet tall, if not a little more—and looked down her patrician nose at Anne.
“Do you know who I am?”
“Yes,” Anne replied. “I just don’t care. This isn’t about you.”
Bordain left the room without another word. Anne watched her through the glass wall as she marched up to Cal Dixon and Vince to file her grievance.
Later, Anne thought, she might feel a little guilty for being rude to the woman. But for now, she cared only about the child in her arms.
22
It was well past midnight before Mendez climbed into his own car and drove out of the sheriff’s office parking lot. He and Hicks had hung around the ICU, hoping for a chance to have Haley Fordham make all their lives easy by simply telling them who had attacked her and killed her mother. No such luck. His clever call to bring Anne in had backfired on him in more ways than one.
Vince was pissed off at him. And once Anne had connected with Marissa Fordham’s daughter, there had been no getting near the child.
He should have foreseen that. Anne had been like a tigress with cubs protecting her students who had discovered the body of Lisa Warwick. She wouldn’t let anyone—not him, not Vince, not the kids’ own parents—push them. She would be no different with Haley Fordham. Her first priority would be the child, not the investigation.
Still, it seemed the smartest way to go—to keep Marissa Fordham’s daughter within the law enforcement family, a more controlled environment with the watchful eyes of trained professionals on her. If Child Services fostered her out, they would lose control of her to a certain extent.
Of course, the woman from Child Services who had finally showed up at the hospital had been furious at the breach of protocol, and had demanded a meeting with all concerned parties and a family court judge the next day regarding the placement of Haley Fordham. Dixon himself would go to represent the interests of the SO. Which meant Dixon was pissed off at him too.
All would be forgiven if Anne could get the little girl to tell them what they needed to know. In the meantime, Mendez was feeling restless and anxious for some kind of progress, some small lead, anything that could point them in a direction.
Instead of going home to crash for a few hours, he prowled the empty streets of Oak Knoll, thinking, reviewing the day, making a mental list of the people he needed to speak to the next day.
They had to find out the details of the death of Zander Zahn’s mother and what role he had actually played in it. Had he meant he literally murdered his mother with a weapon, or had he been speaking in the abstract? Maybe she died giving birth to him. Or maybe she had committed suicide when he was a child. Children often blamed themselves for things like the suicide of a parent or the divorce of parents.