LITMIR.BIZ

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out of police jurisdiction.”

      The hurricane.

      Another euphemism. There had been hurricanes before and since, but Katrina was the hurricane. Giselle didn’t have to say another word because again, her expression reflected the helplessness and horror of an event that had been far beyond the control of the people involved, an event that had challenged everything from their comfy worldview to standard business practice for this department.

      All hard-copy documentation had been lost in the flooding. Out of the five thousand plus kids in foster care at the time, two thousand had been displaced by Hurricane Katrina, then many shuffled again a month later because of Hurricane Rita.

      Kids had wound up spread over nineteen states in that mess, and social workers such as Courtney, Giselle and Nanette had tracked them all down again. The aftershocks were still being felt to this day, along with memories of the litany of priorities that had dictated their lives as they functioned from evacuation shelters because offices and homes had been flooded, cell towers had been down, and the city had been under martial law.

      First, we keep you alive....

      Then we get you safe....

      Then we work on your health and medications....

      Then we figure out where you belong....

      Recalling that long road back to a functioning system brought another realization, one that hit with familiar category-five velocity.

      The hurricane had been eight years ago.

      “Tell me we have some other documentation, Giselle,” she demanded. “Tell me we’re not operating on what Nanette pieced together after the hurricane.”

      Giselle spread her hands in entreaty, motioned to the desk. She didn’t have to say another word because they were both thinking the same thing.

      The only person who might shed some light on this situation had died on the side of the road, surrounded by strangers on a drizzly February morning.

      “Her work was stellar.” Giselle assumed the crappy responsibility of verbalizing the doubt that would be cast on someone not able to defend herself. “I won’t believe this situation is a result of negligence. That goes against everything I know about her.”

      “You’re right. Absolutely right.”

      “The FBI will want conclusive proof, but we don’t have any. Nanette looks culpable. This department looks culpable.”

      Which circled right back around to the we.

      Giselle was responsible for this department and everything that took place within. Courtney was responsible for this case and everything that had taken place since Nanette.

      A child was missing.

      The only answer that mattered, the one that left her doing exactly what she’d been told not to do—panicking—was the very one she had no answer for.

      What were their chances of finding Araceli alive?

      “We had no way of tracking Araceli after the hurricane.” Giselle riffled through documents one by one. “We can’t prove Araceli’s the child on one document in this folder. We can’t prove we placed the real Araceli with the Perea family. We can’t prove she’s the Araceli in this Red Cross database.”

      Her voice escalated. “We can’t prove she evacuated to the Superdome with her foster family, then got separated on the buses in Houston. We can’t prove she went to Atlanta after being evacuated during Hurricane Rita. We can’t prove she was the child we got an emergency injunction to remain out of state until the Pereas moved out of the FEMA trailer and back into their home. We have no idea who we’ve been shuffling around because the last known photo of Araceli is from third grade.”

      The papers were now all over Courtney’s desk. Papers that proved nothing conclusively—except that Araceli Ruiz-Ortiz had gotten lost somewhere over the course of the past eight years.

      Courtney walked to the window that provided no escape. She saw nothing but eight years stretching out like a lifetime, and all the horrifying things that could happen to a girl alone. The passage of time was marked only by the silence echoing as she mentally replayed every horror story she’d ever heard.

      The young girl in Florida who’d been adopted by her longtime foster family and was tortured and starved to death instead of living happily ever after.

      The twins who were kept in cages in the basement under the care of foster parents who’d been taking kids into their home for four decades.

      The nearly three hundred kids who’d been placed with a sexual predator over the sixteen years it took social workers to figure out that many of these kids were being molested.

      Negligence. Incompetence. Heartlessness.

      Horror stories.

      Most social workers weren’t the careless or inept monsters showcased in the media. The majority were the ones the general public never heard about. Social workers who maneuvered deftly through the obstacle course among laws and legalities and court decisions for kids they were responsible for protecting.

      Most social workers cared more for needy kids than they did their own paychecks, because no one got compensated for all the work. Most didn’t mind the long hours, and usually found a way to squeeze in just one more kid when they were already burdened by a staggering caseload.

      Given the crushing demands of the job, it wasn’t hard to see how mistakes could happen even to the most caring and competent social workers. They managed needy kids’ lives the way an air traffic controller oversaw airspace: the consequences of one oversight, one distraction, one error could result in the loss of human life.

      The life of a child.

      Courtney’s thoughts slowed enough to finally see the street through the window. DCFS offices were located in a utilitarian building on Iberville Street north of all the French Quarter action. From her second-floor window, she overlooked the stone wall of the cemetery, discolored and stained like the mausoleums within, many overgrown with weeds protruding from odd places.

      Interstate 10 ran the length of the cemetery and all the way to Florida. The green directional signs were the only splash of color in a scene that had never looked so bleak, washed in gray skies that promised rain. Somehow it fit that she couldn’t look at the interstate without thinking of Nanette.

      “What happens now?” she asked, her voice barely a whisper. “How do we find Araceli?”

      Giselle could only spread her hands in entreaty. She had no clue, because how on earth did one go about tracking down a child who had potentially been missing for eight years?

      How could they even hope to find her alive?

      * * *

      “DAMON’S COMING TO get me, right?” Marc DiLeo forced out the question through gritted teeth.

      After all these months, he should have been used to asking. He wasn’t. He resented the hell out of it.

      Especially something as simple as a ride when he owned a Jeep and a Harley.

      His older brother, Nic, glanced away from the road as they were driving down Canal Street in Nic’s police cruiser. At least no one could see them through the heavily tinted glass.

      Did anyone even care that he was being chauffeured to his therapy session because he couldn’t drive himself?

      No. It only felt that way.

      “Damon’s teaching a class,” Nic said. “Anthony will pick you up, and if he can’t get away, he’ll send one of the guys.”

      Great. Now Marc’s ability to burden everyone reached beyond family into the periphery, to the guys who worked in his younger brother Anthony’s automotive garage.

      This was his mother’s fault. She’d bullied him into leaving Colorado Springs for rehab. Not that Marc had put up much

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