and a half years to Child Protective Services now. Cathy, you have to. There’s no other choice. With the compounding element of a severe allergy which could kill her, to a substance so readily available, they have to open an investigation. I was willing for all of you to wait until now. I’m not anymore. The honey allergy could be a death sentence for Jaime in her mother’s hands. Write your report tonight, and call CPS tomorrow. You can’t wait any longer.”
Cathy was silent for a long moment as she thought about it, and much to her chagrin, she knew he was right. And just as Austin did, she felt like a traitor to her friend. She was going to write the report, and call Child Protective Services, as Paul said she should. But she wasn’t going to tell Austin yet. He didn’t need to know.
Chapter 16
Dan Knoll had come to work at Child Protective Services through a circuitous route. Homeless and abandoned on the streets of Chicago at seven, by parents he couldn’t even remember, a father who died in prison, a mother who dealt drugs until her boyfriend killed her, he had grown up in foster care. He had been shuffled from one family to the next, badly treated and sometimes beaten. He had never worked out at any of the families where he’d been sent by the state. They said he was difficult, noncompliant, surly, oppositional, but mostly he was scared. He was a big kid, tall with broad shoulders and red hair, six foot four at twelve, and six-six at fourteen, so no one had figured out that anger was his camouflage to keep people from seeing that he was afraid. His friends and enemies called him Big Red. A football coach at one of the schools he went to had taken him under his wing, gave him a job when he left foster care and let him live with him and his family, and trained him. By a series of fortuitous circumstances that seemed more like miracles when he looked back on them, he had gotten into professional football, thanks to Coach Fitzgerald, and played for the Detroit Lions for three years. He was an offensive lineman, and had a bright future until a game against the New England Patriots in Boston ended all of that for him. He destroyed his knee and no amount of surgery could put him back in NFL football.
He played around with drugs for a while, drank too much, spent his money, and felt sorry for himself until Pat Fitzgerald grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, brought him home, threatened to kick his ass, and told him he had two choices. He could either be a bum for the rest of his life and maybe wind up like his parents, or be a respectable human being and do some good in the world. He told him to clean up, get a job, figure out what he wanted to do now that he was an adult. He lived with Pat and his family, worked at a gas station, and at night studied to be a social worker. It took a long time, but he got the degree. He moved to New York, got a job with Child Protective Services at thirty, and he had been there for ten years, handling cases of kids who were just like him when he was their age. He liked working with the bad boys best. It was such a victory when he could do something for them to help turn them around. That was Pat’s legacy to him. Dan wanted to give back what he’d been given. He wasn’t married, but had had a series of long-term girlfriends. He was “serially monogamous,” as the term went, and unattached at the moment. He had a heavy caseload and the department was understaffed and overworked, and he was usually at his desk at night working till all hours, writing reports to catch up.
The ultimate punishments for him were teenage girls. They were much harder to figure out, bitchier and more vicious than boys the same age. But he took what was assigned to him. His boss was a sixty-year-old African American woman, Yvette, who was smarter than anyone he knew. Dan was in charge of investigations of children whom observers suspected were being abused. It was thankless work, but he liked it. He liked discovering the truth and saving a kid from bad