The Dark Side - Danielle Steel Page 0,84

people. He felt like Superman when he did.

“I’ve got a new case for you,” Yvette said as she came by his office on Tuesday morning and dropped the file on his desk. “Came in yesterday. The initial reporter is the child’s pediatrician.”

“Child abuse?” He hated child abusers with a passion and removed the victims from dangerous circumstances and bad parents whenever he could. He had saved a lot of lives by doing so.

“More or less,” Yvette said cryptically. “In a convoluted way, if what they say is true.” They both knew that, given the opportunity, most of the people they dealt with were liars. Yvette had been in the field for twenty years before they assigned her to run the office. She’d been Dan’s boss since he’d been there.

“What does that mean, ‘convoluted child abuse’? Is that like virtual child abuse? They do it online?”

“Don’t be a smartass, read the report. She called yesterday. It’s confidential as to who called it in. The report is very comprehensive.”

“Is it red flagged? I don’t have time to read it till later. I have to see three kids today, and talk to the neighbor of a kid who was being beaten every night until they called the cops. She’s in a shelter pending a custody hearing.” He dealt with the heavy-duty cases.

“There’s no flag on it yet, but you should read it. It’s unpredictable and could get hot fast.”

“Great.” Yvette went back to her office, and he attacked the stack of files on his desk. He had interviews to do on each of them. The days were never long enough for him and he often finished work at ten P.M. He had no one to go home to right now anyway, although he hoped that would change. He’d been alone for a year, which was a long time for him. He was a good-looking man and some women loved his “gentle giant” appeal. But he hadn’t met a woman who mattered to him, and seemed worth the effort, in a long time.

He made notes on three files, and the orange file Yvette had left with him kept gnawing at him, begging him to open it. He put the others aside, and opened the file. Cathy’s neat, concise report on her letterhead looked up at him. She had sent it in hard copy and email. Yvette had said she’d forward the email to him too. Her identity was confidential to anyone except the department, particularly to the parents.

Cathy had listed all the incidents chronologically, and they filled a whole page, much to his amazement. He scanned through them quickly, all events that could be accidental, or engineered by a clever abuser. She included a brief profile of both parents, and he whistled. They sounded fancy to him, and certainly educated. The mother ran a shelter he knew well, but that didn’t impress him. He’d had two supposedly respectable physicians with apartments on Park Avenue nearly beat their children to death and lose custody. Fancy meant nothing to him. People were people and some of them were very sick. Those were the ones he was looking for, to put them away, and rescue their kids.

Cathy had explained that both the father and the paternal grandmother suspected that the mother of the child in the report suffered from Munchausen by proxy, and were afraid she would continue to injure the child and put her at risk. She said that a psychiatrist she had consulted, who had not met the family or the child, agreed with them, based on the evidence, and had urged her to report the family and situation to CPS. He could read between the lines that she had done so reluctantly, but sincerely felt that the child was in danger. Her phone numbers and email address, and the address of her office were all included if they wished to interview her.

The report was respectful, smart, not hysterical, and as factual as it could be, based on assumptions and guesswork and hypotheses. But there was nothing hypothetical about the injuries the child had sustained. There were too many of them to be entirely accidental. Dan would have been suspicious immediately if someone at the hospital had brought it to his attention. Some medical workers did, but many didn’t. They were supposed to be mandated reporters, but most of the time they were too busy to add up the evidence. They tried to get doctors and nurses to always report suspected child abuse,