The Dark Side - Danielle Steel Page 0,90

didn’t. But his sheer bulk and size were daunting, as well as the agency he worked for, and he handed her his card and asked if Mrs. Roberts would see him briefly. She took it in and handed it to Zoe, who was having an insanely busy day.

“Oh shit. I guess I have to see him. It must be about one of our custody cases. I don’t want to screw it up for them. I can skip lunch and give him half an hour. Send him in.”

She was wearing a white blouse with a red sweater over her shoulders, and black jeans. Her shining dark hair hung below her shoulders, and she smiled and stood up when he walked in. He was struck by how pretty she was, and how young and personable she looked. She instantly tried to put him at ease.

“Which of our cases are you here for?” she asked him pleasantly with a warm smile, and offered him coffee, which he declined. “I think we have half a dozen going at the moment.” He smiled back at her, but he was guarded and didn’t make the mistake of believing that they were friends.

“This is a confidential, closed investigation, Mrs. Roberts, which is why I didn’t mention it to your assistant. It comes from the medical sector, from one of the physicians or hospitals you’ve seen in the past three years. It’s an investigation of you and your husband. Your daughter has had a number of minor injuries, and past a certain point, they are required to notify us.” Zoe looked horrified and narrowed her eyes at him. He knew just what to say so that she didn’t feel directly accused or at fault. He made it sound entirely routine, and had protected Cathy’s identity.

“Which doctor was it?”

“My superiors don’t tell me that. It’s confidential, and so is our investigation. You’ve seen quite a number of physicians apparently as well, it could have been any one of them.”

“She’s a very active child, she fell a lot as a toddler, she was very unsteady on her feet. And she had severe gastric problems as an infant, and apnea. We had to use a monitor for a year so she didn’t stop breathing and die in her sleep. I sat up with her every night,” she said angrily, furious that she had been reported, but not wanting him to see it. But her eyes looked like blue fire, and her mouth was set in a hard line. The charming smile was gone.

He was careful not to mention the recent pool incident, or the dog bite, because she would have known it came from Cathy and he protected his sources. He didn’t mention having seen her husband a week before.

“Has your daughter had any surgeries or stitches?” he asked, following a list of questions.

“Only one surgery, if you can call it that. She had ear tubes put in for recurring earaches, and a stitch in her lip when she fell down the stairs when she started walking. We had a gate up, but someone left it open.” He nodded and made a note with a bland face, well aware that she had already lied to him. She had taken the gate down herself, according to Austin, so there was none, and she didn’t mention the stitches in Florida because they were in another state and she figured he wouldn’t know, or the dog bite, because it was done in the surgeon’s office, and she was a friend of Cathy’s and she was sure he wasn’t aware of it. And she wouldn’t suspect Cathy of reporting her in a million years.

“Any major illnesses? We understand she’s missed quite a bit of school.”

“Kids catch everything the first year and she just started preschool. She’s had the usual colds and flu, nothing major.”

“Hospital records show that she was admitted for a febrile seizure.”

“She never had another one,” Zoe said in a clipped tone.

“Broken bones?”

“Two. A wrist and an arm.” She was trapped on that one.

“And two dislocated elbows?”

She could barely contain herself when he asked her. “What are you suggesting? That my husband and I are child abusers? This is outrageous. She’s a normal child who falls down and gets hurt from time to time. I run the most respected shelter for abused children in the city. You don’t actually think I beat my child?”

“Good Lord, no,” he said, looking dumb for a minute. “These are all standard questions. And I know