Micah felt unaccountably guilty. By making the composites, she had brought attention to Trish. And now Trish, failed by society and the system, would face the justice system for failing at something no one thought her capable of.
“A composite isn’t definitive,” she reminded Bellows. “It’s just the starting point. You still need evidence that Trish was pregnant and chose to abandon her baby. You need to get a maternity test done to prove that she is Sweetie’s mother. You need to show that she understood what she was doing.”
“That’s why we’re here.” Bellows looked at Mrs. Pitz. “We’re going to need the names of people who have seen her, so we can start looking for her.”
❋
When they left the building, Micah took in deep lungfuls of crisp, clean air, trying to focus on the feeling of being free again, escaping the oppressive feelings of the CFS offices.
“Are you okay?” Bellows asked. “Do you want me to take you back to your office?”
“Aren’t you going to follow up on these people today?” Micah asked, surprised.
“Yes. But you didn’t seem very comfortable with what went on in there. I thought maybe you lost your taste for the investigation.”
“I still want to do it. It’s just… sad.”
“You knew going into it that kids in foster care have a tough time. It is sad. Tragic. But I need to determine exactly what happened and how responsible Trisha is for what happened. You have to be a little hard-hearted about something like this. I think you’re too invested emotionally.”
“I… it’s not that.”
“You’re feeling bad because of what she went through. Before that, you were only thinking about Sweetie. How someone could do that to a baby. How bad you felt for her. You wanted to catch the culprit.”
“I still want to find Trisha.”
“To put her behind bars?”
“I don’t know. That isn’t my job.”
“What is it, then? You didn’t seem like you were willing to pursue this. If you want to go back to your office, that’s fine. Like you said, you’re not law enforcement. You were just tagging along to help with any questions. There’s no reason you have to take it any further.”
Micah leaned against the car, looking over the roof at Bellows. “You can’t understand, because you don’t know.”
Chapter Fifteen
He looked back at her steadily. “Understand what?”
“I was abandoned as a baby.”
Bellows’s mouth dropped open. He stared at her. “You were abandoned.”
Micah nodded. “They never found my biological mother. My mom and dad adopted me. They raised me as their own. But we are not genetically related.”
“Wow. So seeing the kind of life that Trisha had growing up, that’s pretty intense. It makes you wonder what kind of mother you had. What happened in her life that made her abandon you.”
Micah nodded and got into the car. She sighed. “I’ve dealt with all of the emotions. Abandonment, anger, guilt, grieving, fantasizing… believe me; there are a lot of different ways it can hit you. Every time I feel like I’ve finished dealing with it, something else comes along.”
“What are you feeling right now?”
Micah was startled. Surprised that he didn’t ask her about the circumstances of her own abandonment, but what she was feeling at that moment.
“I’m not sure I even know. Confusion. Anger and pain. Regret.” She shook her head. “Just… I feel like there’s a hole in my heart.”
“For your mother?”
“Maybe… because of what she took from me. I wish I could answer that, but I can’t. It just hurts.”
He started the engine. For a few minutes, they both sat there, breathing clouds of warm air into the cold car, waiting for it to warm enough that they wouldn’t fog up the windows.
“Where am I going?” Bellows asked. “Do you want to go back to your office? Or home?”
“No. I can deal with it. Let’s go on, see if we can find out where she went.”
❋
Unfortunately, one of the people who had seen Trish since she had run away the last time was Carolyn Dublin, one of her foster mothers from the early years. It was unfortunate because the conversation clearly brought Mrs. Dublin pain, regret over the fact that they had never been able to reach Trish, that they’d let her go, hoping that another family would be able to do more for her.
“You know your kids when you see them again,” Mrs. Dublin said, dabbing at her eyes with the cuff of her green pullover. “Even though it’s been years and they’ve grown up, you love them, and the years don’t erase that relationship.”
“How did she look?” Micah asked.
“Not good.” Mrs. Dublin shook her head. “She was thin, she was smoking, and her face looked very… she had on makeup that was very… grown-up. Dramatic. Like a little girl pretending to be a woman.”
“Jewelry?” Micah suggested. “What did her clothes look like? Did you think she was living on the street?”
“No. I just thought… I don’t know… that she looked too grown up. I guess she’s seventeen now, so she’s almost an adult, but I wanted so much for her just to be a little girl again, to try one more time.”
“Was she with anyone?” Bellows asked.
“Yes. Some other girls around her age. Standing around, smoking and talking to each other. Like kids do. I thought… skipping school… ducking classes.”
“Do you remember what day this was? What month, even?”
“I don’t know. May, June. Something like that.”
“You couldn’t tell that she was pregnant?”
“No.” Mrs. Dublin scowled and shook her head harder. “I didn’t notice any baby bump. She was thin. Her face especially. No one would have thought she was pregnant.”
Bellows nodded. Micah had seen so many similar stories play out in the media that she had to believe what Mrs. Dublin said. Some people, teenage girls especially, just never showed. They gained only a few pounds and managed to hide any bulge or symptoms.
Mrs. Dublin described the area that Trish had been in, and Micah closed her eyes and pictured it. Lots of traffic, both foot traffic and cars. Nowhere near the Sweetgrass Hills. What had Trish been up to? Was she just hanging out with friends? Part of the invisible homeless, never counted, couch-surfing or finding other ways to survive? Or had she found a job and rented a little apartment, with one or two of those girl friends? There were ways for a young woman her age to make money, both legitimate and not.
“Did she see you?” Micah asked.
“I’m pretty sure she did. She was looking my way, and she went quiet, stopped talking to the other girls. They kind of closed around her, blocked her from my sight. I don’t know. I couldn’t just stand there, watching. So I went on.”
Micah nodded. She wasn’t a foster mother, so she couldn’t be sure what she would have done. Mrs. Dublin no longer had anything to do with Trisha’s life. She couldn’t walk up and demand to know what she was doing, or tell her to get in the car because they were going home. If she hadn’t had anything to do with Trish recently, she wouldn’t know Trish was a runaway. Even if she did, it had never been reported as such, and there was no reason to call the police.
“I called the caseworker who had been working with us when Trish was with us. That’s when I found out that she had run away. I wished I had done something… but I don’t know what else I could have done. She seemed okay.” Mrs. Dublin shrugged. “I drove by there a couple more times in the weeks after that, but I didn’t see her again. I guess she just happened to be there once, shopping with her friends. I kept my eyes open, but I never saw her again.”
Bellows made a couple of notations in his notebook. Micah wondered what he’d found to be of interest.
“Did anything else stand out to you?” he asked. “She was smoking. Did you suspect alcohol or drug use? You thought she was skipping school, so you didn’t have the impression that she was homeless or out o
n her own.”
Mrs. Dublin hesitated, her eyes distant, replaying the memory. “I remember being disappointed that she was smoking, but not surprised. I figured she was probably abusing other substances as well. Smoking is a gateway.”
“And school?” Bellows prompted.
“I thought she was with school friends. They were around her age. But they could have just been friends from somewhere else. Trish never really had much of a social group. She didn’t easily make friends. I thought at first that it was just because she was somewhere new. Friendships were already established; it’s harder to break into the social circles. But I’ve had foster children who were immediately an accepted part of the crowd. Trish hadn’t gone to school before, at least not regularly. So she had that hurdle to get over too. Not understanding how it all worked. Not having that same background as other kids do. The school experience, the popular shows and games. A phone of her own.”
“But you thought they were her friends. That she had become part of a group.”
“I guess they could have just been smoking together and started talking because they were all in the same place… but I don’t think so. The way she moved and looked at them. They were familiar with each other. They weren’t girls that she had just met and chatted with casually. They were talking among themselves…” Mrs. Dublin frowned. “You know, facing in, like they shared a secret, rather than just facing out, talking casually because they happened to be in the same place.”
Bellows nodded. “Did you know any of the other girls? Have you seen any of them around?”
“I didn’t recognize any of them.” Mrs. Dublin’s eyes closed. “Have I seen them around…? I don’t know. I might have seen one or two of them before that, or since. Not together as a group, just… on the street.”
“Shopping? Smoking? Or something else.”
“Just… walking. Maybe waiting for someone.” She opened her eyes and nodded, but was unable to add anything else to the picture.
“And what were your impressions of them? Independent? Girls with a home to go to? Or on their own? Or living rough, on the street?”
“These are really hard questions… we’re talking about girls that I might have seen a couple of times; I might not even be remembering properly.”
But Micah suspected she was. People cataloged faces better than they thought they did. They remembered them from one place to another and made snap judgments by people’s facial expressions, body language, clothing, and other clues. As a forensic artist, she was used to picking through these details consciously, or helping witnesses to think about them. “What was their makeup like?” she asked. “You said that Trish’s was grown up, dramatic.”
“Well… yes, they were all pretty similar. Bright lipsticks, lots of eye makeup. Like they were actresses or…”
Micah glanced over at Bellows. His lips were pressed tightly shut. Neither of them prompted Mrs. Dublin, waiting for her to come to a conclusion herself.
The older woman shook her head. “No.”
“No what?”
“They weren’t… streetwalkers.”
Bellows nodded. “Okay.”
His acknowledgment seemed to irritate her more than if he had argued with her. She became insistent. “They couldn’t be. I mean, girls that age, they wear sexy stuff to school, to the store, whatever. It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. No spiked heels or micro miniskirts. Just regular dress. It was a warm day, so they had halter tops and shorts. Just like all of the other kids who were out and about.”
Bellows nodded again as if he believed every word she was saying.
“I’ve been a foster mother for a lot of years, Deputy, and I know what kids dress like. You pick your battles. She didn’t look like she was hanging out on a street corner meeting johns. She was just out with her friends, having a smoke.”
“Okay. I appreciate your time. And the fact that you called CFS about this back when you saw her. I understand there wasn’t anything suspicious to report at the time, but it’s been helpful to get a little background, to know what was happening a few months ago.”
Mrs. Dublin bit her lip. “Are you going to find her? You’ll be able to track her down, won’t you?”
He gave a reassuring smile. “One step at a time. If she’s still in town, we’ll find her.”
“I hate to think that something might have happened to her. Trish with a baby…” Mrs. Dublin rolled her eyes. “Heaven help us. If there was one challenge Trish did not need in her life, it was to have another soul dependent on her. If that was the only way for her to give the baby up… well then… it was probably the best thing she could have done for the poor mite.”
Micah’s stomach clenched in a tight knot. The best thing Trish could have done was to abandon her infant in the wilderness? Totally helpless where she could have died from hypothermia, dehydration, or predation? When there were options for her to have the baby adopted, to relinquish her to foster care, get help with social programs, or rely on the safe-haven laws and abandon her to a doctor, priest, or fire station?
“The girl is seventeen,” Bellows said to Micah, watching her face. “She’s alone and scared. She probably had the baby unattended, or maybe with another girl to take care of her. She knows what foster care can be like. She doesn’t want to deal with a social worker or cop. She just wants to be free.”
Micah nodded, her face and neck feeling stretched and tight like she was wearing a mask.
“She wanted to do right,” Mrs. Dublin said. “When she was a little girl, things were so hard for her, and she would put on attitude to protect herself, like any kid who’s been through what she has. But she wanted so badly to do the right thing, to exceed people’s expectations of her. It couldn’t have been easy. She was… a lost soul.”
“You don’t have to convince me of anything,” Micah said. “I’m not here to judge her or what she did.”
Chapter Sixteen
Jumping from one interviewee to another had eaten up most of the rest of the day. When they were done, Micah was too exhausted and emotionally overwhelmed to go back and face the demands of work.
So she had Bellows drop her at home, thanking him politely for letting her ride along and be a part of the investigation.
“Sorry it was so hard on you,” the deputy said. “It can get to even the most seasoned cop, and you have had to deal with the personal connection too. It’s hard to look at a case objectively when you identify with the victim or the perp.”
“Where do you go from here?” Micah bypassed the niceties, not wanting to discuss her feelings about the case or the character of Trisha Madro.
“We’ll make contact with some of the organizations that help kids caught in the sex trade. See if any of them know her. Reach out to a few of the hookers around her age, particularly in the areas she had been seen. See what we can find out about where she was working and if she’s still out there.”
“You don’t think she would have left town?”
“It’s always possible, but these kids don’t generally have a lot of resources. It takes money to be independent. She could hitch a ride, try to find some other way to survive when she settled somewhere new, but she’d have to know that the opportunities anywhere else would not be that much better than here.”
“A dead end even if she left.”
“She could have an out-of-town relative who would agree to house her, help her to find a way to support herself, but from what we’ve heard so far, she was pretty much alone. No one has mentioned any family. If her own mother is still out there somewhere, it doesn’t sound like they kept in touch.”
“I wouldn’t,” Micah agreed.
He looked at her for a moment, then nodded. “Go back to work tomorrow. Work on other files. Leave this to me. If you want, I’ll send you a summary at the end of the day, let you know if we have made any progress.”
Micah considered. “I don’t know. I’ll email you tomorrow after I decide how I feel.”
“Sure. You’ve done everything you can from your end. Your job was to help us to identify Sweetie’s mom, and you did that. We know who she is now, and we’ll work that angle. From what we’ve heard today, I doubt there was anyone else involved. She made a decision to abandon the child, and did it herself.”
“No one said she had a car.”
He pursed his lips and tapped the steering wheel, thinking about that. “No. But there are many ways to get wheels, especially if it’s only for a few hours. She could have had a friend drive her or have borrowed someone’s car. She could have jacked one, even returning it after she was done so that the owner didn’t know it had been used in the commission of a crime. She could have rented a car using a fake ID. I suspect she didn’t hire an Uber.”
“No,” Micah agreed. “But you didn’t find anything suspicious when you checked out the cars that were parked in the parking lot. No one who’d had their car stolen or said that they hadn’t been to Sweetgrass.”
“So she may have parked farther away than we thought she could have. Hiked in from farther away or from a location we’re not aware of. Pulled onto a shoulder or gravel road where there were no cameras. People have eyes. It’s not exactly a secret that those parking lots are monitored. There are big signs up saying that they are.”
Micah nodded tiredly. Her brain was fried and it was time to walk away from it and give herself some time to think of something else. The kitten would be happy to see her home. Micah could have something nice to eat and a long soak in the tub. She would shut off her phone and not look at her email, and just take some time to regenerate. Bellows was right. It wasn’t easy for her to keep an emotional distance from the case when there were so many parallels to her past.
Chapter Seventeen
Virtually Harmless Page 8