The Perfect Child
Lucinda Berry
CASE #5243
INTERVIEW:
PIPER GOLDSTEIN
“Is this your first homicide case?” he asked in a clipped voice, all business. His chest bulged with muscles underneath his blue collared shirt.
No matter how many times I was questioned by the police, it never got easier. My nerves jumped into high gear automatically. They always made me feel like I was lying, even when I was telling the truth.
I cleared my throat. “I’ve been on other cases.”
I wished I lived in a world where I didn’t know violence intimately, but I’d seen more than my fair share, given the work I did. I’d just never expected the Bauers to be involved in anything so awful.
“How did you find out there’d been a break in the case?”
I glanced at the two-way mirror behind us. Even though we were the only two in the room, I knew we weren’t alone.
“Claire told me.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Claire?”
“My coworker,” I responded quickly.
It was hard to believe it’d been less than an hour since Claire had walked into my office. We were always the first ones in in the morning, and I’d assumed she was stopping by to ask how my date had gone the night before, since she got more excited about them than I did. She had been married for twenty years and liked to live vicariously through me, but her married life must have been pretty boring for her to get so excited about mine. My dating life was nothing to get worked up about.
The officer’s eyes drilled holes into me. He wanted more from me, but I didn’t want to say too much. He rested his elbows on the table and leaned forward. “What did she say when she told you?”
He had to be new, because I’d never seen him before. In a town as small as Clarksville, even the police had familiar faces. He’d told me his name when he’d come into the waiting room, but my head had been swimming with shock, and it had never registered.
I shrugged, anxiously twisting my hands underneath the table. “She didn’t say much, but I could tell something was wrong as soon as she came into my office.”
I had just logged on to my computer and had been organizing my files for the day when Claire had stuck her head through my door before I’d even finished my first cup of coffee. “Jeez, girl, why don’t you just go on my dates for me?” I had joked, but my joke had fallen flat when I’d seen the look on her face.
All semblance of playfulness had been gone, replaced with her most serious expression. All of us had it. The face we wore when the case was so horrible we knew it would keep us up at night and infiltrate our dreams after we finally found a way to fall asleep—the cases that made the social workers with kids hold them tighter.
“So you just knew?” His tone suggested he wasn’t sure if he believed me.
I hated when we weren’t on the same team. You couldn’t be on the other side of the law and not feel like a criminal. It was impossible.
“I knew something serious had happened, but I didn’t have any idea what it was or who was involved.” I glanced down at my phone for the third time, willing it to vibrate. It wasn’t like I was under arrest. I could leave anytime I wanted, but there was no way to leave without looking like I was hiding something.
“What did you think when you found out it was the Bauer family?”
I swallowed past the emotions pushing their way up my throat. “I hoped that it would finally provide them with some answers. They’re like family to me.”
He glanced down at the open file spread out before him. “It says here that you were the original social worker assigned to the case?”
I nodded, then quickly remembered I was being recorded. “Yes.”
“What was that like?”
How could I describe what the last two years had been like? It was the most complicated case of my career and had ended with the worst possible outcome. I’d doubted myself at so many different points, wondering if I’d made the right decisions for everyone involved—what if I’d been wrong? What if I was partially responsible for all this? I took a deep breath, trying to clear my thoughts.
“You couldn’t have asked for a better home for Janie. I’ve been in children’s services for over twenty years, and there are plenty of bad foster homes. A lot of foster parents just do it for the money, so they run their families like businesses, but the Bauers were one of the good ones. All they wanted to do was help.” My eyes welled with tears, and I couldn’t hold them back, even though I tried. I wiped them away quickly, embarrassed to look so soft in front of him. “I’m sorry. This is all just happening so fast.”
“I understand,” he said, but I knew he didn’t. In all my years, I’d never seen a cop cry. He waited a few beats before continuing. “Would it be easier for you if we started at the beginning?”
It didn’t matter where we started. Nothing about this was going to be easy.
ONE
HANNAH BAUER
“I wouldn’t let that fly. I’d ignore him until he apologized,” Aubrey said in the righteous, uncompromising way all unmarried people do, without even looking up from her phone. I forgot she was there half the time because her eyes were glued to her phone from the moment we all walked into the hospital break room, her fingers gliding across the screen with manic speed.