An Act of Persuasion(88)
Anna pushed herself out of her chair belly first. She leaned down and brushed his cheek with a light kiss. “Thanks for everything, boss. I mean it.”
“Sure you don’t want to ditch Ben and make me the new object of your affections?”
“I’m sure. But you do make an excellent sounding board. Make sure Sophie knows that about you. It could change a lot.”
Having stalled on a lead in the Anderson case, Mark decided to make good on his promise to Anna to track her parents more aggressively. The truth was, once he knew Ben was pursuing the matter, he didn’t see much point. After all, Ben had more at stake. Finding Anna’s parents would be one more way for him to impress her and win the girl.
Except that he hadn’t. At least not yet.
Mark went to the Holy Mercy hospital and found the administration floor in the basement. The single person working behind the counter was a girl who appeared as though she was barely out of high school. She put down her nail file as soon as he approached her desk.
“Can I help you?”
“Yes, I’m looking for help with a birth certificate that was filed from this hospital. The names on the certificate were actually falsified and I’m trying to find out how that could have happened.”
“I didn’t do it. I mean, I’m really careful when I do those things because they are super important.”
Mark decided this particular interview would be a struggle. “Yes, of course. I know you weren’t involved. I should have been clearer, this certificate was filed more than twenty years ago. Do you have a supervisor or someone who is in charge down here?”
“Yeah. She’s getting coffee. I’ll let her help you because I wouldn’t know about anything more than a week ago. I’m new.”
“Go figure.”
Mark found a chair in the corner of the office and sat to wait. Not two minutes later a middle-aged woman with a square frame and a matching square face entered the room.
“Natalie, how many times have I told you, I don’t want to see you doing your nails behind the desk? It’s not professional.”
The file was quickly shoved in a drawer. “But there is, like, nothing to do down here.”
“Then you find something to do. Go through the filing system. Develop a better system of organization. Clean your desk of the seven different coffee cups you have half filled with cold coffee. That’s something.”
The girl said nothing but dutifully got out of her chair and started to fuss about her desk. As far as Mark could tell she was simply moving the half-filled coffee cups from one side of the desk to the other.
“Oh, and this guy is here.”
The woman turned and immediately Mark knew he was working with a veteran. The woman had the serious expression of someone who knew this basement was her fiefdom and knew how to run it well.
“Can I help you?”
“Yes, I’m here about a birth certificate.” Mark gave a brief description of his job and why he was interested in the information.
“I know the names are fake, and I know the hospital typically files the information so I’m interested in discovering how something like that could happen.”
The older woman, who had introduced herself as Marge Berry, took the copy of the certificate Mark had brought with him.
“Yes, normally we will handle the filing of the birth certificate. The information for the parents’ names comes from their admission paperwork most of the time.”
“There is no confirmation with the parents first? An ID check, that sort of thing?”
If Anna’s parents had official-looking fake IDs, it would suggest that they had been living underground for some time. Whereas if they decided only at the last minute to change their names, he might be able to find out their real identities here. And that might lead him to locating them now and possibly discovering why they’d lied.
Perhaps they’d been considering leaving Anna at the hospital at birth. They could have left her and disappeared into the city. The fake names would have made it difficult to trace them. Of course, a simpler option would have been to decide to let her be formally adopted, but that required rational thought. And, based on their actions, the couple weren’t very rational.
He wondered how young they might have been. Anna didn’t have any recollection of how old her mother was. At the age of six all adults probably looked the same. But if the parents had been two scared kids, who also happened to be addicts, it might explain their strange behavior when Anna was born.