Millionaire M.D.

“I wasn’t as involved as some of the other members. But I still want to help, if there’s any chance. And I did know all of the people involved.” Justin righted the baby walker, pushed it around the carpet. Sighed. And then turned it upside down to work on it again. “Frightening. To think you could eat dinner with someone, shake their hand, make a joke and laugh with them…and that they could deliberately have had something to do with a near-fatal plane crash.”

“Or that someone could intend harm to so many good people.” She leaned forward to peer over the edge of the bassinet. She cared about the plane crash. She cared about her job. But at the moment—all day really—only one thing dominated her mind and heart.

“You’re not going to wake her up again, are you?”

Winona’s jaw dropped. “Are you out of your mind? I may have only been a mother for a day, but I learned that hours ago. Never wake up a sleeping baby. And if you do, I’ll have to kill you.”

His chuckle tickled her into a smile, but then he shot her a more serious look. “So, what’s the deal on your squirt there? What’s the legal process—what happens to her now?”

“Well, the first thing you already know. An abandoned baby starts out with a medical checkup, no matter how healthy the child appears to be. In this day of AIDS and drug use and all, there’s no placing a baby—even temporarily—without knowing the health picture. But that was a piece of cake. She couldn’t have gotten a cleaner bill of health.”

“Yeah, so you said this morning. So, then what?”

“Then, normally, she’d be turned over to Social Services, and they’d find a foster-care arrangement for her.” Winona’s arms tightened around the pillow. “The court will get more directly involved as soon as something more definitive is established about the parents. And that’s my job. Finding the parents. Especially the mom. I have to find out what their story is, and why the baby was abandoned.”

“And how do you go about doing that?”

It seemed odd that she’d never told Justin any details about her job before, but then, there’d never been a reason for this kind of thing to come up in conversation. “There are lots of ways for me to pick up clues. Now that I have the baby’s age pinned down—at least ballpark—I can start checking hospital records, see if I can get a lead into young women having babies at that time. Then I can check the papers, same reason. Check the 9ll calls, emergencies, abuse, deaths, anything called in around the time the child was abandoned, to see if there could be any obvious connection.”

“Uh-huh. What else?”

“Then…well, after that, I zoom straight for my at-risk kids. You know how it is in Royal. This is a wealthy community, so on the surface it’d seem we wouldn’t have that many kids in trouble. But I keep finding that the very rich and very poor have a lot in common. In both types of families, there are kids raising themselves. Alone a lot of hours. Parents moving near an edge with drugs or alcohol. Divorces, absentee adults. Any way you cut it, it’s the lonely kids who tend to sleep around—and look for trouble. So one of the things I always do is run a computer check for runaways.”

“And—?”

“And then I’ll check the truancy lists. The arrest lists. Then I’ll call the high schools and junior highs for girls with a high absentee record. Talk to the counselors about girls who were pregnant. I started some things in motion this afternoon, but it’d be pretty unusual to land answers overnight. It almost always takes some time.”