Free Finding Susan by Dakota Kahn

worried again, and she was tired of feeling worried. She was wondering what in the world Blake expected her to do with the girl here in the bathroom. Beat a confession out of her? Make her stop crying? Kate didn’t know the first thing about relating to kids, though the truth was most of the criminals she defended weren’t much older than Mary was.  
    “So, kid, what were you thinking?” Kate asked.  
    Mary gave her a skeptical look, and then her eyes dropped back down to look at her feet. She wasn’t ready to talk yet.  
    “Okay, you don’t want to talk. I get a lot of that. Don’t often get clients that cry into my lap, but that happens sometimes, too. One time, I represented this big guy, like twelve feet tall, in and out of jail all his life, and he was charged with a felony moving violation. He hit about two blocks worth of cars with his Humvee. I got him pled down from jail time to a fine and vehicle impound. When he found out he wasn’t getting that Humvee back, he just started crying like a baby.”
    “Who are you?” Mary finally said in a small voice.
    “Kate Becker, Criminal defense attorney. I’m part of a pilot program with the police department. They have a lawyer in every squad car. It’s an attempt to make sure no crimes are actually punished, ever.”  
    Kate smiled at her own self-deprecation. It hadn’t made her popular with many others in her profession. They’d decided long ago in law school that they were going to be martyrs, and thus had to take everything about lawyering VERY seriously.  
    Mary cracked a bit of a smile, but didn’t talk.  
    Kate sighed.   Good enough for now , she decided. She took a quick look at herself in the mirror and cringed. She looked downright sickly.   What was taking Blake so long?  
    “What’s your last name, darling?”
    “Wolfe,” she said, and like the name was a trigger, she started to cry again.
    “Oh, are you Neil Wolfe’s daughter?”  
    Mary nodded. Suddenly, Kate thought she knew the whole story. Neil Wolfe was one of the older guys that she and Susan would moon over when they were little kids. When she actually got to know him when working in one of his dad’s stores during the summer after her sophomore year, she found him to be aloof and a little cold. Maybe Mary was trying to get some attention.
    Or maybe she was feeling separated from the rest of the kids in school, since the Wolfe’s were the closest thing to society that Whispering Pines had. Her classmates would be sure that she was a snob and if she was at all shy, they would exclude her from everything. This was a cry out to her peers that she was just one of them.
    Good Lord! Her imagination was running wild today.  
    Getting paid by the hour, sister ? Kate heard Susan’s voice in her head. It was what she would say when Kate started getting all litigious when dealing with personal matters. She was always looking for solutions, pretexts, and justifications. Sometimes that thinking just wasn’t what was needed.  
    “Will you answer my first question, Mary? Why’d you go and do something like this?”
    “I don’t know. I just thought... uh.... I don’t know!” she said, tears rolling down her cheeks. Someone knocked on the door.  
    “Occupado,” Kate called out, winking at Mary. “You ready to go out there?”
    “Is Mr. Peters going to yell at me?”
    “I don’t know.” Kate hoped he would have calmed down, but Hank Peters was one of those cranky types, the sort that seemed to be perpetually on the verge of a heart attack, and yet he was in perfect health. Maybe it was a technique. “Let’s go,” Kate said, and she opened the door.
    Blake stepped in the way of her coming outside and pushed his way in, shutting the door behind himself.  
    “If you really have to go Mary and I can wait outside,” Kate said, giving him a look, but Blake didn’t crack a smile.
    “Mary, did you take the things that Mr. Peters said you did?”
    Mary looked down at her