Eliot lifted his head off of the table, hearing the conversation of the rest of the crew. He looked at the screen, and say the still shot of a young girl, who looked oddly like Sophie to him. She had Sophie's slightly curled brown hair, and looked tall and skinny for her age.
He looked around the room to see the other three arguing, presumably what to do with her. Eliot got up, walking around the table, to stand next to Parker.
"Guys," he said, his voice having a harshness to it.
"What?" Parker asked.
"Does that look like someone we know?"
Parker, Hardison, and Tara moved closer to the girl's picture.
"It isn't that girl from that car dealer con right?" Parker questioned.
"No, babe, she would be around twenty by now. This girl couldn't be more than twelve," Hardison noticed, pulling up his facial recognition system. The screen buzzed and geek crap came up, presumably running the girl's face through the systems.
"She isn't going to show up," Eliot sighed. "I don't think we have seen her before, but doesn't she remind you of someone?"
The trio stood even closer to the screen, Parker's head cocking in confusion.
"To me she looks a little like Sophie." Yes, good job, Parker, Eliot thought. "But she can't be her daughter right? That would mean she was born, what, ten years ago, when we were still a team," Parker continued.
Team. There was that word again. The crew hadn't used that word to describe themselves since Nate and Sophie left. To the four of them, they were everything but a team. They would use any other word -a crew, a group, a squad, a unit, a troop, a gang- anything but team.
After that cursed, depressing word was said, the room was blanketed with silence.
"Ok," Tara started, after finding the silence suffocating, "if she is some how related to Sophie, I think we should talk to her. She obviously is smart, and careful, knowing where Hardison hid the cameras."
"I'll bring her back here," Parker said.
As Parker stood behind the one way glass doors that Eliot made for the staircase door, she noticed that she was wrong. From a distance this girl did look like Sophie, but up close, the only thing they had in common was their hair. This girls face was tanner, and her nose was much smaller in proportion to her big baby blue eyes. Parker watched as the young girl tucked a strand of hair behind her little ears, only to have the side bang fall back into her face.
The girl, Parker guessed, was closer to ten, and about 4' 11", weighing at only about 70 pounds. Parker saw her fingernails were painted a shade of blue that was very similar to a dress she remembered Sophie wearing once. The girl wore a pale blue shirt, with a line of ruffles down the middle, and a pair of dark wash jeans, with blue sneakers on her feet.
Suddenly the girl turned away from the door and muttered something to herself before starting to walk away.
"Hey wait!" Parker yelled, as she threw open the door, causing the girl to turn back to look at her. "You said you needed our help. Why don't you come up, and we can talk?"
Tara walked back from the kitchen with a glass of orange juice for the girl who was now situated around their table.
Hardison had out his laptop sitting in between Parker and Eliot on one side of their rectangle table. Tara took the seat next to the girl at the head of the table, a spot where she was near for comfort, but not on the same side of the table as to get awkward.
As soon as Tara sat down, placing the glass in front of the girl, the young brunette opened her mouth to start her story.
As soon as she talked talking, they all knew that she must somehow be related to Sophie. She had the same accent for one, and the words she used were very carefully and eloquently strung together. When she talked, it was as smooth as silk, causing Eliot to just close his eyes and take in the sweetness.
But unfortunately as she kept talking, Hardison kept clicking his damn fingers across that damn keyboard of his, ruining Eliot's serenity.
"I really need your help," the young girl started a few minutes earlier.
"Why don't you start by telling us your name. Then the story and problem, ok?" Tara softly asked.
"Oh, right. I'm sorry; I forgot about my manners. My name is Leah, and I am ten years old. I came here from San Francisco, after my adoptive parents telling me stories about what you guys can do."
Not anymore, Eliot thought. We hadn't been able to do anything that they used to in the last five years.
"My adoptive parents would tell me how you would take down big corporations and how you were the modern Robin Hood. And you helped people. You are the good guys, they said, though I could tell there was much more to this group than that. There was no way that you could do anything like those stories except if you had some bad bone in you.
"But anyways, I believed them. After all they did save me."
"Save you?" Eliot couldn't help to interject.
"Oh, yeah. They adopted me about four years ago. They saved me from the system. They also adopted my older brother, but he's in college now, so I guess he wasn't really saved. Anyways, my adoptive parents are really the reason I'm here. They just had their first biological child three years ago, my new brother, Michael." She pause here, to take a drinking of the half full glass of orange juice, while Parker tried to discreetly wipe the tear from her eye. Eliot knew that the moment Leah said 'adopted' and 'system' that Parker was already on board with helping the girl. This was now personal to her.
"My new father was a sober for the first few years I was with them. My new mother said how he would drown his sorrows in the bottom of the bottle, and how he was drunk the how time they were dating. He would always correct her and say that he was a functioning drunk.
"My new mother said that because they wanted to adopt my brother and I, he had to sober up, and she knew that he would do anything to allow the state to let us stay with them. And he was doing good. He got a job at and investigative firm, and would try to teach my brother and I how to drive his boat. He got really excited when my new mother got her job as an art authenticator, and he was even happier when she told him she was pregnant.
"But about a few months ago, he started drinking again. My new mother tried to stop him, but they ended up just yelling at each other, with him always saying how afraid he was to screw up again. He once said how much Michael looked like Sam, someone I don't know, and then he burst into tears.
"He is almost constantly drunk now, and he got fired from his job because of it. He is yelling a lot now, and I don't know what he would do to Michael if Michael did something wrong. He said how he worked with you for a while, and I think that if he could just get back to that point in his life, when he was a happy person, it would make him drop the bottle again.
"Can you guys help him?"
The crew all looked at each other, knowing what the next logical question would be, the question that would bring this all together.
Hardison, the quickest to pull away from their little staring match asked Leah, "What is your new father's name?"
The group held their breath as they waited for Leah to answer.
"Nathan Ford."