I just recently realized the similarity in my character's name to Mariska Hargitay's mom's name. It's purely coincidental...I had Jay all mapped out and grown years ago and just now learned of Jayne Mansfield. But I thought the coincidence was cute, so I added a little to the character to nod to her accidental namesake, which actually ended up fitting extremely well within her personality. Please, please review!

"I thought only cats and dogs could be considered feral," Munch was saying as we all sat around on our desks while Huang explained his findings.

"Unfortunately, that's not true. There are rare cases of feral children, usually in poor, sparsely populated countries. The parents abandon the children at a critical developmental age and they subsequently attach to whatever living thing is around them the most. Usually it's dogs. In our little girl's case, it looks like rats."

"So what you're saying is that our little Jane Doe was abandoned by her parents and she was raised by rats? Sounds like a bad movie to me." Cragen shifted his weight and put his hands in his pockets. "And it still doesn't explain her connection to our rape and assault."

"Well, in order to be completely feral, a child would have absolutely no contact with other humans. Obviously that's hard to do in a city as highly populated as this one, so..."

Elliot spoke up. "That bastard was keeping her locked up somewhere."

"It gets better." Munch started while my phone buzzed and I stepped away to answer it. "We ran the name Nicholas or Nick Sheffield, and came out with nothing."

"So he doesn't have a record, great." Elliot said.

"No, he doesn't have anything. No driver's license, no credit card, no bank accounts. So I ran just his social security number, and I got a hit; a death certificate from 1963."

I rejoined the group. "That was the hospital; Jay's mom just got there, she's agreed to let us talk to her."

"Fine, you go talk to her." Cragen said to me. "Don't say anything to the mother about the other little girl until we figure out what the hell is going on here. Huang, if you would go with Olivia, I would like to know what you think of the kid and the mother." George nodded and turned to leave with me while Cragen continued casting roles. "Elliot, I want you, Munch and Fin on the search. We need to figure out who this guy really is."

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Kate Manfield was one of the most striking women I'd seen, and oddly enough, the first time I laid eyes on her I had the fleeting thought that we'd met before. I shook her hand and introduced myself and Dr. Huang.

"Jay's not talking to me," she said after the introductions. Her tall, confident frame mirrored my own, but she was trembling. "I know she hates to be coddled, but, I'm her mother. What else does she expect me to do for her?"

"Kids sometimes have a problem talking to their parents after something like this happens," I said gently. She looked very pale. "Why don't you sit down here by the window and I'll go talk to Jay in the interview room." Kate nodded and Huang pulled up a chair for her as I went into the room.

The moment I walked into the room, Jay tensed up. "Is he dead?" She asked darkly.

"Who?"

"Nick. Did I kill him?"

"No, you didn't kill him," I reassured her. But her eyes were flashing and intense and I wasn't sure she would have been sorry if she had.

"This room is stupid." She picked up a teddy bear and snorted at it, then lazily pitched it aside. "You know just because I'm a kid doesn't mean I'm some sort of imbecile."

"No, I know." I answered. "This is just the room they make us use when we talk to kids under 18."

She was sauntering back and forth through the room, hands stuffed in her pockets, the axis at her shoulders at a constant tilt as she subconsciously compensated for their disproportionate breadth. "Well they need to figure out age isn't always an indicator of maturity."

It was clear to me that I wasn't talking to an average eleven-year-old. "That's for sure," I commented, hoping the light tone in my voice would coax some sort of rapport out of her. She looked at me suddenly and I swear her bright green eyes saw my very soul, but she afforded a hint of a smile before continuing her lazy patrol of the room. Her long fingers curled around a beanbag frog that was on a bookshelf and she studied it as she sat down on the couch. I watched with a strange feeling in my stomach as she leaned forward and braced her elbows on her knees, twirling the toy absent-mindedly in front of her. She was a hopeless tomboy, like her brother had said, and all knees and elbows. I grabbed a chair and sat on it backwards in front of her. I used to do that all the time when I was in high school; I wasn't sure when I had stopped. "Jay," I started, "We're all still very confused about what happened today."

"Seriously?" She flipped her long dark hair back and looked at me incredulously. "I thought it was pretty obvious."

I noted the haughtiness in her voice blazing juxtaposed to the street-smart confidence in her body language. "I need to hear it from you," I urged gently.

She shrugged. There was a world of responsibility on those broad shoulders. "I'm sorry, Detective. I can't give you what you want."

My heart went straight to the concrete. She was protecting him. God damn it. But I wasn't giving up that easily. "How do you know what I want?"

"My dad was a cop," she said condescendingly. "You all always want the same thing."

"The truth," I filled in the blank in case she thought it was something else. She nodded, staring straight into my eyes. If she hadn't been sitting in front of me twirling that stupid frog in her hands, I would have forgotten she was a kid altogether. "Why can't you give me that?"

"Two reasons. One, because my mother is watching on the monitor in the next room, and two, because I have to protect my family."

"That sounds like the same reason to me."

She nodded appreciatively but went on to say, "It's too important to be lumped into one."

I hated myself as I delivered her a low blow. "What about the girl you came in with? Who protects her?" I had to get something - a witness statement or evidence - within the next two hours or that bastard would walk.

Her eyes narrowed and her voice got lower. "That's a cheap shot, Detective." I nodded in acceptance but wouldn't take my expectant gaze off her stoic face. She regarded me for a moment before she said, "You'll need a search warrant."

I nodded again and waited as she got up and went to the little table with the crayons and paper and scrawled an address in the corner of one. Tearing it off and handing it to me, she held it and made me look her in the eye. "If anything happens to us..." She began to warn me, but I cut her off.

I smiled to assure her and said, "I won't let it." She relinquished the scrap but kept her eyebrows raised and her intense eyes fixed on my own. She didn't believe me. The door opened across the room and her older brother came in, smiling. Jay saw him and instantly grinned from ear to ear, called him "Robbie" and ran into his waiting arms. It was the first time I'd seen her look like a normal eleven-year-old girl. I looked on and watched as the two chatted; it was clear they hadn't been together in a while and their excited adoration for eachother left little space in the room for anyone else. For some reason proving myself to her and protecting her became the most important cause in the universe.