Family Bonds

Disclaimer: I own nothing

A/N

Chapter 10 (The Hunt Continues)

"More paperwork." Trina set the lawyer's docket down on the desk in her downtown office and leaned back in her black leather chair. Her eyes traveled to the whiteboard on her wall that bore the words 'Trial Docket' for Misdemeanors and Felonies.

She didn't work misdemeanors often, if at all. Considering her position, she dealt mostly with high profile criminal cases. The one she was working on now was an aggravated sexual assault case, and she had a fairly strong case. The DNA evidence pointed to the defendant, there was a partial thumbprint matching the defendant, and of course the weapon used in the attack had been found and registered to the defendant.

Her mind, however, ws on other matters. "So this is your office?" Her eyes darted over to the door where Rebecca was entering. She smiled as the girl approached her desk. "Why did you ask me to come today?"

"I know you said you were working as a student reporter. How is that going?" Her right arm bent on the armrest and she tucked her thumb beneath her chin and her index finger on her cheek. "Is it going well?"

"I guess. It could be better, to be honest." Rebecca sat in a chair and Trina watched the girl's eyes travel to the degrees on the wall. "I've kind of been thinking about what I want to do when I start college up next year. I don't know if I still want to be a reporter anymore or not."

"You seemed sure of that decision before." She crossed her legs and laced her fingers together. "What changed?" Her hands perched on her upper knee and she watched the girl as she continued to study the office room.

"I don't know. According to the public, reporters hounded my mom while she was pregnant with me, so did they ruin her career? Did I?" She frowned and unlaced her fingers.

"We don't know what the situation was, Rebecca. What I remember of my sister-your mother-she wasn't so shallow to just give up her child because of a career problem." Rebecca's head bowed.

"What could it be? Why wouldn't she want me?"

"Rebecca, do you know what 'beyond reasonable doubt' means?" She reclined and pulled her hands behind her head. The girl raised her head up, nodding once. "There has to be possibly 98, 99 percent certainty that a person is guilty. Do you know beyond reasonable doubt whether your mother gave you up because you 'ruined her career'?"

"No…"

"That's hearsay as well. Do you know what that means?" The teenager's lips pursed and she replied with another single, brisk nod. "Good. Then you know that hearsay is a third party and rarely admitted into court. We wouldn't be able to put on the witness stand a friend of a friend to the victim, who may have 'heard through the grapevine'. Hearsay isn't always correct, it isn't reliable."

"So?"

"Until we've heard from the people that were there, we do not have the evidence or the witnesses to suggest what you're saying." Trina stood up and walked over to Rebecca, smiling as she placed a gentle hand to the girl's shoulder. Rebecca looked up into her eyes, smiling back and breathing in slowly.

"So we should hear what my mom has to say? You don't think…"

"Tori is, was, a good person at heart." She knelt down with a sigh and dropped her left hand to the arm of the chair. "My sister once had the opportunity to become famous, even before I left, but that manager would have her turn on everyone she knew. She chose not to."

Rebecca dropped her gaze, chuckling once. "That sounds nice."

"If she gave you up, it wasn't because you ruined her career, sweetie. Until I have heard the reasoning from her lips and no one else's, I refuse to accept popular opinion on this. Hearsay."

"You sound like a defense attorney." Trina leaned back and laughed.

"Ironic, isn't it?"

She rubbed Rebecca's back and stood up, grunting and sweeping her hand across her knee so as to wipe off any potential dirt.

Rebecca pressed her thumbs together and looked down into her lap. Trina furrowed her brow and smiled warmly as her niece looked towards her. "I was thinking. Is it possible for me to do an internship here?" She raised an eyebrow and her lips fell open.

"Internship?" It took her a moment to register the thought. She didn't often take interns, and certainly not any that were under eighteen. Still, it was her niece, and the internship here was unpaid. "Why do you want to intern here?"

"Well." Rebecca brushed her hair over her shoulder and straightened her posture. "You know I've always admired you and I do want to see what it's like. I don't know what I want to do in the long run, but maybe it'll give me a chance to see if I want to be a lawyer…"

"I don't have a problem with it, but let me see what I can do." She was the chief prosecutor in the office, but that didn't mean she was going to do anything without checking to see if the others in the office would be okay with it. She still had to talk to them, let them know who Rebecca was and when she might be there. "You're not eighteen yet, and you're still a minor, so I'll have to talk to your school and your foster-"

"I'm emancipated." Trina's speech fell away from her and her heart stopped in mid beat. Rebecca chuckled nervously and watched as she moved her hands down to her hips.

"Emancipated? So you're on your own?"

This was an issue for her, but not so much the fact that the girl was emancipated but that it would have implied the last family that had her wasn't up to par.

Trina raised her hand to her neck and rolled her head to the side until her neck popped. "My last foster family and I didn't exactly get along…" She closed her eyes and let her shoulders fall.

"I see." Tension grew in the room, threatening to strangle her with all of its anger. "Well, I'll need to see those documents. Then like I said, I will want to talk to your school and your employer." An emancipated teen needed to have a stable and reliable income. Since she'd been a student reporter, this meant her actual job was something else. "Where have you worked?"

"Oh I've worked as a waitress at Ihop and a cashier at Walmart." Attempting to process the three different jobs the girl had done, she shook and dropped her head, sighing with amazement.

"So you've managed to go to high school, do a student internship, work at Walmart and at Ihop? Do you have any free time?"

"Y-Yes." She squinted at Rebecca, studying the nervous look in her eyes.

This was unacceptable. She couldn't allow her niece to have so little time to herself. "At this rate, you're not even going to have time for college. If you even start wanting to be a lawyer, you'll have to devote yourself to college."

Trina snapped her fingers and paced to the right. "Here's what we're going to do. I want you to consider leaving those jobs-preferably Walmart-and I will give you a personal allowance." Rebecca's eyes widened and her jaw fell open.

"You're serious?" Her stammer intensified and the girl had to turn away to clear her throat. "I mean, you'd do that? Why would you do that?"

"Because you're my niece and you don't need to be working two jobs right now." She crossed her arms and moved towards her chair. "Rather…I'll let you work here as an intern and I'll see if I can pay you."

"I think…" Rebecca shook her head and her nervous stammer continued as the bewildered expression swept across her face. "I think I'd like that."

"Alright." Trina sat down and reached for the phone. "Do you want to observe a trial in action? I will be going to trial soon." Rebecca's eyes dropped to the trial docket and she leaned towards it while folding her hands in her lap.

"It's an aggravated sexual assault case, Rebecca. We have powerful evidence against the defendant."

"I think I'd like to see that. You have witnesses?"

"We have experts. The police officer arriving on scene, the witness related to chain of control, which includes the forensic serologist." She paused to see the contemplative glint in the girl's eyes. "Chain of control basically means who handled the evidence and when."

"Oh. How many of those kinds of cases do you have?"

"Sexual assault? There are quite a few in this town, sadly." She frowned and slowly shook her head. "It's a large town, so murder is more prevalent, but you get a number of everything."

The cases weren't difficult for her, at least not as they may have been twenty years ago. These days, she took every case that was offered to her, and she requested some cases herself.

"Do you ever do plea hearings?"

"No." Plea hearings were mostly done by defense attorneys that were helping their client either plead out of jail or plead for probation. "Defense attorneys do those."

Trina folded her hand over her chin and began to tap her right temple with her forefinger. She studied Rebecca for a few seconds of silence, watching as the girl's nervous eyes moved along the walls of the office. "You know, you will also need to understand strict confidentiality here. As we are a prosecutor's office, we represent the victim of crime generally, and much the same way that defense attorneys represent an offender, we cannot give any information about clients to anyone."

"I understand." Rebecca took a deep breath and adjusted her glasses. "If I'm handling any case information, I'm not to talk about that person to anyone."

"Precisely." It was tempting, especially when you know a person, but that temptation had to be pushed down.

A good example was before she started out as an attorney, and was a secretary for a family law firm, one of that attorney's clients was a man filing for divorce and seeking custody over his wife: Catherine Valentine. Or more appropriately, Hart. This was back in 2020.

She was deemed by the courts to be mentally unfit and unable to care for the son in that divorce case, so the father won out. It was a sad thing, and it was confidential information that she couldn't reveal even to Beck and Jade. Or at least, she was too strict in regards to confidentiality laws to go blabbing a client's personal stuff to anyone.

"That really refers to anyone not sanctioned to handle that case information. Now…" She picked up the receiver of her phone and moved her hand towards the numbers. "Do you have the number of the person you said that knew the man that took you in? The one that told you your birth mother wanted to be rid of you?" Rebecca frowned and looked towards her purse, a sure sign that she did.

"I…yeah, but why do you want to talk to her?"

"I want to hear what she said about my sister that I don't know about. I want to know where she got this information from." There was also a chance this woman had some sort of idea about the whereabouts of her sister-or someone that may know.

She received the number from her reluctant niece, who waited patiently as Trina dialed the number and brought the phone to her ear. It rang twice, then a woman answered.

"Hello." Trina straightened her back and tapped her nails on the desk, one finger at a time. "This is Katrina Tyler, you spoke with a young woman by the name of Rebecca Wilson recently. Is that correct?" Her eyes moved to her fingers and the skin around them began to fold.

"Oh yes, a wonderful dear. She wanted to know more about her mother. The one that gave her to Bradley."

"How do you know Mr. Wilson, ma'am?"

"He was a very good friend of mine."

"I see." She closed her eyes and curled her fingers into her palm. "I am a prosecuting attorney here in Sacramento and I have Miss Wilson with me. I was curious where you received your information regarding her birth mother. Was this information given to you by Mr. Wilson?"

There was a brief pause, followed by the sound of someone taking a deep and long breath. "Oh I see. No ma'am, Bradley actually got along well with Victoria. He spoke highly of her." Trina's eyebrows shot up and she glanced at her niece, who instantly tensed with nervousness. "I just assumed, I mean I never asked him, but the tabloids and the newspapers suggested that Victoria may have given her up because of her failing career, or that she wanted to abort the poor child."

Trina huffed and slowly shook her head. "You have no concrete evidence that Victoria ever wanted to abort her unborn child?"

"No, I'm sorry. Maybe the reports were wrong to say that, if so, tell Rebecca I apologize. I hope I didn't give her anything too damaging."

"You meant well, at least. Do you know anyone that may shed light on her current whereabouts?"

"I don't. Bradley always seemed to think she might come back. I don't know if that was true or not either, but as you know, he was murdered…the poor dear was put into foster care."

"I see." There really wasn't any further information she could see herself getting from this woman. So it was best to hang up and be done with it. "Anyway, thank you for your time." The woman said her farewell, apologizing once more for potentially giving misleading information to Rebecca. Trina hung up and moved her laced fingers up just beneath her nose.

Rebecca turned up her head, curling her eyebrows in the middle. "Well Mrs-no, aunt Trina?"

"That woman got her information from newspapers and tabloids. There is no concrete evidence that your mother would have thrown you away." Her eyes shut and a gentle breeze wafted from her nostrils. "She said Bradley hinted that Tori may have wanted to go back to get you, but again, we don't know that for a fact."

The girl's hand shot over her mouth and she gasped out suddenly. "You're serious? Why would she give me up if that was the case? I don't…"

"There are a number of reasons people give their children up. Sometimes finances, sometimes it's the environment. Then yes, there are times a person just doesn't want a child." She paused to watch the girl's reaction. Rebecca's shoulders fell and she started to bow her head once more. "None of these we know for sure. We're not going to know the truth until we've heard it from Tori herself"

"Okay. I'll try not to worry, it's just…I don't know…"

"Relax. It will be okay." It was her understanding that Rachel found Gary's profile on some social media outlet. The only issue was he probably didn't have his address down, but she was still trying. "There's a chance that my mom and her second husband will know, but we still have to reach them."

There was one possibility from a legal standpoint that Trina wondered about. It was the fact that former celebrity or not, there was so little out there about Tori's whereabouts over the years.

She recognized this.

A person, it didn't have to be a celebrity, though celebrities were generally the only ones who could afford it, could hire a lawyer to work on helping that person fade away by monitoring any potential marks online where that person may want to hide away.

If somebody wanted to fade away, they could do it, but it usually took a few years to manage. For Tori, it had also been long enough that most of her fans would have grown up by now and younger generations may not be as aware of who she was.

Even Rachel said most of the stuff she was finding on Tori was old, as if someone had been keeping her records hidden and her out of the spotlight. It was like a witness protection program for celebrities.

Tori would have to slip up at some point, and Trina would be there to catch it.

What are your thoughts thus far? So it's still confirmed we have absolutely no idea why Tori gave Rebecca up, or even why it seems she's removed herself from the public eye. It looks like she began the process very soon after Rebecca's birth. Why do you think that is? What do you think where it was implied she might return to the reporter? What was she trying to do? One think it seems Trina hasn't thought about is that Rebecca has been in San Francisco most of her life, the reporter lived in that town and was murdered there-hence Trina wound up prosecuting the murderer. Could that mean Tori may be somewhere nearby?