Author's Note: There is a bit of mild cursing in this chapter. All resemblances to cop drama cliches are purely intentional.
Some weeks later
Today Carmen had learned an important lesson. She would never go broke underestimating the San Francisco Police Department's capacity for shoddy police work or garden variety racism. Both, she discovered, had helped decide her fate at the tender age of two.
She began her investigation with her best lead- herself- and spent days traipsing back and forth between the closed stacks of the Child and Family Services office and the records department in the basement of police headquarters. Many hours and several cheap cups of coffee later, she had obtained the original police report written by the beat cop who had found her wandering the streets of San Francisco as a toddler. Carmen would have liked to have questioned him, but sadly, he had been killed in the line of duty during a liquor store robbery ten years ago. The detective assigned to her case, a Mike O'Leary, was still alive and living in the city. He also had an Internal Affairs file as thick as her forearm.
Carmen found Detective O'Leary deeply engrossed in the sports pages behind a desk piled high with unfinished paperwork. He was a stocky man with graying chestnut hair, paunch layered over a once athletic frame. His overall appearance was one of a good cop that had gone to seed, marking time until he could collect his generous police pension and retire to seaside Monterrey or Santa Cruz. Carmen had unfortunately seen his type many times before. It was not a good sign.
Carmen coughed and politely interrupted. "Excuse me, Detective. I understand you were the lead investigator on a child abandonment case here eighteen years ago."
O'Leary reluctantly lowered his newspaper and grumbled. "I investigated a lot of cases, Miss…"
"Detective Sandiego," Carmen introduced herself and flashed her badge. She took a certain amount of pleasure in watching O'Leary squirm in surprise.
"Well, if it isn't ACME's famous girl detective. Yeah, I remember you. Come a long way from where they found you down by the waterfront." He rubbed the stubble on his chin. "So I take it you're lookin' for your folks?"
Carmen hated that her motives were so transparent. "Yes, I was hoping you could walk me through what happened after Officer Williams brought me to the station. It says in the report I was only speaking Spanish when I arrived." It had been news to Carmen that Spanish was her first language. No one at the orphanage had ever told her; then again, she had never asked.
"Yeah, and a helluva time we had trying to understand you, too. All we could make out was your name, which we were pretty sure was Carmen…or something like it…and the words San Diego, like the city. So we contacted the boys at San Diego PD, thinking maybe you had people down there." He puffed up as if he thought this was some brilliant deduction. "But your description didn't match any missing children there or in the whole state of California. And nobody came for you, so we sent you to the Girls' School."
Carmen winced inwardly; it hurt to be reminded that her name…her whole identity…was based on something so arbitrary as what this man thought he heard one night eighteen years ago. "And no one at the station spoke Spanish? You couldn't have called an interpreter?" she asked, hearing the anger rise in her voice.
"Not a lot of…diversity... on the force back in those days. Only had one interpreter and she was down in the Mission dealing with a gang thing. Budget cuts," he explained with a shrug.
Carmen gritted her teeth and fought the unfamiliar urge to throttle O'Leary by his greasy necktie. "And you didn't think to follow up on this case? You just left me there. Case closed."
O'Leary began to get a little hot around the collar himself. "Listen, missy…"
"Detective Sandiego," she corrected sharply.
"Detective. I don't know how it is nowadays, but back then we had hippies dropping acid and walking off rooftops in the Haight, college punks out burning their draft cards- a lot more to worry about then some lost kid." He coughed and gave her a look that was both irritated and oddly sympathetic. "And if you don't mind me sayin' so, it was no great mystery what had happened to you. It might have been for the best, you going to that orphanage. Your kind, I seen it plenty."
Carmen was slow to catch on to what the veteran detective was implying. Oh. She knew racism existed in an intellectual sense, but had never before felt it directed toward her. Well, she had dark hair and a vowel at the end of her name. Case closed indeed. "So, I was just another Mexican brat to you? Probably here illegally and hardly worthy of further investigation," she spoke, her voice deadly quiet.
O'Leary turned beet-red and shifted uncomfortably. "Now listen, I didn't mean…"
Carmen leaned over and planted both her hands on the cluttered desk, forcing the older man to scoot back in his chair. "No, you listen to me. Internal Affairs thinks you are on the take, a dirty hijo de puta cop. But you know what I think?" she breathed dangerously. "I think you are something worse- a lazy one. Because if you hadn't done such a half-assed job, pendejo, I might have been reunited with my family, instead of spending twelve years of my life in a state-run orphanage."
Leaving O'Leary sputtering, Carmen strode away, ignoring the suspicious glances of the rest of the station. As she left, she called back with a self-satisfied smirk, "And if you don't know what some of those words meant, Detective, I suggest you look them up. Trust me when I tell you they describe you perfectly."
Carmen returned to her office, slamming the door hard enough to rattle the doorframe and dislodge a few of her many awards from the walls. Since the meeting with O'Leary, she had been suffused with a kind of righteous anger, the type that made her want to put her fist through a plate glass window or punt office supplies across the room. Though she possessed the self-restraint to refrain from both impulses, her rage frightened her. It was not like her to slam doors or curse out fellow detectives in Spanish.
Not for the first time, Carmen wondered if this particular case would be better off in the hands of someone who could be impartial and objective. Someone who, unlike her, had no investment its outcome.
Dreamily, Carmen removed her worn brown leather gloves and slowly rolled up the sleeves of her Oxford shirt. She studied her palms and wrists, where familiar splotchy red scars marked her otherwise flawless skin. Where they came from, she had no recollection. Carmen didn't wear gloves out of vanity. She just hated the daily reminder of…unknowingness…the scars represented. She had asked the ACME medical examiner about them once; second degree burns, he had told her. He did not say if they were self-inflicted….or otherwise.
It might have been for the best, you going to that orphanage. The burns had been in the police report. For all his bigoted incompetence, it galled her that O'Leary might have actually had a point. What kind of people let their two year old daughter roam the streets? Or acquire severe burns? She felt faint at the thought and reached out steady herself, taking comfort in the cold, hard embrace of the metal file cabinet.
There were really only two ways this investigation could end, Carmen knew.
In the first scenario, she would discover her parents were dead. That knowledge would bring, in a way, some kind of blessed closure to her life. Maybe she would actually be able to "move on" or whatever that meant. But closure came with a price; she would never, ever know her parents. Never feel her father's arms around her or hear her mother's voice. Sometimes she wondered if the loss of that hope was a price she was willing to pay.
The alternate scenario appealed to her even less. The one where, by some quirk of fate and deductive brilliance, Carmen discovered her family was still alive. Were parents who had abandoned her really parents worth having? To be faced with the revolting prospect that they disowned her not out of poverty or hardship, but because they simply did not want her rippled the fault lines of her soul. Did she display some fatal flaw that caused them to reject her? The unanswered question had lain imbedded in her psyche since childhood, a chronic disease nipping at her heart year after year.
Suddenly feeling claustrophobic and sick, Carmen went to the window and opened it. The fresh air kissed her cheek, but did little to revive her, as sweat dripped down her neck and back. In the courtyard below, she watched ACME's forensic psychologist, Dr. David Kaplan, greet his wife and children on a fine spring afternoon. With effortless joy, the doctor scooped a small blond boy onto his shoulders and ruffled the hair of his copper-headed daughter. Whatever the outcome of her investigation, this she would never know.
As she stepped away from the window, Carmen felt choked by equal parts rage and despair, drowning in a roiling tide of red, as the cold tile floor came up to meet her.
Author's Translatascan: To borrow a page from Carmen, if you want to know what names she's calling O'Leary, I suggest you look them up. ;)