'It's never easy looking into a child like this.'

Adam nodded as he watched Judge Michelle Fuqua, one of the city's top criminal judges, slip off her four-inch pumps and pad around her office in her stocking-covered feet. It was easy to forget when this formidable woman was on the bench that she barely cleared five feet without her high-heels. Her smooth mocha skin was slightly dewed from the warm air of her office and she patted at her cheeks, brow, beck with a handkerchief that matched the frosted-peach tone of her suit.

'Ma'am, you know Detective Beckett's style, you know she wouldn't send me here with this request if she didn't think we were wrong.'

'I know she wouldn't,' Fuqua replied with a smile. 'I know her style and I know yours too.'

'Mine?'

'You're good with people who have been shocked or traumatized, Detective. You have a gift for putting them at ease, and word around the campfire is that you use that same talent for putting criminals and miscreants on their heels to get them talking so when you hit them hard, they feel like they've been leg-dropped by Randy Savage.' She winked at him as she sat down behind her desk. 'To business. You think your killer is one of the students who was in the room with your Professor Hill, and you want to look at his medical records to see if it was the car accident that killed his mother where he survived that caused a blip in his brain?'

'In a nutshell, Your Honour, yes.'

'Sadly, I wish I could say I was surprised by any part of that. But this job...well, you know as well as anyone Detective, this job seasons and ages us in ways we wish it sometimes doesn't. You'll have your papers by one, Detective.'

'Fair enough, send it through when you're ready. Excuse me.'

Adam stepped away for a moment as his cellphone rang; he swiped the screen to answer the incoming call. 'Brennan.'

'Detective Brennan?'

The voice was a young woman's voice, thick with barely controlled tears. 'Yes, this is Detective Brennan. Who is this?'

'It's Ashley...Ashley Archer. Please, you have to come, I...she...I can't...'

'What happened?'

'Someone poisoned Sarah Ritter in the cafeteria,' Ashley let out on a burst of breath. 'She started having trouble breathing, the same way she says she does when she has traces of peanuts.'

Adam's blood turned to ice. 'Where are you now?'

'I'm at the hospital. I- the paramedics, David and Jayla, they let me ride in the ambulance so she wasn't alone.'

'You're at Saint Vincent's?' At Ashley bleary 'uh-huh', Adam felt a nanogram of relief. 'Go down to the ER visitor entrance, wait for us there.'

'Us?'

'Yes, have you called Detective Beckett yet?'

'N-no, your name starts with an A so it was first in my phone before Kate.'

Adam blew out a breath. 'Call her, tell her where I said to meet you. We'll be there as quickly as we can. Don't talk to anyone, not a single person until you see us, okay?'

'Yes Det-t-tective.'

Adam hung up then turned to Fuqua. 'I need those warrants sooner than one o'clock, Your Honour. I just received word one of the students to discover the body was rushed to the hospital.'

'Go.' Fuqua dismissed him with a wave of the hand. 'I'll push this as hard and fast as I can.'

'How the hell could we have missed this.'

Beckett pounded her fist on the steering wheel as she zipped down Fifth and cut west on Thirty-Eighth. She'd been in the middle of interviewing one of the teachers who'd stayed home an extra day in their Upper East Side condo when she'd received Adam's call; without a second thought she ended the interview and flew to meet him at Fuqua's chambers.

It would have been quicker, probably, she knew, to go to the hospital first, but she knew that the doctors would need the time and space to give Sarah the best fighting chance she could have so Beckett had given them that room by also adding to her own front. Having two cops present a united front to the parents - Dean and Georgie Adam had said their names were - would give them some sense of security that something was being done toute-de-fucking-suite.

They screamed to a stop in the emergency parking lot, sprinted to the ER visitor entrance where they saw Ashley, no longer the cool, in-control lady of the house she'd been with getting the starchy majordomo to step off but the little girl they'd seen breakdown over lemonade and cookies. She was still in her school uniform kilt and blouse, and her face was tear-ravaged as she propped herself against the stone wall with a blank stare out at the world. Beckett approached her first, used the tactics of a mother, not of a cop.

'Ashley, it's Kate,' she called out first, hoping to get the girl's attention. Ashley's eyes focused, and she launched herself off the wall straight into the detective's arms as she wept like a toddler. 'Shh, shh, it'll be fine, girl, you'll see.'

'She wasn't breathing, and...her face...God, her face was turning p-purple...' Ashley all but wailed it as the shock and terror and fear came pouring out of her. 'On the weekend she...her parents said I could stay with them as long as I needed to, until things at home settled down. When I couldn't sleep, when I just cried and cried, Sarah...she made me tea and put pretzel M&M's on my ice cream and made a second bowl for herself just because she knows I don't like to eat alone.'

'She sounds like a good friend.'

'She's my best friend, my sister really.' Ashley sniffled heroically and sighed, eased back from Beckett. She gripped the edge of her uniform sweater with her sleeve, used it to swipe at her eyes as she tried to pull it together. 'Detective Beckett, I know I'm not legally related to her, but I was right there. I called the paramedics on my cellphone when she started coughing like that. Can I-'

'We'll keep you posted, though I doubt Dean and Georgie will keep you out of the loop.'

'Ashley.' Now Adam stepped forward, knowing she was ready for this part. 'The three of us will go inside and wait for word on Sarah. Beckett will talk to Sarah's parents, and you'll tell me start to finish what happened. Can you do that?'

'Yes, I can.' Despite the numb shock in her voice, there was steel in her eyes now. 'It's the least I can do. I need to get her flowers, and a book, and maybe some tea. Sarah loves tea and a good book when she is sick. Maybe she'd like me to read it to her?'

'That sounds lovely.'

The trio walked inside, where Adam and Ashley split off towards a private corner of the busy ER and as luck would have it Beckett spotted Dave and Jayla at the intake nurse's deck. Both were in uniform, Jayla with sunglasses perched on her chocolate brown hair, going over the details of a report. She marched to the desk and tapped her badge against the glass. 'Excuse me nurse, I need a few minutes with these paramedics.'

'Of course Detective.'

The nurse stepped one way, letting Dave and Jayla come around the counter. 'We have to stop meeting like this, Kate,' Dave teased his friend with a slight bit of weariness in his voice; Beckett made a mental note to text Lanie and tell her friend that her hubby would need something extra special tonight. She knew it right away from seeing him because she'd seen that look on her husband's face more than once when he'd been on the job with her.

'Tell me what you can.'

'It happened very fast, as things do in situations like that,' Jayla piped up in her Minnie-Mouse-from-Tehran voice. 'We attended to the young lady while the other one speaking to the other detective-' she pointed to Ashley '-tried to keep the crowd back.'

'Did she mention anyone by the name Nicky Tomasi, or Nicky Tee?'

'Yeah, she did,' Dave replied. 'She was hollering at him to stay back and asked him what he gave Sarah.'

Beckett gave him the frosty eye. 'You're sure?'

'Yeah, I'm sure Detective. She was standing less than a foot from me and she screamed at him, what the fuck was in that drink.'