“Faint praise, indeed.”
“It wasn’t meant to be.”
“In that case, thanks.”
Ramon inclined his head. “You’re welcome.” Reaching down he pulled out a chair. The act was completely unplanned and took even him by surprise. Nevertheless, he issued the invitation formally. “Care to take a seat?”
She shook her head. “No time. I’m just picking up a cup of coffee on my way to work.”
“Ah.” Unaccountably disappointed, he wondered what had gotten into him. “Have a good day then.”
“You, too.”
With that she walked away. He folded himself down into his chair, his gaze falling on the newspaper again. Lori obviously enjoyed her work, judging by its quality, and had the determination to ferret out a good story. But then he already knew that she had her share of spunk. Few people would have pled their own case to the opposition the way that she had. Apparently she’d had lots of practice standing up for herself. How else could she have survived all that she’d endured in her lifetime?
Ramon shuffled aside the newspapers and picked up the file that he’d received by special delivery only that morning. He’d hired a private investigator to check out Lori even before he’d met her, and the resulting report was surprisingly thick. Lori Sumner was an open book; being a ward of the state until age eighteen had guaranteed it. The report gave Ramon plenty of ammunition to use against her in court and also made him loath to do it.
A movement at his side had Ramon looking up again. His brother-in-law, Zach Fletcher, grinned as he dropped down into the chair that Ramon had pulled out for Lori.
“How you doing?”
Ramon chuckled. He’d been determined to dislike Zachary Fletcher, but it just wasn’t possible. For one thing, he’d made Ramon’s sister, Pilar, ridiculously happy, and he was turning out to be a very fine father to the children they were in the process of adopting, Adrianna and Eduardo. For another, Zach was exactly what a good cop should be, a first-rate detective who went after the truth.
“Fine. You?”
“Never better.” After signaling the waitress for coffee, Zach smoothed his wavy brown hair and folded his arms against the tabletop. “So what’s up with you these days?”
Ramon folded his napkin just so across his thigh. “I’m sure Pilar’s told you about the custody case.”
Zach made a face. “Yeah. She feels pretty bad about it since she’s the one who recommended Lori as an adoptive parent.”
“I guess that should’ve been my first clue.” Ramon sighed.
“Meaning?”
“When I first took on this case I expected to be dealing with a spoiled rich girl, a do-gooder with little real-world experience and no appreciation for Latino culture. Instead, I find that Lori Sumner is not only open-minded but a survivor of some of life’s most devastating blows.”
Zach nodded. “Pilar’s told me some of her story. Guess her father was never a part of her life, then her mother died when she was young.” He shook his head. “You’d think she’d have been adopted, but instead she grew up in foster care.”
Lori had languished in foster care because she’d been diagnosed as learning disabled as a result of her mother’s drug use. Traumatized by her mother’s death, she hadn’t spoken for a couple years, and during that time she’d suffered from horrible night terrors. Her intelligence was not, however, by anyone’s standard, deficient. Ramon could attest to that fact himself. Not surprisingly, though, by the time she’d reached her early teens, she’d been rebellious and belligerent, acting out in frightening ways.
“Like I said, she took some tough blows.”
“Yeah,” Zach agreed softly. “I told Pilar that a couple brushes with the law shouldn’t be held against her. I mean, she’s made a real success of herself, right?”
The waitress arrived with fresh coffee just then, and Ramon took advantage of her presence to delay replying. He shifted in his chair, crossed his legs, pinched the crease in his slacks, anything not to look Zach in the eye, because the truth was that in a court of civil law, Lori’s past could very much be held against her—and he would have to be the one to see that it was. The idea left a sour taste in his mouth.
She’d been only fifteen when she was arrested for marijuana possession. Because she’d pled guilty and performed community service, the record would have been expunged had she not gotten caught again only months later. There were other scrapes, too, such as skipping school and petty shoplifting. She’d wound up on probation and at one point it had seemed that she was destined for detention, but then she’d been placed with an older couple by the name of Evans, both now deceased, and everything had changed.
It pained Ramon to think of her having been in trouble with the police. He remembered only too well his own early experience with the heavy hand of the law. It was part of the reason he’d been so ready to dislike Zach. Even now, the memory rankled.
He and a couple of friends had been lounging against their cars at a popular strip mall on the outskirts of Richmond, cutting up and talking as teenagers will do, music throbbing from someone’s CD player, when a fight had broken out across the parking lot behind them. It had nothing to do with them and was far enough away that they hadn’t felt threatened at all. They’d scoffed among themselves at the stupidity of scraping up knuckles and faces in some silly macho exercise, when suddenly they were surrounded by cop cars.
Before Ramon had known what was happening, he’d found himself thrown to the ground, arms wrenched behind him and pinned back with steel cuffs. No one would listen to a word he had to say. Instead, they’d hauled in everyone in the lot. It turned out that the fight had been called in as a gang action, which meant that the police were taking no chances, but the unfairness of the whole experience still smarted for Ramon.
He’d been a good kid, raised in church by strict, loving parents, destined for college and the fulfillment of the American Dream; yet he’d been thrown in the clink, identified as a possible gang member, questioned for hours and finally turned loose without so much as an apology. As a result of that single arrest, his college choices had been limited, and even though the charges had been dropped, the taint of possible gang involvement had followed him for years.
Ramon was proud of what he’d accomplished with his life. He felt that, fired by the indignity of injustice, he’d turned a negative experience into a worthwhile vocation. Yet he couldn’t quite forget or forgive what had been done to him. Just the shock and embarrassment that his parents had suffered because of his arrest could still cause his face to heat and his temper to rise.
Things had gotten a little better since his sister had married Zach. Ramon had to admit that Zach was definitely one of the good guys, and he’d helped Ramon see things from a different perspective. But not even Zach could change reality. The world, so far as Ramon was concerned, remained a biased, unfair place. It was not, in Ramon’s estimation, the sort of place that a wise, just, loving God would tolerate. If anything, Lori Sumner’s personal story reinforced that conviction for Ramon.
Groaning, he pinched the bridge of his nose and baldly admitted, “I wish I’d never gotten involved in this child-custody case.”
Zach made a sympathetic sound, sipping from the cup that the waitress had filled moments before. “It’s your calling to wield power for the powerless.”
Ramon had to smile. His brother-in-law had come to know him well. “My sympathies definitely lay with Yesenia, but…”
“You can’t help feeling sorry for Lori Sumner,” Zach surmised correctly.
Ramon