“That’s absolutely not true,” Anne said, her focus more on the judge rather than her accuser. She knew from experience there was no winning an argument with Maureen. The woman was as tough and unyielding as gristle, as unmovable as a city bus.

She was also so red in the face she seemed in danger of having a stroke. “When I got here last night, she was calling you Mommy. How do you explain that?”

“It’s a simple case of transference,” Anne said calmly. “Haley’s last moments of consciousness before she lapsed into the coma were spent with her mother’s dead body. She regained consciousness in totally unfamiliar surroundings, in a room with strangers, hooked to monitors and machines. Who is the first and only person she really wants to see? Her mother—alive.”

“And you just happened to look like her mother,” Upchurch said.

“No, Maureen, I planned that in my mother’s womb,” Anne snapped. “I knew it would come in handy one day.”

There goes the patience, Anne thought. She could feel it sliding through her mental grasp like a very short satin ribbon.

“The girl’s mother had dark hair and dark eyes,” Dixon said to the judge. “Anne has dark hair and dark eyes. It only makes sense. The poor kid was terrified. She needed someone to be Mommy. Anne was there.”

“I would have been there if Detective Mendez had called me sooner,” Upchurch griped. “It was already too late by the time I got there. And she made no effort to put a stop to it.”

“What was I supposed to do, Maureen?” Anne asked. “Rip the sobbing child from my arms and tell her I wasn’t her mother because someone cut her mother’s head off?”

“Oh my God!” Milo Bordain cried out, pressing a gloved hand to her throat. Tears rose up in her eyes.

“Mrs. Leone, did you at any time try to tell the little girl you aren’t her mother?” the judge asked.

“No,” Anne admitted. “She was terrified and hysterical. My only concern was calming her down. I certainly didn’t encourage her. I didn’t tell her I’m her mother. I just let her call me what she wanted.”

“Now the girl has attached to her,” Upchurch said. “How am I supposed to place her with a family?”

“Maybe you won’t have to, Ms. Upchurch,” Judge Espinoza said pleasantly.

“She should be placed with me,” Bordain argued. “She knows me.”

Upchurch didn’t like the judge’s tone. “But she’s a ward of the state, Your Honor. Her case clearly falls under the auspices of CPS.”

“But I’m the judge,” Espinoza explained calmly. “And what I love about being a judge is that what I say goes.”

He turned to Dixon. “What’s your position on this, Sheriff?”