But Abby was already off the sofa and doing that angry fast walk-run thing that girls learn to do when they’re oh so young. Her iPad slipped slowly off the edge of the seat and landed unhappily on the metal floor, earphones slithering after it.

Spencer hung his head. He let the pattern of metallic diamonds on the fire escape floor go out of focus.

Talk to me, Marielle.

Nothing.

Caitlyn Dunn was thinking about the guy whose life she suspected she’d ruined, although he’d been doing a pretty good job of that himself. She liked to think of herself as a fair person but he’d been given too many chances by Lonnie.

Even though she was new to Oakland, Caitlyn already had her doubts about Lonnie. She wondered whether her colleague had been swayed by the whole charm offensive the Burnham guy was apparently capable of pulling. It was hard to miss how desperate she was to bag a guy. Ray told anyone who’d listen that she’d given him herpes.

Whatever had gone on, or not gone on, between Lonnie and Burnham, Caitlyn realized that he’d really annoyed her, to the point that she hadn’t gotten around to raising the matter of his employment with him. How had he gotten under her skin so? The sarcastic British thing?

The hurricane comment had pissed her off. But she shouldn’t have shown him Abby’s drawing. With a degree of shame, she real­ized she’d wanted to punish him, a man who’d lost his wife in a car wreck only four years before. He’d been a normal father until then it seemed.

And that was when it dawned on her. Abby Burnham’s parenting hadn’t been normal. Even if her father had been normal, then her late mother couldn’t have been. Because Abby was an extraordinary kid. Some of her grades were off the scale. She hadn’t even been asked to draw a picture of the couch. Sally-Ann, the clinical therapist, had laughed herself stupid over it, hadn’t been able to help herself. Then apparently Abby had joined in. She could converse like a fourteen-year-old. That would be partly down to necessity; when parents were absent, figuratively or literally, kids had to grow up fast.

Caitlyn was going to save that girl from a father who’d obviously decided she should go down on his sinking ship. He wasn’t Caitlyn Dunn’s worry, but Abby Burnham? She deserved better.

Normally there would be a tide of procedural hearings and meetings to follow if a case were to be escalated. But less than a month had elapsed since Spencer Burnham was last the subject of an investigation, an investigation in which there’d been serious oversights. And he was now a confirmed Category Two.