Unprotected (9 page)

Amanda couldn’t let her fear take away the chance to do something meaningful and real. It was true that she accepted this job more for herself than to help anyone else, but helping people was important too. And another truth was emerging: she wanted to see Jake again. Going back was the only option that made any sense.

Slowly Amanda wandered back to work and tried to be nonchalant as she made her way to her cubicle. She tried to walk past her supervisor, Max, who was in his office with Leah, but Max waved her in.

Max was, in a word, fantastic. When Amanda interviewed with him she was immediately at ease because he always smiled and seemed unflappable. He looked vaguely like Barack Obama, without the protruding ears, and was often asked if he was related to the president. Max was in his mid-forties and married for the first time, his office full of pictures of his wife and one-year-old daughter.

Amanda took a deep breath, went in Max’s office, and sat down next to Leah.

“Where did you go?” Leah asked pointedly. Tact was not her strong suit, but that was part of what made her a good social worker.

“I was feeling really sick. I’m sorry. How did it go?” Amanda asked quickly to get the subject onto something else.

“I think we’re ready to give both of these cases to you,” Max said. “You have been shadowing long enough, and I think you’re ready to jump in and do some work on your own.”

Insecurity crept in. While she was getting very bored following other workers, taking on these two families didn’t appeal either. Somehow, she wanted to refuse cases that seemed distasteful, or really anything she could screw up. Was there any such thing as an easy child protection case?

“Is that going to be okay, Amanda?” Max asked her. “You’re looking stressed. Was court that bad?” Max leaned forward and looked at her intently.

Amanda suddenly remembered that she was in her boss’s office and he needed to have faith in her. She was still on probation as a new hire. If she couldn’t handle the job they were under no obligation to keep her.

“No problem,” Amanda said, shaking her head a little and smiling. “Where do I begin?”

Leah pulled some papers out of her file. “I got Marlys to sign releases and agree that the kids can’t come home until she completes treatment. But the Judge said you have to facilitate visits three times a week while she’s in treatment. She’s going to stay in outpatient for now, but if she has any further alcohol or drug related incidents she’ll have to go inpatient.”

Amanda took the file from Max. “The main part of her caseplan is sobriety, but she also needs to do some basic parenting education,” he said. “Why don’t you meet with her and write up a draft of a caseplan, then bring it to me and we can talk about it?”

“I can probably see her this afternoon,” Amanda said.

“No, you have a meeting this afternoon with that new county attorney,” Leah said. Already? Amanda’s stomach dropped and she looked at the floor to hide the flush on her face. “Skip Huseman pulled all kinds of case law that says his client doesn’t have to say one more word to us if he doesn’t want to. Our attorney was totally unprepared and had no reply. He managed to get the judge to agree that they could submit briefs on the issue to give him time to figure out an answer.” Leah shook her head. “He got really lucky. I can’t believe he showed up for court so unprepared.”

Amanda managed to ask a casual question. “Did he explain why he’s on this case?”

“All he’d say was that Gloria’s no longer working in their office so he was given the file this morning, ten minutes before he went upstairs.” Leah shook her head knowingly. “You know we’ll be getting requests to commit Gloria within the week. She was so doped up these last few months there’s no way she can just quit now.” Amanda didn’t know Gloria or anything about her rumored drug problem. All she knew was that Gloria did many CHIPS cases. If Jacob got her file, he might be taking over the child protection caseload.

“We’d be referring that commitment to another county,” Max said. “There’s no way any of us should be involved in that … small towns…”

“Anyway,” Leah said. “That attorney wants to get up to speed with you and figure out where to go from here. I’d come too, but I have two appointments this afternoon.”

“So I’m going to Jake’s office?” Amanda asked.

“That’s his name—Jacob,” Leah said. “Max, please don’t reprimand me for creating a hostile work environment if I say I wanna grab his ass.”

Amanda jumped up to put an end to the conversation. “I’ll get going on that plan then,” Amanda said quickly.

“He said he knows you, Amanda.” Leah said with a smile.

“Hmm,” was the only reply Amanda could think of as she scurried out of the room. She didn’t see Leah raise her eyebrows in question of Amanda’s curt response.

* * *

Walking over to the county attorney’s office, Amanda watched the sidewalk and tried to think of an opening line. During her lunch hour, she had briefly considered trying to get off the cases, but she realized there was no way she could get off both. She had to keep reminding herself that she needed to be more concerned about doing well at her job than figuring out how to deal with Jake.

She entered the same building that contained the courtrooms and took the stairs to the basement. The county attorney’s office took up the whole basement level. She had been in the offices once before for a meeting with Gloria. Amanda’s meeting with Gloria had lasted five minutes because she had excused herself from the room and never came back. The head county attorney, Barb Cloud, finished their meeting with a brief apology and said Gloria wasn’t feeling well. Amanda had spent at least an hour in the office not knowing that Jake was down the hall the entire time.

“Your name?” a woman asked from behind the receptionist’s station.

“Amanda. I’m here to see Jacob Mann.” Even saying his name out loud made her heart thud.

The woman buzzed Jacob’s office. “Amanda is here to see you.” Amanda could not hear his reply.

“He just wants you to head back,” the woman said, pointing to a row of offices over her shoulder. “He’s the third door on this side.” There were offices lining both sides of the floor, and about ten desks in the middle, separated by low dividing walls, where several women and one man worked on computers. Amanda breathed deeply and walked to Jacob’s office.

“Hey, Jacob.” He was sitting at a large metal desk in an office not much bigger than the desk, with one chair in front of the desk, and filing cabinets flanking the chair. Amanda couldn’t figure out how Jacob got behind his desk because it was so wide that both sides almost touched the walls. Amanda couldn’t contain a smile. “I can’t believe they let you have the whole closet!”

“Hello to you too, Amanda.” He looked up from the file he was reading and smiled back, in spite of himself. “Welcome to the county.”

“I’ve been here a month, Jacob. I wonder how we haven’t crossed paths until now.”

Jacob motioned to the chair for her to sit down. “I’ve been out of state for some training so I could take over the child protection cases. Have a seat.”

She smirked. “How?”

He gave her a look, got up from his chair, squeezed around the side of his desk and pushed one of the filing cabinets forward with ease to the front wall of the office. This left at least a foot of space for Amanda to maneuver around and sit in the chair. “I asked for a filing cabinet,” he said with disgust. “Somebody with a sense of humor found the biggest ones in the building.”

“Nice coworkers,” Amanda said as she slid into the chair. He squeezed around her back into his chair. They had run out of small talk, so when he sat back down they found themselves staring at each other.

Jake rubbed his palms along the edge of his desk. “So … how’ve you been?”

She nodded and looked away. “Fine … good. Thanks. Anyway, um, are you going to have all the CHIPS cases?”

He shrugged. “Looks that way. Barb said she would back me up, especially in the beginning. The files aren’t in the best shape, but one of the paralegals did a lot of covering for Gloria, so I think she’ll be able to help me figure out what’s going on.”

“I don’t have a clue about the legal stuff in these cases. I barely know the social work part,” Amanda said. “Maybe Barb should take my cases since you and I are both so new.”

“Nice try, Amanda,” Jake said. “You can’t avoid me.”

She shook her head in protest and was going to say that wasn’t what she meant, but he was right, so she didn’t say anything. Thankfully, her heart wasn’t thudding anymore.

“Okay, so we’re working together, “Amanda said, trying to sound businesslike. “What do I need to know about these cases?” She opened Marlys’s file first.

“Well for starters, it would be good if you actually attended the court hearings.”

She looked up at his nasty smirk. “Jacob, if we’re going to work together, you’re going to need to find a way not to take jabs at me,” she said more defensively than she intended.

“Amanda, am I supposed to ignore the fact that you ran out of the building this morning? I have to represent you on these cases. I have to know you’re going to stick around.” He said it with enough force that she knew he was referring to more than that morning.

“I wasn’t feeling well this morning,” she said quietly.

“You have a history of bolting, Amanda,” he said equally quietly. “I need to know if there’s anything that I did, or anything I shouldn’t do.”

Again, this was about more than this morning.

“This is my job,” she said finally. “I’m not going to mess it up.”

Jake looked like he was going to say something more, thought better of it, and let the subject drop. He nodded.

“So, what’s the deal with this Thomas case?” he asked taking a deep breath and opening the file.

“Well I wish Leah was here. She did all the interviews, but the gist of it is that Matthew, the thirteen-year-old son of Charles Thomas, was seen at the emergency room for a dislocated shoulder and compound fracture of his right arm. The ER doctor wrote in his letter that he suspected child abuse, both because of the nature of the injury, and because the kid and the mom couldn’t explain what happened consistently. A few days later the kid told a friend in detail that his dad hurt him, but he just shut down during his interview so we don’t have a direct statement from him. ” Amanda paged through her file until she found the initial report. “It’s obvious that the doctor didn’t know who he was reporting, and he hadn’t made too many child protection reports before.” She looked up at Jake. “At least that’s what Max said. He couldn’t believe the doctor made the conclusions that he did about the injury being ‘highly likely’ to have resulted from child abuse.”

“I saw that, “Jake said. “That doctor is a lawsuit waiting to happen, whether he’s right or not.”

“That’s the really sad part,” Amanda said. “Everyone is just freaking out about this because of who the family is, and it makes it really hard to focus on the fact that this kid was beaten up pretty badly.”

“Makes it a lot easier to be out-of-towners,” Jake said. “I really don’t care who he is. But that lawyer is the one who’s gonna make it hard on me. I’ve barely been doing this two years,” Jake said. “He’s already trying to intimidate the hell out of me, and referred to his experience about eight times in the three minutes he spoke.”

“How did he manage to make his experience relevant?”

“In my thirty-four years of trial experience I have never seen such an egregiously overzealous response to an obvious accident.” Jake snorted. “Well, in my twenty-two months of trial experience I have never seen an attorney more impressed with his own shit.”

“What did the judge think of his shit?”

“Oh, that was even better,” Jake said. “Chuck and the judge had to catch up on old times, ‘off the record’ of course. Then the judge looks at me, and I swear he would have scolded me if he could have, and says, ‘how can we dispose of this matter today?’”

“He did NOT!” Amanda said, loud enough for the paralegals in the office to turn around.

Jake waved them off over Amanda’s shoulder. “Amanda, you need to find a way not to sound quite so naïve,” Jake said scoldingly. “There’s very little about this process that makes sense, and nothing happens the way you learned about it in school.”

“Knock it off and spare me the lecture,” Amanda said, feeling pissy again. “First of all, you don’t need to act like you’re wise to the world of law and disenchanted before you’re thirty. Second, if you’re not bothered by what happened in there then you need to find a new job.”

“I didn’t say I’m not bothered by it. I’m just saying I’ve seen plenty of it and you will too.” He sat back and smiled at her. “I don’t fight with any of the other social workers,” he said smirking. “It must be you.”

Thrown off guard again, she could only smile back.

* * *

They spent the next hour reviewing the two cases. Jake thought Marlys’s situation would settle down and become relatively routine. Her public defender had not put up much of an argument and seemed to know that the kids needed to be placed until she could get sober.

Skip Huseman had demanded discovery on the Thomas case, and he had already filed briefs demanding that the case be dropped citing three different bases in three different statutes. Jake felt that Huseman was trying to drown him in paperwork so he would drop the case and take the easy way out.

“Fortunately, the law is on our side,” Jake said, “and I think he knows it. We have a serious injury, a report from a doctor, and the kid’s own words, via his friend, that his dad did it. If we charge him criminally we’ll have a hell of a time admitting any of this evidence into court, but since it’s a CHIPS case, we only have to have a ‘preponderance of evidence’ that he did it.”

“Are you going to charge him criminally?” Amanda asked, finishing her diet coke and twisting off the tab.

“I really don’t know,” Jake said. “Criminal charges are a lot harder to get, and depending on the situation, sometimes Barb wants us to resolve it in family court instead. I’m thinking I should focus on the CHIPS because that will keep Huseman more off balance, and I’ll have a whole lot more latitude to talk about what really happened.”