Secrets and Lies by Capri Montgomery

twenty-two depending on who was looking. There was an older lady who thought she was fourteen, but she attributed that to the glasses the woman had in her hand instead of on her face.
    “She’s missing,” she snapped.
    “Down the hall to your right,” he dismissed her by shoving the remainder of the doughnut in his mouth. It was like half the doughnut! How could he fit it in his mouth and still have room to chew?
    She stood there, looking astonished at the site in front of her. She had seen many men eat before, but never once had they piled food in their mouth as if it were going to magically disappear if they ate it in pieces. She shrugged. He mumbled something garbled.
    “I’m sorry; I couldn’t understand you with that half masticated doughnut in your mouth. Chew, swallow and then speak,” she reminded him. Good Lord, where had manners gone to? Vanished, she assumed, like everything else in that precinct seemed to do. She had never disliked cops before, but she was starting to dislike them now. What on earth was her tax dollars helping pay for? If they didn’t want to do their job they should have relinquished the position to somebody who did. There were plenty of people still out of work; she was sure any number of them would be willing to do the job. So far she had encountered cops who wouldn’t even work her mother’s case. She didn’t know much about police work—sure, she had seen a few episodes of CSI New York and Cold Case, but she didn’t know much outside of that. What she had expected, and maybe the television shows had jaded her view of reality, but what she had expected was that somebody would at least make a show of pretending to work her mother’s case.
    “I said,” he swallowed the chewed up doughnut. “Down the hall and to your right.”
    “Somebody there will help me?”
    “Down the hall and to your right,” he repeated before walking away.
    Great. What was down the hall and to her right? Another door, another desk, a dead body? She blew out an exasperated breath. Clearly she wasn’t going to find out the answer to her question without going down the hall and to her right so she went, down the hall and to her right. What she found was just a door that led to stairs. “What am I supposed to do now?”
    “Are you looking for something, ma’am?”
    She jumped, startled by the masculine voice behind her. An officer, she deduced from the uniform, badge and gun…then again, in this place he could have been a stripper in costume. She was starting to wonder if she actually came to the right place. Or maybe she had stepped through the front doors into the Twilight Zone because the experience so far had been so far removed from what she thought it would be, thought it should be, that she was starting to wonder if this really was reality.
    “The officer at the front desk told me to come down the hall and go to my right, but he didn’t say where to go after that. I’m here about my mother—”
    “Oh,” he cut her off. Did everybody know her already or something? She was sure she hadn’t seen any of them before so why did they all seem to know exactly what she was there for. “If he sent you this way then he must have wanted you to go to MP. That’s up the stairs, third floor, first door. You can’t miss it.”
    He walked away before she could ask what MP was. She shrugged. “Up the stairs, third floor, first door,” she repeated. She walked up the stairs, to the third floor and through the first door where a friendly female officer greeted her with a smile. Now, this was the police department she expected. Friendly, helpful…after all wasn’t it the police mantra to protect and serve? Although she gathered there was nothing in that mantra about doing either of those things with kindness and grace.
    “I’m here about my mother.”
    “I see.” She sighed. “It’s sad when it’s family, but worse when it’s a parent.”
    “I know,” Thena shook her head. “You just never