drove Wren there in the front seat of her own cruiser, not the back. Tom followed on the Road King, and found that his hands were shaking on the grips for the whole twenty miles, and had to pull over once on the shoulder and sit for a minute with the engine running, breathing.
At the substation they put Wren in a small break room with a couch and a vending machine and a television that only got one channel. Ruiz bought her a grilled cheese sandwich from the café across the street, and a bag of chips, and a chocolate milk, and Wren ate all of it without seeming to notice she was eating. Tom gave his statement to Trooper Begay in an office down the hall. It took an hour and a half. When he was done, he went and stood in the doorway of the break room.
Wren was sitting on the couch with her knees drawn up, staring at the television without watching it. Ruiz was sitting beside her with a laptop.
"Mr. Calloway," Ruiz said. "Come in. We could use you, actually."
He came in and sat in a plastic chair across from them.
"Here's where we are," Ruiz said. She said it to both of them, Tom noticed; she did not talk over Wren's head, the way people usually talked over children's heads. "I've got an on-call caseworker from Child Protective Services in Elko on the phone, and she's driving out, but it's two and a half hours. Wren can't go back to the diner. Obviously. And there's no relative on file with the state except her mother, who's incarcerated. So unless we find somebody tonight, the caseworker will place her in an emergency foster home until a judge can look at it." Ruiz paused. "Wren tells me she has a sister."
"Jess," said Wren. "Jessica Pike. She's in nursing school at the University of Utah. She's twenty-one. I don't have her number. He took my phone. I used to know it by heart but it's been so long I can't..." Her voice cracked. "I keep trying and the numbers come out wrong."
"That's okay," Ruiz said gently. "That's why I've got this." She turned the laptop around. On it was a social media page with a photograph of a young woman in blue scrubs, laughing, with the same sunburned nose as Wren and the same long brown hair. "Is this her?"
Wren looked at the screen and made a sound Tom would remember for a long time. It was not quite a sob. It was the sound of something very tightly wound coming loose all at once.
"That's her," she whispered. "That's Jess."
It took Ruiz forty minutes and three phone calls, one of them to the nursing school's after-hours security office, to get a number. She dialed it on speaker, and set the phone on the table in front of Wren, and it rang four times, and then a young woman's voice answered, tired and a little wary.