Chapter Text
Rossi sighed as he looked out from the steps of the FBI building. He had a rare break between cases, and he had no idea what to do with it. Jason had suggested that he go outside, likely just to annoy him, but Dave had taken him up on the suggestion anyways. He figured that as soon as he tried to leave, he’d get called in on another case, and that would at least give him something to do.
So as Rossi waited for his next case, he profiled the people around him. He took in their clothes, their expressions, and the way they moved. There were the commuters traveling to work - bankers, secretaries, businessmen, lawyers. There were parents taking their children to school, and tourists visiting the city for the first time. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Nothing, that is, until Dave spotted a haggard young woman climbing the steps to the FBI. Her eyes anxiously searched for something, but they seemed unfocused. Like she wasn’t quite seeing what was around her. In her arms, she cradled a blanket-wrapped bundle.
Intrigued, Rossi took a few steps closer to figure out more about this woman. She paced back and forth on a single step, muttering something to herself. Despite the cold, she wasn’t wearing any shoes, and around her wrist was a band that looked suspiciously like a hospital bracelet. Dave put all this information together and came to a fairly obvious conclusion: this woman wasn’t well, and she needed help.
“Hello? Ma’am?” he ventured, slowly inching closer to the woman. She turned and looked up at him. Some of the fog cleared from her eyes.
“Ma’am?” Rossi asked again. “Are you alright?”
She smiled with what seemed to be relief. “You’re just the person I’ve been looking for,” she breathed.
“I’m sorry?” Dave asked, confused. Clearly, this woman wasn’t going to be easy to get through to. “Ma’am, is there someone I can call for you?” He tried to catch a glimpse of her hospital band. All he could see were the last three letters of her name. EID.
The woman shook her head. “I can’t take care of him. But you can.” She shoved the bundle at Rossi, and he took it from her automatically. Then he looked down at it and gasped.
Wrapped in the blankets was a baby. A newborn, no more than a few days old, and fast asleep. “Ma’am!” he protested, looking back up at the woman. But she was already gone.
“Ma’am?” Rossi asked again. He looked up and down the steps. There was no sign of her anywhere.
Rossi hurried down to the street as quickly as he could, cradling the baby to his chest. He continued to call out for the woman but got nothing except for a few strange looks from passersby as he asked if any of them had seen a barefoot woman with a hospital bracelet.
“Dave?” a voice asked from behind him. Rossi spun around to see Gideon giving him a confused look. “When I said you should go outside and talk to people, this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind. Whose baby is that, anyway?”
“I don’t know,” Rossi replied frantically. “She just gave it to me and then ran off. You have to help me find her.”
Gideon raised an eyebrow. “Very funny, Dave. Is that Harrison’s new baby? Or Miller’s?”
“Jason, I’m not joking!” Gideon immediately sobered up when he saw his friend’s serious expression. “Some woman just came up to me and told me that she couldn’t take care of her baby, and then she handed it to me and disappeared.”
“Which way did she go?”
Rossi shook his head helplessly. “I didn’t see. She was just here and then she was gone.”
“Okay, here’s what we’re going to do.” Gideon thought quickly. “It’s cold outside. We’ll take the baby inside and call Child Protective Services. They can deal with this. Until then, we’ll just have to try not to kill the kid.”
-
A short while later, Rossi sat in a hospital conference room with a mix of FBI agents, police officers, and social workers. Another social worker had taken the baby to get checked out by a doctor, so that was one less thing for Dave to worry about at the moment.
“Can you tell us what happened, Agent Rossi?”
Rossi sighed. He’d already gone over the story several times. But he knew how these things worked, and so he dutifully recounted the story once again.
“I saw a woman carrying a baby up the steps of the FBI building. I could tell she wasn’t well, so I approached her to see if I could help.”
“How did you know that she wasn’t well?” one of the police officers asked.
“She wasn’t wearing any shoes, and there was a hospital bracelet around her wrist,” Rossi replied. “It also looked like she was talking to herself. And when she looked around, it was like she wasn’t seeing things how they really were.”
“So then what happened?” The other police officer, who seemed to be slightly younger than the first, took notes as Rossi told his story.
“I asked her if she was alright and if there was anyone I could call for her. She didn’t answer, but she said something about how she’d been looking for me.”
“Did you recognize her? Is there any chance you knew her somehow?” the older officer interrupted. Rossi took a deep breath. He wasn’t used to being on this side of a police interrogation, and he had to say that he didn't enjoy it much.
“No,” Dave replied with confidence. “As I said, she clearly wasn’t very stable mentally. And I think she was aware of that because she told me that she couldn’t take care of her baby and that she wanted me to take him. Then she gave him to me.”
“And you have no idea where she went.”
Rossi shook his head. “When I looked up, she was gone. I tried to find her on the street, but no one I talked to had seen her.”
The first police officer nodded. “Do you think you could describe the woman to a sketch artist? It might be able to help us find her.”
“Of course,” Rossi replied automatically.
“Great. We’ll get one in here as soon as possible. Thank you for your cooperation.”
Rossi nodded. As the officers turned to leave, he remembered the woman’s hospital bracelet. “Wait,” he blurted out.
The men looked back at him. “Yes, Agent Rossi?”
“I took a look at the woman’s wristband when I was talking to her, and I saw part of her name. EID. Do you think that might help you to figure out who she is?”
“It might,” the older officer said, although he didn’t seem particularly convinced. The other police officer made a note of Rossi’s observation in his notebook. “Thank you for your cooperation, Agent.”
Rossi nodded. “Of course. Please let me know if there’s anything else I can do to help.”