Nobody's Child — Janet Dawson

When a decomposing body is dug up by a construction company, authorities suspect murder. Private investigator Jeri Howard's abrasive client, Naomi Smith, thinks the victim could be her daughter, Maureen, who ran away from home two years ago. Jeri dislikes her client, but she is determined to discover the identity of the dead woman and how she was killed. What worries her just as much, though, is the missing child Maureen was last seen carrying--both of them sick, broke, and sleeping among the homeless in the shadows of Berkeley's Peoples Park.

Posing as a homeless person, Jeri probes the darkening heart Of the once-beautiful city, peering behind the lace curtains of middle-class respectability to find out why Maureen ran from home and how she ended up on the streets. In her desperate search to save a child that nobody seems to want, Jeri hits a chilling wall of suburban silence and urban distress....