The Cradle Robbers (8 page)

“You
did
want to spend five years living with a Nazi?” I said.

“Of course not. I just didn’t take any such stand. I was nowhere near that brave. I simply asked to be transferred, repeating my request until the warden got so irritated with me that she had me put in the SHU for two weeks. By the time I was released, my former roommate was in segregation, having stabbed someone in the throat with a knife made out of toilet paper.” Sandra sat down.

“Toilet paper?” I said.

“Sure.”

“I’ve heard of making knives out of toothbrushes, hard candies, spoons. Never toilet paper.”

“It’s like papier-mâché,” Sandra said. “Ms. Applebaum, I understand from Fidelia that you have agreed to investigate the disappearance of my baby. I am very grateful to you. You cannot imagine how horrible it is to be stuck in here with no way to find him, no way even to know if he is safe.”

“Chiki told me about how it happened that Noah was . . . was taken. But could you tell me yourself? Just so I’m sure I have the full story?”

She folded her hands on the table in her front of her. She had a stillness about her that was remarkable, especially considering the fact that I could tell she had been a junkie, and a hardcore one at that. I did not know if she was currently using, but I could see that Sandra had used for long enough to blow out the veins on the inside of her elbows and even those on her wrists. There were marks on her forearms, on the side of her neck, in the well of her throat. Her pale skin was a roadmap of heroin ruin.

“In the months before Noah was born I tried to find someone to take him. My parents both passed
away—my mother when I was young, in grade school, my father almost five years ago now. My father has no family, but I have an aunt and two cousins on my mother’s side. I haven’t seen them since I was a teenager, but I know if I had some time, I could find them.”

“What’s your aunt’s name?” I asked.

“Bettina Trudeau. And my cousins are Jonathan and Mary. I don’t know if Mary got married and changed her name.

“It’s an unusual enough name, Bettina Trudeau. I should be able to find it with a simple skip trace.”

Sandra smiled sadly. “I hope you’ll need to.” Then she continued with her story. “I heard about the Lambs of the Lord from the social worker here at the prison. Some of the other pregnant women in the unit were using them, and it seemed like the perfect solution for me. The Lambs could keep the baby for as long as it took for me to find my aunt or my cousins. They sent me a packet and I signed a foster care agreement with them.”

I frowned. “Did the social worker arrange for them to send you materials?”

Sandra nodded. “A week or so after she told me about the Lambs of the Lord, I got their stuff.”

“So you didn’t contact them? The social worker set it up for you?”

“Yes.”

That, it seemed to me, was going to be important in any lawsuit against the organization and against that social worker. If she was actively soliciting on behalf of the Lambs of the Lord, and going so far as to set up contracts with women who had not actually contacted the Lambs of the Lord themselves, that would directly implicate her in the baby-stealing conspiracy. If one existed.

“What’s the social worker’s name?”

“Brock. Taylor Brock.”

I jotted that down.

“Does she work here full-time, do you know?”

“Mornings, I think, most days.”

“Did you bring the paperwork you got from them?”

Sandra took an elegant brochure printed on thick, creamy paper from one of her creased envelopes. She had brought dozens of these envelopes down with her. Prisoners aren’t allowed to have file folders, so they keep all their papers in the envelopes in which they receive them. I’ve known prisoners to carefully nurture a single manila envelope
for a dozen years. For that reason, I always make sure to send each page of correspondence in its own large envelope. Just in case they need an extra one.

Sandra had a contract on matching paper, replete with fine print. There was also a form entitled “Instructions for Transfer of Custody.” I glanced over the documents, noticing the engraved letterhead and the organization’s address.

“Did you ever meet with anyone from the Lambs of the Lord?”

“Just the foster family. When I got to the hospital I called the number on the instruction sheet. The foster parents got there right away, but the midwife wouldn’t let them take my baby. She said I had a right to at least a few hours with Noah.”

“A social worker wasn’t there to facilitate the transfer?”

“No, just the couple.”

I shook my head and motioned for her to continue.

“It was a long labor, and I was so tired. I tried not to, but I fell asleep holding Noah in my arms. I wasted hours of his time with me, sleeping. But I remember it. I have reconstructed every single moment
of those hours in my mind. Those are the only minutes in the first years of my son’s childhood that I will be with him outside of a prison and I want to remember them exactly as they happened.”

I swallowed, willing myself not to cry, and swearing that I would linger with gratitude and joy over my baby as soon as I once again held her in my arms.

“After about six hours the couple came in,” Sandra said.

“What were they like?”

“Young. Nervous. I don’t know. It was hard to pay attention. Everything happened so fast. I was staring at Noah, trying to hold him in my eyes for as long as possible. They sort of whisked him out and away. I didn’t even talk to them, really.”

“And what’s happened since?”

“I’ve written to the address they gave me, but my letters have come back ‘addressee unknown.’ The Lambs of the Lord won’t accept collect calls, but I’ve written to them, too. They wrote me this letter.”

She opened an envelope that had softened and crumpled a bit over time, but was scrupulously clean and unmarked. She pulled out a single sheet of paper. The letter, on plain white paper with what
looked like a totally different letterhead, laser-printed rather than engraved as it had been on the formal contract and the solicitation, informed Sandra that the Lambs of the Lord had no record of her case, that the child “Noah Anthony Lodge” was not under the care of the agency, and that all further correspondence from her would be returned unopened.

“I wrote back to tell them they had the name wrong, that it’s Lorgeree, not Lodge. I’ve asked friends on the outside to call the telephone number the foster family gave me, but nobody has gotten through. The same with the number for the Lambs of the Lord. Noah has just vanished. Sometimes I wonder if I’ve gone crazy, if this was all some horrible psychotic episode. If it wasn’t for the fact that I can’t fit into my clothes, it’s almost like I never gave birth to him at all.”

There was no response I could give that would possibly make her feel better. I felt my heart reach out to this young mother, whose circumstances were so dramatically different from my own, but whose love for her baby was precisely the same. I was suddenly so deeply ashamed of my previous thoughts that her child would be better off in other arms. Who was I to say such a thing?

After a few moments Sandra said, “I should probably tell you what I’m in for.”

“Only if you want to.”

It was a heroin deal. Sandra had introduced a new friend of hers to her dealer, and the two men had cooked up a scheme to take advantage of the L.A.–Kabul heroin distribution network that had gotten so vigorous since the U.S. invasion. Sandra’s new friend, however, turned out to be a confidential informant, working for the cops. For some reason the prosecutors decided to take pity on her and prosecute her in state court rather than federal. Or maybe the feds just wanted to throw the county D.A. a bone. Sandra pled guilty and was sentenced to five years, and was lucky to get it. If she’d been prosecuted in federal court she would have gone to jail for two or three times as long.

One of the things you learn as a public defender is that the line between those who end up in jail and those of us whose lives are untouched by this kind of trouble can be very thin. Sometimes it’s a matter of evildoers getting caught, but more often than not it’s a question of the fortunes of people’s lives, the accidents of fate and birth. Had my parents both died when I was young, as Sandra’s had, might I
have ended up a heroin addict, caught up in a drug deal, in jail on conspiracy charges? Anything is possible. I was so lucky in my life, and she was so unlucky. My babies were home safe in my beautiful, ramshackle house. Sandra had no idea where hers was. I decided at that moment that I was going to help this young woman, not because of Chiki and his cousin, not because Al and I had little else to do right then, but because I owed it to whatever it was in the world that had allowed me such good fortune and cursed her with such unhappiness.

Right before I left, Sandra said, “If the Lambs of the Lord try to have my parental rights terminated, do you think I could have Noah’s birth father come forward and demand custody?”

I had been waiting for Sandra to mention the father and was relieved that I didn’t need to bring it up myself. I flipped my notebook to an empty page. “I’m not a family law attorney, but I am absolutely certain that the baby’s father is entitled to custody of the child. Unless, of course, there’s a reason that he would be denied custody on his own.”

“Tweezer’s a junkie.”

“Is he still using?”

She shrugged. “Probably. I mean, when I’m
with him he can stay clean, more or less. But not on his own.”

“I’m not sure, then, that it would help your case to have him come forward.” She frowned. “Do you want me to get in touch with him?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so. Not yet. I hear from him sometimes. Or people tell me where he is. We lost our apartment in Eagle Rock after I got arrested, so he’s been staying with friends. If I need to find him I’ll be able to.” Sandra pushed her chair back across the tiles with a decisive squeak and opened the door to the interview room. “I am grateful for your help, Juliet. I wish I could pay you in something more than gratitude, but that’s all I have left to offer.”

B
ACK
out in the parking lot, I plugged the breast pump into the cigarette lighter, turned on the car engine, and did my best to achieve a modicum of discretion by lowering my shirt over the tops of the flanges. I watched a few cars drift in and out of the parking lot and almost nodded off, the rhythmic hum of the motor lulling my chronically sleep-deprived self to sleep. I jerked myself awake and, holding the pump flanges with one hand, I called the office with the other. Al was out, unfortunately, but Chiki was there, waiting for me to check in.

“Damn,” I said at the news that my partner was on the shooting range.

“You need some help, Juliet?”

“Yes, but you can’t help me. I need Al to do a quick address search.”

“Who are you looking for?”

“The social worker at the prison, Taylor Brock. There’s no way they’re going to let me into the prison to see her without an appointment and permission from the warden. I figured I’d have better luck just showing up at her house.” Since Sandra had said the social worker was only at the prison during the morning shift, there was a chance I could find her at home. Now I was going to have to rely on the telephone operator, and the likelihood of Ms. Brock being listed was slim. Individuals who work in law enforcement rarely are. They are less sophisticated, however, at keeping their addresses off the Web.

“436 Peachwood Lane. In Dartmore Village.”

“Excuse me?”

“There’s a T. Brock at 436 Peachwood Lane.”

“Please tell me you did not just use the computer.”

“Go on, check your BlackBerry. I bet there’s an email from Al with driving directions from Dartmore to 436 Peachwood Lane.”

“Did
Al
also turn up an actual office address of
the Lambs of the Lord?” The address I got from Sandra’s documents was the same as the one I got from Sister Pauline—a post office box in Pleasanton: their mail drop.

For a moment I heard rapid clicking that sounded suspiciously like tapping on a computer, but that of course must have been something else. A long-toenailed rodent clicking across the cement floor of the office?

“Dang,” Chiki said.

“Dang, what?”

“Nothing. I’m just surprised at what a good job the Lambs are doing at hiding their business address. It’s, like, nowhere. I can’t find it in any of the usual places.”

“
You
can’t find it?”

“I mean, Al can’t find it. Man, whoever they have doing this for them is
good.
You know what? You got to go to Pleasanton today? Because I know I—I mean, Al—can find it. It just might take some doing. It’s like trapping a mouse, you know? You come at it from every direction, bit by bit, until you’re holding it in your hand.”

I looked at the clock on the dashboard of my
rental car. I had just enough time to get over to Taylor Brock’s house and grill her before making the drive back to the San Jose airport. As little as I relished the idea, I was going to have to come back up to northern California some other day to visit the office of the Lambs of the Lord. Another flight. Not to mention the hours. This non-case of ours was going to end up costing Al and me more in expenses than most of our actual cases did. And there was no one to reimburse us this time. I glanced over at the hulking prison building behind the razor wire. The money didn’t really seem to matter.

“I’m sure if you gave Al some very specific instructions, and a few hours, even he could figure out how to use the computer to track the Lambs down. Chiki, you’ve got to be careful with what you’re up to in the office. You don’t want that probation officer of yours barging in while you’re doing something you shouldn’t be. They make unannounced work and home visits. You know that.”

“I’m in a windowless garage with the door locked, Juliet. But don’t worry. I won’t touch the computer. I won’t even breathe on it. How about
that? Not even to download you the patches for your system software that were released today. You’ll have to figure out how to keep your computer from crashing all on your own.”