Waking Kylie

by Alafair Burke

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Waking Kylie

  An Excerpt from The Wife

  About the Author

  Also by Alafair Burke

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Waking Kylie

  Diane Light closed the file folder and tucked it at the bottom of the foot-high pile. When the tower began to wobble, she used her forearm to hold it steady.

  She resisted the urge to separate that last file from the rest. It was special. It deserved to be carried into court on its own.

  “Jesus, I thought I was late.” Diane heard footsteps rush past her office door, her coworker’s voice fading as he moved farther down the hallway. “Stone’s a stickler about time, you know.”

  She knew.

  She stole a glance at her watch as she scooped the stack of files against her chest. Two minutes until Stone would be seated at his bench, tapping the face of his own watch, eager for Diane—the deputy district attorney assigned to his courtroom today—to start calling cases.

  Judge Stone was a stickler for promptness, but he was also a stickler for facts. She’d memorized the contents of Kylie’s file, from start to finish.

  Two hours in, Stone pointed at the clock. “Nice job this morning, Miss Light. You could teach your colleagues a thing or two about docket management.”

  Her pile was down to two inches. Three more cases and still an hour to go before Stone’s hardwired lunch alarm would sound. The strategy was working. She was saving Kylie for last.

  She rushed through the next two cases. They were easy ones: both mothers were complying with conditions. The assigned social workers reported progress and recommended continued monitoring and treatment. The parties would return in two months for another status check.

  Forty-five minutes to go, and only one more file. Kylie’s file. She called the case number and watched Kylie’s father, Kyle, approach the opposing counsel’s table with his court-appointed attorney. The daddy-daughter pairing of names could have been cute under different circumstances. Kylie’s assigned court advocate stood between the two lawyers.

  “Your Honor,” Diane said, setting the stage for the discussion, “you may recall this case. The State originally moved to terminate parental rights ten months ago, after police learned the parents had permitted the child to be sexually abused in exchange for drugs. She was only twenty-two months old at the time.” Twenty-two months old sounded much younger than two years old. Somehow it sounded even more babylike than a year and a half. Diane noticed the court reporter’s eyes widen. She hadn’t been working long enough to have hardened to the kinds of facts recited on the child welfare docket.

  “Objection.” It came from the dad’s attorney, Lisa Hobbins.

  Hobbins pretended to care about her clients, but Diane knew for a fact that she didn’t; three years ago, after too many tequila shots at the old Veritable Quandary, Hobbins had notoriously puked her guts out in the gutter of First Avenue and cried about the “scumbag parents” the courts forced her to represent.

  “Miss Light, of all people, is well aware that only the mother was convicted of those charges,” Hobbins said now. “My client was estranged from his wife at the time the crimes occurred. He wanted to get clean. She didn’t. He would never have left Kylie with her mother if he’d known—”

  “We dispute all of that, Your Honor. A grand jury indicted the father as well as the mother.”

  Hobbins interrupted. “And then Kylie’s mother testified at my client’s trial—under oath—and took sole responsibility for the horrific abuse.”

  “Your Honor, the State’s position is that the mother is a battered woman and not estranged from her husband at all. She testified under duress, falsely taking full responsibility to protect him—”

  Judge Stone held up a hand. “You lost at trial, Miss Light. The jury must have rejected that theory.”

  “But this is a separate case, Your Honor. As an independent finder of fact, you can make a fresh assessment—”

  “So where are we now?” He didn’t try to mask the glance at his watch.

  Diane quickly summarized the efforts to find Kylie a suitable parent. Ten months earlier, Kylie had been placed with a foster mother, Janice Miller, while the State sought to terminate the rights of her biological parents. Kylie’s mother had already agreed as part of her criminal sentence, but the father was resisting. After three hearings, Judge Stone found grounds for termination “in theory” but wanted assurances that Kylie would have a permanent home. Since then, the case had been continued repeatedly while Kylie’s foster mother decided whether to enter into a legal adoption.

  Stone was rifling through the court’s file. Maybe Diane should have called the case first. She didn’t want the judge getting stuck on continuances and previous hearings; she needed him to focus on Kylie.

  All that work. All that planning. And now she was blowing it. Again. She remembered breaking down in her office, sobbing with the door closed, moments after the criminal trial against Kyle Chance had ended with a Not Guilty verdict.

  “To cut to the chase, Your Honor”—she knew that was Stone’s favorite phrase—“Kylie was not an easy child to place. Adoptive parents are reluctant to take on children who have been through the kind of trauma Kylie experienced. In addition to the abuse that led to her parents’ arrest, she was born drug-affected. When Child Protective Services became involved, she was undernourished and suffering from PTSD. But after nearly a year as a foster parent to Kylie, Miss Miller was sufficiently comfortable with Kylie’s physical and emotional progress. This morning was supposed to be a hearing to finalize the termination of Mr. Chance’s parental rights with a simultaneous adoption by Miss Miller.”

  “But?”

  Diane had a sudden image of Janice sitting in her office last week, bouncing Kylie on her lap and thanking Diane for her patience while she made certain she was capable of raising a child on her own. “Miss Miller was struck and killed by a drunk driver two nights ago as she was jogging across Powell Boulevard.” Judge Stone made a tsk sound. “The State is still seeking termination of parental rights. Regardless of her father’s acquittal on criminal charges, the basic facts remain.”

  She couldn’t believe she had to spell out the stomach-churning evidence once again. A neighbor in the Chances’ apartment building called the police after she saw blood on a child’s dress in the communal laundry room. A fan of crime TV, she went so far as to seize the evidence and seal it in a Ziploc bag. The lab results—the blood was from a female, another type of fluid was from a man—painted an even more disturbing picture. A search warrant executed at the apartment led to a set of Kylie’s pajamas with yet another man’s genetic material. The State’s DNA database turned up a match to the pajamas—a convicted sex offender named Trevor Williams, who just happened to be Kyle Chance’s cellmate during Chance’s prison stint on drug charges.

  Cutting a deal with that pedophile was the hardest bargain Diane had ever struck. They might never identify the other man—or men—to whom Kylie was traded for drugs, but they had Williams, and Williams was willing to give them both of the parents. It was the only way to protect the girl in the long run.

  When Diane got to Williams’s trial testimony, Hobbins cut her off. “Your Honor, that man was a serial offender who testified in exchange for leniency. Given how child abusers are treated in prison, he would have said anything to get in the prosecutor’s good graces.”

  Judge Stone raised an impatient palm again. “I’m not going to relitigate the criminal case here, ladies. You should both know that the standard is the best interests of the child.”

  And how the hell was it in Kylie’s best interests to live with a man who sold her as a
two-year-old to support his heroin habit?

  Diane knew her argument would only go downhill from there. The woman who was supposed to be Kylie’s forever-mother was gone, and now Kylie was staying in a group home, the youngest of all the children there.

  Diane focused on maintaining her composure while her opposing counsel painted Kyle Chance as some kind of victim. According to Hobbins, Chance’s shock at what his wife had done to their daughter had been the wake-up call he needed. After some initial relapses, he had been clean for five months. He still denied all knowledge of his wife’s crimes, but he had been willing to let Kylie go with Janice Miller because the woman had been there for his daughter when he had not. But now Miller was gone, and he was finally in a “position to parent.”

  “Miss Hobbins, does your client have a residence suitable for the child to live there now?”

  Diane couldn’t believe how quickly Hobbins had managed to reframe the entire case.

  “Yes, Your Honor. He has a private apartment with subsidization through Section Eight. It is a one-bedroom; Kylie would have the bedroom, and he would sleep in the living room. Were he granted custody, he would qualify for additional subsidization. He has a social worker through his drug rehabilitation program, and she would assist him in securing a two-bedroom. He is working part-time as a janitor at Portland State, and his sister has agreed to watch Kylie while he is at work.”

  Diane remembered the sister. She’d refused to take Kylie in because “my food stamps barely cover my own three kids, and you people don’t pay foster parents for shit.”

  “And what does Kylie want?” The judge directed his question to Paula Chambers, Kylie’s court-appointed advocate.

  “Your Honor, she’s not even three years old,” Diane said.

  “I didn’t ask the child if she wanted a pony. I’m simply asking a question of a fellow lawyer who is supposed to play a role here. Is that all right with you, Miss Light? Am I allowed to ask a question?”

  Diane forced herself to nod deferentially as Chambers walked them through the basics: Kylie was lucky “in a sense” to have suffered the abuse at such at a young age. The psychiatrists said she was unlikely to retain any conscious long-term memory of the incidents.

  She tested at below-average intelligence—most likely a consequence of her mother’s prenatal drug use—but the experts attributed her delayed speech to the lack of environmental stimulation prior to her placement with Miss Miller. She had recently shown some willingness to vocalize but had become distracted and unresponsive in the two days since her move to the group home. She had seen her father six times during the last three months with the consent and supervision of her foster mom. According to Chambers, Kylie demonstrated a “natural fondness” for him and “clearly recognized that he played some role in her life.”

  Kyle Chance chose that moment to speak up on his own behalf. “I just want one more chance to be her dad, Judge. I promise you on my life that I will not mess it up this time. Please, sir. Please.” Chance had trimmed his straggly black hair and had gained a few pounds since the time of his mug shot, but he still looked at least a decade older than his actual thirty-five years.

  “Baby steps, Mr. Chance. We’ll start with five-hour days with you, one hour supervised. She’ll remain at the group home at night. We’ll hear again from all parties in two weeks and make a decision then.”

  Diane could not believe how quickly this case, almost a year in the making—not to mention the criminal trial—was spiraling out of control. “Your Honor, that’s four hours a day without supervision,” she protested.

  “I’m aware of basic math, Miss Light.”

  “But the best interests of the child—”

  “—require some consistency for this little girl. The biological mother is in prison. The foster mother just died. She has one, and only one, person left, and he stands here by all accounts a changed—and acquitted—man. You have nothing to offer but a group home filled with juvenile delinquents.”

  “I can offer myself, Your Honor. I’ll take her if that’s the only option. You can’t put her back with this man.”

  “Good Lord, Miss Light. Get control of yourself. I recognize your indignation, and it’s on the record. There’s no need to be hyperbolic.”

  “It’s not hyperbole, Your Honor. I’ve been on this case for ten months. I handled the criminal prosecution. I have shepherded the case through the family court process. I went to Miss Miller’s home multiple times to talk to her about the adoption. He’s seen Kylie—what, six times since this all happened? I’ve seen her on at least twenty occasions. Does he even know her favorite stuffed animal? It’s a raccoon. Its name is Coo-Coo. It was one of the only times Kylie repeated after her speech therapists—she tried to say raccoon, and she said coo-coo, so that became the toy’s name. I was there for that, not him. Kylie knows me. I know Kylie. I will take her.”

  The courtroom fell silent. Even Diane could not believe her outburst. In all those hours studying the file, she had never once considered the possibility. But suddenly every piece fell into place. There was a reason she had been the major-crimes attorney assigned to the trial. There was a reason she had requested the transfer from criminal court and had landed in the family law unit. Maybe there was even a reason Janice Miller had been hit by a drunk driver.

  Diane could do this. She could be a good mother to that girl.

  Stone cleared his throat before speaking. “Well, that’s very noble of you, Miss Light, but the best interests of the child value biological connections. Let’s give Kylie a chance at a life with her father. I hope I’m not wrong about you, Mr. Chance.”

  “You’re not, sir. I promise you, you’re not. Thank you. Thank you so, so much.” Chance grabbed both of Hobbins’s hands and shook them hard.

  Diane saw the defense attorney well up and wanted to slap her.

  Five weeks later, Diane started her car engine, searching for the comfort of the radio. All that silence made the minutes tick by too slowly. Where the hell was Matt?

  The guy leaving the McDonald’s was looking at her. He saw her notice him. He smiled.

  Diane still wasn’t used to that kind of smile from a man. She had spent her entire life as the type of girl men looked away from. Or if one looked, the glance would be followed by a nudge of his buddy, then a wisecrack and guilty giggle. Dude, that’s just wrong.

  At least they usually had the courtesy to keep their voices down. Well, not that one time, back in law school. She’d worn her knee-length purple sweater tunic to class. Even with the black leggings, it was a bold fashion choice. She’d thought she looked pretty good until she heard the male voices singing in the undergrad quad, “‘I love you, you love me . . .’” Maybe she would have managed to forget the incident—the day abandoned somewhere in the recesses of her mind like that enormous sweater discarded in the bathroom garbage can—but someone had yelled, “Barney!” as she walked the stage at commencement. To this day, she still burned inside if she stumbled across a picture of that big purple dinosaur.

  Her cell phone buzzed on the console. A text message illuminated the screen. It was from Greg. Will u pls change cable bill to ur name? Grace tried 2 add Showtime. Mix-up b/c 2 accts under mine. Thx.

  Greg and Grace. Just the sound of it was ridiculous. Diane had spent nearly thirty years with the man, and now her relationship with Greg was nothing but logistics hammered out through misspellings and abbreviations. She hit Delete.

  Where the fuck was Matt?

  Maybe pulling Matt into this had been too big a risk. At one point, they’d had something resembling a friendly relationship, albeit one based on reciprocal compensation: he was her favorite informant; she was his benefactor in the drug unit. Relying on and rewarding the cooperation of criminals was one of the ugly realities of her job, but as felons went, Matt wasn’t so bad. His only crime was to sell drugs, and then only to adults and in small quantities. Most important—for her purposes, at least—he always kept his ears and eyes
open for information that he could trade for a get-out-of-jail-free card.

  Matt was so well connected to Portland’s heroin trade that she’d gone to him last January hoping he might recognize Kylie’s parents. Maybe he was selling to them or had seen them in the usual spots looking to buy. Matt had never seen either one of the Chances, but Diane had mentally added a chit to his account, just for the time he spent studying their mug shots.

  Matt had been popped fourteen times, but because of the chits, he had never taken a conviction. The defendants who’d been burned by his information called him Matt the Rat, but more commonly, he was known on the streets as Matt the Cat because he’d burned through nine lives and then some.

  That track record made him a good informant, but not a good ally. Sitting in her car waiting for him, Diane realized that a senior deputy district attorney’s head on a silver platter would be hefty currency in Matt’s trade, much more valuable to him than yet another IOU from her.

  She wondered how the office would respond if anyone discovered what she was about to do. She’d been with the office for nearly eighteen years; she’d known colleagues who had DUIs, arrests for so-called domestic disturbances, even coke problems. Some had jobs waiting for them after the appropriate amount of rehab. Others got shipped off, their cases referred to the attorney general for investigation.

  A year ago, if she’d been caught using an informant to entrap a defendant, she would have gotten the kid-glove treatment. She’d been a team player. Kept her head down. Put the office first, always.

  And then Greg left her. The boy who’d taken her to the high school prom. The guy she’d shacked up with in college. The man she’d married the weekend after graduation. The asshole left her.

  When he’d asked her to prom, she was already approaching two hundred pounds. She was nearly at three when he told her there was someone else.

  Her weight was never really an issue for him. That’s what she’d thought, at least. He was big too. They both liked to eat. They both said they were happy in their bodies and wished other people would accept them as they were. Regardless, they had accepted each other. Now she wondered whether they’d loved each other only because no one else would.