Mystery Writers of America Presents Vengeance

by Lee Child

  Hobbins interjected on her client’s behalf. “Your Honor, that man was a child rapist 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.”

  The man’s name was Trevor Williams. His status as a convicted felon was the primary reason the State’s criminal case had come together. A neighbor in the Chances’ apartment building called the police after she saw blood on a child’s pair of pants in the communal laundry room. A fan of CSI, she went so far as to seize the evidence and seal it in a Ziploc bag. Police found not only blood but also seminal fluid. A search warrant executed at the Chances’ home turned up a set of pajamas with a different man’s fluids. Thanks to the state’s DNA data bank for convicts, they linked the second sample to Williams.

  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 Kiley was traded off, 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.

  Judge Stone wasn’t interested in the details of Williams’s testimony, however. He 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 Kiley’s best interests to live with a man who sold her as a two-year-old to support his crack habit?

  Diane knew her argument would only go downhill from there. The State had not yet secured a new foster placement for Kiley. She was staying in a group home, the youngest of all the children there.

  Then it was Hobbins’s turn. The conviction of Chance’s wife and initiation of TPR hearings had been the wake-up call the father needed, she said. 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 Kiley 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 live in a residence suitable for the child to be there now?”

  Now?

  “Yes, Your Honor. He has a private apartment with subsidization through Section Eight. It is a one-bedroom; Kiley would have the bedroom, and he would sleep in the living room. Were he granted custodial status, 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, but his sister has agreed to watch Kiley while he is at work.”

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

  “And what does Kiley want?” The judge directed his question to the guardian ad litem.

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

  “I didn’t ask if she wanted to run off and live with Santa Claus. I’m simply asking a question of our assigned guardian ad litem, since presumably she needs to justify her public-interest salary here today. Is that all right with you, Miss Light? Am I allowed to ask a question?”

  The guardian ad litem’s role was to advocate directly for Kiley, but in this case, Diane believed that the prosecution was doing precisely that.

  Diane took a deep breath and forced herself to nod deferentially. She waited while the guardian ad litem rushed through the basics. In some ways, Kiley was lucky 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 the monitoring social worker, she demonstrated a “natural fondness” for him and “clearly recognized that he played some role in her life.”

  Kiley’s father said, “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.”

  “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.”

  “Your Honor, that’s four hours a day without supervision,” Diane 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 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 Kiley—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 Kiley 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. Kiley knows me. I know Kiley. 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 to 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. She and Kiley could be a family. The two of them, together.

  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 Kiley 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’s eyes tear up and wanted to slap her.

  THREE WEEKS LATER, Kiley officially moved in with her father full-time. Kiley’s clothing and Coo-Coo were packed into a black Hefty bag at the group home. A social worker drove her and the bag to Chance’s recently rented two-bedroom apartment, outfitted with a new twin bed for Kiley, and left her there.

  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 Jake?

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

  She 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 sc
hool. 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 couldn’t see that big purple dinosaur without wanting to eat a pint of Häagen-Dazs.

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

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

  Where the fuck was Jake?

  Maybe pulling Jake into this had been too big a risk. At one point, they’d had something resembling a friendly relationship, albeit 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 drug dealers went, Jake wasn’t so bad. He sold only to adults and only 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.

  Jake was so well connected to Portland’s white crack trade that she’d gone to him last January hoping he might recognize Kiley’s parents. Maybe he was selling to them or had seen them in the usual spots looking to buy. Jake 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.

  Jake the Snake had been popped fourteen times, but because of the chits, he had never taken a conviction.

  That track record made him a good informant, but not a good ally. A senior deputy district attorney’s head on a silver platter was some pretty hefty currency in Jake’s trade, much more valuable to him than yet another IOU from her.

  She wondered how the office would respond if she were tainted by the whiff of scandal. 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, 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 Mark 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. Instead, they had accepted each other. Now she wondered whether they’d loved each other only because no one else would.

  Everything started to change about five years ago. They’d gotten married so young that they just assumed a baby would come along eventually. Before they knew it, their thirties were almost over. The doctors said her weight might be the reason she hadn’t conceived.

  She and Mark went on a diet together. They joined the gym. Success came faster to him than to her.

  So did pregnancy.

  Ironically, it wasn’t until Mark broke the news that he was expecting a child with someone else—Mindy from spin class, naturally—that her own weight finally started to come off. It was as if that one conversation changed her physical makeup. Her metabolism, her glucose levels, her fat cells—all transformed. It was like waking up in someone else’s body.

  But by then, the body was too old. She was forty-four. On a government salary, she didn’t have the money for in vitro, private adoption, or a surrogate. She’d always assumed she was lucky to have Mark, even when he’d looked like Jabba the Hutt. Now she couldn’t believe the person she saw in her mirror every day. She was finally the kind of woman who was appealing to men, but to what end?

  It wasn’t just her body that changed. So did her determination. Before the weight loss, though she worked in an office filled with athletes and health nuts who viewed physical fitness as a measure of character, she had nevertheless excelled because she was like an uncaged tiger at trial. But the anger and indignation that had propelled her courtroom performances had somehow burned away with all those pounds. She found herself cutting corners. Winging opening statements. Last December, she’d snapped at a rape victim: What do you think happens when you smoke meth with total strangers? She rang in the new year by oversleeping on the final day of Kyle Chance’s criminal trial, then delivering her closing argument in a groggy haze.

  She’d barely had the energy to cry after the acquittal.

  And so, after climbing the prosecutorial hierarchy for eighteen years, she’d asked for a transfer out of the major-crimes unit, the most coveted job in the office. She knew the rotation out of downtown and into the wasteland of family court was intended as punishment, a message to the rest of the attorneys that they requested changes at their own peril.

  But now she realized the move had allowed her to stay in Kiley’s life. Who else would have protected her?

  She finally spotted Jake, who looked only in the direction of oncoming traffic on the one-way street before he dashed across Park Avenue. This was the kind of thing a mother noticed.

  She rolled down her window halfway.

  “Sorry, Light. No dice.”

  “You didn’t find him?” According to the social worker, Chance worked janitorial duty at the campus until nine o’clock.

  “I found him a’ight. Dude dipped.” Jake’s skin was white as Casper, but not his voice. She once tried getting him to drop the affect for his trial testimony, telling him he sounded like a twenty-first-century minstrel show. He responded by asking what religion had to do with it.

  “Are you sure you talked to the right guy?” She hit her overhead light and showed him Chance’s mug shot again. If only Jake had recognized this photo in January. If only he’d had some connection to Kyle and Rachel Chance. Testimony placing the couple together near the time of Kiley’s abuse would have debunked their bogus story that the mother acted alone during a desperate binge brought on by their separation. “This picture’s a year old. He’s put on a little weight since then.”

  “I did my thing, you know? Acted like I was working the park blocks. Saw him coming. Sidled up to him. Asked if he was looking for rock. Dude just said no, thanks, and kept on walking.”

  “I’m not buying it, Jake.”

  “You’re my girl, Light. Liked you better with that junk in your trunk, fo’ sho’, but you know I want to he’p you out. You think I’d cross you? I know better than to get DiLi mad.”

  She smiled, remembering the nickname he’d conjured up for her when J.Lo first hit the cultural lexicon, a decade earlier.

  “I want to trust you, Jake, but I don’t believe for a second that this guy turned down the opportunity to get high.”

  “Hey, whatchu want me to say?”

  “That you just sold the man in this picture some dope.”

  “Then you send your man in there to frisk him down but he don’t find no rock. That would make me a liar, and you know I only speak the truth. I bathe in the light of honesty, girl. I might sell folks to the law, but only if they did the crime, you know? Hey, don’t get so upset, Light. I never seen you so down. It must be that diet. Get yourself some cheeseburgers and
onion rings, you know what I’m saying?”

  “You’re positive it was the same guy?”

  Jake looked back toward the park, but she could tell he was just buying himself time to answer. “If it makes you feel better, I could tell he was craving it. Real tempted, you know? Like pondering and shit. But—I don’t know—maybe I made it seem too easy. I knew you wanted him, so I floated a half ball at a hundred. Price was too low; he probably figured I was po-po. Maybe try again in a few weeks? I’d do anything for DiLi.”

  A few weeks was too long. A man like Chance could break Kiley all over again in a few hours.

  “No, that’s all right. You want a ride back uptown?”

  “Nah, I’m good. Might hang down here for a bit.”

  “Dumb question, Jake, but any chance I can persuade you to get into another line of work?”

  “You cute, girl. And, seriously, you look good, Light. Maybe a little too light, if you get it. But good. Hang tough.”

  THE NEXT NIGHT, Chance showed up at home close to eleven o’clock. Diane watched Kiley hold his hand as they stepped from the bus onto McLoughlin Boulevard. From the university to the aunt’s house to here should not have taken him the nearly two hours it had. Chance was definitely up to something. Not to mention, what kind of father let a three-year-old stay up that late?

  She watched from her car as they walked together, hand in hand, to their apartment complex. She saw Kiley’s bedroom light turn on. Five minutes later, it turned off. She waited another twenty minutes before stepping from her car out into the darkness.

  The chill of the night was perfect. Her quilted black hat felt snug on her head. Her neoprene gloves provided just enough compression to make her fingers feel extra alive. She placed her hands in her coat pockets, felt the knife against her left hand, the brick-shaped wad of paper against her right.

  He opened the door for her. Of course he did.