The Cradle Robbers by Ayelet Waldman Read Free Book Online Page B

child who would be taken from them after five years. Each case independently had its merits. However, when taken together, suddenly there seemed to be a terrible and troubling pattern. Were the Lambs of the Lord conspiring to take the babies of incarcerated women at Dartmore Prison?

Five
    A L had his tie flipped over his shoulder and was holding not one but two chili dogs, one half eaten, grease soaking into the bun and dyeing it fluorescent orange.
    “I don’t understand how you can eat that at nine in the morning,” I said.
    “How is this different from huevos rancheros? Or bacon and eggs?”
    “It just is.”
    He shook his head balefully. Normally, I can follow Al on any of his culinary expeditions. Together we’ve eaten at canteens and dives from Santa Barbara down to La Jolla. But I cannot eat a Pink’s chilidog, no matter how crisp the skin on the thin sausage, no matter how fragrant the hot sauerkraut, no matter how crunchy the chopped onion, first thing in the morning. Even if I know that that is the only time of day you can count on the chili in the steam table not to settle into a pool of thick, orange grease. In three hours, or even two, I would have been right there with him, and I might even have been convinced to give the jalapeño dog a try. But all I want at 9 A.M. is a cup of coffee and a donut. Two donuts, maybe.
    Al unhinged his lower jaw and stuffed the remains of his first dog into it. Then he started in on the second. “So are you more inclined to believe Fidelia’s bunkie given what you learned from that Pauline woman?”
    I shrugged. “Filing for termination of parental rights isn’t exactly baby stealing, although it’s pretty damn close. And the way they went about it is worth investigating, that’s for sure. But not by us. This is something the Department of Social Services should be looking into. Or the U.S. Attorney’s office, if the agency is engaged in some kind of civil rights violation. I’m going to make some calls, see if I can’t motivate one of those agencies to takeover the case. I’ll get in touch with some people at the U.S. Attorney’s office and call the Department of Corrections. I’ll file a report with DSS, too. And while I’m at it, I’m going to prepare a request for information from DSS and from family court for any information they have on Sandra’s baby’s foster care placement. The might have some record of the specific placement, even though it was contracted out through the Lambs of the Lord.”
    Al smacked his lips and licked the last bit of mustard from his fingers. “I’m still hungry. Maybe I should get some fries.”
    “God no,” I said. “This place has the worst fries in the city. Come back to my house, I’ll feed you something.”
    Al and I were at Pink’s because I didn’t want to head all the way down to Westminster, a good thirty miles south of the city, if all I was going to do was spend my day making phone calls. I had tried to lure him north with more reasonable breakfast foods, but it had taken a chili dog to get him out of his house.
    Although I’m not a cook—Peter is responsible for that in our family—I keep my cupboards stocked for Al’s infrequent visits, and soon enoughwe were set up on either end of my long dining room table, between us an array of carbohydrate- and salt-laden snack foods. We were each busy on the phone, trying to convince someone in a position of authority to pay the slightest bit of attention to the fact that there was something strange going on with the Lambs of the Lord foster care agency and the women prisoners of Dartmore Prison.
    My attempts to rouse the interest of someone in the United States Attorney’s office in Los Angeles met with exactly no success. That shouldn’t have been a surprise to me. I did not have many friends in that office. Lots of people I knew from Harvard Law School went on to become Assistant United States Attorneys, far more than joined the public defender’s office,