about what she’d done to cover expenses. “Some pay with other stuff.”
“Like drugs, you mean?”
She nodded. “There are plenty of those out there on the street, and methadone is easy to come by. Once I had it—without Petey there to talk me down and without going to meetings, it was easy for me to slip back into old habits. But I was careful. I only used methadone, nothing stronger. I didn’t think methadone would hurt the baby. I mean, doctors give it out during treatment, don’t they?”
Yes, they do, I thought, but they do so under supervised conditions, and they most likely don’t prescribe methadone to addicted patients who happen to be pregnant at the time.
“So you were left there alone but getting along,” I said. “Then what?”
“One morning I got up and discovered that the electricity had been turned off overnight,” Naomi reported. “A few days later, the water got turned off, too. It was cold in the house, but at least there was a roof over my head and I wasn’t out in the rain. I found an old bucket over by Agnes’s garage and used that to collect rainwater so I could flush the toilet. I got drinking water and food from the food bank. I was doing okay. At least I was surviving. Then, two days before Christmas, some asshole from the city turned up. He told me that the house was no longer considered fit for human habitation and that I had to leave. He said the place had been ‘red-flagged.’ He demanded that I pack my goods and get the hell out—right that minute. He refused to leave until I did.”
“That’s when you grabbed your grocery cart and took off?”
Naomi nodded.
“How did you end up at an all-woman encampment down by the Mount Baker Tunnel?”
“I asked around on the street,” Naomi answered. “Everyone told me if I went there, the women in the encampment would take care of me, and they did. I showed up. Dorothy said I could stay and put me up in a tent. On the night I went into labor, she said it was too soon for the baby to be born and that I had to go to the ER. Some of the women in the camp helped me over the barrier by the freeway so I could flag down someone to help me.”
I said nothing about the bus driver and the EMT saying she’d been high at the time. It didn’t matter.
“When I left the hospital, I went right back to the encampment. I knew Dorothy and the others would take care of me, but they wouldn’t have been able to take care of Athena.”
I had already heard at least two other versions of this story, but this was the first time I was hearing it from Naomi’s point of view. There was no doubt in my mind that she was telling the truth. The poor girl had been left alone, lost and broken. No wonder she’d gotten hooked again. And when it came to abandoning Athena at the hospital? What she’d done might have been morally wrong, but she’d done it for all the right reasons—so the baby could be properly cared for.
“So Petey really is Athena’s father?”
There was no fight left in her. Naomi nodded dejectedly. “He is,” she admitted at last.
“And there’s been no sign of him since he left your house that day in late October?”
“None,” Naomi said. “I’ve asked about him out on the street, but no one has seen him. I guess he left town.”
“As the mother of his child, you’d be within your rights to file a missing-persons report, but the cops might want proof that he’s actually Athena’s father.”
She thought about that for a moment. “I could get proof,” she said. “I could give you something with Petey’s DNA.”
I was dumbfounded. “You could?” I asked.
“I still have his hairbrush,” Naomi said. “Would that help?”
The fact that the interview had veered off into an unexpected discussion of DNA really struck me. Our involvement in DNA wasn’t just about Petey Mayfield’s relationship to Athena. It was also about Naomi Dale’s relationship to me. The girl was speaking my language, as though our shared DNA might be pointing her along the same track I had followed. If she got her head on straight, maybe she’d make a decent detective someday.
“You have his hairbrush?” I repeated, still not quite believing my ears.
Naomi nodded. “It was his pride and joy. His grandfather gave it to