The Dollmaker's Daughters (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Five) (14 page)

"We'll close the Malcolm case and transfer it over to foster care," Madge said. "Here's a new case I want you to begin immediately. It's pretty messy. You may need police backup." Something in her voice suggested that argument would be pointless.

"Sure," Bo replied, "but I haven't done the closing summary yet."

"I'll do the summary for you. It's important that you get out on the new case. It's a sibling petition on a three-year-old who's been living on potato chips and sleeping on a pool table in a bar. She's already been brought in, but apparently there's a baby brother still in the care of the mother, who has an extensive drug and alcohol history. You'll need to pick up the baby."

There was no point in hanging on to Janny Malcolm's case file. It contained no information. Bo took the orange-banded manila folder from her briefcase and handed it to Madge, aware that in saying nothing about Kimberly Malcolm she was allowing Madge the illusion of secrecy, and of closure. Saying nothing, Bo knew, could be as reprehensible as lying.

"How was the lunch with your husband and his business partner?" she asked, pretending to read the new case file.

"Very nice," Madge answered too quickly. "I had a continental salad with raspberry vinaigrette."

"Mmm."

How many times, Bo wondered, had momentous decisions, irrevocable rifts, deadly conflicts been established in just such banal exchanges of untruth? But there was no going back. For a split second Bo felt something like pity for the woman
standing in her office. She was sure what lay ahead wasn't going to be pretty.

"I'll have the cops meet me to grab this baby," she said. "It's a rotten neighborhood even in broad daylight."

"Yes," Madge agreed, looking across Estrella's empty desk and out the window. "But we don't say, 'Grab this baby.' "

"I do," Bo insisted, but the older woman was already out the door, gone.

"Dar, meet me at Tenth and Market," Bo whispered into the phone seconds later. "I need backup for a baby-snatch at a wino hotel. You can tell me about the Malcolm case then."

"Are you kidding?" the deep voice growled. "Call some uniforms for backup. I wouldn't send my worst enemy into that place, not without body armor and a gas mask. Trust me, you'll have to burn your shoes once you get out of that sewer. That is,
if
you get out. Why don't I just meet you at the curb with the Malcolm file?"

"Dar, I don't believe this. What h
appened to 'protect and serve
’
?”

"I'm a detective, Bradley. One of the perks is I don't have to wade through wino shit and infected needles. Is there really a kid in there?"

"I'm not going down there for cocktails, Dar. There were two kids. The three-year-old girl was picked up from a bar after the owner called the hotline. At the receiving home she said her baby brother was in a room up there with her mother. Nobody's seen mom or the baby for over twenty-four hours."

"Shit, Bradley. You know what this is gonna be."

"Probably," Bo answered.

"A
baby
?”

"I'm going to get the car seat now. Meet you there in fifteen minutes."

"Uniforms. I'm bringing uniforms. You know I can't stand to see this stuff close up, Bradley. I've got kids, you know."

"Dar, how did you wind up in the child abuse division?"

"I like to nail the SOBs," he answered with characteristic gruffness, "throw their sorry asses in prison where they'll find out what it's like to be defenseless. What I don't like is this neglect stuff. It's messy, not real police work. It's your thing, Bradley."

"Which is why I'll see you in a few minutes."

"You win." He sighed. "But you owe me one."

"Agreed." Bo smiled and hung up.

The infant car seat she'd grabbed from the supply room was old and dotted with a sticky residue that had once been chocolate. Heading south on 163 toward San Diego's downtown, she wondered how many babies had been fastened into it over the years. Wondered where those babies were now.

Most of the CPS workers kept pictures of babi
es on their walls
. Not snapshots but commercially done posters and ad artwork featuring babies. The most popular was a narrow, three-foot-long poster of about thirty multiethnic babies in pastel terrycloth sleepers. Several of the workers had that one on their walls, but when Bo had asked why, they'd just looked at her as if she'd asked what the American flag was for. There was something about babies, she admitted to herself, that caused other people to dissolve in dewy-eyed inanity. "Aww," they crooned, "that's what it's all about, isn't it?"

Bo had routinely stopped short of asking what
what
was all about. She thought of babies as simply very immature people with distinctive habits and personalities. There were some she liked and others she didn't, just as she would undoubtedly like or dislike them when they had teeth and political opinions.
There was nothing about babies that made her feel gushy. And nothing that would endear her to expensive replicas of them, either.

The old urban highway became Eleventh Street as it drained into downtown San Diego, and Bo slowed the Pathfinder to accommodate traffic signals and pedestrians. She was on her way to seize a real baby, but a different one drifted across her mind. An old porcelain baby with a missing eye. Where had Janny Malcolm's doll come
from?
And what did it have to do with the body Madge Aldenhoven had committed to the ground only hours ago?

Dar Reinert was standing in front of a corner liquor store as Bo parked illegally and got out. The Ruger revolver at his stocky chest ruined the lines of a new gray tweed sportcoat, Bo noticed. But not the stylish impression created by his blue and gray checked shirt and navy tie featuring tiny ca
rtoon mice in handcuffs and leg
irons.

"Great tie," she grinned.

"My five-year-old picked it out, then couldn't wait for Christmas to give it to me. I think it gives a strong message, huh?" he bantered. "Look, let's just get this over with, okay? I've talked to Ahmed, the guy in the liquor store, who says there's four rooms-for-rent above the store. Only access is that door over there," he said, pointing to a wide steel door with flaking yellow paint and a new deadbolt lock. "A fire code violation. The door leads to a set of wooden stairs. Burn them and there's no way out except to dive through the second-story windows. Put that in your report."

"Can we get a key from Ahmed?"

"Got it
.
He won't go up there, though. Says he wouldn't dream of going up there without a sidearm, at least
.
And he said he's heard a baby crying, although not today. Let's do it"

Bo watched as the burly detective unlocked the door, opened it, and then pulled the Ruger from its shoulder holster under his jacket. "Police!" Reinert yelled in a voice Bo thought would unquestionably scare even the cockroaches into thoughts of relocation. A cascade of sour, musty air rolled across her face from the open door, but there was no response to the warning. Nothing moved on the floor above or on the unlit stairway. Not even, she noted as they stomped up the wooden steps, an emaciated black man in purple suspenders and a woman's pink velour house slippers who appeared to be sleeping upside down against the stairwell wall. Bo could see a trickle of congealing blood running from his nose.

"Dar?" she began.

"Forget it. He's not dead, he's drunk. Fell down the steps. He'll wake up. We're not here for him."

The closer they got to the upper hall,
the worse the odor.
Mildew, vomit, urine. And something less obvious. A pervasive sickroom smell that announced the proximi
ty of death. The hallway, Bo
realized, was a last way station for those already dying, for whom the future was no longer an option. The hallway reminded her of the dream.

"Don't touch anything" Reinert growled, holding the Ruger in both hands as he glanced up and down the colorless hall. "Ahmed said the baby crying was right over the store, which would be down here."

As they turned right, a door opened revealing a filthy communal toilet and a pale young man with a shaved head and a large rose tattoo over his left nipple, which was pierced and threaded with dirty string. Blood ran down his right arm from a puncture in the brachial artery at the bend of his elbow. Bo could see a blackened spoon and a syringe lying on a greasy paper napkin beside the toilet.

"Just ease your butt back in t
here and close the door," Rein
ert told the boy softly. "Nobody saw you and you didn't see nobody. Stay in there until you hear us leave."

The shaved head nodded slowly and then the bathroom door closed again. Dar stood with his back to the streetside wall and motioned Bo toward a closed door. "Go on," he urged. "I can cover both the room and the hall from here. Knock first, then stand to the side of the door."

When there was no answer, Bo turned the knob and pushed the door ajar, then stood back. Nothing. Silence. In the dim light filtering through grimy windows she could see what appeared to be an ocean of clothing mounded in heaps on the floor, but no furniture, and no baby.

"Dar, this is weird," she said, wading in. "There's nothing in here but clothes. Wall-to-wall dirty clothes."

“
Try the kitchen."

Bo glanced toward the old-fashioned sink and accompanying hot plate which comprised the room's cooking ar
ea. On the hot plate a baby bottl
e of greenish, curdling milk stood in a coffee can half full of water, flies rimming its edge. An empty Pampers box was overturned beneath it. Bo snapped a Polaroid of the scene for the court report and turned to leave, but something stopped her. There was somebody there. She could feel it.

Dar moved into the doorway and grimaced. "Place is empty, Bradley. Let's get outta here. Uniforms can come out later and grab the kid. Let's go!"

"Dar, there's somebody here," she said.

"There's nothing he
re but clothes. Don't go nutso o
n
me, Bo. This scene isn't secured, isn't safe. Some fry-brain could come out of one of these doors at a
ny minute, shooting, wav
ing needles. The mother's taken off with the kid. She'll be back and we'll have a crew waiting. Now come on."

Bo caught her foot in a pair of women's shorts that had been ripped in half, and fought back a ringing nausea. The clothes were dragging her down, making her dizzy. But she couldn't leave. Not yet
.

"Dar, shoot the gun," she said.

"Oh, God, you are crazy. I knew this was a mistake. Bradley, you can't handle the stress of this work, you really can't. And I can't discharge a firearm within the city limits unless I've got a damn good reason, which I don't. Am I gonna have to drag you outta here?"

Bo could feel her eyes burning from the insult. "Crazy." The minute you revealed a difference, just the smallest divergence in perception, they dragged out the c-word. But she was right. There was someone else in the quiet room. She could sense another presence that was there, but not conscious. And desperate. It could be an animal. But she'd bet her precarious sanity that it wasn't. Slogging back to the hot plate, she picked up the coffee can and held it high over her head.

"Go to hell, Dar," she yelled, and slammed the can down on the metal hot plate with all her strength. The resulting crash was precisely what she wanted. As Dar Reinert plunged angrily into the room, a thin wail rose from a wad of stained sheets on the floor beneath the window. A stringy, mewling cry, but not an animal.

On her hands and knees Bo grubbed through the sheets until she found him, gray and dehydrated, but alive. In the baby boy's sunken eyes Bo saw an old man, and the vision made her angry. He was only about three months old.

"Bradley, how in hell..."

"I'm crazy, remember?" Bo snarled as she ran some water
from the sink over her fingers and allowed the baby to suck the moisture. Then she removed a diaper which hadn't been changed in at least two days, wrapped the baby in a blouse and two sweaters from the
floor
, and turned to the door.