The Dollmaker's Daughters (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Five) (16 page)

Bo stared out at St. Mary's parking lot and listened as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sang "Oh Holy Night" through speakers mounted under her dashboard. The night documented in the police report had been
anything but holy
. Something terrible had happened. And even from a thirteen-year vantage, the story told by Tamlin Lafferty sounded contrived, unlikely.

Why had she waited an
hour after a break-in to call th
e police? What was she doing in that hour? And where was the estranged husband? Bo had seen a sufficient number of unhealthy marital relationships in her work to predict from the one paragraph she'd read what the Lafferty marriage was probably like. "Codependent" was the current catchphrase, but "pathetic" more closely approximated Bo's assessment
.
Tamlin Lafferty had been unable to think of anything to do in an apparent emergency involving three very young children except to call her husband in a suburban area of San Diego from which it would take him at least a half hour to reach Mission Beach. Unless, of course, the unanswered and therefo
re unprovable phone call was a lie designed to mask the fac
t that the "intruder" was the estranged husband, Rick Lafferty. But what had happened? Who were these people, and where were they now?
Why had they not been at Kimberl
y's strange funeral? Where had Kimberly been for thirteen years? And why had they abandoned Janny to a lifetime of anonymity in the foster care system? Bo felt a satisfying energy begin to throb softly inside her skull. It was like opening a new book

or smoothing the first brush of paint on a blank canvas. Curiosity warming dormant synapses and creating light.

The bulk of the report had been written by Pete Cullen in an informal style not intended for official use. These were the notes from his investigation, Bo realized. As messy and yet as thorough as her own. When appropriate he'd attached copies of germane documents. Bo noticed Rick Lafferty's dishonorable discharge from the U.S. Army for "frequent unauthorized absence from duty, malingering and insubordination." A marriage license indicating th
at Tamlin Malcolm and Rick Laf
ferty had married at eighteen, some twelve years before the incident in which a baby girl had sustained a head injury that would take thirteen years to kill her. Bo added the years on her fingers, calculating that the parents of Janny and Kimberly Malcolm would be forty-three now. But where were they?

Cullen had also attached copies of forms legally changing the surname of Kimberly and Janet from "Lafferty" to "Malcolm," although further perusal of the file revealed no divorce papers. Bo drew a series of question marks on the dust filming her dashboard. Tamlin Lafferty had legally changed the names of her daughters to her own maiden name, but not her son's name. Estranged from her husband, she nonetheless lived in a house owned by her
father-in-law while her thirty-
year-old husband lived with his father. Bo shook her head and read on.

"
Rick Lafferty works intermittentl
y as a construction laborer, usually on jobs provided by his father, George Lafferty," Cullen wrote.
“
Both father and son are regarded as master bricklayers in the local construction community, but Rick is seen as a loose cannon who can't be relied on to finish projects on
time or within budget. Some of the men who have worked with Rick say he has a drug or drinking problem, some say his wife drives him crazy with demands for things he can't afford to buy, and another bunch just says there's something wrong with the guy but they don't know what it is. He isn't disliked by co-workers, but he isn't friends with them either. Apparently he hangs out mostly with his father and keeps his business to himself. Both Rick and George Lafferty state that they were asleep in George Lafferty's home at the time of the attack on Kimberly Malcolm and that they did not hear the phone ring. Helen "Dizzy" Lafferty, wife of George and mother of Rick, also states that she was asleep with her husband at the time of the attack, and that their bedside phone did not ring.

"Okay,
so the phone call thing was a li
e," Bo told the Pathfinder's steering wheel. "Or at least Pete Cullen thought
it was."

Flipping through the voluminous file, Bo found the section she was looking for. "Department of Social Services' Child Welfare Division has assigned the Malcolm case to Child Protective Services," Cullen noted. "The social worker, Mary Mandeer, has been cooperative but unable to provide any additional information which might help conclude this case successfully. See attached."

The DSS forms were thirteen years old, relics no longer used anywhere in the system. Still, they provided the answer to at least one question troubling Bo. Mary Mandeer's hand had been unsteady when she signed the last "change of placement" form for Kimberly Malcolm eighteen months after the intake forms and the original face sheet. Eighteen months
after something that had been like a two-story fall onto the side of a cement block. Bo felt her own hand tremble as she read the disposition.

"Kimberly Malcolm will be transferred to the Kelton Institute where courtesy supervision will be provided by Child Protective Services of Los Angeles County," a clerk had typed. The inked letters looked strange, old-fashioned. The enclosed tops of the e's were solid black. Bo tried to remember the last time she'd seen a typewriter, tried not to think about Kimberly Malcolm at three, caught in the shadows between life and death. Somehow the blackened e's hinted at old secrets hidden between the lines, behind the words. Bo felt a chill that made her palms sting. This case was something worse than she'd imagined. This case involved the unthinkable.

Nobody talked about Kelton. Workers in the grisliest cases, the head-trauma cases, knew about it but never discussed it over lunch or even after a few drinks at a unit cocktail party. The name, if spoken at all, was whispered, after which all eyes looked away and the subject was quickly changed. There were rumors about Kelton. That the nearly dead there sometimes awakened immediately before death and insisted that no time had gone by, that they were as they had been.

A story drifted over from the Adult Protective Services workers, who routinely dealt wi
th the elderly, that an eighty-
six-year-old man profoundly brain-damaged by street thugs when he was seventy-nine had somehow managed to leave his bed (if indeed there were beds) at Kelton on the night of his death, and to board a city bus, where he terrified nine passengers by recognizing each of them and calling them by name before he fell in the aisle and was still. The passengers believed that the boundaries of their own lives were revealed
in the way he pronounced
their names. The passengers be
lieved that death itself had crept onto the bus.

Estrella, Bo remembered, had told her the story years ago. And when Bo asked what the Kelton Institute was, Estrella had talked about a facility where the bodies of those whose brains exhibited almost no electrical activity were maintained until final, physical death occurred. Head injuries and massive strokes, mostly. A few whose families couldn't bring themselves to authorize the cessation of life-support systems and were willing to pay to keep the heart and lung machines and intravenous feedings going indefinitely. A place of stopped transition. Like an abandoned subway station.

The realization was like an icy breath inside Bo's shoulders and back. The dream. It was the dream. Shivering, Bo glanced at the authorizing signature below Mary Mandeer's.

"M. Aldenhoven," it said, "for the San Diego County Department of Social Services."

As she eased the Pathfinder out of St. Mary's parking lot Bo
heard a train whistle slicing th
e air from someplace east, toward the desert
.
Its Doppler effect
,
the eerie two-note moan created by moving sound and stationary listener, brought tears to her eyes with its message of inevitable loss.

"Aye, Cally," she whispered, "it's your feast it is now, your time. But there's more to this than death. Something it is in this that's evil. Something rotten that never should have been."

In the distance the train howled softly and then was silent as Bo drove back to her office, drumming her fingers on the record of an old but exhaustive police investigation that had missed something. Something that was still there, still hidden. Still, she thought while snapping her teeth together just for the sound, waiting.

Chapter
12

Walking back into her office building under a g
lowering
sky, Bo realized she h
ad made no decision about the
Malcolm case. There was really no decision to make, she thought in an attempt at rationality. While intriguing, the case was only a historical curiosity. One among thousands gathering dust on corridors of metal shelves in a windowless ground-floor storage room behind the word-processing office. Kimberly Malcolm was dead. Kimberly Malcolm had in significant ways been dead for many years.

Madge, Bo assumed, had been involved in the Malcolm case with the social worker Mary Mandeer. Mandeer was probably the other woman at the funeral, the one who recited Louise Bogan's poem about a girl who was a statue. The two women had arranged and participated in the closure of an old case for reasons belonging to the past. Bo knew she would read the rest of Pete Cullen's file. But maybe she would only read it out of curiosity. There were sufficient numbers of live children demanding her professional attention, like the baby boy she'd just found in a sea of dirty clothes. The Malcolm case, she decided vaguely, was best left in a past that had not included Bo Bradley. Besides, she didn't want to think about it
.
Not about the Kelton Institute and not about whatever realm lay between life and death. Not about an eighteen-month-old toddler trapped in that realm for over thirteen years. Thinking about it pushed open a door Bo recognized as dangerous. A door that could open into nothing but horror, grief, and madness.

Leaning against Madge's door frame with her hands jammed into her denim skirt pockets, Bo felt herself sliding into "the look." She hadn't meant to. It just happened organically sometimes. The heavy-lidded, medicated manic-depressive look that made people feel transparent and exposed. Bo had experienced it herself at a fund-raising dinner for San Diego's suicide hotline, which had at one point been nothing more than an answering machine. Seated with other psychiatric "consumers," she'd been uncomfortably aware of the steady, intrusive gaze of a chubby, bespectacled young man across the table from her. His look forced her to acknowledge that she was acting, that all social interaction was essentially a sequence of exhausting roles which existed only to obscure the flawed personalities hiding inside them. His look made her nervous.

"Why are you staring at me?" she asked.

"Sorry. It's the meds. I've got manic depression, and sometimes—"

"Look, I've got manic depression and that's not the look we cultivate. It's supposed to be, you know, wild and zany."

"Never could do wild and zany," he said with a slow smile, continuing to stare at Bo as though she were covered in pages that could be read.

"Duel, the
n," she challenged, matching her
eyelid level to his and staring hypnotically into his face. "Loser picks up the parking tab for the whole table."

"You're on," he agreed, and then just sat there like a Buddha with laser eyes. In less than four minutes he'd made Bo
so uncomfortable she conceded the challenge and forked over twelve dollars in parking fees. After that she practiced. By now it came naturally, sometimes unbidden. This time, she thought, it was probably a response to the idea of the Kelton Institute and a toddler's body growing to young womanhood there without a brain, without awareness.

"What is it, Bo?" Madge asked, looking up from a stack of case files. "What are you staring at?"

For a split second Bo imagined being able to talk to her supervisor, imagined saying, "How have you survived all these years in a job which demands daily confrontation with the unspeakable? How do you keep the truth about what people do to helpless things from killing you?" But Madge was in one of her renowned snits, and the moment passed. The snits were legendary and occurred in response to nothing in particular. Everybody in the building knew there was no remedy but to stay out of Madge's way. She could be vicious.