The Dollmaker's Daughters (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Five) (22 page)

Bo stood to hug her shrink good-bye and then flung herself back into the yellow Adirondack chair. It was time for red pepper sorbet and some thinking.

Eva had, as usual, been right. The strange dream might represent some connection to Kimmy Malcolm and it might not. Deep inside Bo knew that it did, but so what? Psychic phenomena were, she acknowledged, interesting. But they were also random, inexplicable, and woefully short on the sort of data necessary for solving thirteen-year-old mysteries. Better to focus on reality.

The police report on the Malcolm case had been thorough but lacked any documentation about CPS's investigation. Bo enjoyed her sorbet and its accompanying shortbread cookie while pondering the California laws which afforded more protection to CPS files than any other stockpile of information in the entire justice system. Even the cops could not access those files or obtain copies of them. The idea had been to protect the children involved. Its result was often to protect CPS.

And Madge had taken the information gap a step further in deleting the old file from the new, and nearly empty, folder she handed Bo. So what had
Madge done with that thirteen-
year-old file? She wouldn't have sent it back to storage, Bo thought, smiling into her sorbet dish. Because Bo or any other worker in the system could simply request it back out. No, Madge would have to keep that file away from the storage room for a while. At least until Janny Malcolm's case was back on routine maintenance status and the foster care worker assigned to Janny would not be likely to request it
.
Then,
three years in the future when Janny was eighteen and no longer legally under the "care and custody" of San Diego County, the file would be microfiched and stored in another facility. Always it would enjoy the strictest legal protection.

"But not at the moment." Bo smiled to herself and found her keys.

Half an hour later she pulled into the nearly vacant parking lot of her office building, parked near the rear door, and then walked Molly among the sparse plants comprising CPS's landscaping. A few social workers were in the building, their cars parked in a clump as if for company. Madge's car was not among them.

"Hey, Bo!" a worker from another court unit greeted her as he exited the building. "Working Saturday again?"

People were in and out every weekend, trying to keep up with caseloads and the accompanying tons of paperwork. Before her involvement with Andrew LaMarche, Bo had done al
l her paperwork in the office on
weekends when it was quiet. Nobody would bat an eye at her presence there now.

"Just have to authorize a stack of vouchers for Medi-Cal payments," she yelled back. "The doctors need money for Christmas!"

"They're out of luck, then." He grinned as he unlocked his car. "Medi-Cal takes six to nine months to pay."

"I didn't say
which
Christmas," Bo countered, and unlocked the door.

The hall was quiet and musty with the odor of old building, cheap paint, and paper. An institutional smell. Bo secured Molly in her own office and checked the other eight cubicles lining the hall. All empty. But any one of a hundred people could show up at any time. Bo ducked into Madge's office and closed the door.

As usual, every available surface was piled high with case files. An old picture of Madge, a man, and two boys peeked over the stack of three-ring binders in which Madge filed every shred of information disseminated to its employees by the County of San Diego. Dental insurance forms, revised parking regulations, announcements of cholesterol testing and stress-management programs—Madge kept them all. There was something sentimental about Madge's hoarding habits, Bo thought
.
Like the collecting of mementos characteristic of young teenage girls, their scrapbooks of ticket stubs and snapshots that would later be thrown out as embarrassingly juvenile trash. It occurred to Bo that Madge's identity was wrapped up in her job in the same way a thirteen-year-old's identity might be wrapped up in a horse or a cheerleading squad. An obsessive identity meant to be transitional, temporary. Except in Madge the temporary had become permanent. The glass over the photograph, Bo noticed, was smudged and filmed with dust. And the younger Madge staring out from it seemed as stiff and unreal as a middle-aged doll.

"Okay, where would you stash it?" Bo whispered to the photograph.

There wouldn't be time to go through every
one of the hundreds of files li
ttering every flat surface including the floor. She would have to think like Madge, get into a Madge-like frame of reference in order to find the old Malcolm file. But how did Madge think? Bo forced her mind to become a flat reflective surface, envisioned her supervisor, and drew a blank. From every conceivable angle, Bo could imagine Madge doing nothing but following rules. Gleefully following rules. Being happy and even oddly intense about following rules, as if guidelines for every aspect of behavior were a blessing.

"Okay, then, what are the rules for old files?" Bo muttered, feeling suddenly like a voyeur. She hadn't intended this psychic intrusion on the older woman who was a co-worker as well as nemesis. Still, it was necessary. And Madge would have constructed a legitimate reason for keeping Janny Malcolm's file. Something defensible, procedural. But what? The file really belonged over in foster care with Janny's foster care worker.

"Except for a change in status!" Bo breathed. If Janny were to be transferred to relatives in another state, for example, or removed from foster care because she'd been sentenced to serve time in a juvenile correctional facility, then the case would be handled by the court unit
.
And there was nothing about Janny which might necessitate such a change except her medical condition. Bo scoured
the room for files with the pro
truding light blue Post-its that indicated a child undergoing critical medical treatment, and saw a stack of them under a chair between a filing cabinet and the far wall. The Malcolm file was the fourth one down, thick as the phone book for a town of a hundred thousand people. Breathing fast, Bo grabbed it and scuttled back to her own office.

Mary Mandeer had done the entire investigation and had originally placed Janny with a maternal aunt named Beryl Malcolm shortly after the incident in which Kimmy had been injured. The home investigation on Beryl Malcolm documented Mandeer's opinion that the home was "adequate" and that the aunt's concern for her nieces seemed "distant, but appropriate," but that supplemental payments might be necessary for incidental expenses since the aunt didn't work and was apparently supported by her father. Madge Aldenhoven had signed the approval for additional foster care funds.

Bo scribbled Beryl Malcolm's address on a legal pad and then cocked her head in puzzlement at the next address on the old list "Tamlin Malcolm Lafferty," it said, "Mother House, Sisters of Saint Dymphna, Julian, CA." Bo mentally surfed her Roman Catholic childhood for memory of a saint named Dymphna and came up with nothing. But the name sounded Greek. Maybe Dymphna was a Greek Orthodox saint. And why was Tamlin Malcolm, a married mother of three, in a convent?

Knitting her brows, Bo noted the information and read on. The father, Rick Lafferty, was listed at the same address he now occupied. The maternal grandfather, Jasper Malcolm, had an address in the old Victorian San Diego neighborhood called Golden Hill because of its exposure to the setting sun. Kimmy's older brother, Jeffrey, Bo read, had been placed with his paternal grandparents, George and "Dizzy" Lafferty. The elder Laffertys had moved to a small Connecticut town called Redding Ridge less than a year later, taking Jeffrey with them.

"Why did they agree to care for Jeffrey and not Janny?" Bo frowned. "Why did they abandon her?"

The slam of a car door in the parking lot roused Molly from a nap in Bo's lap, and an extended growl vibrated against Bo's stomach. In the silence she could hear a key turning the lock of the exterior door. Slamming the case file shut, she jammed it to the back of a bottom desk drawer and grabbed a handful of legal forms. The characteristic authority of the turning lock was familiar and brought a hot flush of guilt that bloomed from her neck to her scalp.

You'd make a rotten criminal, Bradley. Now what in hell are you going to do?

"Bo," Madge Aldenhoven pronounced with a tremor of alarm, "what are you doing here?"

Molly's juvenile barks and scramble to escape Bo's grasp provided a momentary distraction.

"Looking for that form we use to document parent searches," Bo lied. "The mother of that baby I picked up yesterday hasn't turned up and I want to have the report ready for the detention hearing."

"The detention hearing won't be until next Wednesday," the supervisor scowled.

In a rumpled khaki dress and tennis shoes Madge looked older, Bo thought. Frazzled. There were dark smudges beneath her eyes, and her usually gleaming silver hair hung dispi
ritedly from a rubber band at th
e base of her neck. Bo couldn't remember ever having seen Madge's hair fastened with anything short of a museum-quality clip.

"I'm running a littl
e fever and I was afraid if I didn't get it done now I might be really sick by Monday and not feel like coming in to do it. By the way, somebody was down here looking for something in your office. You might wan
t to check with the front desk…
"

"Who?" Madge asked.

"I don't know. I think it was Diane something-or-other. Somebody from the other side."

Nice save, Bradley. Now
if she 'll
just go check, you can get that damn file back in her office.

Fully a third of the female CPS social workers seemed to be named Diane, Bo remembered, so that had been a stroke of genius. And "the other side" was in-house parlance for the offices in the front of the building. Adoptions, foster care, the police liaison, and the public relations representative. That had been a stroke of idiocy, since none of them ever worked weekends. But Madge might feel compelled to check it out anyway.

"I'll see if anybody's over there," she nodded. "And go home, Bo. You look flushed."

Bo made noisy leave-taking movements near her office door until she saw Madge turn the corner at the end of the long CPS hallway. Then she grabbed the Malcolm file, her ears ringing with guilt, and stuffed it back into the stack of "medical crisis" files in Madge's offi
ce. She wasn't sure where, exactl
y, it had been. Fourth or fifth, she thought, and jammed it under four other files. Then she grabbed Molly and dashed to the waiting Pathfinder. There hadn't been time to read much of the file, but at least she had names and addresses. And a growing headache born of nefarious behavior.

Shaking it off, she drove two blocks away, locked Molly in, and walked back to stand in the open cement-block entry to the ladies' room at the pocket park across from the CPS parking lot
.
Shadowed by the building's overhang, she could see out but no one could see in.

Minutes later Madge left the office building through the rear door and walked toward her car. In her left hand was a thick case file flagged with a light blue Post-it

"Under no circumstances may any county employee remove a case file from county property," Bo recited from the procedures manual. "The penalty for doing so is termination of county employment."

Bo felt as though she were watching a statue trying to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge. Impossible but nonetheless terrible and wrong. Madge Aldenhoven was removing the Malcolm file from county property. Bo couldn't see the name on the case file, but she didn't have to. Madge was going to take the file home, keep it
,
maybe destroy it
.
Later Madge could admit that the file had been lost while in her possession, and accept responsibility. There would be the predictable flap
from the director's office. Madge would be called in and reprimanded, but nothing much would be done. A
veteran supervisor with an impeccable twenty-year record of employment could be forgiven for one lost file.

"But why
?”
Bo breathed against a cement block. What could Madge possibly have done thirteen years in the past that would drive her to risk her job, her very identity, now? There was at least one person who knew, Bo remembered. Mary Mandeer, the other worker on the case, who'd recited a Louise Bogan poem at Kimmy's funeral. Hurrying to her car, Bo hoped Mandeer was listed in the phone book. And that she had the fatal flaw characteristic of many who work to clean up human messes—a belief that change can be imposed rather than merely engendered.