The Dollmaker's Daughters (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Five) (23 page)

"You're going to work undercover," Bo told Molly minutes later. "Think of yourself as a voice for the voiceless."

Chapter
16

D
aniel Man Deer had just finished editing a chronology
of activities by a local In
dian leader named Olegario in
the late 1800s when the doorbell rang. He'd barely heard it over Carlos Nakai's Indian flute on the living-room stereo. Mary had gone shopping with a friend, so he irritably abandoned his computer and stomped to the door. He was working on a biography of Olegario and the chain of lies, broken treaties, and usurpation which characterized the leader's attempts to work with San Diego's white settlers. He did not want to be interrupted.

"Yes?" he said t
o a woman with green eyes and f
reckles who was holding a small dog in her arms. Something about her made him uneasy.

"I'm Becky Harrison from Animal Crackers," Bo smiled. "A member of our organization suggested that Mary Man Deer would want to know about our holiday effort in behalf of the local no-kill shelter. Is she here?"

The only "Mandeer" Bo had located in the phone directory had been spelled "Man Deer," so she'd pronounced the name that way. The broad-shouldered man standing before her was obviously an Indian and was looking at her as though she'd just stolen his horse. Clearly, this wasn't the right address. "Who told you Mary would be interested in this group?"
Dan asked, reversing her assessment. He wasn't surprised. Mary either joined or contributed money to at least a hundred organizations determined to right various social evils. This one obviously had something to do with animals.

"Um, Diane." Bo pulled the common name out of thin air for the second time that day as Molly's throat began to vibrate in response to music drifting from the open door. "Diane Singer. She's a social worker, and—"

"My wife isn't here, but I'm sure she'd want to give something. If you'll wait I'll get my wallet—"

"Oh, no, we're not fund-raising, we're trying to organize a lobbying effort. Our goal is to introduce legislation prohibiting intrastate shipments of very young animals into California from unscrupulous 'puppy farms' where—"

"Why don't you just leave your card, Ms. Harrison? My wife can call you later if she's interested, all right? I'm afraid I'm rather busy. I need to get back to my work."

"J
ust tell Mary I dropped by, and she can get in touch with Diane," Bo chirped. "Sorry to have bothered you."

The house was new and the last one on a quiet street near the eastern leg of Mission Gorge Road, once the east-west trail of Indians moving between seashore and hilly high desert villages. Bo could smell chlo
rine from a pool behind a post-
and-rail fence to the left of the house. From there an attractive expanse of rocky chaparral rose to deeply shadowed hills threaded by a footpath leading from the back of Man Deer's property. Of course. The man who opened the door looked like the sort who'd walk miles for the fun of it. Bo wished he'd invited her to explore the trail while waiting for his wife. Now it would be impossible without attracting his attention.

Later Bo would identify this moment as the point of no return, the seemingly innocuous juncture beyond which events
escalated with an ominous independence of anything she could do. She wanted to go for a hike. She could have taken Molly to Mission Trails Park and walked for miles. Instead, she drove to a convenience store pay phone and called Pete Cullen.

"Cullen," he answered with a gravelly abruptness that reminded Bo of peasa
nts threatening to occupy a castl
e. That grimly forlorn resolve.

"My name is Bo Bradley and I work for Child Protective Services," Bo said, matching his tone. "I'm calling because you worked on the Malcolm case thirteen years ago. You may not remember it, but—"

"I remember it," he interrupted. "But I won't discuss it with you until I see your ID. I'll be down in San Diego tomorrow afternoon. We can talk then."

'Tomorrow's out. I'm having a Christmas party. And I can prove who I am over the phone. Just call the Child Abuse Hotline for confirmation. Then I'll call you back."

"You got a tree yet?" he growled.

'Tree?"

"Yeah. Christmas tree for your party. You got one?"

"Uh, no," Bo answered, confused by the sudden shift. "I'm going to get one tonight. Why?"

"Don't. I'll bring one down. What's your address?"

"Last apartment building on Naragansett, Ocean Beach, upstairs, number four."

Bo couldn't imagine why she'd answered him. Something about the gruff old cop seemed to demand a reciprocal bl
unt
ness. If it weren't for that Eeyore-like pathos in his voice, she thought, he'd be scary. And he was bringing her a Christmas tree. She guessed that meant he'd be coming to the party as well, which would be fine. There should always be a stranger
at Christmas gatherings, her grandmother had insisted. To honor the fearful Caillech Beara, whose connection to death and madness would always seem strange to the living.

"Great, Bradley. See you tomorrow morning."

Bo heard him hang up and wondered when she'd talked to anyone more uncomfortable with speech. Talking actually seemed to cause him pain, and the feeling was infectious.

"He's obviously not Irish," she remarked to Molly as she headed out of Mission Gorge and toward Beverly and Howard Schroder's house. Eva had been right
.
It made sense to check out the possible reality behind Janny Malcolm's terrified assertion that somebody had been outside her window at the foster home.

The Schroders weren't there when Bo arrived, but it seemed pointless to waste the trip. Standing beside the Pathfinder, she surveyed their property. The two-story house had been built against a hill, with the garage apartment comprising the ground floor. To the left of the wide driveway, stairs to the second-story porch were flanked by a reinforced cement wall. Its rounded cap was narrow and covered in places by runners of the popular succulent erroneously called "ice plant" in Southern California for another, smaller succulent whose resinous leaves appear to be coated with sparkling frost
.
When crushed, the chubby two-inch ice plant left a slick, jellylike goo. Bo decided not to attempt a climb up the narrow, rounded wall and turned her attention to the graduated cement-block wall flanking the other side of the driveway.

It too, was draped in the ice plant that had been used as ground cover for the entire lot. But here the cement blocks made a narrow set of steps leading to the foundation of the
second story, set in the hillside. The bedrooms would be on this side or in the back, Bo assumed, and began to climb.

The cement blocks stopped at the house's perimeter, so she carefully bent to lift the tangled ice plant runners before placing each step on the dead gray undergrowth as she climbed to the rear of the house. The first bedroom must be the Schroders', she thought a
s she peered in a window. King-
sized oak canopy bed with a floral spread and mint-green dust ruffle. Pictures of children on a matching dresser. Probably foster children, Bo thought as she noticed a framed school photo of Janny Malcolm. Nice foster parents.

Next was an opaque bathroom window and then, facing the back, the window to a teenager's room. Definitely Janny's. The vampire posters were a dead giveaway. Bo turned to survey the upward-sloping ground beyond the window and felt her heartbeat escalate. The ice plant was crushed in several places near the window, and some ten feet higher it was flattened in a short trough shape that made no sense until Bo realized what had happened. Somebody had approached the house from above, tripped in the dark, and fallen. Crawling now to maintain her balance
against the steep slope, Bo ap
proached the flattened patch of succulent.

Footprints were improbable, but it was worth a try. Tugging the runners apart at the base of the flattened area, she looked at snarled gray undergrowth. Hopeless. The matting was old and well-developed, the ground at least four inches beneath it. Bigfoot, she realized, could not have made an impression in the ground here. Nor was there anything unusual stuck in the ice plant. No matchbooks, check stubs
or
lockets on broken chains. But a trail of smashed patches led upward, so Bo followed it on her knees, wondering which stain remover would be best for getting the pale green ice-plant goo out of her
khakis. At the top of the hill behind the Schroders' property was a high chain-link fence surrounding a school playground.

"Ha," Bo nodded, noting that the fence didn't wrap around the school ground, but merely protected the grade-schoolers and their Frisbees from falling down the steep hill. Anyone could walk around the end of the fence and slide into the Schroders' hillside backyard. And there would be no one on the school grounds at night to witness this suspicious behavior. An intruder could easily enter and exit the Schroder property without being seen, but that person would have to have surveyed the situation earlier, in daylight, to know that. And wouldn't someone have noticed a stranger walking around in a schoolyard?

Bo hunkered beneath the fence and checked the current patrons of the grassy area beyond. A man and two children playing catch. A teenage girl walking a beautifully groomed border collie. Two young women with babies in strollers watching a toddler pile grass and twigs on the rubber seat of a swing.

"Hi, Jennifer!" one of the children called to the teenager, who waved and then chatted briefly with the two young mothers. These were neighbors. People who knew each other. They would have noticed a stranger on the school property. For a moment Bo considered clambering out of the ice plant and asking them, but then remembered that she hadn't brought her CPS ID with her. And there were spider webs in her hair. Perhaps now was not the best time.

Sliding back down on the seat of her khakis, she stepped from the lowest cement block to the driveway just as a police cruiser stopped behind the Pathfinder.

"Oh, shit," she sighed. Somebody had seen her and called the cops.

"I know how it looks, but I'm here investigating a case in which somebody's stalking a child in the foster care system," she said, walking toward the black-and-white with her palms waist-high and facing outward. "Bo Bradley, court investigator, CPS. Run my plates to verify."

"Already called it in," a young female officer smiled professionally from the passenger's seat as her partner, a balding body-builder, got out and approached Bo.

"Stalker?" he asked.

"Fifteen-year-old female reported that somebody was looking through her window last night," Bo explained. "This is her foster home, the Schroders'. They aren't home, but I wanted to check it out. Somebody was up there, outside her window. The ice plant's smashed where they came down the hill from a schoolyard above."

"That would be Stevenson Elementary. Slope's pretty steep."

"Tell me," Bo agreed.

"Pathfinder's registered to Barbara Joan Bradley, a CPS worker," the young woman announced from the patrol car. "She's who she says she is."

"In the future wait until people are home before you go crawling around in their yards," the balding cop advised, and walked back to the black-and-white, his heavy leather belt and sidearm holster creaking.

"Sure," Bo replied, feeling their mutual disappointment that she hadn't turned out to be anything interesting. There had been times, she remembered with a rueful smile, when she would have been exactly what they expected when the dispatcher announced, "Unknown adult female climbing through ice plant to look in windows of unoccupied private home." The memory prompted her to stop for a Coke and take

her meds before checking out her next destination, the home of Jasper Malcolm.

It had been one of the lesser Victorian mansions built before the turn of the last century, she realized as she parked and checked the Golden Hill address. Subsequent renovations included a hodgepodge of styles which made the three-story structure look like a child's drawing of a castle. The long, west-facing side of the house had been covered in brown shake shingles, and a door halfway to the rear was shaded by a white aluminum awning. Probably an apartment, she guessed.

Most of the huge old Victorians in Golden Hill had long ago been subdivided into oddly laid out apartments with stairs going nowhere and bedrooms accessible only through closets. The front of the house had been paint
ed barn
red, and the gingerbread millwork adorning the porch a creamy pale yellow. The porch floor and window flashings were a deep green, as was the tottering wrought-iron fence enclosing a small yard boasting no less than three cement birdbaths surrounded by now-dormant rosebushes. Bo nodded to a splashing blue jay as she led Molly up the brick walk toward a large porch flecked with golden squares of light created by the sun filtering through cream-colored lattice at the western end. A single wicker rocker near the door faced a fraying wicker footrest. The rocker was padded with an old pink blanket and several pillows. Jasper Malcolm, Bo remembered, was old.