The Dollmaker's Daughters (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Five) (28 page)

Something about the top of the dresser bothered Bo. Just a slab of thick pulp-composition from which the veneer was curling, it seemed to occupy more space than it actually did. It seemed somehow physically loud. And it made her sick.

"You never found the weapon, did you, Cullen?" she whispered through rising nausea.

He followed her gaze to the thick, straight edge of the dresser top.

"Fuck! You're right. Why didn't I see it then? Nobody hit that kid with anything, but somebody hit something with the kid! The edge of that damn dresser! Just picked her up and slammed—"

But Bo was gone, diving headlong through the rancid cottage and out the open window. Something snagged the back of her coat and she felt ripping fabric. Irrelevant. Nothing mattered but getting out of that space, away from a mental image so cruel it forever poisoned the air where its reality had
occurred. Gasping against the vine-covered trunk of a magnolia tree, Bo wondered if she had the strength to tear the cottage down herself. It had to be obliterated. And so did the thing that had taken Kimmy Malcolm's life.

"Good eye, Bradley," Cullen said as he replaced the window boards, pounding the nails in with a rock.

"It was Tamlin," Bo whispered, still shaking. "It had to be Tamlin."

"Maybe, but I don't think so. Too violent
.
It was a man."

Bo inspected a foot-long flap of ripped ripstop nylon hang
ing from th
e back of her coat "Rick Lafferty? He wasn't here. He had an alibi."

"Lafferty's parents were his alibi, which is no alibi. But I don't think it was Lafferty."

"Who, then?" Bo asked.

"The pervert" Cullen announced in a gravelly bass. "The grandp
a. The little fop with his damn littl
e dolls. He did it I always thought he did it but I couldn't prove it
.
"

Bo watched a wisp of fog drift across a cluster of rattling palm fronds and evaporate over the fence. "Jasper Malcolm? Why?"

"Because he's a sick bastard. Who knows what goes on in his mind? But I think he killed his wife so he could have at those girls, have them to himself. Then they grew up and—"

"Killed his wife?" Bo interrupted. "What?"

"Supposedly she fell down the stairs in that mausoleum of a house in Golden Hill. Broke her neck."

"And?"

"And I read the medical examiner's report
.
She'd been carrying a tray. Tamlin was sick and the mother'd taken dinner up to her room on a tray. There were flowers on the tray in a
small glass vase. Roses. Dorothy Malcolm liked to grow flowers."

It occurred to Bo that Pete Cullen could be very talkative when discussing a case.

"Many women who grow flowers are not murdered by their husbands," she said.

"There were a number of small puncture wounds in the woman's face, Bradley. The ME determined that they were from rose thorns."

"So, she fell on the roses. I don't get this, Pete."

His voice dropped to basso profundo. "There were punctures on her forehead and both sides of her face, yet the ME was certain she died inst
antl
y."

Bo breathed deeply, pondering this information. The dour cop had presented it as a sort of riddle. Solving it would earn his respect. Bo found herself wanting that respect, realized that she liked the grisly old giant.

"Maybe her body moved after the fall that broke her neck. She dropped the tray and the flowers fell down the steps, then she fell on them, dying instantly. But gravity caused her to roll farther down and in the roll her
head turned, pressing against th
e rose stems from the other side."

"Good, you're good," he grinned. "That's what the ME figured, too. But I don't buy it. I think somebody deliberately pushed those thorns into her face as she lay there dead at the bottom of the stairs. A kind of a mark to show he'd won. Malcolm has a thing about faces, you know. His damn dolls. It's the kind of thing he'd do, hurt her face that way."

Bo remembered Jasper Malcolm's interest in her own face, his touch on he
r cheekbone, and shuddered. Then
she remembered a child's doll-like skull, also ruined.

"You may be right, Pete," she said. "But why would he hurt his own granddaughter?"

"Remember Tamlin said the man who broke in grabbed both twins. I think he meant to kill them both, but dropped Janet when Tamlin struggled with him. I think he had to kill them before they grew any older, before he couldn't resist them any longer. He had to keep them babies, like his dolls, or succumb to his lust for them. It was the only way he could stop himself."

"But Tamlin would have seen him, been able to identify him. Why would she protect him?"

"Money, some sick attachment to him. Malcolm's loaded. He supports that monastery she's in, and his other daughter, Beryl, as well. You know how victims are, Bradley. You work with this stuff every day. They never stop worshiping the bastard that raped them as kids, even when they grow up."

"'Worship' isn't the right term, and Tamlin's in a convent, not a monastery," Bo began, and then remembered Jasper Malcolm's phone call of the night before. "He called me, you know, and asked me to believe he'd never molested a child. He said it was important."

"He's a shitbag," Cullen said with finality. "Do you know his dolls are used to make kiddy-porn photos that're sold all over the world?"

"Whaaat?"

"Yeah. We've been tracking this thing for a while. Hard to prosecute, since dolls aren't people. I wanna nail him, Bo. I want it so bad I can taste it!"

There was a determined movement beneath the blueberry climber near Bo's left foot
.

"And I want to get out of here," she said. "I'm having a party this evening, a Christmas party. I'm going to go out and
buy wine and cookies and c
ré
me-filled chocolates with littl
e sugar holly leaves on them. I'm not going to think about this case any more today."

"Won't work, hound dog," Cullen said knowledgeably. "But you can try. And I think I'll take you up on that invitation. Party sounds pretty good, actually. But first maybe we'll drop in on our friend the dollmaker, huh? I've got some pictures I'd like to show him. And I think you and I make a pretty good team."

Bo was flattered.

"I've already seen him," she replied. "The one I haven't talked to is Tamlin. If I were going anywhere today it would be up to Julian to interview Tamlin Lafferty, but I really don't have time."

"I haven't convinced you the old man's the perp?"

"Nobody convinces me of anything," Bo smiled ruefully. "I have to do it myself."

"Then let's do it."

"Do what?"

"Get you up there to interview Sister Sicko."

Bo looked at her watch. "Pete, it's a three-hour round trip to Julian and back."

"Not in a chopper," he answered, a genuine smile threatening to crack the panes of his face. "I need your help on this thing, Bradley. Let's go!"

Chapter 20

Daniel
Man Deer inhaled deeply and chose crumb-cru
st
apple pie with vanill
a ice cream and coffee. Beside
him Mary shrugged off her rust-colored down vest and ordered the same thing
, but with pastry crust The littl
e Julian restaurant was warm and redolent with the characteristic odor that had rescued the town after the mines played out. Apples. Thousands of them from mountain orchards planted above deep veins of quartz that could be, and sometimes were, laced with gold.

Dan wasn't quite sure why t
hey'd made the mountainous hour and a
half drive from San Diego except that Mary wanted to go someplace. For days she'd talked about a trip, a drive up to San Francisco or out to Palm Springs, a weekend cruise down the Mexican Baja Peninsula,
maybe a week in Hawaii. Tucked
in the pocket of his pajama shirt he'd fo
und a colorful brochure on deep
sea fishing off Santa Catalina Island. Mary believed that he needed to get away, that his obsessive prowling in Mission Trails Park was unhealthy.

"Dan," she'd whispered the night before after an inspired interlude of lovemaking that left him breathless, "this Indian thing you're doing is approaching silly. You've been peeing in spray cans in the garage and then hauling them off to the park. No doubt this is some ancient Kumeyaay ritual, but face it
,
you're not an ancient Kumeyaay. You're a well-off retired mortgage broker of Kumeyaay ancestry. It's the end of the twentieth century now, Dan. Let's hop on a Concorde and spend Christmas in Paris!"

"I was trying to save a bobcat," he'd said, blushing in the dark. "Marking territory with urine to keep him out of the park, over across Fifty-two where it's still wild and he can live safely. I think it worked, Mary. There hasn't been any scat on the trails for days."

Her silence after this revelation suggested that she knew there was more to it.

"And?" she said finally.

"And it was a way of appealing to the Old Ones, asking for their help with the unhappy spirit I knew was approaching you. They had methods for dealing with spirits of the dead, you know. I needed their help to protect you."

Mary had smoothed his hair and
kissed the top of his head, nestl
ed against her breasts.

"You were peeing in cans to save a bobcat in order to solicit the help of your ancestors in protecting me from the spirit of Kimmy Malcolm. Do I have this right?"

"Yeah."

"Dan?"

"Yeah?"

"You are the most wonderful man in the world and I love you, but this is nonsense. Madge Aldenhoven and I buried Kimmy Malcolm three days ago. It was a terrible case, but it's over now. There is no 'spirit' pursuing me, nothing you need to protect me from. And I absolutely insist that we get out of here for a while. Preferably to someplace where there have never been Indians!"

"We'll take a drive tomorrow," he'd promised, keeping to
himself an awareness that there were just some things Mary would never understand. Like the fact that he couldn't leave San Diego right now. Like the certainty that he would be called upon, finally, to stand against something alien and threatening. Something from the world of the dead crossing back not in love and courage, like David, but in bitterness.

And Mary, straightening the edge of her pillowcase before settling in to sleep, also kept certain thoughts to herself. There was one thing she hadn't told her husband about the Malcolm case, one thing she would never tell him. Men were not equipped to cope with the chaotic forces which bind life to life, she knew. Men were frightened by chaos and knew a single response to fear, a response which usually involved killing something. Only women could withstand that maelstrom and survive to maintain the illusion of order. Madge Aldenhoven had survived, so far. But the danger Daniel Man Deer imagined to be threatening his wife was in fact looming closer to Madge. And it had nothing to do with the ghost of Kimmy Malcolm.

"Let's go look at woodburning stoves," she said after Dan finished his pie and the melted ice cream in her dish as well. "The hardware store has a bunch of them—different enamel colors, soapstone, Franklin stoves, hi-tech ones, everything."

"Do you want a woodburning stove?" he asked, rising sluggishly in the overheated restaurant festooned with twinkling Christmas lights that made him sleepy. "Where would we put it?"

"I don't want one, I just want to look at them," Mary answered. "They're pretty. They're
Christmasy
."

Daniel Man Deer followed his wife onto the main street of a mountain mining town where sparse, tiny snowflakes flashed in the morning sun before dissolving on the shoulders
of tourists. He had no idea why looking at woodstoves should be fun, but he didn't care. He'd stand around and look at piles of giraffe manure if she wanted him to. As long as he could be with her, woodstoves were just fine.