The Dollmaker's Daughters (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Five) (7 page)

Today the plane was not moved. The box from a Los Angeles mortician was unloaded and transported without notice to the unmarked van of a San Diego mortician, parked at an assigned space inside the baggage area. The baggage crew, having waited uneasily the fifteen minutes presumed necessary to clear the gate area of deboarding passengers, were as usual relieved when the mortician's van joined the stream of outgoing airport traffic. A sad and vaguely scary responsibility was out of their hands.

Twenty minutes later the van's driver, also an embalmer and cosmetologist, pushed a remote control and backed into the garage of a mid-city mortuary. Then he quickly closed the garage door behind him. He'd worked for a number of these establishments in his sixty years. It was always important to keep the doors closed.

After sliding the box from the van onto a gurney, he wheeled it into the cold room without turning on the light, set the brake on the gurney, and went out back for a smoke. The body had been embalmed in Los Angeles, so there was nothing much to do except the clothes and makeup. And that had to wait until the family or whoever was responsible came over with clothes and a picture or description he could use. He enjoyed the work and knew he was good at it, even though it wasn't something people liked to hear about.

Reentering the garage through a side door, he checked the orders pinned to a cork bulletin board by the mortuary's owner/director, who only came in for the big funerals. Most of the time the o
wner played golf with a cell
phone on his belt for business calls.

“
Private service to be held tomorrow noon. Economy casket. No public announcements, no press of any kind. All inquiries must be referred to me. Do not confirm identity of deceased to press or any outside inquiry. Expenses to be covered by private
individuals Aldenhoven and Man
deer. Burial immediately after service in Mt. Hope Cemetery. Aldenhoven will be by after five with clothes.
”

The driver grinned happily. Plenty of time to catch a matinee of that new sci-fi movie, the one about mutant insects from the future coming through computers. He'd be back well before five.

Twenty miles from the mortuary Daniel Man Deer stood in a narrow canyon on the south face of Fortuna Mountain, staring at the dried excrement of a large animal. The scat contained the usual mouse fur as well as the longer and more substantial fur of a mule deer. He knew that the deer carcass was probably somewhere north of Highway 52 on the vast expanse of land still owned by the military, off limits to human animals. But not, he judged from the segmented shape of the
scat, to the feline variety. The scat had been left in the middle of a "corridor" he'd suspected was the path of a bobcat, and now he knew. The next task would be planning a method for keeping the cat alive.

Through prescription sunglasses Man Deer scanned the ground for the sheen of old metal that might indicate the presence of unexploded ordnance. The park had been used as a weapons training area during World War II, then neglected by the military for a half century. Now a fifty-three-hundred-acre regional park only eight miles from bustling downtown San Diego, the wild gorges rising from the San Diego River still held the threat of explosives manufactured to stop Hitler's Reich. Seeing nothing suspici
ous, he eased his muscular six-
foot-two-inch frame to the ground and thought about death. About the dead.

In nature, he acknowledged, death demanded nothing beyond itself. The mule deer had undoubtedly been ill, injured, or old, and quickly killed, probably by coyotes. The presence of the deer's pelt in the bobcat's waste indicated that the cat had not been the first to feed on the carcass. The first predators invariably claimed the protein-rich liver and other internal organs, leaving the rest for latecomers. The deer had simply taken its place in the food chain without prolonged suffering or unnecessary trauma.

But human death was another matter entirely. Human death required honor and ritual and devices for the protection of the living from its unknowable realities. Realities which might transgress the boundary between living and dead if not controlled. Daniel Man Deer knew all about that from a shattering moment in his past. Nodding slightly, he sighed and accepted the fact that it might be happening again. He wasn't sure, but he had a feeling about what had wakened Mary last
night. What had made her scream in terror and then cling to him in the dark.

It occurred to Daniel Man Deer that this crisis might be the reason for the changes that had come over him in the last two years. His early retirement at fifty-eight from a long and lucrative career in the mortgage industry. Reclaiming the old Kumeyaay spelling of his surname even though Mary thought it was ridiculous and refused to change her name from the anglicized "Mandeer" to the Indian "Man Deer." Maybe this crisis had necessitated his dogged research into the Indian life which had belonged to his grandfather, Jeremiah Man Deer, a San Diego dockworker who'd unloaded freighters for fifteen dollars a week until he was beaten to death by a gang of drunken young midshipmen in Navy whites.

Dan had never known his grandfather, but he did now. Beneath the forest-green polo shirt of the Mission Trails Regional Park volunteer, he wore a chipped stone on a leather cord. A stone from the river gorge below him where his ancestors had lived for over ten thousand years before the arrival of the Spanish. In his heart he felt he knew these vanished ones, and he w
ould honor them by protecting th
e wild things still roaming with their spirits on the land. In exchange, they would show him the way to protect Mary from the unhappy spirit that might be reaching toward her from the land of the dead. They would help him. And he would be ready.

In a gray silence falling over the canyon he recognized the coming rain and smiled. Like
the hundred-and-fifty-million-
year-old Santiago peaks towering over the river gorge, he be
longed there. A littl
e rain couldn't change that.

Chapter
5

Pewter-colored clouds had gathered in cottony towers as Bo folded herself into Madge Aldenhoven's car in front of Mercy Hospital. Backlit by the sun through ragged patches of blue, the clouds seemed gilded. Bo would not have been surprised if Renaissance angels playing herald trumpets had appeared between them. The image was another reminder that she hadn't sent a single Christmas card.

"What's the status of Estrella's condition?" Madge asked with characteristic precision.

"Braxton Hicks contractions, not the real thing, so my godchild isn't likely to make a debut today," Bo answered. "But there's a problem with Es's blood pressure. Her doctor wants her to stay in the hospital until some tests are in. Then she wants her t
o stay home until the baby's born
. I'm afraid she went ballistic when we told her what happened today, the gunshots and all. Doctors can be so overbearing—"

"Estrella's doctor is quite right in advising her to stay home," Madge interrupted, tight-lipped. "This work is dangerous. I don't think you understand how dangerous it can be."

A large raindrop hit Madge's windshield, creating a shape in the surface dust that reminded Bo of a blood platelet. The supervisor's voice was tremulous with emotion. Anger, Bo thought. Or fear.

"What happened today was a fluke." She shrugged, running both hands through her graying auburn curls. 'Too many men running around with guns. People get shot in shopping centers, parks, their own cars stopped at traffic lights. What I can't figure is how you knew Es would run into trouble, how you knew to send me out with her. Let's face it, two investigators on one case is a bit irregular."

"I didn't know," Madge said, carefully steering the car onto the old Cabrillo Highway which transected the heart of San Diego from north to south.
"I was simply worried about Es
trella's vulnerability. She should have taken a leave of absence months ago."

"Umm," Bo replied neutrally as they drove beneath the ornate Laurel Street Bridge in Balboa Park. During the holidays the bridge was strung with amber fights, creating a dreamlike atmosphere Bo associated with Venice, even though she'd never seen Venice. The glowing bridge reminded her again that time for shopping was diminishing by the minute. As yet she had no gift for Andy, nothing for Estrella and Henry or Eva Broussard, her shrink. No thoughtful little tokens for co-workers or the neighbor who cared for Molly every day.

"The truth is," she sighed dram
atically over the swoosh-
thump of Madge's windshield wipers, "I'm feeling a little shaky myself, now that the excitement's over. Maybe it would be best if I took the afternoon off, got away from things for a few hours."

"Of course," Madge agreed without adding the usual lecture on professional commitment. "I'll close Estrella's case and transfer the Malcolm girl over to foster care. Perhaps you should call your psychiatrist, too. I'm sure a violent experience like this can be, er, can present difficulties for someone with your, um, problem."

Wow, Madge, well put! Any more delicacy and even I wouldn't have known what you were talking about.

"That's thoughtf
ul of you, Madge," Bo said sweetl
y. "But you know, I just don't feel comfortable closing the Malcolm case until I've at least had a chance to talk with the foster parents. The girl was pretty decompensated last night; they put her in restraints. In the event that this case goes back to juvenile court for a placement change or something in the future, the record isn't going to look very good if it doesn't show a thorough investigation of the situation."

Against the black steering wheel Madge's knuckles showed bone.

"I assume by 'decompensated' you mean hysterical," she said.

"'Hysteria' actually means 'wandering womb,'" Bo grinned, sinking int
o her coat collar. "Until recentl
y the male medical establishment was sure that moodiness in women was caused by unmoored uteruses floating around like empty potato-chip bags in a park pond. Now they're embarrassed and don't use the term much. And 'decompensated' means psychiatrically fragile, having trouble assessing reality. Janny Malcolm was frightened of something, thrashing around, at times not able to assess quite where she was or what was going on. But I don't think—"

"What was she frightened of?" Madge interrupted, the planes of her face oddly prominent beneath pale, papery skin.

"It's hard to say," Bo hedged instinctively. "That's why I want to talk to the foster parents. You know how the press has been lately, claiming CPS just transfers kids around in the system without really checking on them. I think we should cover our tail on this one."

"In case the girl has a problem which will require a more
secure environment, more professional care," Madge said, completing some thought of her own. "I agree, but have that file on my desk before the end of the day tomorrow. It will be Friday. I don't want the case to remain open over the weekend, beyond the forty-eight-hour investigatory period. Any longer than that and it automatically goes back to court. Let's avoid that."

"Roger," Bo answered, feigning interest in two ragged men searching in the rain for recyclable trash in the ice plant bordering the freeway off-ramp. "Do you have any idea how long Janny's been in foster care? I haven't looked at the file yet, but it's pretty thin. Is she new?"

Madge floored the accelerator and made the left turn off Genesee Avenue onto Linda V
ista Road as the yellow traffic
light arrow turned red. In the rainswept gloom Bo was sure she saw tears swimming in the supervisor's violet eyes.

"The name sounds familiar," Madge said tersely. "But I don't know the details."

Bo had been lied to by child molesters, drug addicts, and sadists in the course of her job with Child Protective Services. And she'd known e
ach time. She could pinpoint a li
e at the moment it was spoken. When Estrella had asked how she did it, how she knew, Bo had only been able to explain it in her own terms.

"This is going to sound crazy," she'd told Estrella, "but it's this feeling. A feeling that smells blue. It's like a flash of blue that I feel behind my nose."

This one, she thought, had been a sort of aquamarine. But why was Madge lying about Janny Malcolm?

"I appreciate your coming over to Mercy to get me," she said politely as Madge swerved into the CPS parking lot

"I do the best I can," Madge answered with a tremolo of emotion Bo sensed had nothing to do with Mercy Hospital, Estrella, herself, or anything else in the immediate frame of reference.