Moonbird Boy (10 page)

"Do you have a German name, too?" Bo asked.

"Nah, it's just American. It's Linda Sandifer, but I like Lindsey. I have my friends at school call me Lindsey because it sounds like a girl pioneer who lives in a covered wagon. I'd like to live with my mom in a covered wagon on the prairie. She got me Gretel for my birthday when I was seven last week. I didn't really want a dog; I wanted hamsters so they'd have babies. Except Danny, that's my stepfather, Danny says Gretel's more like a rat than a dog. He doesn't like her."

And I don't like him.

"Lindsey, do you remember what room your mom and Danny are in?"

"Yeah, it's upstairs, it's number seventeen."

"Well, I want you to take Gretel and stand on the porch by the office while I run up and talk to them for a minute, okay?"

"But... they said they'd come get me after they were, you know, done being alone. You can't..."

"Yes I can." Bo smiled. "Now go stand by the office. I'll be right back."

The man who opened the door of number seventeen had penny-sized beige eyes, an overlarge jaw, and smelled like beer. He was wearing nothing but a pair of gym shorts and seemed to have been asleep. "Yeah?" he said.

"Your little girl, Lindsey, has been standing outside alone for over two hours," Bo began. "It's dark now and I'm afraid it's simply not safe for—"

"It's her kid," he said, gesturing with a jerk of his head toward a woman emerging from the bathroom and tucking a new T-shirt into her jeans. "Honey, handle this." With the air of a man put upon by inferiors, he scooped a beer can from a large cooler and concentrated on the flickering light from a color TV.

"Where is Linda?" the woman asked. "Is she okay? I didn't realize it had gotten dark. I really appreciate..."

"Some people oughtta mind their own business," the man growled at the TV. "The kid's fine, no big deal."

Bo felt something like a miniature bolt of lightning inside her skull. It felt good. Pushing the door fully open with her knee, she let her head rotate with dramatic slowness toward the man slouching on the end of the unmade bed.

"I'm afraid it is a big deal, sir. You're in California, where we have some really serious laws affecting people who endanger children. I live in this neighborhood, so I know that if you'd so much as glanced at what's hanging around on that sidewalk where you dumped a seven-year-old girl, you'd have noticed what I'm talking about when I say 'endangered.' "

"Lady, get a life," the man sneered. "Go get yourself a man and quit bothering normal people. Get outta here!"

"Dan, I think..." the woman whispered.

"I'm not leaving until that child is safe," Bo insisted. "Lindsey tells me you're in the navy. Let me tell you I work for Child Protective Services. That way we both understand that one call from me to your CO will go straight into your service record and possibly land you in a shoreside job loading garbage for six months while you sit through an Armed Services Family Counseling Program. Now, was there anything else you wanted to say?"

The man merely glared into his beer can as though it contained something repulsive, but Bo could see a flush of humiliation and rage crawling up his thick neck. He might take his anger out on the child unless safeguards were established.

"I'll go down and get Linda," the woman said.

Bo followed her down the stairs and told Lindsey she'd come by tomorrow morning and take her and Gretel to a neat place nearby where they sold great stuff for dogs. "I'll bring my ID badge so you'll know I'm who I say I am," she told the girl's mother. "You can check it out by calling the child abuse hotline. Then I'll take Lindsey and her puppy out for a while, give you and that pinnacle of manhood another chance to be 'alone.' " Between the lines was a clear message—"I'll be back."

The woman blushed under the motel's security lights. "It's just that he's been on a tour for three months. And we only got married just before that..."

"Spare me," Bo said, and turned to walk home. She felt better than she had in months. Too good, probably. Eva was right. Time to cut back the antidepressants before she went too far the other way and got manic. But for the moment she was enjoying the upswing, and completely forgot to think about sharks.

The shark had washed ashore during the night on a rocky beach north of Ensenada, Mexico, about eighty-five miles south of San Diego. Her death had occurred several hours before the tides beached her body amid moonlit rocks and ropes of seaweed. At dawn an old man beachcombing for plastic bottles dumped into the ocean from hundreds of pleasure boats cruising the coast saw the shark, and quickly cut off her dorsal fin with the curved knife he carried hidden in his boot. Then he packed the fin in seaweed and walked eight miles into Ensenada where he sold it for twenty American dollars to a fancy restaurant. The fin, he knew, would be made into soup.

After that he walked two more miles to the Escuela Ciencias Marinas, the School of Oceanography, on Calle Primera where a man named Professor Hector Vincente Ortiz would pay five dollars to anybody who told him when a whale or any big fish washed up on the beach. Since it was Saturday Dr. Ortiz wasn't there, but a man at a desk inside the door phoned Ortiz at his home and was instructed to establish the precise location of the shark cadaver and to give the old man his five-dollar mordida.

Hector Ortiz was excited about the availability of a great white for dissection, but he had to attend his son's soccer game and then drive his aging father-in-law to a doctor's appointment for the prostate problem that was making the old man meaner than a scorpion. There was no honorable way for a man of his character and position to avoid either of these responsibilities, but by afternoon the great white shark would be hacked to pieces for food and souvenirs. Hector Ortiz thought about this for exactly two minutes and then phoned a promising student in his graduate marine biology seminar named Jose Mendez.

"I'm particularly concerned with stomach contents, crustacean-load in the gill areas, and the brain," he told Mendez. "Get those and then we'll try to take samples of everything else we can before it's too late. Don't forget ice. I'll be there as soon as possible."

An hour later Jose Mendez and his girlfriend, Bianca Escobedo, hauled an old metal Coleman cooler across the gray sand and black rocks to a beach between Ensenada and a village called San Miguel. In the cooler were a bag of ice, a hack saw, a keyhole saw, two pairs of pliers, a tape measure, knives in four sizes, two large C-clamps, boxes of sandwich bags and half-gallon freezer bags, a waterproof marker, and tape.

Ahead on the beach people stood in clusters staring at the shark, whose double-lobed tail, eyes, and most of its teeth had already been removed by human scavengers. Jose and Bianca both knew that the shark's eyes and teeth, along with mummified toads, straw dolls, jimsonweed, playing cards, snake skins, and black chickens, would be used in primitive rituals by people like the servants who had raised them both. The tail, more easily hauled away than the unwieldy body, would be ground for fertilizer in somebody's garden.

"Ycchh," Bianca said when they were twenty yards from the baking carcass. "I'm glad I majored in business instead of this. It smells."

"Wait until I cut open the stomach." Jose grinned at the young woman who would be his bride after he graduated and got a job. His father had wanted him to stay in medical school, but Jose loved the beach and its freedom. Marine biology seemed like the easiest way to avoid having to get what he thought of as a real job. "You're going to throw up," he told her gleefully.

"I will not! I can take anything you can."

Approaching a middle-aged man with a machete who was ineffectively trying to saw chunks of flesh from the cadaver, Jose explained who he was and asked the man to wait until he had completed his scientific duties before hacking off stew meat to take home for his wife. The man nodded and stood back three feet, establishing Jose's authority in the eyes of the onlookers. Removing his shirt, Jose flexed his shoulder muscles, showing off for Bianca and demonstrating to the crowd how manly the field of marine biology could be. Then he selected the largest knife from the cooler and assessed the task before him.

The shark, a massive female great white, had come to rest on its left side parallel to the shore and facing south. Several metal harpoons trailed black nylon cord onto the sand. The stomach would be, Jose calculated, just below one of the harpoons. Measuring the distance with his eyes, he plunged the knife into the shark's side with both hands and pulled the blade laterally until the cut was wide enough to accommodate the hack saw.

"I need the big saw," he told Bianca, who was standing behind him, "then the second-smallest knife, and then the big plastic bags. When I get the stomach open I'll scoop the contents into the bags and then you seal them, okay?"

"What women do for love." Bianca grinned and handed him the hack saw.

After exposing the stomach Jose waited for a strong breeze off the water, made a small, vertical cut through the organ's side, and then pushed against the shark's belly with his knee. The gaseous stench escaping through the cut brought bile into his throat and made his hands shake. Bianca had a white line above her upper lip and tears in her eyes, but she didn't move even though the onlookers moaned and held their noses. In minutes he'd widened the incision and plunged an open plastic gag into the stomach.

Bones. There were bones amid the expected contents of the shark's stomach, and they weren't from fish. Bigger bones, and lacking that opaque flexibility characteristic of skeletons that would swim but never walk. In the second sample was a straight bone with three sides, too long to fit in the bag. Some animal must have fallen into the sea, he thought, and been devoured by the shark. Maybe a goat or a large dog.

Curious, he explored the stomach with his right hand and found another, larger bone, cylindrical with a big round knob at one end that was fastened to the shaft at nearly a right angle by a pyramid-shaped neck. As an undergraduate in premed, Jose had taken an anatomy class. He was certain this bone was a femur, a thighbone. The round knob was what fit into the animal's pelvis. And the other long bone had been a tibia. Holding the bigger bone next to his own thigh, he saw that it was somewhat shorter.

"What is it?" Bianca asked.

"I don't know. An animal of some kind that the shark ate. Could you hand me the tape measure?"

The femur was sixteen and a half inches long. But what sort of animal would have this long, straight thighbone? Maybe an ape of some kind, Jose thought. Except there were no wild primates for thousands of miles. The shark could have eaten a monkey that fell into the ocean somewhere, but the bones would been digested or excreted long before the shark could have swum to Baja, Mexico. These bones had only been in the shark's stomach for a few days.

From his anatomy class Jose remembered a formula. The femur was supposed to be a fourth of total body height. So this femur, he calculated, was from an animal that had been about five feet, six inches tall. Except that formula was only for human femurs.

The thought brought a sense of horror that was like frost spreading inside the muscles of his chest and back. What if this bone were human? Jose held it in both hands, turning it in the bright sunlight. Had it belonged to a man or a woman? Either one could be five feet, six inches tall. But there was something about the angle of the knob, where the bone fit into the pelvis. Women's pelvises were much wider than men's in order to accommodate babies. So the angle of that knob was almost ninety degrees in women, he remembered. Professor Guitierrez had made dumb jokes about it in class. This femur, Jose Mendez predicted, would turn out to be from a female, and a human. The realization intensified his curiosity, but also intensified his discomfort. In Mexico human remains were honored, their resting places visited by their families for celebrations. To be standing on a beach holding a dead woman's thighbone was unthinkable.

Jose didn't know what to do. He wanted to throw the thing down in the sand and run, but that was childish. It was just a bone. Probably a cemetery in some little seaside village had been eaten away by the surf, and... But no, he reminded himself, the shark wouldn't have been attracted to a dead body and besides, where was the rest of it? Well, maybe an amputation in a hospital somewhere, and the hospital had been careless about disposing of the amputated leg and it had wound up in the sea? The nausea came back, this time from someplace deep inside him. Unconsciously he rubbed his thumb against the bone where he held it along the shaft about four inches beneath the big knob.

"Jose, you're bleeding!" Bianca cried. "Look at your thumb!"

Looking down he saw the slice of skin from which a rivulet of his blood ran over the side of the bone. He'd cut himself on something sharp that shouldn't be there. Looking closely at the femur he saw, highlighted by his own blood, a cut in the bone. Something had gouged it and glanced off the surface, chipping the bone and leaving a small, straight, razor-sharp flap.

No triangular, serrated shark's tooth could leave a slice like that, he thought. Only something thin and straight, like a knife. When he turned the femur forward he realized that the gouge would have cut directly through her femoral artery. If the injury occurred prior to her death it would have killed her in minutes, her blood pumping in torrents from the large artery at its most unprotected point low in her groin. And if this injury happened in the sea, the pumping blood would attract sharks.

Jose placed the femur in the ice chest and stared at the shark, which no longer interested him. He'd used his mind to figure out part of a story. That interested him. The fact that he could do that interested him a lot. He wondered who the woman was, what had happened to her. Weren't there police doctors, medical examiners, who did this for a living? It would mean going back to medical school, but he could be such a doctor. The thought was exciting.

"This shark has devoured the leg of a woman," he told the crowd with authority. "It will be necessary for someone to notify the police."