Moonbird Boy (27 page)

The Indians, she remembered, frequently called each other by different names. A significant event in the life of an individual would give rise to a new name celebrating the event, although the person's previous names remained in use as well.

Zach's oldest son, Ojo, had been named, as had all of Zach and Dura's children, for Kumeyaay listed in the 1880 San Diego census. Zach explained that the Indians had not been allowed to claim identifying surnames because the white census takers thought names such as Lost Water and Eats Eyes were a joke. And so, Zach said, he'd found the names of the dead in the San Diego Public Library. Kumeyaay listed simply as Maria Jueh, Ojo, Juana, Tiron, Cunel. In naming his children with their names, he told Bo, he'd given the old ones his own surname.

But the other children often called Ojo Rabbit in honor of his hunting skill, Bo recalled. And Dura often called the boy Stone Burro for reasons known only to mother and son. Yet all the names were still Ojo, as all the names by which Adam Keith might have been known would to Bo always be Mort.

"I figured it out," she answered her own question as Molly stretched against the door in an attempt to look out the Pathfinder's window. "Nobody's just one thing, one identity. Mort was as real as Adam: it was Mort that I knew. And don't worry, tonight I'll tie a stack of towels to the seat so you can see out."

Bo parked in the shade and walked Molly around the CPS parking lot before settling the little dog with a bowl of water in her box on the back seat. The windows were down. The puppy would be all right until Bo returned, she thought, which would probably be in a few minutes. She was next up on the rotation for new cases. It would be a miracle if Madge hadn't already assigned it.

The miracle was not forthcoming. On her desk when she entered was a clean, new case file so thin Bo knew there could be nothing in it but a face sheet.

"Sounds like a weird one," Estrella said as Bo assessed the condition of her tousled curls in the mirror affixed to the back of their office door. "General Hospital emergency room staff called it in to the hotline. Seems a biker mom brought her seven-year-old daughter in with what turned out to be bronchial pneumonia, and the hospital slapped a hold on the kid. They think mom's on drugs or something. She's still at the hospital demanding to take her daughter home. You'd better get up there."

"They'll call the police if mom gets too obstreperous," Bo said, sinking into her chair. She wasn't ready for another case, not that it mattered. They kept coming.

The door opened and Madge Aldenhoven leaned in. "The court liaison just phoned," she told Bo briskly. "Your Wagman petition's been dismissed. You can close the case. Let's get it out of here this afternoon." Good old Madge, visions of "cases handled and closed" statistics dancing before her eyes. Everybody in the system knew that Aldenhoven's unit petitioned more cases than any other. Closing one only made room for more.

"Do you really think I should take the time for the paperwork?" Bo asked, feigning deep concern. "This new case sounds pretty messy. I thought I'd run up to General right away."

"I suppose you're right," Madge answered, knitting an otherwise seamless forehead. Bo had marveled for years at her supervisor's flawless complexion. Fifteen years Bo's senior, Madge nonetheless had a face betraying no more lines than Ingrid Bergman's in Casablanca. Probably the result of clean living, Bo thought. Living within the tidy, if incessantly changing, boundaries set by the Department of Social Services procedures manual. "If you leave now you may get back in time to complete the Wagman paperwork."

"I'll try," Bo lied. She wanted to keep Bird's case open just in case. But just in case what? As the CPS investigator she'd have access to any information she needed to determine the best plan for the child. But she'd already made that determination. The information she wanted now was something quite different.

"The Sheriffs Department is never going to find Mort's killer," she told Estrella after Madge closed their door. "And MedNet is going to take over the Ghost Flower program. They'll turn it into a marketing zoo, probably sell 'Indian headdresses' with 'Crazy House' spelled out in plastic beads on the headband. Then when they've destroyed the program and the Neji, they'll sell it and go on to ruin something else. I don't know what to do."

Estrella spun her desk chair to face Bo. "You've done what you said you wanted to," she said softly. "You found Bird's grandmother. You made sure Bird was safe. That's what you wanted to do for Mort. Now it's done. The rest isn't your responsibility, Bo. It's time to let it go."

"I still don't know who was playing those tapes, who followed me and tried to drive me crazy. I can't just let that go, Es. And there's something in all this, some piece of information, that would tie it all together, show the connection between the creep with the tape and Mort's death, but I can't see it."

"There may not be any connection, Bo. Maybe it's just somebody in your neighborhood who doesn't like you or didn't like Mildred's barking, some nasty neighbor who wants to make a point. These things happen. And you do live in a sort of odd neighborhood."

"I'm odd," Bo replied. "And I might buy the nasty neighbor theory if it weren't for what happened out at UCSD—the red dog collar thing. Everything else happened at or near my apartment, but somebody had to be following me to set that up, Es. Somebody following me with a red dog collar in his pocket, just waiting for the right situation. It wasn't a dog-hating neighbor following me. I don't know who it was."

"Henry's almost finished with the baby's room," Estrella said, deliberately changing the subject. "Why don't you and Andy come over for dinner tonight to see it? We decided on a vinyl tile floor because it's so much easier to keep clean than carpet, and he's built a whole wall of shelves with a built-in space for a desk later. You need to relax, Bo, get away from this case."

"Oh, Es, thanks. You're right, of course. But I'm tired, I've got Molly to train before I can take her anywhere, and tonight I think I'll just crash, read a mystery and eat corn chips or something. But how about tomorrow? We'll bring a couple of pizzas, okay?"

Estrella nodded, her dark eyes unconvinced. "You plan to have Molly trained by tomorrow?"

Bo sketched a large corn chip on her desk blotter. "I just want to think tonight, Es. Be alone."

"Ees no good, thees theenking," Estrella replied in a mock accent, snapping imaginary castanets over her head. "Especially alone."

"It's the only way to do it." Bo grinned. "And I've got to run up to General Hospital to see a lady biker. Don't worry, Es. I'm okay."

But as she closed the office door behind her a wave of concern seeped beneath it and followed her outside.

"Be careful," it said. "Something's not right. Be careful."

It was almost six when Bo completed the case at General Hospital. It had been, she thought as she parked the Pathfinder and carried Molly up the apartment steps, a tribute to everything that can go wrong when one set of people judges another. Especially when those sitting in judgment have as backup a legally sanctioned bureaucracy empowered to impound children. In this situation the bureaucracy had been called for the simple reason that a woman had a tattoo.

Of course it wasn't an ordinary tattoo. Bo grinned as she spooned puppy diet into Molly's dish on the kitchen floor. It was an outrageous tattoo. A tarantula, in fact, exquisitely inked in the skin of a twenty-eight-year-old woman named Donna Sprauer, whose seven-year-old daughter, Michelle, was ill. The tattoo had been drawn on Sprauer's neck a decade earlier, and was now somewhat faded and fuzzy. But insufficiently faded and fuzzy to diminish the horror felt by the emergency room paramedical staff, some of whom maintained that the tattoo was evidence of Sprauer's devotion to Satan.

"I was eighteen!" Donna Sprauer told Bo in the hospital's ER waiting room. "I was an idiot! But I don't see why a stupid tattoo I had done ten years ago when I was too dumb to know my ass from a hole in the ground should mean these people can keep my kid. They can't do that."

Bo explained that they could do that, and had. "They think a woman with a tarantula tattoo on her neck must be depraved, unfit," she explained. "They put a 'hospital hold' on Michelle and called Child Protective Services. Now I have to do a complete investigation before I can release the hold."

"I should have worn a turtleneck," the young woman sighed. "I always wear one when I go out. If I could afford it, I'd have the damn thing removed, but it costs a fortune. And I was too panicky to change clothes. She was running a real high fever. Her eyes looked funny. I called her pediatrician, but the nurse said he was at the hospital. She said I should bring Michelle to an emergency room, so I did."

"Another claim is that you endangered the child by bringing her here on a motorcycle," Bo went on.

"My old man, Denny, he took the truck to work. The bike was all I had. What was I supposed to do, walk seven miles carrying a sick kid in this heat? She had a helmet on, and I had her tied to me with duct tape in case she passed out or something. I've got a license; the bike's got a license. What did I do wrong?"

"So far, nothing," Bo told her. "It sounds as if you've done exactly what you should to care for your daughter. Would you mind if I took a look at the house where Michelle lives?"

"Why?"

"It's just part of the investigation."

"This is insane," Donna Sprauer insisted, tucking a black tank top into her black Levi's, "but come on. I just want to get Michelle out of here, get her home where I can take care of her. They said she was better now. They got the fever down."

"I'll drive," Bo answered.

Sprauer's home, shared with Dennis Overholt, a general contractor, was a two-bedroom bungalow on a well-kept street in El Cajon. Except for debris from a playhouse Overholt was building for Michelle in the backyard, the house and yard were clean. No dirty dishes in the sink, no garbage in the carpet. No pornographic pictures or videotapes in sight. A waterbed in the adults' bedroom was neatly made. In the girl's room a calico cat lay among rumpled Beauty and the Beast sheets, clearly waiting for the return of her mistress.

"That's Angel," Donna Sprauer said, "Michelle's cat. Put that in your report."

"I will," Bo agreed. "Now let's go bring Michelle home."

The release had taken another hour, and Bo felt compelled to wait and drive the child home rather than risk more flak over the motorcycle. The little girl had been thrilled to share the ride with Molly.

"Now you know how I make a living," Bo sighed as the little dog waddled after the rubber porcupine Bo threw for her. "Sometimes it's meaningful work, sometimes it's like this afternoon. But at least it's never boring."

Molly took the porcupine onto the deck and tried to bury it in a box planter full of mummified geraniums Bo had forgotten to have someone water while she was at the lodge.

"Go for it," she told the dog. "Guess I should get you a sandbox, huh?"

It would be fun to get a sandbox, she thought. And Molly would enjoy having somewhere to dig. Dachshunds liked to dig. But if they moved in with Andy, Molly would have a whole yard to dig in. The issue seemed to permeate everything.

"I'm getting the sandbox," she told Molly. "Maybe later we'll decide to live with him, and maybe we won't. But for now I'm going to stop thinking about it."

After a call to Andrew in which she insisted on a night alone and he countered with insistence on breakfast, Bo relaxed in a steaming tub and sifted through what she knew of Mort Wagman, bit by bit. He'd been a successful stand-up comic in spite of his schizophrenia. Well, that wasn't exactly astonishing, Bo thought. It was a closely guarded secret in the psychiatric community that more than one popular comic had a mild case of the illness, one even touring with an attendant to make sure the medications were taken. Sometimes the illness provided an edge appropriate on stage, a quicksilver ability at impersonations, mimicry.

And Mort was wealthy, a status most comics working the clubs only dreamed of claiming. Was there something about his business relationship with SnakeEye, the athletic shoe company that paid him a fortune to go off his meds and become psychotic for a commercial, that could result in his death? What would SnakeEye gain from the loss of its "psycho" star? Nothing, Bo thought. Forget SnakeEye.

MedNet then. Was Ann Keith's view correct? A powerful corporation willing to kill in order to achieve a relatively insignificant takeover?

"I don't know much about megabusinesses," Bo told a floating island of lemon-scented bubbles, "but it seems to me they lean more toward twisted legalities, the purchase of elected officials, and under-the-table monopolies than they do on murder. It's so old-fashioned. The really sophisticated criminals regard it as passé, I think."

What about the brain surgery? Mort Wagman had been walking around with brain cells in his skull from a Jack Russell terrier. There were plenty of people who would lose it completely over that, run around screaming about "God's law" and signing petitions to stop fetal cell implants. But nobody knew about Mort's surgery except Ann Lee Keith and the foreign surgeon who'd performed the operation.

But Mort had told her about it, Bo thought, running additional hot water into the tub. He'd mentioned it in his characteristically odd way, explaining himself to her. And he'd said something else. He'd said he kissed a frog, that maybe he'd marry her. Bo held a bar of soap under the water and then released it. As it burst through the water's surface a train of thought regarding frogs came to its conclusion.

"Of course!" she yelled, climbing out of the tub and wrapping her terrycloth robe about her. What did frogs do? They croaked, they ate flies, and they hopped. Mort Wagman had kissed a hopper. And her last name was Mead.

It made sense. Hopper Mead's friends had told the police that she was seeing somebody in Los Angeles, somebody working in "the industry," involved in show business. A stand-up comic fit the description. And Mead had stayed in San Diego during the month Mort Wagman was rehabbing at Ghost Flower Lodge. No more weekend trips to the City of Angels. But, Bo remembered, Hopper Mead had not come to the lodge to visit Mort. No one had visited him. So what did that mean?