Moonbird Boy (28 page)

Bo paced the length of her apartment accompanied by Molly, who seemed to regard pacing as a reasonable, even entertaining, pastime.

"Why wouldn't she come to visit him?" Bo asked rhetorically.

She already knew the answer. Most young men in love would go to some lengths to avoid being seen in a psychotic episode by the beloved. Psychiatric illness could be a real damper on romance. Mort had probably asked the young woman to stay away until he was stable, and she'd respected his wishes. Bo felt a surge of respect for Hopper Mead, followed by a dragging wave of sadness. Mort had planned to introduce his lady to his mother, a significant event connecting tumultuous past to triumphant present. Now Mort Wagman and Hopper Mead were both dead, and within hours of each other.

"It's too coincidental to be coincidence," Bo told Molly, pulling a length of yellow cotton thread from the puppy's mouth. "And stop attacking the hem of my robe."

Ann Keith's assumption that MedNet was responsible for her son's death might be accurate, Bo mused. But what about Hopper Mead? It was, after all, her death that had transferred a four-hundred-thousand-dollar loan into the hands of MedNet, threatening the Indians' ruin, and so outraging Mort Wagman that he'd phoned his lawyer in the middle of the night to initiate fund transfers as a first step in bailing out the Neji. But Hopper Mead's death had been an accident, an illfated rendezvous with a shark cruising San Diego's coastal waters. The bones of her severed leg had been found in the shark's stomach. No ambiguity there. A shark killed Hopper Mead, and despite the elegance of the theory, sharks could not be hired. Still, the confluence of events suggested a pattern, a scaffold of connections with Ghost Flower Lodge at its center. But why?

Bo wandered back into her bedroom and threw on random items of clothing for a potty-run with Molly. Only ten minutes later on Dog Beach did she realize that her T-shirt was on backward and the madras plaid shorts she'd grabbed from a drawer were tight in the hips because they weren't hers, but Andy's. Fortunately, no one on Dog Beach would care.

"There's something missing in this picture," she told Molly, drawing a shark in the sand with the splintered end of an abandoned yardstick. "Even if that Mexican graduate student's suspicions are true, and somebody knifed Mead before the arrival of the shark, everything still points to MedNet. Nobody else stands to gain from the deaths of Hopper Mead and Mort Wagman. But the police already checked that out and found nada. Back to square one."

Molly chased the stick with which Bo was drawing a square in the sand, her paws flinging arcs of grit into Bo's shoes.

"So maybe these two deaths really are a coincidence," she went on. "Maybe somebody from MedNet arranged to have Mead knifed and thrown to the sharks within the same twenty-four hours that somebody else entirely tracked Mort to the rim of a desert canyon in the middle of the night and shot him. But if MedNet wasn't behind Mort's murder, then who was? There's something I'm just not getting, Molly, a blank space."

Over sluggish, low-tide surf a horizontal band of water vapor called the marine layer turned the sky into a gray envelope. Shut. Sealed. Occasionally a gull fell from it to strut on the beach before being driven aloft again by puppy barks, but nothing else seemed forthcoming. The ocean sky was as impenetrable as whatever had snuffed out the life of Mort Wagman. Bo threw the broken yardstick into the sky, half expecting it to be swallowed, but it merely fell into the sea and floated limply on the swells.

Back at her apartment Bo cleaned sand from Molly's ears, reconsidered the sandbox idea. The little dog was really too close to the ground for the endlessly blowing sand of a beach community. Ocean Beach had been Mildred's home, but Mildred was gone. Maybe it was time to leave, move on, try something new. As if on cue, the phone rang.

"Hi, Andy," Bo answered.

"How did you know?" queried the familiar baritone.

"I was thinking about Molly's ears, about Mildred, sand, moving, all that."

"Of course," he replied with heroic indifference to implications, "all those things are important. But I called because I just learned that I'll need to be at the hospital early tomorrow morning to document a particularly important surgery for a criminal investigation, so I can't meet you for breakfast. I thought maybe lunch ..."

"Not tomorrow," Bo replied thoughtfully. "I'll probably get another case since I closed the one I got this afternoon, and I want to run by Ghost Flower and talk to Zach. Andy, I've figured out something, a connection, in this case but still nothing fits. I think Mort and Hopper Mead had a thing, as they say. Mort was trying to tell me that when he said he'd kissed a frog. But even that doesn't explain his murder because MedNet couldn't possibly have known about Mort loaning the Neji enough money to pay off Hopper's loan the same night he made the call to his lawyer. It's just not possible unless MedNet had the lodge phones tapped or something, and even then ..."

"You've lost me," Andrew LaMarche said as if this were nothing new. "But why would a young woman of Hopper Mead's background get involved with—"

"Watch it, Andy," Bo said in tones usually reserved for street predators. "Don't say what I think you're going to say. Just don't."

"I was going to say," he went on imperturbably, "... get involved with someone in the entertainment industry. She was wealthy, probably privately educated, well-traveled, even pampered. The social register set. They hire entertainers, Bo, but they don't marry them."

Bo drew an ascot tie decorated in dollar signs on a dog food label. "You sound just like your parents," she said brightly, aware as the words left her mouth that her relationship with Andrew LaMarche had in the moment donned a terrible cloak of intimacy, the verbal trappings of people who know each other's secrets. The awareness had a loamy scent, like plowed fields or a dense forest floor.

"Mon dieu," he sighed. "I do."

In the silence that followed, Bo felt the swooping weight of ten thousand moments like this one, moments between friends, lovers, parents, and children. Moments on which whole dramas hinged, when a flawed human reality would meet acceptance, denial, or attack.

"It comes with having parents." She laughed softly. "They live in your head and blurt things out at inappropriate moments." Acceptance. She couldn't imagine where the inclination had come from, but it felt good.

"My parents were pompous and pathetic," he groaned. "I can't believe I—"

"You're definitely not pathetic," Bo replied. "But since you now owe me a little struggle to even things out, help me with Mort's murder. I can't figure out who, or why ..."

"If your guess about their relationship is on target, then a connection between the two deaths seems likely. So what's the common link?"

"Ghost Flower Lodge. Hopper Mead invested in it and then Mort was a patient there. Also MedNet, sort of. But I want to focus on the lodge."

"Well ..." Andrew drew out the word thoughtfully, "What's there?"

"What do you mean?"

"In the military it's called reconnoitering. It means getting the lay of the land, what's nearby, who's around, when, why. It's like a map with buildings and people. So what's out there? Remember, I was never there."

Bo thought about the desert wasteland "given" the Kumeyaay when invaders seized all the desirable properties. "Nothing," she said. "Just two or three Kumeyaay reservations, some Bureau of Land Management lands, a few parcels of private property, a state road. Lots of chollas, baked dirt, the occasional ghostly mule train with a headless driver."

Andrew LaMarche was all business. "What about the Neji property? Is there anyplace that allows easy access other than the road?"

“‘Easy’ isn't a term I'd use anywhere out there," Bo answered, "and there's really nothing. Well, there is a dirt road into a geological dig, or at least I think it's a geological dig. There's a sign. It's called Had-a-something with a Roman numeral two. Had-a-sea, I thought, no... Had-a-mar. I think it's a university dig called Hadamar II."

"Hadamar!" Andrew's voice boomed through twenty miles of fiber-optic filaments and Pacific Bell relays. "Is that what you said?"

"Well, yeah. It's just some cutesy geologist pun on the old seabed, Andy. It doesn't have anything to do with Ghost Flower Lodge."

"A psychiatric care facility." His voice was an octave deeper than usual and tremulous with anger.

"Ghost Flower Lodge is a psychiatric care facility," Bo confirmed. "So what?"

"Hadamar is a small town in Germany, Bo. I happened to visit it one day when I was touring. I intended never to tell you what I saw there."

Bo sighed. "Andy, every time you try to protect me from something there's trouble. What on earth are you talking about?"

"Sit down, Bo," he said. "This may be nothing more than a coincidence, but then again it may not be."

"There are too many coincidences already, Andy. Tell me what this is all about."

"All right," he said, and began a tale that fell through Bo's mind like an intolerable light, explaining everything, illuminating a face Bo realized she had never seen. Illuminating the face of a killer hiding in fog.

When Andrew was finished with the gruesome story, she merely said, "Let me think about this, Andy. I have to think about this alone."

Then she checked a name in the San Diego police report on Hopper Mead's death, found the address in a San Diego phone directory, and grabbed her keys. If she were right, she'd just identified Mort Wagman's killer and her own tormentor. A man so obsessed with his own superiority that he'd buried a knife in his sister's groin, effectively preventing any "unworthy" new life from growing there.

They'd all been suspicious of MedNet, Bo realized, for the same reasons that the hospital staff had mistrusted a mother with a tarantula tattooed on her neck. Corporations and tattooed people were known for their nasty agendas. But not this time. Bo flung herself into the darkness beyond her door, determined to uncover the truth. Afterward, she'd notify the police. But first she had to be sure.

San Diego's night streets seemed innocuous as Bo drove to the suburban University City address she'd found in the phone book. Yellow porch lights highlighted junipers, bottlebrush trees, poisonous oleander with blossoms of white, pink, or a rich buttery color precisely the hue, Bo observed, of homemade shortbread. Ordinary Southern California landscaping, ordinary residential streets. But then probably nothing in its shrubbery had advertised the town of Hadamar's hideous secret, either.

At the corner of Genesee and Governor Bo turned at a clump of decorative sycamores into the condo complex where he lived. Somebody named Anselm Tucker. Clerk to Randolph Mead, Jr., whom Bo had never met and yet knew, now, intimately. Hopper Mead's older brother, whose voice was nothing more than a distilled version of the hate spewing in rivers from a thousand gun clubs, talk shows, and diseased affinity groups masquerading in the word "Christian." Their message, Bo thought, was elegant in its simplicity. "Be like us or perish." Randolph Mead had become their very personal soldier.

After finding Tucker's address in the maze of beige stucco, Bo parked in the alley-sized street behind his numbered garage door and contemplated the lighted steps leading to a walkway fronting the building. There were four attached condos, each a two-story town house resting heavily on its ground-floor garage. Over the walkway, jutting corners of adjacent buildings came within three feet of touching. Bo climbed the steps into a sense of imprisonment created by architectural closeness. And Anselm Tucker wasn't home.

"Damn!" she whispered, standing at the gate of a front patio so small it seemed crushed between thick stucco walls. A window overlooking the patio's bare Mexican pavers was dark, as was an upstairs window sliced with wide vertical blinds. Bo rang the bell again, and looked around.

People kept to themselves in places like this, she knew. The suffocating proximity of a badly planned condo complex forced inhabitants to ignore each other, maintain an illusion of privacy. Anselm Tucker's immediate neighbors probably didn't even know his name, but Bo tried the bell outside the next patio anyway.

"Yes?" a delicate Asian woman answered, moving toward Bo through an attractive arrangement of potted shrubs.

"My uncle, next door," Bo improvised smoothly, "asked me to come by and pick up some things, but he's not home. Do you have any idea when he'll be back?"

"Uncle?" the woman said softly.

Bo realized that she had no idea how old Anselm Tucker was. The name "Anselm" had just sounded, even to her maturing ears, old. "It's a family joke," she grinned. "He isn't really my uncle." That, at least, was the truth.

"He is gone," the woman went on. "My husband saw him load things in his car four days ago and then leave. We don't really know him. I'm sorry."

"Thanks." Bo nodded, pondering this new information. Had Randolph Mead's only alibi for the time in which his sister met her death just blown town? If he had, it was a smart move.

Bo hurried back to her car, got in, and then noticed that Tucker's garage door padlock, while locked, actually secured nothing. Through haste or carelessness, Tucker had neglected to flip the sliding bolt over the hardware's slot before snapping the padlock shut. And the presence of the padlock meant there was no automatic door-opener. Like many basementless Californians, Tucker probably used his garage for storage and parked his car on the street. In case anyone was watching, Bo waved enthusiastically to an empty window in the Asian woman's condo and called, "It's okay! He left the garage door open for me." Then she pulled up the door, slid under, and let it fall softly behind her.

In the gloom she saw the white outlines of a washer and dryer, some boxes, clothes in laundry baskets. An interior door stood open, revealing a short set of stairs that would, she was sure, lead to a kitchen. The garage felt abandoned.

The kitchen proved to be more of the same. Fiestaware dishes in a white plastic drainer, clean. Microwave under a cabinet. Toaster oven. A faint smell of bleach. The odor wafted from a larger refrigerator next to the sink. Bo stared at the appliance for a full minute before tugging skittishly at its handle, half expecting to find something unspeakable inside. But the refrigerator was glaringly empty. Disinfected. Ready to sell with the condo. The immaculate refrigerator confirmed Bo's suspicion. Whoever Anselm Tucker was, he wouldn't be coming back.