Turtle Baby (29 page)

"I think I can do something here," she told the ex-stuntman. "I shouldn't. The rules absolutely prohibit my interference in foster care and adoptions decisions. If my boss should hear that I did anything connected to the placement of a child, I'd be blacklisted in every CPS agency in the country, capice?"

Davy Dooley's black eyes sparkled like crystal in lamplight.

"Do anything you can," he said, his voice cracking. "Even if we don't have Acito, he should go to people who're right for him. We'll do whatever you say. We only want him to have the best."

"May I use your phone?" Bo grinned.

"Sure. It's in the kitchen."

In moments Bo had reached a big-hearted Cajun named Gaston Barrileaux in Lafayette, Louisiana. He listened, he agreed, he would do as Bo asked.

"Wanted to do some fishing, anyway," he laughed. "And nothing warms my heart more than beating a bureaucracy at its own game. Liz is right here; she agrees. I'll call you tomorrow, let you know if it worked."

"Thanks, Stoney," Bo said. "I knew I could count on you."

Alone in the Dooleys' kitchen, Bo realized that her attachment to Liz and Stoney Barrileaux felt familial. Comfortable and solid. They didn't question her decision, just agreed to help. Friends. If only Andrew LaMarche, she thought, were more like his own family. But now wasn't the time to worry about that.

Connie Dooley had rejoined her husband in the living room, her composure regained.

"I apologize," she began. "It's just that—"

"Look," Bo explained, "I've just pulled the last available string that may keep Acito with you. That's what I think is best for him, and so that's what I've done. It may work and it may not. The system may never approve your home for a regular adoption, but there's a way to prevent what's been set up for tomorrow. After that, it's one day at a time. Can you handle it?"

Connie Dooley's smile could have sold surfboards to nomadic tribes in the Sahara.

"Did you mean that? That you think we're the best home for him, even though we're not young and Dave's got a bum leg, and we don't work regular jobs, and we don't belong to a church, and ..."

"I think you're just fine," Bo answered, marveling at the weight given her opinion just because she worked for an agency that distributed a prized commodity—children. "So enjoy your evening with Acito, and let's see what happens tomorrow."

"Thanks," they both said as Bo headed for her car and an unscheduled visit with an Australian entrepreneur. "Whatever happens, thanks."

In her car Bo put Chac's tape in the deck and said, "I hope you'd approve, Chac. It's the best I can do with what I've got."

In dusky twilight the Terrells' house was even more attractive than it had been in sunlight. Like some tasteful high-desert resort patronized by aging movie stars who would lie on the deck in silk dressing gowns, reading scripts. Invisible ground lights illuminated the house, its plantings, and a mailbox Bo had missed on earlier visits. A Frank Lloyd Wright—style mailbox, hewn of local granite with narrow little windows and a hinged door painted flat black. The name "Terrell" and the house number were painted in reflective Garamond type across the bottom of the door. Bo was sure Angela Barrileaux would approve.

A cream-colored Mercedes convertible with the top up sat in the driveway, and there were lights on throughout the sprawling house. Bo parked the Pathfinder and padded stealthily to the door in her tennis shoes, wondering why she felt as if she were breaking and entering. She wasn't. There were plenty of lights; she was going to knock quite properly on the door; she was going to tell Munson Terrell that he might have gotten away with murder, but not entirely. She was going to tell him that she knew what he had done, knew what he was. A pampered, egotistical yuppie who thought easy charm, good looks, and intelligence gave him the right to create and then destroy whatever he chose, including life itself. Bo was going to tell him he was a man who would eat in front of a pregnant woman.

That was what Chac meant, she reassured herself as she rang the doorbell. That had to be what Chac meant. Bo was sure Terrell would merely laugh, and then politely usher this crazy government hireling out his hand-carved front door. But there would be that momentary flash of angry vulnerability when he saw that his victim had sent a message blowing his cover. In the car Bo had practiced the arrogant, superior smirk she would lavish on Munson Terrell in that instant.

"The Indian outsmarted you," she would sneer. "A druggy prostitute who wouldn't know a classic Navajo rug from a polyester doormat beat you at your own game and took her stolen culture back from you. She won, Terrell. She died, but she made a fool of you first."

Bo liked the speech. Delivering it would be her gift to Chac. A message from the grave, sort of. Except nobody was answering the door.

Bo rang the bell again, listening for its chime inside the house. There was nothing. Pushing the bell repeatedly, she pressed her ear to the door. Still nothing. Incongruously in the perfect house, perfectly maintained, the doorbell was broken. And there wasn't a knocker. Ineffectively she pounded her knuckles against the solid oak door. She could barely hear the sound herself. If Munson or Kee were anywhere but standing around in the entry hall, they'd never hear her. Surprisingly, the brushed brass doorknob turned when she tried it. The house wasn't locked.

"It's Bo Bradley," she yelled into the tiled foyer. "Hello?"

A breeze from the open deck doors off the living room ruffled her hair. They might be admiring the view from the back of the deck, Bo thought. With all the lights on and the door unlocked, somebody had to be home. On the glass-topped coffee table with its collection of fetish animals inside, a white rectangle of paper fluttered. Closing the door, Bo padded soundlessly across the carpet and looked at the paper. It was a note from Kee, casually handwritten on ordinary typing foolscap.

"Darling," it said. "I'm helping Dr. Stoa with the orientation group. He says I'm his best advertisement. Back around 9:30. Your Kee."

The handwriting was round and juvenile. A circular smiley face had been drawn after the word "advertisement." Bo looked at her watch: 8:00. Plenty of time to confront Terrell before Kee got home. If she could find him in the cavernous house.

"Terrell?" she bellowed down the hall where the nursery door was now closed. "It's Bo Bradley. I want to talk to you!"

A silence echoed back, making her ears ring. In shadows near the glass wall overlooking the canyon, the lifesize bronze statue of the old Indian woman seemed to be staring at her. Its gaze was not friendly.

Get out of here, Bradley. You're alone in an isolated house with a man you believe capable of murdering his own baby. He knows you're here. He's waiting for you. Go!

Bo looked at her tennis shoe on the carpet, turned toward the door. The foot inside was straining against the leather toe-guard, but the shoe seemed rooted to the floor. An image of ambivalence. Bo thought she might do a small pen-and-ink sketch of it, if she lived long enough. From a partially open doorway across from the nursery, yellow light spilled in a fan shape across the hall. Terrell might be in there, she thought. Maybe he was listening to music on a headset. Maybe that's why he hadn't heard her shouts.

Ignoring the fact that there was no earthly reason to use a headset in an isolated, empty house, Bo climbed the three tiled steps from the living room to the wide hall.

"Terrell?" she called again.

The silence now seemed to rush in waves from the backlit doorway. It made a thumping sound in Bo's ears, rushing past her. Her knock on the half-open door was so loud it made her jump. Then more silence. Pushing the door aside, she stood facing an attractive office decorated in Southwest style, and the back of a ponytailed head visible in the colored light of a computer monitor. The room smelled like the marzipan candy her grandmother used to send from Ireland every Christmas. Almonds. That dusky-sweet, unmistakable odor of almonds.

Her shadow, cast by a stoneware floor lamp beside the door, snaked across the motionless body of Munson Terrell as Bo moved on numb legs to look at his face. The foam at his lips had dried to a thin, white line, but its odor was still powerful. An empty cup painted in Kachina figures sat on a coaster beside the computer. The coaster was a tiny Navajo rug, Bo mentally recorded without knowing why, complete with fringe. Munson Terrell's blue eyes were open, but covered with a drying film. In the wrist beneath a silver bracelet inlaid with polished stones, there was no pulse.

Bo felt dizzy, then forced herself to resume breathing. On the monitor screen, a paragraph of words shone yellow against a bright blue background. Reading it, Bo thought Munson Terrell must have dreamed of being a poet.

"I'm sorry, my darling," it said, "but the colored skies of our love have grown dark at my betrayal. The woman, Chac, was nothing. Just a cheap joke told by cheap tequila. I tried to kill the bastard baby she called Acito, too, to save that sky for us. But it's too late. Our sky is closed. Never forget that I loved only you. Mundy."

Bo scanned the desk top for paper. There was none. But in a small, pit-fired pot were several black ballpoint pens embossed in gold with the words "Outback Odyssey." Bo grabbed one and copied the text of Terrell's note onto her left forearm. Then she ran.

Down the hall, past the glaring statue, outside. The car started immediately and drove itself away from Munson Terrell's dead body. Several blocks away Bo saw a brightly lit convenience store, and seized control of the vehicle.

"I have to call the police," she told it. "That's what one does in these circumstances."

The hand that dialed 911 from a pay phone next to an ice machine was shaking, but Bo managed to convey the gist of the situation to an operator trained to remain calm. A dead man. The address. Bo's name. Her address. Her phone number.

"You may phone me at my work number tomorrow," she agreed politely in a voice that sounded like Julia Child's. "No, I will not wait at the address of the deceased for the arrival of the paramedics. Yes, I'm sure Mr. Terrell is dead."

One more call, this time to Eva Broussard, gave Bo sufficient stability to get home.

"I will meet you at your apartment in an hour," the unruffled voice told Bo as if they were talking about dinner before the symphony. "I will give you a mild sedative, phone Estrella and Andrew, and spend the night. We will not discuss this until tomorrow, if then. Agreed?"

"Agreed," Bo replied gratefully.

She hoped the paramedics got there before Kee Terrell got home at 9:30. She hoped Kee wouldn't have to smell the almonds.

Bo awoke at an uncharacteristically early hour and found Eva Broussard already drinking coffee on the deck. The marine layer, still dense, sent dimensionless fog-shapes from the sea. Bo watched something that looked like a thin frying pan float diagonally through Eva before dissipating near the deck doors.

"Chickens can swim in Louisiana," she told her psychiatrist, whose bare, tanned feet were propped on the deck rail. "Fly, too. So I guess an Australian murderer might take himself out, leaving what must be the worst suicide note ever written."

She held her left forearm across Eva's field of vision.

"Did you read this? It's awful. Not what you'd expect from a sophisticated international type."

Eva stood and stretched, the sleeves of her oversize black sweater sliding down to reveal muscular arms adorned with narrow woven leather bracelets. With a bronze finger she drew an Iroquois mask in the film of dew on the deck rail. The elongated face lacked a mouth. Eva's black eyes beneath cropped silver hair regarded Bo fondly.

"This is the mask of confusion," she said. "It also teaches the way to defeat confusion. Would you like some coffee?"

Bo smiled at the drawing. "You mean I should stop talking, achieve inner tranquility, that sort of thing? Sounds like fun. But I'm afraid the best I can do is find tranquil surroundings, Eva. My mind never shuts up. And right now it's going over and over what I saw last night. I should probably have closed his eyes, but they were ... they were dry ..."

Eva sighed and wrapped an arm over Bo's shoulders, steering her inside.

"Coins," Bo went on as Eva poured coffee. "My grandmother always talked about putting coins on the eyes of the dead, although my whole family's dead and I didn't see coins on any of their eyes—"

"Yes," Eva interrupted. "Your parents and sister are dead and you've stumbled on to the dead body of a man you suspect was responsible for another grisly death you witnessed less than a week ago as well as the attempted murder of a baby, followed by the slaughter by police of a man who suffered the same disorder with which you must live. One might safely say that for a mind prone to emotional and symbolic excess, your situation is less than optimal. How are you going to deal with it?"

Bo eyed the empty Golden Grahams box on her kitchen counter narrowly.

"Go out to breakfast?" she suggested.

"Excellent," her psychiatrist agreed. "And Bo? Wear a long-sleeved blouse. I don't want to read suicide notes over my omelette."

Bo couldn't remember having eaten breakfast at six o'clock in the morning, ever. But the little Mexican restaurant on Newport Avenue in Ocean Beach was already populated with early risers when she and Eva jogged in, ruddy from the three-block sprint through patchy fog. Bo ordered huevos revueltos and grimaced at a fading wall mural from which a toreador glared proudly at a gaunt spider plant in an orange macrame sling. The restaurant smelled of cooking grease and old wood.

“Huevos revueltos looks like it should translate as 'revolting eggs,' " Bo said, scowling at the toreador. "You know, Eva, Terrell's suicide pretty much closes this case. Ties it up in a clean little package. Yuppie idealist dies of self-loathing. Except I don't buy it. That suicide note's just too smarmy, and—"

"Revueltos means 'scrambled,' and suicide notes aren't usually drafted for publication. What are you saying, Bo? That you don't think Terrell's death was a suicide?"