Turtle Baby (3 page)

"Thanks," she told the nurse. "I'll just take a look at the baby and get on out of here."

And straight to a phone where you'll call Dr. Broussard and tell her this medication has about as much clout as a mint patty. You're not scouting for a documentary here, Bradley. Stop seeing dramatic camera angles.

Acito was asleep, the tiny, terracotta-colored fingers of his right hand wrapped snugly around the large thumb of a male special-duty attendant Bo knew from an earlier case. The baby's left arm was taped to a white plastic support into which snaked an IV drip.

Bo glanced at the bottle upended from a steel rack at the head of Acito's crib. Pedialyte. Gatorade without the flavoring, meant for dehydrated little people. A quart of the chemically enhanced water sat in Bo's refrigerator at all times. Her old fox terrier, Mildred, was prone to scarfing up rancid delicacies found on the beach, with resultant gastrointestinal chaos. Fortunately, Mildred loved Pedialyte. Among San Diego's fox terriers, she was perhaps the least likely ever to suffer an electrolyte imbalance.

Bo watched air bubbles drifting up the clear IV tube toward the bottle. A fast drip. They were putting a lot of fluid into Acito, to water down a poison. The special-duty attendant, Rudy Palachek, wore alarmingly deep furrows in a wide, tanned forehead.

"What is it, Rudy?" Bo whispered.

"Kid damn near died," the fifty-year-old ex-Marine growled, "and where's his mother? This little dude needs his mama right now, not a bunch of strangers."

The words carried a judgment that ruffled and snapped like a flag in the wind. Rudy Palachek disapproved of absent mothers.

"I'm just doing the initial investigation for Estrella," Bo said softly. "I don't know anything about the mother except that she's apparently in Tijuana. Is he going to be okay?"

"Looks like it," Palachek breathed as the baby stretched and grimaced in his sleep. "But his gut's gonna feel like he ate barbed wire for a while. If you're going to be here a minute, I'll run to the head."

"Sure," Bo replied, her focus on the baby in the crib. His reddish brown legs were long and still chubby, smooth and unmarked by scars. Above the elasticized waist of a disposable diaper decorated in cows jumping over moons, his round baby stomach rose and fell with each breath. The little brown hand that had held Rudy's thumb now curled against ribs barely visible under healthy, filled-out skin. Gently Bo rolled him to the left, so she could check his back for any evidence of abuse.

People who hit babies, she knew from the experience inherent in her job, often hit them on the back in the deluded belief that blows to kidneys or spine couldn't do any real damage. Acito's back was unmarked, but the movement had disturbed his sleep. Blearily he opened the blackest eyes Bo had ever seen, and blinked with long, feathery lashes.

"I'm sorry," she explained as he struggled to sit up. "I just had to make sure nobody'd hit you. A crummy job, but somebody's got to do it, right?"

The face that looked back was unusual. A rosy brown face faded to rust in sickness, but unmistakably different from the parade of babies Bo saw constantly. Not just different from the black babies and the white babies, but different from the Latino babies, too.

Probably an Indian, Bo thought, from one of the demoralized Mexican tribes routinely seen begging in the streets of Tijuana. A higher forehead, higher cheekbones, glossier raven hair so straight it stood out uniformly from his skull, peaking in a fierce cowlick that made him look like an Indian version of the "Little Rascals" character called Alfalfa.

And his nose. Even though the cartilage was still soft, Bo could see the subtle outline of a bend at the bridge. A Barbra Streisand nose, sort of. Unconsciously Bo began to sing the chorus from "People," and then bit her lip. The ballad ranked high in her personal list of Truly Awful Lyrics. Now it would sing in her head, all day.

In his struggle to sit up, Acito had rolled onto his taped arm and couldn't get enough leverage with his right arm to rise from a kneeling position. His diapered rump wobbled like a balloon with the effort. Sleepy baby mutterings melded into an irritable cry.

"I know, it's the pits," Bo said as she lifted him over the crib's side, careful not to disturb the IV. Against her chest he whined and nuzzled like someone much younger than eight months. Regressing, Bo thought, because he was sick. All kids acted younger when they didn't feel well. Adults, too, for that matter. His right hand clutched at the knit fabric of Bo's blouse, and then at her hair. Somehow it was obvious that this wasn't the fabric, or the hair, that he wanted.

Bo breathed the faintly sweet-and-sour baby smell drifting from the little form in her arms and kissed the top of his head. "I know you want your mom," she said into soft, black hair. "You're scared and sick and nobody else will do. Maybe we'll try to find her, huh?"

An anticipatory shiver of joy seemed to animate Acito's small frame. It occurred to Bo that she had just made a sort of promise to an infant Indian who, if he comprehended words in any language, did not comprehend words in English. A desperately important promise that on some primitive level he appeared to understand. A promise she would have to keep.

When Rudy Palachek returned, Acito was again asleep beneath a spill of Bo's unruly curls, drooling copiously down the front of an ensemble intended to create the illusion of chic.

"Teething." The burly attendant grinned as he took Acito from Bo. "See?" He pointed to two perfect incisors in the center of the baby's otherwise toothless lower gum. "But it's these up here that're hurting." Bo saw the almost transparent white edge of an upper incisor, already through the skin, and another beside it, not quite erupted.

"One more thing for him to deal with." She nodded. "Have you heard any theories about whatever he got into? Clorox, tile cleaner, somebody's stash of tequila?"

"Nothing like that," Palachek answered, tucking a miniature white thermal blanket around Acito's shoulders and settling into a rocker. "Andy told me toxicology can't seem to identify the substance. It's something unusual."

Andy was Dr. Andrew LaMarche, pediatrician and director of the hospital's child abuse program, old Marine Corps buddy to Rudy Palachek, and enigma to Bo. At the sound of Andrew LaMarche's name, her scalp began to feel like a warm hat, unaccountably shrinking. She hoped she could complete this leg of the investigation without running into him.

"Thanks, Rudy," she said, and stashed Acito's file in her briefcase as she left the room.

A cup of coffee would be nice, she decided, for the trip to San Ysidro, San Diego's southernmost community smack on the Mexican border. And the hospital cafeteria provided free coffee for the county's child abuse investigators.

Bo loped into the cafeteria appreciatively and then stopped short halfway to the coffee. To her right a display of small, wholesome salads nestled in a bed of crushed ice beside overlapping watermelon slices under plastic wrap. The watermelon slices were accentuated with artful clusters of parsley. To her left Dr. Andrew LaMarche in dazzling white lab coat and equally white French cuffed dress shirt sat at a table with a woman Bo could only describe as stunning.

"Bo!" he greeted her, standing and holding out his hand as if he expected her to climb over the chrome bar that routed cafeteria patrons past the display of delicacies. "I didn't expect to see you today. Please, won't you join us?"

His companion stood also and brushed nonexistent crumbs from the bodice of a perky little silk dress in an art deco print unwearable by anybody weighing more than a coatrack. Bo fought an awareness of the dark baby-drool smear down the front of her own blouse, now the color of dried mud, and the silvering clumps of red hair pulled loose on one side of her head by Acito's little fingers.

You look like a haystack on feet, Bradley. But don't let it bother you.

"Thank you so much for your time, Dr. LaMarche." The woman smiled, exiting. "I hope to discuss this with you further once our program is established." Her elegant nose crinkled in a disarming mock grimace. "There are bound to be kinks we'll have to iron out."

Kinks? Bo feared that the idiot smile distorting her face might appear frozen. She actually felt its chill until she realized that the heel of her left hand, swung back in surprise at LaMarche's greeting, was a half-inch deep in crushed ice.

"Andy," she sighed, "we've got to stop meeting like this."

Over coffee and a slice of watermelon Bo felt compelled to buy because she'd smashed seeds all over its little plate, she explained her role in Acito's case. Andrew LaMarche nodded approval.

"I'm so pleased for Estrella and Henry," he said quietly. "But I think it might be a good idea for Estrella to let somebody else handle this case after all. It may get complicated."

"Why?" Bo asked. "The baby got into the toilet cleaner, or somebody's marijuana brownies, or swallowed some roach pellets. It happens all the time. What's complicated, besides the fact that the Immigration and Naturalization Service people are going to want to deport him back to Mexico and nobody knows how to find the mother? Es deals with the INS all the time."

"It may be more serious that that." Andrew LaMarche's gray eyes were troubled. "The toxin involved has so far eluded analysis, but it's clearly something unusual. So unusual and deadly that I don't think we can write this poisoning off to accident. At least not until we know more."

Bo stared at the man whose surprising proposal of marriage she had rejected only weeks ago. He continued to look like an attache to the court of Victoria and Albert, aloof and foppish as a society mortician. A gold collar pin beneath his handwoven gray linen tie caught the cafeteria's fluorescent light. Bo felt something akin to panic at the thought of his succumbing to stress, sliding into an embarrassing eccentricity. "You can't mean you suspect that somebody tried to kill Acito." She frowned. "That's crazy."

"I've been advised not to use that term in casual conversation." He smiled beneath a graying military-style mustache. "Let's just say I recommend caution and an exhaustive investigation. Since there's insufficient evidence as yet for the police to become involved, the task must fall to Child Protective Services. You can see why it may be too much for Estrella at the moment."

Bo thought about the strange baby three floors above, ill and lonely amid alien noise and unfamiliar touch. Why would anybody want to murder a little Indian baby already lost in the shifting cultural landscape created by an international border?

"And by the way," LaMarche interrupted her reverie, "the lady who just left is the administrator for a grant which will fund training for volunteers in our pediatric AIDS unit. Very important work. I was delighted to see that you were a bit jealous."

"I wasn't jealous," Bo replied, snapping the lid on her Styrofoam coffee cup. "Something, but not jealous. I wish you'd stop this game, Andy. We have to work together from time to time."

"It's not a game, Bo. Will you have dinner with me tonight?" He made the request as if it were perfectly ordinary. As if he weren't hell-bent on a quaint courtship that made Bo feel like an antique paper doll, complete with parasol.

"Sorry, it's Thursday," she answered, rising. "My poker night."

In the hospital's parking lot Bo paced thoughtfully beside the Pathfinder, smoking. She'd decided not to smoke inside, at least until the vehicle's newness wore off. She'd keep the little vehicle sparkling, an oasis of tidiness on wheels. It would be a statement. Or something.

From a slowly passing car whose driver obviously coveted her parking space, Bo heard an old Patti Smith song that promised to supplant the first two lines of "People" repeating themselves in her head. Turning on her own radio, she scanned the dial for "Because the Night" and found it, although something was different.

The music was the same, the whiskey-voice similar, but the words were in Spanish. Intrigued, Bo headed away from the hospital and onto I-805 toward the border, listening to a San Diego phenomenon generically called "Mexican radio." The next song was a Roy Orbison hit she'd loved in seventh grade called "Crying." She sang along in English, wondering if the Spanish words were the same, and how they could do that. Didn't copyrights extend over national borders? Maybe not.

By the time she reached the last U.S. exit in San Ysidro, an unfamiliar song had begun. A poignant tune accompanied by only a guitar and some sort of flute. The woman singer's voice resonated with controlled power. A trained voice, deliberately speaking of feeling. Bo wished she could understand the words. One, repeated several times, was corazon. And at the song's end Bo could have sworn she heard the phrase mi Acito.

"Nah," she told the station's announcer, who was booming something involving numbers. "I'm imagining it, or else Acito is just a common endearment, like darling."

That had to be it, she reassured herself as she parked near a nondescript San Ysidro apartment complex where people named Natalio and Inez Cruz had cared for an eight-month-old baby that was not theirs. A baby who had, accidentally or deliberately, been poisoned.

"Thees ees Rrrrahdio Rrrromantico," the announcer crooned in heavily accented English, "where the secrets of the heart are hidden."

Bo turned off the ignition and clambered to the gritty street. A quarter mile away the sprawl of Tijuana climbed uphill from the valley border, clearly visible. The two cities were, geographically, one. But which held the secret that had thrown an Indian baby up on the shores of high-tech Western medicine, and left him there, alone? Bo sucked air through her teeth and stared at the Mexican city, a jagged web of streets in the distance. The secret lay there, she thought. In Tijuana, where she could legally investigate nothing.

Chac stretched uncomfortably on Chris Joe's aluminum-frame camp cot, and punched at the pillow. It wasn't really a pillow, but a canvas bag full of clothes. An odor of eucalyptus clung to it from the leaves he kept inside so his Tshirts would smell good. Chris Joe acted as though doing things with leaves and herbs were something new. As if the Maya hadn't used medicinal plants since long before the birth of the Christian god.