Turtle Baby (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Three)

by Abigail Padgett

  Estrella actually smiled. "I owe you one, Bo."

  "How many times have you and Henry helped me over rough times, Es? Ten? Twenty? How about pretty much consistently, all the time, for nearly three years! I know it's not easy being friends with somebody like me. Let me do something for you for once, okay?"

  Estrella glanced at the long-dead fly once again. "Just be careful then, Bo. You never know when one of these easy cases is going to get messy. And you don't know anything about dealing with Mexican people. I shouldn't let you do this ..."

  Bo raked her silvering auburn hair with both hands and refastened a cherrywood clip that strained to corral too many curling wisps. "That's just your wacked-out chemistry again. Too much estrogen or something. Go home and research diaper services over a tall glass of lemonade. Lie in the sun, if it ever comes out. Take a nap. I'll see you at three thirty."

  In the parking lot Bo threw her briefcase onto the passenger's side bucket seat of an almost new Pathfinder with four-wheel drive. She'd bought it with the insurance compensation for her BMW wrecked only a month earlier. Haze-filtered sunlight swam on the pinkish beige surface of the vehicle's hood, a color named "champagne pearl" by the manufacturer. Bo polished a smudge of dust from the left side panel with her thumb. Estrella's case was going to be easy. At least something different. An eight-month-old baby who'd gotten into the laundry detergent or something. Hardly a quagmire of murderous intrigue.

  Chapter Two

  The Little Turtle

  Safely belted in the Pathfinder, Bo drove sedately through the chain-link gates of the CPS parking lot. No sense in irritating Madge with a display of boisterous driving.

  From the console between the gray leather seats, not one but two gear levers indicated the vehicle's readiness to take Bo anywhere she wanted to go. Off the roads. Into the desert where an ancient silence that either terrified or bored other people invariably flooded her mercurial brain with peace.

  She'd go out to the desert soon, she promised herself. She would have gone already, but she'd been driving a cheap rental car until the current vehicle turned up a week ago at a police auction. Dar Reinert, the child abuse detective who'd worked a recent big case with her, had alerted her to its sale. Probably out of macho-cop-guilt, she thought, because he hadn't really believed she was in any danger. Hah.

  "Only a coupla years old," he told her paternally over the phone. "Been used to transport cargo in from a little airstrip the Tobacco and Firearms guys found out in the desert near Borrego. Wheel rims look like pastry crust, but they're chrome steel so I can hammer 'em out for ya. Want it?"

  Bo knew the "cargo" had been drugs, fleeing Mexican gang kingpins, and the occasional corpse, and didn't care. A four-wheel drive would be her passport to earthly nirvana, well worth the small sacrifice in symbolic principle. And the lousy gas mileage would do for penance.

  "I want it," she told the detective.

  And even though the end of June was too late for anything resembling comfort in the arid wilds surrounding San Diego, she was going to get out there at least once. Just once before the hammering heat of July, August, and September that could mummify an already dehydrated human body in one day.

  Bo had seen it. One of her first cases involved a runaway fourteen-year-old girl, already an open file with Child Protective Services. The teenager's active CPS status was the result of her frequent calls to the child abuse hotline claiming that her parents were abusing her by not allowing her to date a twenty-year-old reject from the navy with a history of arrests for kiting checks.

  The girl, Stacey, had sneaked away with the young felon, Ron, for a romantic motorcycle trip to the desert. Alone at last, they had explored the joy of sex on a greasy tarp and feasted on four six-packs of Corona and a bag of jalapeno barbecue chips. When Ron, as he explained later, declined Stacey's offer to move in with him the next day, she hopped on his Yamaha Virago 535 and sped away into the desert, furious. He didn't worry too much because he passed out.

  When she hadn't returned by the time he woke up the following morning, he assumed she'd ditched the bike somewhere and got a ride back to San Diego. Visions of statutory rape charges precluded his phoning her family to see if she'd made it home after he hitchhiked back. By the time Stacey's frantic parents found him to ask, it was hours too late.

  Sheriff's deputies located the body that evening, less than a mile from the fallen four-hundred-pound motorcycle, which had simply been too heavy for the hundred-and-five-pound girl to upright. Coyotes had found the body first. What was left, Bo noted when she accompanied Stacey's father to the morgue for the identification, was a mottled husk that looked like a wizened old woman. She hoped he didn't see the barrel cactus spines imbedded in his daughter's hands from what must have been a last, frenzied attempt to find moisture.

  To the Pathfinder's rear door the previous owners had welded a wire frame that held a five-gallon can of water. An unsightly addition that, in light of Stacey's demise, Bo welcomed. Five gallons of water could buy at least two extra days in the summer desert, in an emergency. Plenty of time for somebody to find a stranded camper.

  Rounding the corner from Linda Vista Road onto Genesee Avenue, Bo slowed to admire a long vacant lot full of thistles. Their blue flowers dried on the gray-green stalks every year, retaining a color that reminded Bo of forest ponds on Cape Cod. That same inscrutable amethyst. An artist away from the job that paid her rent, Bo envisioned a painting in which blue thistles covered an entire canvas. Maybe she'd stop on the way back and pick a bouquet for Estrella, to celebrate the forthcoming blessed event. Except the spiky flowers were probably full of ants, or earwigs, or the larvae of centipedes. Maybe she'd just buy a couple of carnations at the florist near the hospital.

  By the time she found a parking space in St. Mary's Hospital for Children's inadequate front lot, Bo was entertaining doubts about the new medication Dr. Broussard had said might work better than the lithium. The side effects did seem less noticeable. That sloppy, awkward slowness that seemed to accompany all the medications was a little less annoying. And there was no hand tremor, or not much, anyway. But the singular thoughts characteristic of manic depression were heartily in evidence despite the scrim provided by the little pills. Objects seemed more than usually anxious to reveal covert aspects of themselves. Bo regarded the parking lot's asphalt pavement, thought of dead dinosaurs melting into the primordial crude oil from which asphalt would be made, and sighed.

  "I can only imagine," she told an audience of invisible dinosaurs at her feet, "what a life without these endless scenes from PBS specials might be like."

  The baby called Acito was, Bo ascertained at the fourth-floor nurses' station, still classified as "guarded" after presumably ingesting a toxic substance that had caused violent diarrhea and vomiting. "Rule out hemolytic anemia," her copy of the medical chart suggested. What it meant was, "Don't rule out hemolytic anemia; hemolytic anemia is a possibility here." Bo whistled critically at medical jargon that seemed intent on obfuscation.

  "What kind of poison causes hemolytic anemia?" she asked the nurse who'd politely duplicated the chart.

  "I don't know." The young woman smiled beneath a haircut too short and chic to hold a nurse's cap even if she owned one. Bo tried to remember when nurses stopped wearing those starched white relics, and concluded that the actual date was probably a secret. "But sometimes it's a symptom of malaria."

  "Malaria? I thought this baby got into some kind of toxic substance."

  "It looks that way," the nurse answered, leaning conversationally on the counter. 'We've got whole blood on standby, just in case he needs a transfusion. He came in pretty sick."

  Pretty sick. The usual euphemism for "potentially near death." Bo drew a sharp breath and felt a halo of sudden sweat forming at her hairline. The hall with its bright colors, its stuffed animals and Disney pictures, was a facade, a set. Behind it desperate battles were being fought. Nothing new, but the reality seemed oddly shocking.

  "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, terra-cotta-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 actual
ly 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."