Turtle Baby (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Three)

by Abigail Padgett

  "I need to see the Dooleys," she told Estrella. "And somebody else. Could you keep Mildred until tomorrow morning? I'm going to pay a visit to Munson Terrell. It looks like he poisoned Acito and Chac, Es. I'm going to confront him. If he's guilty, I'll know it."

  "It's not Terrell, it's Chris Joe Gavin. You're just going to make a fool of yourself. Stay home, Bo. I'll bring Mildred with me to the office tomorrow, and you can take her home on your lunch hour. Promise me you won't do anything rash, that you'll just stay home."

  Bo had stretched the phone cord around the end of the counter so she could reach the refrigerator. Inside, what had once been a slab of pizza was now a landscape of greenish gray mold, but the skim milk was still okay. In a cabinet she found enough Golden Grahams to fill one of the new stoneware cereal bowls she'd found on sale at a china outlet only last month. Dinner.

  "Can't promise," she told Estrella. "I don't lie to friends. But there's something I need for you to do. Would you mind calling every guitar store in South Bay and central San Diego? I've got the phone book right here. There aren't that many."

  Estrella's tone could only be described as resigned. "Why?" she asked.

  "It's a long shot," Bo answered through stale cereal, "but Chris Joe lives for music, and he uses silk-wrapped guitar strings. I noticed that the day I went down to Tijuana alone. Those strings are only available at special stores that cater to musicians. I know because my mother used to take me with her to get violin strings. He'll be in and out of one of those stores if he's still in San Diego, probably in the evening when the manager's not there. That's when the young guys hang out, talking about music until they go off to do gigs in the clubs starting at nine or so. Somebody may know him, know who he is. I want to get a message to him."

  "What message?" Estrella asked in a singsong voice meant to reveal her dim view of the task.

  "Just say Bo Bradley has a gig for the Ghost Pony, backing an Australian heavy metaler, and he should call right away."

  "Heavy metaler?"

  Estrella was beginning to sound deeply edgy.

  "Yeah." Bo laughed. "I thought that was a nice touch. Terrell wears a silver bracelet inlaid with polished stones. Heavy metal. Get it?"

  "Bo?"

  "Yeah?"

  "You've been taking your medications, right?"

  "Religiously," Bo answered. "Don't worry, Es. I'm not losing it. And I'll call you when I get home."

  "Roger," Estrella sighed, and hung up.

  After a quick shower and a change into sweater, jeans, and tennis shoes, Bo drove the beach route from her apartment to La Jolla. In the long park fronting Mission Bay people clustered around barbecue grills, backlit by fading yellow light. The water seemed black and fathomless, its smooth surface ruffled only sporadically by a weak breeze. A smell of charcoal starter hung in the air.

  Bo watched the picnickers, the teenagers on Rollerblades, the elderly couples walking fat little dogs, and wondered what these people would do if there were no such thing as a government agency called Child Protective Services. Would they rescue children from cruelty, or would they look the other way?

  "My job shouldn't exist!" she yelled from her car window. "And what does it say about you that it does?"

  No one heard across five lanes of traffic. And no one could have answered, anyway. In Africa they said it took a whole village to raise a child. But American cities weren't villages, Bo thought, so it took a whole bureaucracy just to keep children alive. Raising them, the decades-long process of socialization, had been forgotten.

  But not for Acito. An unlikely sprout from a dying culture, this Maya baby was going to get a fair start in life if Bo had to break the law to ensure that. But how? Once set in motion, the CPS bureaucracy would be supported by the courts. It could not be stopped or altered.

  Adoptions had certified the Estan home as suitable for a child. Foster care had changed Acito's status from long-term unadoptable to pre-adopt because the Court Unit, in the person of Madge Aldenhoven, had notified them that both the mother and the legal father were dead and there were no relatives. The actual adoption would take months to finalize, but in the meantime Acito would be moved to the adoptive home as a foster child for the sake of continuity. The plan was, on paper, in the best interests of the child.

  Legally, the facts that one parent hadn't been a biological parent at all, and that one biological parent had apparently attempted to murder the child, were irrelevant. The system, like an enormous, blind hamster in its exercise wheel, simply ran. Bo pounded her fist on the steering wheel as Mission Boulevard became La Jolla Boulevard. The monster was running over Acito.

  The Dooleys were home when Bo arrived unannounced. She'd half expected them to have left, taken Acito and run to Mexico where the idea of "kidnapping" an orphaned child from the jurisdiction of a court would still be met with disdain. The Latino culture would have sheltered Davy and Connie Dooley, but they hadn't grabbed that desperate option.

  Connie was giving Acito a bottle as Davy limped to the door and invited Bo to enter. The softly lit room pulsed with sadness held in check, a sense of inevitability. The Dooleys barely looked at Bo.

  "Have you come to take him now?" Davy asked. "They said—"

  "No!" Bo blurted in the quiet room, startling the baby in Connie's arms. "I just found out what's happened. It's not right. Estrella, my officemate, checked out the adoptive parents. We don't think ... she doesn't think ... oh, hell, this whole thing sucks."

  "We knew what the rules were when we signed on as short-term foster parents," Connie pronounced as if she'd said this several thousand times already. "And it's ridiculous that we think of Acito as ours. We've only had him for four days."

  Her voice cracked as Acito reached over his bottle and patted her face. Crying, she stood and handed him to Bo.

  "I love this baby," she said through tears. "I don't care what your damned agency thinks. We would have made good parents for him, but we couldn't even be considered. We're not good enough."

  Turning her back on Bo, she left the room.

  "I'm sorry," Davy Dooley said as Bo sat in the rocker and regarded the baby in her lap. The patch of white hair that would have earned the tiny boy adulation among the ancient Maya was more pronounced now. A deformity indicating the blessing of the gods. Bo wondered when Munson Terrell had figured out this was his son, since Chac had hidden the evidence with hair dye. Acito was watching the door through which Connie had vanished, his rosy brown right hand waving.

  "Connie's right." Bo nodded. "But I don't know what to do about it."

  "There isn't anything you can do, is there?" Davy said, his shoulders bent under a red T-shirt featuring the black profile of a timber wolf under the words "Save the Wolves." "We won't be accepting any more foster children, though. What's happened to us here ... it's what they told us not to do. They told us never to think we might really be parents, just to give a little love and be ready to let go. We couldn't do that. We failed."

  Bo rubbed her cheek across Acito's soft hair, and thought of Chac. If the mother could have chosen, would she have picked these people to love and raise her son? Bo saw nothing but darkness in the conjecture. No way to know what Chac would have chosen. And Chac was dead. The person who would have to choose was sitting right here.

  "I don't think loving, giving the best of yourself, can ever be equated with failing," she said slowly. "It's risky, and pain is always part of it, but it's not failure. I'd like for you and Connie to forget about what they told you in foster care training, and see what a wonderful gift you've been to Acito and Acito to you. You've changed each other's lives. Not everybody can have that experience."

  Bo had no idea where her words had come from. Emotional crises usually sent her running for the nearest exit.

  "Right," Davy Dooley replied dismally.

  "Daaa-daaa," Acito crooned in Bo's arms, pronouncing the syllables that all babies, regardless of the language they would ultimately speak, produced first. Dada. In English, a
diminutive for father. Bo let Acito stand in her lap, holding his brown hands and admiring the strong little legs beneath white terry cloth sweat pants. The matching shirt had an applique of "The Little Engine That Could" on the chest.

  "I think I can, I think I can," Bo quoted from the children's classic.

  "Daa-daa," Acito replied, making walking movements on Bo's stomach. "Daaa!"

  He seemed to be trying to make a point.

  "You've got two dads," she whispered to his drooly smile. "Only I'm afraid one's a killer, and the other one's dead. Legally the dead one was your father, although ..."

  Legally! Bradley, stop emoting and start thinking. That's it. There was a way!

  Bo stood Acito on the floor and walked him in sliding swoops toward Davy. The terra-cotta toes still curled inward at every step, she noticed, but that wouldn't last much longer. In another month he'd be walking. Just as soon as the first round of teething subsided.

  "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."

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Blood Woman

  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.