Child of Silence (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book One)

by Abigail Padgett

  Weppo handed a picture of a taco across the seat. A blue taco, surprisingly recognizable.

  “Blue food,” he signed, standing up so she could see over her shoulder.

  “Yes,” she signed with her fist. “Blue Food.”

  He was so bright, and obviously gifted. A taco, Bo realized, was one hell of a thing to draw. The depth was the problem, the curve of a flat object on a two-dimensional surface made to appear three-dimensional. And he'd done it. How? Who had taught him to draw but not taught him to talk?

  Nobody, she realized. He was just a natural.

  All the more reason to keep your shit together, Bradley. This kid may turn out to be the twenty-first century's answer to Renoir. Keep him alive.

  Bo grabbed a slice of the abominable seven-grain bread from her purse and bit off a piece. It would buffer the sedative.

  Weppo yawned and lay down on the sleeping bag, signing colors at his crayons with pale, short fingers.

  Ahead lay the immigration checkpoint at the border between San Diego County and Riverside County. Empty. Nobody was checking for illegal aliens tonight, and Bo drove under the white, barred signs like a fugitive. She'd forgotten about immigration. Thank God they weren't there.

  Signs to Indio and to Hemet flashed past, then the 215 turnoff. Was that the way she'd gone before? It felt right. Something in the bread cleared her head momentarily, she guessed.

  The headlights of a car behind her veered to the right of 215 as she did. Odd. The lights, she realized as a wad of bread stopped halfway down her throat, had kept that same distance behind her for miles.

  27 - A Map in the Moon

  Andrew LaMarche had no trouble identifying Bo's apartment. It was the only one of four in the building whose door gaped open, revealing overturned furniture, broken lamps, books, and papers heaped on the floor.

  A sixth sense told him no one was there, but he entered cautiously nonetheless. The killers had known where to find Bo. They'd gone to her apartment after their failed attempt on the child's life and left the picture of a decapitated dog as a warning of what they would do if she meddled further. Bo had been furious when she arrived at the hospital last night, her little dog tucked inside her blazer. The dog was safe now with Estrella, but the danger to Bo was a thousand times greater. LaMarche jammed his fists into jeans pockets and wondered if Bo Bradley was as scared right now as he was.

  “Hay-soos!” yelped a voice behind him as Estrella and Henry Benedict breathlessly mounted the stairs. “They've been here!”

  ”Oui,” LaMarche replied nervously. “Estrella, you know Bo. Where would she have gone?”

  Henry Benedict closed the door, locked it, introduced himself and began prowling through the apartment. LaMarche noted with comfort the black .45 caliber service automatic in the man's right hand.

  “I wish I could tell you something.” Estrella sighed. “But Bo stayed here most of the time when she wasn't at work. The job,” she told LaMarche pointedly, “doesn't leave much time for a wild social life. We work weekends. It's never done. . .”

  LaMarche acknowledged the chastisement with a polite nod. “But now, with the deaf boy, where would she run?”

  Estrella regarded him closely, her mascaraed black eyes searching his face, his sweater and Levi's, his bare ankles and loafers as if for a clue to something. She seemed unsure.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  She tossed her black hair and looked him in the eye. A decision. Made.

  “There's something you don't know about Bo,” she explained. “It's hard to know where she's gone, because, well. . . Bo's different. I mean her mind works. . . different.”

  LaMarche was puzzled.

  Under a purple cashmere sweater Estrella's shoulders squared above a deep breath.

  “Bo's a manic-depressive,” she stated finally. “Nobody knows except me, and Henry. She'd lose her job. You can't tell anybody.”

  “Mon Dieu!” LaMarche breathed. He knew little about the major mental disorders. One course years ago in medical school. He was a pediatrician, not a psychiatrist.

  “Lithium.” The word rose into consciousness from some long-forgotten textbook.

  “She takes the lithium when she has to,” Estrella explained.

  “When it starts to get bad. She knows what to do. She's taking it now, but she just started and it takes. . .”

  “Three weeks. About three weeks,” LaMarche finished the phrase. It was coming back, the minuscule information he'd memorized for an exam, and then forgotten. How had she managed to rescue the boy, under those circumstances?

  Henry Benedict had phoned the police.

  “A patrol car'll be here in five or ten minutes,” he told them. “They'll take a report. But there won't be a detective on this case until Monday.”

  LaMarche made a dive for the phone. He knew a dozen good psychiatrists in San Diego, but there was somebody better.

  “Elizabeth?”

  His sister was, fortunately, at home.

  “This is Andy. I don't have time to explain. It's an emergency. Just give me an idea of what a manic-depressive might do, running from a life-threatening situation.”

  “In a manic or a depressive episode?” she asked quickly.

  He remembered green eyes, clear and intense, flashing at him in anger only yesterday. Bo had shown none of the telltale signs of depression, only an abundance of affect.

  “Manic,” he decided.

  Estrella confirmed it.

  “Bo gets manic, mostly. She told me it only went the other way once, after her sister committed suicide. She had to... you know. ..go in a hospital. She said the depression's the worst, like a poison that doesn't have the decency to kill you.”

  LaMarche was sure Bo had said precisely that. The gift for drama, the creative flair.

  “Your manic will do what anybody else would do, only in an exaggerated way,” Elizabeth explained. “Look for the person's—is this a man or a woman?—symbol system. What do they care about? What's important to them? What belief system keeps them going? You know. . . like a manicky priest might run to the church where he was ordained, or a nature lover might run to a favorite spot in the woods...”

  LaMarche handed the phone to Estrella.

  “You know the answers,” he urged her. “Talk to my sister. She's a psychologist. See if you can figure out where Bo’s gone.”

  LaMarche poked randomly though the ravaged apartment. He had no idea what he was looking for. Beside an overturned easel was an unfinished painting. A bighorn sheep, rendered in primitive, stick-figure form. Around the sheep were smaller figures—spirals, mandalas, humanlike images with rectangular bodies and heads that looked like targets wearing round earrings. All the figures appeared to be emerging from a pile of rocks. Or caught in a pile of rocks. LaMarche couldn't tell which.

  The painting's source of light was the moon. A full moon, on which close inspection revealed more of the figures, hundreds of them buried in the shine of gray-white paint. Were the moon-figures calling the rock-figures to life, or merely reflections of them? He stared dizzily into the painting thrown atop Black Watch plaid sheets on the bed. The answer to where Bo Bradley would go, he realized, lay in the picture. But it might as well have been a blank canvas.

  “Bo doesn't exactly have a belief system, like your sister said,” Estrella explained, approaching the painting. “She's not, you know, religious or anything. She likes to tell these Irish stories, folk tales or something. And lately this has been her main thing, these Indian paintings.”

  “What Indians?” LaMarche asked. “Where did she learn about these figures?”

  “She goes out in the desert someplace,” Estrella answered. “She told me where, but—”

  “Look at this,” Henry mentioned, holding up a book he'd found under the bed. “It's about Paiute Indians in Owens Valley up around Lone Pine. Pictures of these rock-drawings. Some of the pages are torn out.”

  “Lone Pine! That's it! Bo's been up there,” Estrella
cried.

  LaMarche scanned the book.

  “There's something else,” Estrella thought aloud. “Bo told me the old Indian woman who found the little boy and then remembered the license number was going up there today—to Lone Pine. Your sister said Bo would try to get to somebody she trusts, somebody that seems like a part of the symbol system.”

  The figures in the painting. The interest in folklore. It all came together for LaMarche: Bo was fleeing with the boy to the Indians in Lone Pine, to one Indian who'd already saved the child's life. An old woman, a powerful symbol in the Celtic tales she'd undoubtedly heard as a child. It made sense.

  He glanced at his watch. Bo had been gone for almost two hours. He could never catch up with her. Not in a car. . .

  “Listen to this,” Henry yelled from the living room.

  “My name is Delilah Brasseur,” a black voice in the patois of the deep South filled the room as Henry upped the volume. “Until two weeks ago I was the housekeeper for the Rowes...”

  When the message was over they stared at the machine.

  “Who in hell are the Rowes?” Henry blurted.

  “Bo's on to more than we knew,” LaMarche decided. “Make sure the police bag that tape for the detectives. Stay here until they get here. I'm going after Bo.”

  “How?” Henry and Estrella asked as one.

  There was a way. And a man who would help. The man who'd covered for LaMarche in Vietnam after Sylvie died. The man who'd taken his shifts in surgery and lied to the CO. and finally carried him bodily out of a Saigon brothel where Andrew Jacques LaMarche, AWOL and drunk for two weeks straight, hadn't cared which came first—death or dishonorable discharge. And Rudy Palachek would, LaMarche was sure, be more than happy to help find men who shot mercury-tipped bullets at sleeping children.

  “That friend of yours at Pendleton,” he asked Palachek on the phone, “the copter pilot. Can he liberate a chopper and get us off the roof at the hospital in forty-five minutes?”

  Five minutes later Palachek called back. “Affirmative. He'll be at the copter pad in half an hour. And Andy. . . ?” Rudy Palachek’ s tone was firm. “I get the kill.”

  28 - Joshua Trees

  The car, like a reversed image of her own headlights, continued to follow. Always at a precise distance, as if she were towing it.

  Two hours ago at 9:30 P.M., skirting the city of Riverside, Bo had made a final decision. There would be no pulling off, going to police, relinquishing Weppo to yet another system identical to San Diego's, which would not be able to protect him. The Riverside Police, dazzled by her warp-speed speech and bizarre story, would undoubtedly have taken her politely and swiftly to their county's psychiatric facility. There, a perfectly legal seventy-two-hour observation hold would have confined her behind locked doors with a well-meaning staff who'd listen absently to her story, and then say, “Try to rest now.” Weppo would have gone to a receiving home and on Monday another investigator, another foster home. Except that by Monday, Weppo would be dead.

  Besides, she'd tried to think rationally, maybe the car wasn't following, but just one of those cautious night drivers who like to stay behind somebody else's taillights. Not surprisingly, the rational approach had proven to be a comforting illusion, bearing no relation to fact.

  Somebody was following her. Speeding and slowing as she did. Staying just far enough back that she couldn't identify the make of the car or see the license plates.

  But why? The desert road was sparsely traveled. They could overtake her anywhere, force her off the road, shoot her and Weppo, and then just vanish. Nobody would see them. Nobody was there.

  Or was there? In the eerie, moonlit landscape of the high desert Bo was aware of distorted forms. Armies of the twisted, multi-armed Joshua trees the Mormons named “devil trees” for their grotesque appearance. A desert growth that made people nervous. The Joshua tree, Bo felt, was kin.

  She could see them, tearing loose shallow roots and walking toward the killers. A hundred Joshua trees moving scratchily across the desert floor and wrapping two men in a thousand black, cactusy arms. Mercury bullets wouldn't harm them. They'd keep coming. They'd lacerate, crush the murderous human flesh in the car behind her. There would be nothing left but mutilated pulp clinging to two skeletons. And two useless guns.

  “Stay with me,” she called to them with her mind as the car ate mile after mile of desert road. “I may need you.” The strange trees, one after another, seemed to bow in acknowledgment. As if they'd known for centuries this would happen, and were ready.

  Weppo had crawled inside the sleeping bag and fallen asleep. Bo could see tufts of his hair blowing in the breeze from her open window. Angel hair. Burnished gold wire. The stuff of which a bridle might be woven to fit a unicorn. Or a torque for a daughter of Lir.

  Bo remembered the children of the ancient king—children turned to swans and doomed to fly forever in rains of ice over black and storm-tormented winter lakes, until the day when the mountains would open again, and the lost faerie kingdoms would be restored to the world.

  “Aye, an’ ye're one,” her grandmother had crooned sadly. “Ye an’ wee Laurie too. Ye're like swans, the children of Lir.”

  Bo felt like a swan, soaring low over a lake bottom frozen in arid silence. Ahead the Paso Mountains might hold deep within their prehistoric hugeness some faerie kingdom, some kind and splendid race of beings whose mirth and poetry would restore balance to a world gone mad with greed.

  At the turnoff for the China Lake Naval Weapons Center— the once-sacred land of a vanished people who'd left symbol-tapestries painted on rock—Bo felt the car stall and catch again. A cough in the engine. A hiccup.

  You re out of gas, idiot! This is what they were waiting for.

  A glance at the fuel gauge confirmed it. Empty.

  Your stupidity is monstrous. You are crazy. Because of you, they're going to kill him.

  The car coughed and stalled again. Slowed. Died.

  Through wild tears Bo eased it off the road and appealed one last time to the weird trees and the forgotten figures painted on canyon walls thousands of years ago.

  “Now!” she begged them as the car behind slowed, and stopped. A falling star high above left a brief arc, but nothing else moved. Bo leaped over the seat and flung herself on the boy in the sleeping bag as footsteps approached on the gravelly shoulder of the road. Inside the blood roar in her ears Bo, heard the laughter of Caillech Bera.

  A chuckle, actually.

  Words.

  “You must be Bo Bradley,” a woman's voice said cheerily. “I've been following you for hours. Sorry if I scared you, but you never stopped for gas, and I didn't want to lose you. . .”

  Wakened by 125 pounds of frantic weight on top of him, Weppo croaked peevishly and blinked at Bo, then the stranger.

  A slightly overweight woman with close-cropped reddish blonde hair. Sparking blue eyes. Jeans and a sweaty T-shirt imprinted with the sentence “I Don't Have to Go to Hell When I Die; I've Been to Houston!” The woman looked like neither a Joshua tree nor a rock-drawing.

  “I'm Bo Bradley, all right,” Bo gasped, “but who are you?”

  “Gretchen Tally. Bayou Banner. You called me in Houston, left a message about somebody trying to murder a Rowe child. My editor's desperate to stop Tia Rowe from winning that senate seat. That's desperate with a capital D and that rhymes with C and that stands for corrupt, if you know what I mean. You're our last hope for keeping her out of power. The paper flew me here with its last dime and instructions to use anything. So what've you got? The only Rowe kid left around is Kep. Where is he?”

  “Who's Kep?” Bo asked thickly. The sedative had taken its toll on her ability to speak. The words felt like dustballs stuck to her tongue as she climbed out of the car into chill desert air. Weppo stumbled out as well, and sleepily went behind the car to relieve himself. Tally checked Bo out, and frowned.

  “Is something the matter with you?” she questioned bluntly.

 
“Nothing that rebirth as a gnome in another galaxy won't cure,” Bo answered. “Look, I'm as mad as a hatter, manic. Off the wall. I'm serious. I really am a manic-depressive, and this is not, as they say, one of my better days. But you've got to believe me, somebody's trying to kill this kid. You've got to help us. My car's out of gas. I thought you were the killers. We have to get to Lone Pine. Delilah Brasseur said it'd be over by Tuesday—”

  “Slow down, slow down,” Gretchen Tally admonished. “I believe you. I want to help you and the kid, so talk slow. You mentioned Deely Brasseur; she was the Rowes' housekeeper. If there's anything fishy in that house, she's the only one who'd know. What did she tell you?”