Moonbird Boy (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Four)

by Abigail Padgett

  "I love you, Andy," Bo smiled. "I really do."

  Andrew LaMarche beamed and then flattened a mound of barley cereal against the interior curve of his bowl with the back of his spoon. "You said Bird's father, this Mort Wagman, was pretty young, didn't you? In his twenties?"

  "Uh-huh," Bo answered vaguely.

  "And you were, um, just friends?"

  Bo walked around the counter to scrape her cereal into the garbage disposal. "No," she answered. "I didn't say we were just friends. I wouldn't say that. I said we were friends." The clattering disposal punctuated her remark.

  "Oh," Andrew said miserably. "Well."

  Bo stared levelly at his chestnut brown mustache, drooping now at the corners. "Friends are just about sacred to me," she said. "There have been times when I wouldn't have made it without them. You're the only man I love, Andy, the only man I sleep with. But you're not my only friend. If that's what you want, then—"

  "No," he interrupted, grinning sheepishly. "I just want to be your only husband."

  "Aagghh!" Bo roared. "Not now, not in the morning, not when I have to go to work, not when people are running around committing murder and playing tapes of barking dogs in the fog. I can't cope, Andy. Why start the day like this?"

  "I'm sorry," he said, gray eyes twinkling.

  He wasn't sorry at all.

  After arriving at the Child Protective Services office building, Bo stopped in the hall to glare into Madge Aldenhoven's corner office. "You should never have okayed Bird Wagman's transfer to a group home," Bo said flatly. "He's only six and he may have ADHD. He's vulnerable. Thanks to you, three other kids attacked him, broke one of his ribs, put him in the hospital. Great work, Madge."

  The supervisor didn't blink. "Your emotionalism is, as usual, completely unprofessional." She sighed into the stack of case files on her desk. "Procedures were followed. If you can't work within procedural guidelines, you don't belong here. But let's not waste time arguing. Was there anything else you wanted to say?"

  "Just that this child will inherit a substantial estate," Bo smiled. "The attorney administering the will has been appointed temporary guardian. If there is any further mishandling of this case, any more endangerment of this little boy, his guardian just might sue the Department of Social Services on Bird's behalf for damages."

  "In that event, your name will be the first one on the subpoena list," Aldenhoven pointed out.

  "But your name is the one authorizing his transfer to a group home," Bo countered, "where he was seriously injured."

  "What do you want, Bo?"

  "Complete discretion from this moment on over that child's movement within the system even if it means junking the procedures manual."

  Aldenhoven examined a narrow gold watch at her wrist and then adjusted the matching belt of her blue silk shirtwaist. "That's impossible," she said.

  "It's that or I tell the lawyer the truth when he calls, that his client's well-being, even his client's life, cannot be guaranteed by San Diego County's Child Protective Services."

  Madge glanced at several piles of pink phone memos on her desk.

  "He's already called, hasn't he?" Bo asked.

  The older woman shoved a stack of memos in Bo's direction. The one on top, a phone call made at 7:15 a.m., was from Reynolds Cassidy, the attorney for Mort Wagman's estate.

  "You may do what you think is best for the boy," Madge agreed as if Bo hadn't just come close to blackmailing her. "Legal trouble is the last thing the department needs."

  It was a small victory, but one Bo could relish.

  "You're early, and you're glowing," Estrella noted suspiciously when Bo opened their office door. "What's going on?"

  "Bird Wagman's in St. Mary's with a broken rib, somebody's trying to drive me crazy by playing a tape of a barking dog that sounds like Mildred, and Andy got back from Germany last night," Bo answered. It was impossible to halt the blush staining her cheeks a hopelessly Irish pink.

  "Ah," Estrella beamed. "He came back early."

  "Yeah. Ah."

  Estrella's smile, Bo thought, rivaled that of the Mona Lisa in knowing subtlety. "Don't start planning the wedding shower," Bo warned. "I'm not—"

  "I didn't say a word," Estrella grinned. "Although I was thinking of little paper parasols and salade Niçoise on crystal plates ..."

  "I hate olives."

  "Okay, tarragon chicken in pastry shells on crystal plates, then. Crème brûlée for dessert."

  Bo was salivating. "Can't we just have the crème brûlée and forget the shower business?"

  "No."

  "I was afraid of that."

  Bo settled into her desk chair and dialed the Backcountry Sheriffs Department. Wick Barlow, the deputy who interviewed Bo the morning after Mort's death, had just arrived for her shift. The news was frustrating.

  "Basically, we've got nada," she told Bo. "The bullet that killed him was a thirty-ought-six-caliber soft point, time of death within an hour, give or take, of four a.m. Soft points flatten and split on impact to a cupped blossom shape about the size of a dime. From the trajectory of the flattened point through his chest, it looks like the shooter stood down in the canyon and fired upward. But we've been all over that canyon floor and haven't found the shell casing, tracks, nothing. Whoever it was got in and out without leaving a trace. To say we haven't got a suspect is stretching it. We haven't even got a clue!"

  "Did you, ah, check to see if anyone at the lodge had any guns?" Bo asked awkwardly. She didn't want to implicate Zach Crooked Owl. Not just yet.

  "You mean Crooked Owl's rifle? Sure. That was the first thing we did. It's a twenty-two and it hadn't been fired recently. That gun didn't kill Wagman. And neither did any of the other thirteen guns we pulled off the Neji Reservation. Half of 'em were so old they wouldn't fire eight times out of ten, but the Indians say they keep 'em around for hunting. Guess they bag a rabbit once in a while. Anyway, none of the reservation guns did it. And it's not likely we'll ever find the one that did."

  Bo experienced a wash of relief. At least Zach's gun hadn't killed Mort. Maybe Zach hadn't, either. "So what will you do next?" she asked.

  "Keep the investigation open," Wick Barlow replied. "It'll stay open for years. There's no statute of limitations on murder. But unless we get something—evidence, a witness, something—we're never gonna know what happened out there. I'm sorry."

  Bo hung up the phone and watched for a while as Estrella dictated a court report. Then Bo grabbed her purse and whispered, "Back in an hour," before heading out the door. The County Administration Center would be open by now. She wanted to see what Ghost Flower Lodge looked like on paper.

  The CAC was an old, Depression-era structure built by the Works Projects Administration in the early 1930s and situated on prime bayfront property. Half its offices commanded a view of naval vessels and sailboats for which nearby hotels charged two hundred dollars a night. Bo parked facing an art deco lion's head adorning the side of the building, and left her CPS ID badge on the dash. County employees could park free at the CAC, one of the countless and nearly always useless perks of the job.

  In a large, second-floor office marked "County Office of Records," Bo leaned on a counter that came to her chest and looked at Ghost Flower's completed application for a business license. A rotund clerk in a flowered acetate dress fluttered eagerly nearby. The business license, she saw, had been revised at the time the lodge contracted for construction of its new building, and noted the corporation's debt in the amount of four hundred thousand dollars to a private lender who had agreed to pay the taxes on the loan as well. The name of the private lender made Bo gasp.

  "Hopper Mead," it said. The deceased heiress. The woman whose right leg was retrieved from the stomach of a great white shark, Bo realized, had paid for the rammed-earth desert sanctuary where Bo and Mort Wagman met!

  "What did Hopper Mead have to do with Ghost Flower Lodge?" she said aloud. "This is weird."

  "Hopper Mead?" the clerk answered.
"Oh, I know all about that. You see, we have this investment club, just a few of us here. It helps with the boredom, if you know what I mean, and—"

  "She's the one the shark ate while she was swimming by her yacht last week," Bo said. "I know that. But I don't understand her connection to this Indian psychiatric facility out in the desert." She pointed to Mead's name on the document. "See, she loaned them the money for—"

  "For construction of a physical plant," the clerk interrupted gleefully. "And then she was killed."

  Bo thought the woman's attitude toward death was unnecessarily chipper. "You seem delighted," she said.

  "Well, no, of course not," the clerk went on, temporarily abashed. "But you see, our investment club had just bought a thousand shares of MedNet stock right after they got that huge judgment. Rock-bottom prices, and now—"

  "MedNet? What's MedNet?" Bo thought the name sounded like a hairspray for surgeons. It would be scented with ether.

  The clerk pursed her lips. "Don't you read the financial pages?" she asked.

  "No. I don't read the sports pages, either. But my life has been full, even meaningful, without them. Why would I read the financial pages? I'm a social worker."

  "And I'm a clerk. You read them to make money, that's why. And let me tell you, our club's going to clean up on MedNet!"

  Bo was sure she'd never seen a county employee this happy. "Okay," she smiled back, "what's MedNet?"

  "It's a medical management consortium based in Phoenix," the clerk answered conspiratorially, metal bracelets jangling as she smoothed orange-black hair from her face. "It buys and manages hospital chains, nursing homes, that kind of thing. Mostly, you know, places for mental illness, Alzheimer's, stuff like that. Drug companies and labs, too. The ones that, you know, deal with that." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "You'd be surprised how many crazy people there are," she went on. "Why, over twenty percent of all hospital admissions in this country are for psychiatric illness. Lots of money in that, let me tell you!"

  "Wow," Bo said, biting the inside of her cheek. "No kidding? But what does Hopper Mead have to do with this MedNet?"

  "She inherited MedNet, or the money her father made with it, at least. That's what she was an heiress to, you see. She and her brother, he runs some kind of consulting business so I guess he doesn't need his trust fund, but the young Miss Mead did good things with hers, like make a big loan to this place called Ghost Flower Lodge. That's a pretty name, isn't it? I wonder how those Indians came up with it."

  "It's just a little yellow desert flower," Bo answered thoughtfully, "so pale you can almost see through it. But inside it's got maroon speckles, and it's tough. So what happens to Hopper Mead's loan, now that she's dead?"

  The clerk's eyes glowed. "The loan was made from her trust," she explained. "And the trust, including its loans, went to MedNet upon her death. We bought our stock just before the corporation got all that money, so of course shares went way up again."

  "So MedNet now owns the loan Mead made to Ghost Flower?"

  "Owns it and is calling it," the clerk chirped. "The Indians can't pay, so MedNet now owns this program they do out there. Apparently it's like a spa for movie stars who go crazy, something like that. There's a rumor they'll sell foreign franchises on this Indian thing, too, which will mean another stock increase, maybe even a split! And they've already applied for a business license under their name here. Would you like to see it?"

  "MedNet's license to run a business in California? So they can run Ghost Flower, right?"

  "That's right. Here, let me get you the file."

  Bo chewed a knuckle and waited. This must be, she thought, the financial crisis Eva had mentioned. The crisis that would strip the Neji of their pride, reduce them to the status of serfs under the dominion of a gluttonous corporation. This would end the dream of the Neji.

  "Here it is," the clerk said, placing a file carefully on the scratched counter. "MedNet's license application. Everything's in there, even copies of stuff we don't require. Everything related to MedNet taking over the Ghost Flower Lodge program."

  Bo thumbed through copies of documents she didn't understand, stopping at a letter of acknowledgment from MedNet of its role in Mead's estate. It was signed by MedNet's chairman, Alexander Morley. The copier had blurred MedNet's printed logo, a cluster of arms holding aloft a caduceus, but a list of names was still visible in a column of tiny print down the letterhead's left margin. "Board of Advisors" was printed at the top of the list.

  Bo narrowed her eyes to bring the tiny names into focus. They were all doctors. At the top of the column a familiar name appeared. Dr. Ann Lee Keith.

  "Whaaat?" Bo whispered, scrunching her nose. The investment-happy clerk knew everything else; maybe she knew something about this, too. "Do you know anything about this Dr. Keith?" Bo asked her, pointing to the name.

  "Nah. Just somebody who's on their board of advisors. Those people don't have anything to do with the business, really. They're not important."

  Wrong, Bo thought, but said, "Thank you so much for your help," instead.

  Outside the county building she sat on a bench and admired bas-relief cement swordfish pursuing unlikely schools of arthropods around the base of a WPA Federal Art Projects statue. The statue was of an enormous woman with a flat nose holding an equally enormous jug on her left shoulder as she gazed toward the naval base on North Island across San Diego Bay. Behind the statue, an inscription above the County Administration Center's doors said, "The noblest motive is the public good."

  "Tell it to MedNet," Bo muttered, and headed for her car.

  Chapter 23

  The eyes of his father followed Zachary Crooked Owl as he paced from one side of the lodge's living room to the other. The deep black eyes of the painting over the fireplace laid blame as eloquently, and as silently, as John Crooked Owl himself would have done. There was no escaping those eyes. Zach didn't even try. He knew they were right.

  "The white man hurts everything he touches," John Crooked Owl told his son years in the past. "He hurts the earth. He hurts the sky. Even the rocks he smashes for his tunnels and roads. The white man enslaves the mother of his children as he wants to enslave the spirit of life. The white man will hurt us if we are not careful. He will devour the soul of the Neji and all the Kumeyaay if we are not always careful."

  Zach could hear Dura and the other women serving food in the dining hall. A balanced diet as determined by the County of San Diego. Dura had gone to classes at a community college to learn what foods the Neji must serve their guests, and had come home laughing.

  "They teach that grains, leaves, stems, roots, and berries are the healthy things for people to eat," she told her husband. "What do they think Indians have been eating for a thousand years? Why didn't they just ask us?"

  "We don't exist in their minds," he answered. "They only see Indians at the movies. They can't see real people."

  That was still true, Zach thought as he walked slowly beneath his father's painted gaze. It would always be true. But white men and other men who adopted their ways could see money, even if they couldn't see anything else. Indian money, any kind of money. Money made them happy, and they would find ways to take it for themselves. They had found a way to take it from the Neji. And that was Zachary Crooked Owl's fault.

  "Zach, come and eat," Dura called from the dining hall door. "It's a brown rice casserole with cheese. Fruit salad. Brownies." Her voice was flat with worry. "You like brownies, Zach."

  "I have to think, Dura," he told her. "I'm not hungry right now."

  Smoothing her apron, Dura moved to stand on the hearth under John Crooked Owl's picture. She held a brown-checked dish towel in one hand like a proclamation extended toward her husband. "We'll go on living here," she pronounced slowly. "The Neji will stay at Ghost Flower Lodge, stay on the land. This is reservation land. They can't take it, they can't come here. It's ours. You know this, Zach. They can't take Neji land or anything that's on Neji land. You have to stop wor
rying."

  "They will steal our story, which is our spirit," he said, sitting heavily on a carved chair. "Steal it and sell it. They will take the money we earn because they will own the work that we do. You don't understand, Dura. We can stay here, but we will have nothing. The Neji were the only band of Kumeyaay they couldn't buy. Now they have. And I allowed this to happen.

  Dura let the dish towel fall to her side and then sat next to him, biting her lip. He could see the pale knuckles like stones beneath the skin of her hands. A woman's hands, tied to time through the births and deaths that they cradled. Different

  from a man's hands, which were meant to build and to fight for his people. Dura didn't contradict what he'd said. She merely took his hand and held it between both of hers. The gesture was like a ghost of his mother.

  "What are you thinking about, Zach?" she said. "What is it that you're thinking about doing?"

  "I don't know," he answered. "I'm going to walk outside."

  He couldn't tell her. He wasn't sure.

  Standing, he jammed his hands into his pockets and strode into the sun. In his right pocket was the spent shell, the bright copper casing of the bullet that had killed Mort Wagman. He'd fasted and danced to find it. He'd stripped off his shirt and let the sun sink into his dark skin until he was dizzy and blind. And the spirit of the canyon, or of his father, or of the raven whose namesake had died there, had showed him the orange glint of copper filmed in pale brown dust. But now he was afraid.

  It had to be Henderson, he thought for the thousandth time. Henderson said he was going to become the head of this corporation, MedNet. He had plans, this Henderson. Zach had seen these plans in his face when he looked right through the patients, and through the Neji. When he looked at the lodge with its walls that would last forever, and didn't see their beauty. He saw money.