Strawgirl (20 page)

"I confess that I set Cynthia Ganage up with that story to keep Hannah out of the very system I got her into. To keep her out of foster care. I knew Ganage would blow it all over the papers within ten minutes and give us a cover. Hannah's here, Father Goodman. She's in very, very fragile shape, but she's with Eva, who's adopted her as an Iroquois, like a granddaughter, and since Eva's also a shrink I know she can take care of Hannah. It'll help when Paul gets out of jail and Hannah can see him. Until then, they're laying low in a beach place up in Del Mar. Waiting."

"I can go to visit Hannah at any time, if it'll help," Goodman offered. "She knows me. The mother brought the girls to church here occasionally. Hannah was the quiet one, always looked a little sad. This has got to be hell for her."

"She's like the proverbial house of cards," Bo said, throwing twigs for Mildred. "One more shock, even the smallest break in what's left of her sense of security, and we may lose her to a world inside her head. It's a tightrope right now. Dangerous. But I'll ask Eva if she thinks a visit from you would help."

Bo allowed the youthful priest to pull her to her feet. "The best thing that can happen would be the arrest of the creep who really did this." She sighed. "But there don't seem to be any good leads."

"What about the daycare center?" Goodman asked. "I told the police Samantha stayed at a center while Bonnie worked at a part-time job and Hannah was in school. Paul was gone a lot of the time, scouting for property out in the desert. Bonnie found a place for Samantha to stay. Don't you have that information in your reports?"

Her file on the Franer case, Bo realized as Mildred dropped a soggy twig on Frank Goodman's foot, had not been updated since her return from New York. But all new information would have gone through Madge Aldenhoven. And stayed there. Madge was covering her own tail, making sure Bo couldn't botch the case more than she already had. For once, Bo didn't blame her.

"Do you have an address for this daycare center?" she asked the priest.

"Sure. It's on Kramer, where it dead-ends in a cul-de-sac. But the police have already been there, I'm sure."

"Just curiosity," Bo said as she headed for her car. "I'll see you at the memorial service tomorrow. And thanks."

"Hey!" he yelled from the curb. "I forgot your penance."

Bo pretended not to hear.

A professionally lettered sign above the door identified the residence as KRAMER CHILD CARE CENTER. Gray security bars covered every window of the white-shingled house. The place looked, Bo thought, like Beaver Cleaver's suburban home converted to a jail. The house was long and rectangular and set squarely in the middle of the cul-de-sac. Behind it one of San Diego's innumerable small canyons sloped down through two hundred feet of scrub and sage to the usual seam of eucalyptus and sycamore bordering the canyon's drainage stream. Beside the driveway to the left several mature bougainvilleas created a mass of blazing magenta bracts and murderous thorns over a six-foot chain-link fence. To the right closely set white oleanders, equally mature, formed a dense, attractive wall between the daycare center and the adjoining property. An older house like thousands built in San Diego during the 1960s well maintained. And private. Very private. Bo carried Mildred, squirming, to the door and rang the bell.

"
Si
?" a woman answered. In her arms a wet, naked baby boy of about a year struggled to be put down. Behind her a dark-haired girl holding an overweight orange cat stared at Bo with shy curiosity. The cat also stared, its orange tail sweeping laconically beneath the girl's arms.

"I'm Bo Bradley, from Child Protective Services," Bo began, clutching the trembling fox terrier firmly. "And although I know the police have already been here—"

But Mildred, propelled by centuries of canine honor, chose to ignore the message in Bo's grip. A series of imperious barks was accompanied by much thrashing of terrier legs and a resultant small rip in the sleeve of Bo's sweatshirt. The orange cat climbed over the girl's head, causing the child to giggle and stumble against the leg of the baby, who howled in indignation. The woman narrowed her eyes and looked at Bo as if she were there to sell something unpleasant.

"I'll just put the dog in the car and get my identification," Bo said. It occurred to her that this might be the worst interview she'd ever done. A fiasco. The woman obviously spoke Spanish, which Bo did not. And their introduction could only be described as "not conducive to confidence." Bo wondered if her own lighthearted approach might be construed as harebrained. Maybe she was getting a little silly, exuberant, overconfident. A little manic. What was she doing on a Saturday, on her own time, checking out leads with grass stains on her rump and a dog in her arms? A bad sign. Or was it?

Maybe she'd just fallen into the situation through a series of conversations and was exhibiting praiseworthy devotion to her job.

When hell freezes, Bradley. Your devotion to this job is precisely as deep as your checking account. What are you really here for?

The image of a little girl with wide-set eyes handing Bo a strip of beaded rush materialized and then vanished. Hannah had been able to reach out from the papery shell of her own threatened survival. To reach out and offer comfort to another whose pain she understood. In that act, Bo realized as she shoved Mildred into the fading BMW, the child had secured a human bond that demanded Bo's best. Nothing crazy about that. But she'd keep an eye on her thoughts, just to be sure. The minute she started feeling grandiose or dispatched by mystical forces, she'd back off. At the door the little girl hopped from one foot to the other while explaining that her mama had been giving her brother, Jesus, a bath and was now "putting pants on him."

Bo checked her own response to this news for any hint of seeping religiosity. There was none. Latin people routinely named baby boys Jesus. The girl, Bo mentally bet the BMW and a year's rent on her apartment, would be named Maria.

"I will be there soon," the woman's voice called from inside the house. "Luisa, take Papa Cat to the yard."

Bo cursed herself as an ethnic bigot while Papa Cat eluded Luisa by leaping atop a television and overturning a backlit representation of the Sacred Heart in a frame of starched red lace.

"What do you want?" the woman asked as she emerged from a hall to the right of the living room, still carrying the baby. Jesus, now clad in a disposable diaper and tiny white dress shirt, smiled and offered Bo the remainder of his bottle. From the scent wafting through the door, it was grape juice. Bo sighed and reminded herself that symbolism exists entirely in the mind of its observer.

"I'm from Child Protective Services," she repeated, showing her ID badge. "I'd like to talk to you about Samantha Franer."

The woman grimaced. "The police, they already be here," she said. "I tell them all the children do good here. I take care of them. And I have a helper. This bad thing did not happen to the child here." The dark eyes dropped to a point below the handle of the security door. "No man work here," she whispered, glancing at Luisa, now rolling on a flowered couch with the cat. "No man."

"But could you just tell me," Bo began, "is this your house? Are you a licensed daycare center? How are children referred—?"

"I don't want talk," the woman said, turning from the door. "I already talk to police." In the woman's back, the tense set of the wide shoulders under a thin blue sweater, Bo recognized controlled emotion. But what emotion? Grief? Fear? Whatever it was, a fierce determination held it in check. It was curious, unaccountable. And impenetrable.

Bo headed back to her car and noticed Luisa, opening the heavy security door to wave. At her open car door, Bo waved in return as something orange streaked from the house and across the yard toward the oleanders. Mildred, aroused from a nap by Bo's return, was standing on the front seat, her forelegs braced against the dash. Mildred did not fail to see the streak. With a look of delight, the dog catapulted out the open car door, around the BMW's dented rear bumper, and into the oleander. A trail of barking led downward, into the canyon.

"What next?" Bo asked a cloudless sky as she struggled past twenty yards of dense, white-flowered shrubbery. "You're too old for this," she yelled at the echoing barks. "Remember your arthritis, and you're going to get burrs." There was a predictable absence of response.

The fenced backyard of the daycare center boasted a swing set, large sand box, and several small play tables. At the back of the yard a gate in the chain-link fence opened to a narrow trail leading down into the canyon. Bo edged her way around the perimeter of the fence and began a dusty descent toward the now-stationary cacophony of barks. Mildred had, apparently, treed Papa Cat.

Except the noise had its origin off to the left of the path, halfway up the canyon's side where there were no trees. Only fragrant sage bushes, prickly pale green tumbleweeds, scrub, and rocks. Beyond the trail the canyon wall was treacherous. A terrain of loosening concretized sandstone spall, compacted under tons of seawater when San Diego had been an ocean bed. Bo slipped as a football-sized clump of dirt broke raggedly under her weight and tumbled to rest against what looked like a giant mayonnaise jar full of brown water. It
was
a giant mayonnaise jar full of brown water. Bo stared at the object as comprehension rose sluggishly in her brain. Tea. Somebody was making sun tea in a jar where there should be no people or jars, much less tea. Mildred's barks, tiring now, were only a few yards ahead. Rounding a particularly unstable outcropping, Bo found the dog yipping upward at something on a ledge behind which a crude cave had been dug. The some thing was not an orange cat. It was a gargoyle, a hunkering figure Bosch might have painted if Bosch had painted urban hermits.

"Oh, my God no." Bo gasped as a sunburned face stared wildly from beneath a thatch of filthy reddish hair. The huge eyes under bleached-out lashes were more frightened than her own. But she'd seen eyes like that before. She knew what to

do.

At eight o'clock Bo found herself seated across from Solon Gentzler on the balcony of a La Jolla seafood restaurant whose chef, if rumors were to be believed, knew not only the secret of perfect
sole blanchaille
, but also the more intimate secrets of several San Diego society matrons. From the distracting flash of moonlight on diamonds about the area, Bo guessed that a few of the matrons were hanging around for another glimpse of his culinary style.

"I love haddock," Gentzler said with enthusiasm, shrugging off a rumpled suit jacket bearing a Beverly Hills label, "but I'm going to have the shark bisque and then just a simple poached flounder with capers. How's the wine?"

Bo gazed down the length of her own freckled arm to a crystal balloon glass in whose depths a pale golden liquid said poetic things about sun and rain in California's northern valleys. Her hair, she acknowledged, was reflecting candlelight in precisely the way her shampoo intended. And the merest dab of imported scent, strategically placed, was perhaps not the only reason Gentzler's animated gaze kept drifting to the V of a casual little green silk blouse that cost a fortune and gave her eyes a sealike depth. While she knew perfectly well where this evening would lead if she opted for that direction, Bo chose not to analyze her presence in a candlelit restaurant with a lawyer too young to remember where he was when Kennedy was assassinated. Whatever happened, Solon Gentzler would not burden it with cumbersome considerations. Like marriage.

"The wine's lovely," she answered. "But I'm having trouble with the concept of a tuna salad that costs $27.50. Do you realize how much tuna you could buy for $27.50? People are starving, Sol, and we—"

"It's because it's fresh bluefin," he apologized for the restaurant's politically incorrect extravagance, blushing slightly. "And it's on Gentzler, Brubaker, Harris and Gentzler, the family law firm. Brubaker's my sister, incidentally. A CPA as well as an attorney. She'd tell you this dinner is a business expense."

"Who's Harris?" Bo grinned. "And I thought you worked for the ACLU."

"Harris is my dear old mother, who graduated law school four years before I did. We call her Harry. And the ACLU work is pro bono. We all do it. It's sort of a family hobby." He leaned back and stared at the darkening Pacific Ocean beyond the balcony. "My
zayde
, my paternal grandfather, made it out of the death camps. His first wife and baby son didn't. The baby's name was Solon, which explains my old-fashioned name, and why we believe so strongly in what the ACLU does . . ."he turned to smile at Bo, "among which is to make sure people like your Paul Massieu don't get hanged as rapists just because they believe in little green men."

"Silver," Bo sighed. "Little silver men. I think I'll have the broiled snapper."

The contrast was still dizzying. The afternoon's terrifying discovery with a man who called himself Zolar and lived in a canyon because a huge network of people in San Diego were trying to control his mind with radio waves. The radio waves, he said, couldn't reach him there. From Zolar to the sort of eatery weekending movie stars were known to patronize. A shift of epic proportions. Bo thought of Andrew LaMarche's le monde and sighed again. There were too many worlds. And Zolar had shown her the grimmest yet. She watched as Solon Gentzler reverently attacked a bowl of bisque the size of a hubcap. Could she tell him about what Zolar had shown her in the canyon? About what she was sure it meant? Would Solon Gentzler believe anything she said after she told him just why she was not uncomfortable chatting with madmen? Too risky. Reluctantly she conceded that she should have returned one of LaMarche's six phone calls, as Estrella advised. It was, after all, his words that had made sense of the bizarre scene Zolar showed her.