Strawgirl (21 page)

The man in the canyon behind the Kramer Child Care Center was suffering from schizophrenia, no question. Bo knew the symptoms from others met on her own psychiatric sojourns, and he'd told her as much when he named the litany of neuroleptic drugs he'd been given at a "crazy bin." Thorazine, Haldol, and Cogentin to curb the thick tongue, tremors, tics, and muscular convulsions caused by the first two. Zolar knew his way through a psychiatric pharmacy and was having no more of it. Bo wondered what his real name was. And how long it had been since he'd tried to get help for the illness. The drugs he mentioned were the old standbys, used for decades, lousy with side effects that felt worse than the symptoms they were supposed to curb. But the guy was still young and his elaborate paranoia was a good sign that he could respond well to the right medications. Bo's bet was he couldn't be much over twenty-five. He probably wouldn't have been sick longer than seven or eight years. And there were some impressively helpful new medications for schizophrenia now, if only he'd try again.

"So what is the dog here for?" Zolar had whispered from his cave after Bo defused his anxiety by sitting on the ground and performing her head-ducking act. No threatening eye contact. No aggressive bodily movement. No invasion of his brittle and hard-won psychic sanctuary. Simple courtesy, primate-style. "They don't usually send dogs. Dogs are nicer." At six feet and well muscled, he looked like a healthy if somewhat soiled young giant, lost from myth and unaccountably stuffed into a California hillside. Bo was certain he'd played football in high school, before the pitiless chemistry in his brain made a normal life impossible.

"Dogs are nicer," she agreed wholeheartedly, looking at the ground. "And this is my dog, Mildred. We're not here to see you. We were at a house up there to ... to try to help a little girl who got hurt." Bo could not have said why she chose to explain her presence in that way. It was simply the truth. A spill of dusty gravel from Zolar's ledge indicated sudden movement. Then a sharp intake of breath.

"Goody," he intoned raggedly, beginning to rock from the waist. "Goody, Goody, Goody ..."

Bo gasped and glanced up through the scrim of her own red hair. He was crying. Incredible. How did he know that name? Either he was Goody, or he knew something about Goody. But she'd have to act fast or he'd rock and chant himself into a trance. Another world where no one could reach him. Rising slowly and away from the swaying figure, Bo grasped Mildred to her side and said, "Show us where you saw Goody. We need to know about Goody." The words, pronounced clearly and with agonizing slowness, would either have an effect or they wouldn't. He continued to rock.

But he knew something. He knew the name by which a murdered child identified her killer. How could he know? Was he that killer? The stock lunatic of countless horror stories, lurking in shadows like a half-remembered nightmare? Bo felt her abdominal muscles tighten at the thought. She didn't want it to be so. But he lived here, close to the daycare center's yard. Had Samantha somehow wandered off into the canyon and then been raped by this disoriented man?

Just because you don't want it to be so doesn't mean it isn't. Be very careful here, Bradley. Be rational.

Fat chance.

Bo summoned her wits and a vast resource of something she couldn't name, and bent them toward the ragged man. She had to know. Now. "Hear me!" she thought ferociously into the air between them. "I'll try to help you. But right now you've got to hear me." Hard to do it without eye contact. Hard to solidify any connection at all with a young man whose sole desire was to avoid a world in which people existed only to plot against him. "Show us something about Goody," she said again, this time aloud.

The chanting stopped as he clambered down from the ledge and stood ten feet from Bo. "Hi, Mildred," he whispered, holding out his hand toward the fox terrier. "Come on, I'll take you."

Bo felt a stab of fear. The identical fear, she realized, that others had at times felt for her. The fear of someone who does not share the same, widely agreed-upon reality as everyone else. What did he mean by "I'll take you"? What if he took Mildred? Bo hated herself for her reaction and with an inadvertent appeal to St. Francis, the protector of animals, she set the aging dog on the ground. From the side of her right eye Bo watched the man hunker, pull something from his shirt pocket. Mildred advanced, her docked tail wagging. Bo could hear the booming pulse in her own arteries as if the volume had been turned up. But it was jerky. The guy was just giving Mildred a piece of beef jerky.

As relief and a bitterly personal remorse washed over Bo, she found herself wondering where he got jerky. And tea bags for his sun tea. A glance at the little shelter revealed a sleeping bag, empty cardboard juice cartons, several bags of puffed rice cakes, a jar of chewable vitamins, and an economy-sized tub of premoistened towelettes, unopened. Not the typical clutter of the homeless mentally ill. It dawned on Bo that somebody must be providing things for him, trying to help. Another in the web of secrets lacing this innocuous urban canyon.

Seconds later he stood and struck out to the left and downhill from his cave. Bo had expected him to lead them up, to the daycare center, if anything.

"I'm Zolar," he announced as if the name were a state secret. "But they won't get me."

"No, they won't," Bo agreed calmly as she struggled to keep up. He was moving swiftly through the rough canyon, his eyes sweeping the terrain as if every shadow might hide untold danger. Bo scooped up the exhausted dog and plunged ahead, wondering if this might turn out to be the ultimate wild-goose chase.

"There!" he stopped suddenly and pointed. His grubby hand was trembling.

Bo looked where he indicated and saw nothing. Just more dusty plants, sage, countless rocks, lots of beige dirt. A basic San Diego canyon. Home to owls, rabbits, the random coyote, and people who have nowhere else to go. "Where?" she asked.

Zolar grabbed a rock and pitched it into a spreading, blue-flowered shrub. "There."

The shrub was about four feet high at its center, and about six yards beneath where they stood. Odd mounds of rubble, Bo noticed on closer inspection, peeked from beneath its spreading branches. A faint path led toward its western side from the canyon floor where a medium-sized eucalyptus dropped its bark beside the drainage stream. Bo noticed shreds of the peeling bark littering the path. How would the bark get uphill, twenty yards from its source? Unless somebody put it there, to disguise the path.

Curious, Bo had clambered down to the shrub and found a three-foot opening shored with two-by-fours, concealed behind the spreading branches. Still holding the panting dog, she'd pushed the branches aside.

"Bo? Are you on the planet?"

It was Solon Gentzler, offering a basket of sourdough rolls, piping hot. They weren't microwaved, he was sure. He could tell just by touching one.

"Sorry, I was thinking," Bo belabored the obvious. At an adjacent table a woman in enough tasteful gold jewelry to finance a small emergent nation informed her male companion that she'd had to fire her gardener because he kept sneaking off to visit his wife and children in Mexico. The woman hoped he wouldn't return and salt her lawn in revenge. Bo eyed the salt shaker on the table she shared with Gentzler and toyed with the idea of removing its lid, turning and dumping its contents into the woman's hair.

"I'm getting irritable," she told the sourdough roll on her bread plate.

"This case is getting to you." Gentzler nodded. "Have some more wine. We'll take a walk on the beach after dinner. We'll take off our shoes and talk about baseball."

"I'd like that," Bo replied as a waiter placed a pound and a half of enticing aroma before her. She didn't mention that she'd never been to a baseball game in her life. But Zolar would have. He was the type. Tailgate parties with pretty girls. A Padres baseball cap that he probably wore backward when he was younger. When he still had a life. Bo sighed and cut into the snapper with a pistol-handled knife.

What she'd seen in the canyon was appalling, and at first indecipherable. A rough cave, hand-hewn like Zolar's, but bigger. Carefully shored with boards. And pink. Somebody had spray-painted the walls and ceiling in a bright pink, and lit the dim space with at least three hundred twinkling white Christmas tree lights. Bo easily found the battery pack that powered the lights, hidden under a big pink rock with a happy face on it. When she switched it on a cheap tape recorder began to play the theme from Sesame Street. Candy wrappers and empty cans of a children's drink called Yoo-Hoo littered the floor beside a rolled-up futon mattress. The mattress was red with white piping, and beside it on an Astroturf mat covering the dirt floor was the cover of a magazine called Naughty Nymphets. Kiddie porn. For a few seconds Bo couldn't make sense of the scene. And then she remembered Andrew LaMarche's explanation of the hospital logo, Mabel Mammoth: "Bright colors make strangeness friendly."

The psychology that would help children accept the unfamiliar in a hospital could do the same in a canyon. Except a child made comfortable here would be primed not for the strangeness of surgery or medical tests, but for the grotesque strangeness of adult sex. Zolar hadn't done this, she was sure. This was the work of a mind capable of complex planning and execution. But Zolar had witnessed something, and had wept at the memory of it. Bo kicked the battery pack to pieces before ducking back through the low door, tears blurring her vision.

This, she was certain, was where somebody had raped a little girl whose hair became spun crystal under operating room lights. Somebody who called himself Goody had created this place for that reason. A place to delight children into acceptance of the intolerable. Children from the daycare center. Little ones, too young to verbalize well. Small, inarticulate people too immature to distinguish cheap paint and sparkling lights from love and safety. In her worst moments Bo had not imagined anything this diseased. She wanted to scream and tear the canyon apart, rock by rock. Above, Zolar paced and muttered.

"Oh, shit." Bo breathed against Mildred's furry side. "What will happen to him if I tell the police about this?"

The answer was a dead certainty. Paul Massieu might be off the hook, but the young man who'd led Bo to the truth would be crucified. She could see the headlines—"Canyon Crazy Arrested in Child Rape After Cult Member Goes Free." Absolutely no one would believe that Zolar hadn't built the pink hellhole, in spite of his obvious incapacity. Wasn't it similar to his own "home"? And everybody would recall that mentally

ill people are universally prone to unspeakable crimes, overlooking the fact that mentally ill people are almost invariably victims, not perpetrators. Bo felt the pressure of an ethical dilemma. An Olympic headache. A desire to leave town and surface in New Zealand with a phony passport.

"You're going to love Auckland," she told Mildred. But the fantasy wouldn't take the place of the tears she'd seen in the young man's eyes when he remembered Goody. When he remembered things he must have witnessed. Zolar had wept for the horror in that canyon, a horror even worse than his own. Bo felt a kinship with the young hermit, and a need to protect him. Dar Reinert, she guessed, would produce a half-baked theory that Zolar might be Goody and not know it. That he was one of the "multiple personalities" now in vogue despite their statistical rarity. Everybody would like that theory; in a matter of days it would be regarded as hard fact. People in diverse bureaucracies would close their cases on Samantha Franer and her sister, Hannah, and an innocent man suffering from one of the most terrifying disorders in the medical annals of the human race would vanish into a prison for criminals who are also insane. There would be widespread relief. And a clever, resourceful rapist would destroy more children.

Bo gave Zolar five dollars, tried to talk to him briefly about new medications, and ascended the canyon wall. After a few yards she looked back and saw nothing. As if Zolar, the pink chamber, none of it were really there.

"And we'll leave it that way," she told Mildred. "At least until I figure out what to do."

The Kramer Child Care Center was dark when Bo left. Her banging on the security bars produced no response from inside. The nameless woman, the children, and even the orange cat were simply gone.

At home she'd phoned Dar Reinert and left a message requesting information on the owner of the Kramer Child Care Center. Then she'd phoned Estrella and begged her to go by the facility before the memorial service tomorrow. If the woman were there, Es could talk to her in Spanish. After a bubble bath shared by Mildred, she'd dressed and driven to pick up a waiting Solon Gentzler, who seemed not to notice the gray cloud nesting on the bridge of her nose as they drove toward La Jolla and its seafood.

"You're exhausted," the radical attorney mentioned much later as Bo stumbled against him on the beach. They'd gone back to her apartment after dinner so Bo could change before their walk. And he was right. She was so tired the familiar beach stretching north of her apartment seemed alien. Its piles of ropy kelp could have been somnolent, feathery eels. And a lone tourist in a Hawaiian shirt just sitting on the seawall appeared to be watching her and Gentzler as if he knew them.

"You're right. I'm so tired I don't think I can drive you back to your motel," she agreed. Something about the tourist made her think of pinball machines. A mechanical carnival of simple gravity. A steel sphere rolling down a maze. The image was cold, inexorable. And crazy.

Are you trying to bring on another manic episode? Get some sleep!