Strawgirl (24 page)

"A battery pack?" The raven-black eyes widened.

"Yeah. He used it to power the lights and a tape recorder. Children's music ..."

"And perhaps a video camera as well," Eva Broussard breathed. "Have you told the police?"

Bo glanced through the picture window of the studio apartment across the patio. Hannah Franer lay on the floor playing with a huge assortment of Legos. Now and then she flipped her long hair from her face in a gesture oddly adolescent, as if an older personality were already framing itself in the childlike visage. Flute music drifted from stereo speakers through two screened windows flanking the picture window.

"Only this morning," Bo admitted. "Dar Reinert called. I'd asked him to check out the registration for the center. He told me the house is rented in the name of somebody who died in Texas eighteen years ago. A phony name, in other words. The property owner lives in Oregon, pays a management service to rent and maintain the house. The management service is actually a bankrupt realtor named Brock Mulvihill who runs his business out of his garage up in San Marcos. Mulvihill says he never saw the guy who rented the Kramer Street property; it was all done over the phone and through the mail. He says the guy's checks were good, and that he paid for a new chain-link fence around the backyard so his wife could run a playschool on the property. Mulvihill drove by the house once, three months ago on a weekend, found it well kept up, and left. No questions. The market's rotten. He was thrilled to have a responsible, solvent tenant. The center isn't licensed by the county. A Hispanic woman who ran the place has vanished, although I've got a coworker who speaks Spanish checking this morning to see if the woman's come back. It's obvious that the perp set the whole thing up to have access to children, but there's no way to learn more until tomorrow when parents start showing up to drop off kids. I told Reinert about the cave, and about Zolar, the man who took me to it. Reinert's been out there already. Zolar's vanished, but the cave's still there. The police are checking it out now, but they don't expect to find much. Reinert, of course, now thinks Zolar is our perp. Meanwhile the media are 'cautiously exploring' the possibility of a Satanic takeover of San Diego. Ganage was their pet."

Eva Broussard sighed and remained silent for some time.

"I trust your judgment on Zolar," she said. "And even if I didn't, the elaborate preparations you describe—the construction and shoring of the cave, the paint and lights—it's all too calculated and consistent for an individual with untreated schizophrenia. No, from what you've told me, I feel safe in predicting that our killer is scarcely delusional. But more significantly, I think he's an isolate. To do what he does successfully, he can have no real contact with other people. His entire existence is a sequence of performances designed to disguise what he is inside."

"A child molester?" Bo filled in. "That's what he is inside. I've had a lot of contact with child molesters. This guy's not your typical—"

"No," Eva Broussard answered, "he isn't typical and that's not what he's hiding. He's hiding the fact that inside, he's nothing."

"Huh?"

"It will be almost impossible for you to comprehend, Bo," Broussard went on, the pace of her speech accelerating slightly. "You are ... how can I say this? ... uniquely equipped to understand the experiences of the living—joy and passion, despair and hopelessness. You are the masks of drama—comedy and tragedy. But this man is nowhere in that world your brain magnifies. This man is devoid of all emotional capability with the possible exceptions of anger and fear, which are in him one thing. His experience is not accessible to most people, but least of all to you. Don't even try."

Bo made a stab at digesting Eva Broussard's words, and then merely filed them for later. "If you're saying he has a mental disorder, like command voices in schizophrenia or something, that accounts for his behavior, it's like nothing I've ever seen."

"He has none of the major psychiatric disorders, least of all schizophrenia, as I've said," Broussard went on. "If anything, he'd be diagnosed with one of the personality disorders— borderline, narcissistic, one of those. But he's quite sane." She appeared to study a patch of succulent ground cover spilling over the edge of the patio. "Terms like 'personality disorder' are just categories for the inexplicable. Categories that define the ways in which some people simply cannot feel normal concern and interaction with others. But this man is plagued less by disorder than by an absence of personality altogether. He feeds on power, nothing else. His power to manipulate reality. Sexual gratification with children is an almost pure exercise of power. But now he may have found something better ..."

Bo inhaled slowly, Eva Broussard's train of thought finding completion in her own mind. "Cold-blooded murder," she exhaled. "He's found a source of power in killing." The sun-warmed beach seemed suddenly wintry. "And just as he's certainly molested more than one child, he'll kill more than once as well."

"It's quite possible that what we have here," Broussard completed her assessment carefully, "is the birth of a serial killer."

Overhead a gull dipped and squawked, wheeling out over the sea as if to avoid the grim pronouncement hanging in the air. Bo closed her eyes and shivered.

Inside, Hannah continued to work on an elaborate enclosure made of Legos. In the space of silence as the taped music stopped and reversed, Bo heard the child's voice through the screened windows, humming tunelessly. As Hannah hummed, her lips moved. "There," she pronounced, snapping Lego to Lego. "And there."

"She's talking," Bo whispered.

"Not exactly." Broussard smiled. "She isn't aware that she's forming words as she hums. Her mind is occupied with play. But eventually she'll hear herself, and if no attention is brought to the fact that she's speaking, if it's treated as perfectly normal and unremarkable, I think she'll abandon her mutism. And then even more care must be exercised as she begins to verbalize her pain and loss. Hannah will need professional care for some time."

Bo smiled. "And love, Eva. Look what your love has done for her already."

The Indian woman's face was pensive. "Like many Americans you tend to romanticize everything, Bo. This wasn't included in my plans. After surgery for a breast cancer that may or may not have been caught in time, I determined to devote the remainder of my life to researching a particular human experience. I was content with my decision, excited about the project. Then Samantha Franer was killed, her mother a suicide, Paul in jail. These people weren't especially close to me, Bo. I'm essentially an intellectual, not what you Americans would call a people person. I would have avoided this love if there had been any way to do so, but there wasn't." She looked curiously into Bo's eyes. "I think most of us will avoid the responsibilities of love in favor of less troubling attachments, don't you?" A twinkle visible in the dark eyes was a dead giveaway.

"I understand Dr. LaMarche stayed with you and Hannah last night after Ganage's murder." Bo accepted the challenge. "Can it be that he mentioned his harebrained intentions regarding me?"

Eva Broussard's smile became a grin. "He brought Hannah the Legos but said little about you," she answered, "although his discomfiture at your not being alone last night was rather too obvious. The male ego is perhaps the most fragile construct on the planet, you know. And hopelessly transparent."

"Precisely why I don't want—"

"You owe me no explanation, Bo. That debt is to yourself, no one else. I assume you're clear on your reasons for spurning his advances?"

"The problem is, he doesn't make advances." Bo sighed. "He's like something out of Godey's Ladies Book—the perfect gentleman. Besides, I like him. I'd rather keep that. And this case is a bit distracting ..."

"Of course," Eva Broussard agreed, rising. "So what is the next move?"

Bo stretched and checked her watch. "I'm meeting my coworker, Estrella Benedict, at the daycare center in forty-five minutes. If the woman who runs the place has returned, Estrella can interview her in Spanish. Then we're going to the memorial service for Samantha and Bonnie. Reinert thinks there's an off chance our killer will attend, if it's not Zolar. Reinert's got cops scouring San Diego for him, too. I hate it that I involved him in this."

"Your Zolar is unmedicated and miserable," Broussard noted crisply. "If he's found and gets help, it may be his salvation."

"Spoken like a true shrink." Bo laughed. "It's clear that you've never been tied down and shot full of Haldol. But maybe you're right. And Eva ...? " Bo couldn't resist asking. "You seem to know quite a bit about the killer, the way his mind works. But I've checked out your credentials. All your work has involved social interaction, religious mysticism, stuff like that. Nothing published on pederasts or serial killers. How do you know so much?"

"One becomes, in a sense, what one researches," Broussard answered. "A long time ago I chose to avoid research into the dark side of human behavior. I chose to avoid it precisely because it fascinates me. Too dangerous. For one who lives by choice outside the usual interpersonal frameworks of marriage and family, intense research in psychopathology can create a distorted view of the human condition. Surely you've seen that, among some of your coworkers who've come to view the world as nothing but a cesspool. Nonetheless, I keep up on others' work. Sometimes it's impossible to understand the up side without some comprehension of the depths."

"Oh," Bo replied. It was the answer she had expected. Sort of. Forty minutes later she nosed her ratty old BMW into the curb behind Estrella Benedict's immaculate silver coupe. Estrella herself paced in the driveway of the Kramer Day Care Center, her high heels popping like BB shots. Estrella pacing was not a good sign.

"What's happened?" Bo asked, hurrying from her car to the driveway. "Was she here? Was the woman here?"

"
Si
," Estrella answered, singing the monosyllable in two notes. Her cheeks twitched with something like anger. "She was here."

"So? What happened? Where is she?"

Estrella curled her lips inward over her teeth and looked at the sky. Bo could see white oleanders reflected in her friend's sunglasses. "She's gone," Estrella announced.

"Gone? You mean you talked to her and then just let her walk away? She's our only witness. She's the only person who can identify this pervert. I asked you to try talking with her, in Spanish. I didn't really think she'd be here, but—"

"She didn't think I'd be here, either," Estrella went on. "And I wish I wasn't. Bo, I hate it when you get me involved in these crazy schemes of yours. Why can't you just do your job like everybody else and then go home? You always have to go too far, know too much. You get too involved."

Estrella appeared to be on the verge of tears.

"Es, tell me what happened," Bo said, leading her coworker to lean on the BMW. "What's going on?"

Estrella smoothed a black linen skirt obviously selected for the memorial service they were about to attend, and crossed her arms over a white silk blouse pinstriped also in black. "I told her I just got a job as a secretary to a Latino lawyer, and needed day care right away for my two little girls. I said the lawyer wanted me to start next week and wouldn't wait. I said I was desperate. And you know what she told me? You know what this illiterate peasant woman from some village in Chihuahua told me?"

"What?" Bo asked. Estrella had bowed her head, Bo realized, to avoid smearing her eye makeup with tears.

"She told me to take my babies back to wherever I came from, to get out of the U.S. no matter how bad things were at home. She told me the devil had bought her soul here for a thousand dollars a month. That's what he paid her, Bo, to run this place and look the other way. She said he let her live here with her two kids for free, and paid her a thousand a month, cash. And sometimes he'd come by at noon and take one of the children, usually a girl but not always, for walks in the canyon. She thought it was strange, but Bo, she didn't know until Samantha's death what he was doing to the kids. She said they'd act funny, sometimes vomit later, at snack time. But no evidence of injury. He was probably ..."

"Oh, God," Bo breathed through her nose to fight the familiar nausea, "how can something like that just walk around?"

Over Estrella's shoulder the gray house seemed to be watching from behind its white bars.

"So where is she now?" Bo went on. "Why did you let her go?”

"She told me she took her kids to Tijuana yesterday and left them overnight in an orphanage with some nuns. Then she just walked around, tried to think what to do. She's been supporting about fifteen family members back in her village with that money, Bo. Their situation is desperate. She decided to leave her children in T.J. for a week, come back and try to get more money out of the creep before taking off for home."

"My god. You mean even after she knew ...? "

Estrella squared her shoulders and looked at Bo over the top of her sunglasses. "Yes," she replied. "And I have to tell you that I advised her to leave before you got here, to get over that border and home with her kids before she wound up in jail. I told her who I really am and I told her what would happen when the police finally put this picture together. She's gone, Bo. She's safe."

"Well, well," Bo said. "The voice of doom who thinks I'm crazy even when I'm not has just joined the ranks. And for what it's worth, you did the right thing. The woman could have lost her kids, spent years in a California prison as an accessory to crimes she didn't know were being committed. More innocent lives ruined pointlessly. I would have done the same thing, Es."