Strawgirl (5 page)

Bo smoothed her forehead with the heels of both hands. "What is it?" she asked, entering the room Samantha and Hannah Franer had obviously shared. Red, white, and blue Raggedy Ann sheets adorned a double-bed mattress on the floor. Above a red-enameled bureau whose half-open drawers revealed children's socks, Tshirts, pajamas, hung a face. Or a head. A thing woven of straw with protuberant, empty eye sockets, a sharp nose, and an oval mouth that appeared to be blowing. Bo recognized the mouth as similar to one in an Irish children's book her sister, Laurie, had loved. The north wind's mouth in a cloud, gusting winter over Lough Derg. The memory of Laurie was, as usual, unsettling.

"I dunno what the hell it is," the detective snarled at the hollow eyes, "but didn't the pediatrician's report say somebody painted a spiked face on the poor kid's belly before he raped her? This looks like a spiked face to me, made of straw or something. So what does that say?"

"I don't know what it says," Bo answered. The straw face seemed to tell some story far removed from the terrible stains in the bathroom. A story Bo sensed in the same way she could tell, even in windowless rooms, when clouds covered the sun. But a closer story was that Hannah Franer, if she were still alive, had just entered a world Bo knew very well. A world in which there only used to be a little sister.

"It says these people are into some weird stuff that may involve sex with children. Ritual abuse stuff. That psychologist, Ganage, says they do it because destroying innocence pleases Satan, or something like that. And with this devil mask right here in the kids' room, it's safe to guess Mom might just have gone along with it. Time for a warrant—at least accessory to felony child sexual assault. I'm gonna call it in ..."

Bo watched the straw mask. It stared wildly at nothing, howling soundlessly. Things were moving too fast, assumptions being made with senseless velocity. Accustomed to occasional manic episodes in which her own perceptions accelerated beyond the boundaries of reality, Bo now felt like an inert stump rooted in a hurricane. Something was off, wrong, skewed. Why was everybody in such a hurry to jump on the devil worship thing? The situation, Bo gauged uneasily, was assuming the framework of mania. Too fast. Out of control. But recognizing it didn't mean there was anything she could do about it.

"I want you to interview the mother as soon as we get back to the hospital," Reinert said from the kitchen where he was on the phone arranging a warrant for the arrest of Bonnie Franer. "I hear you're magic getting the truth outta people. I want you to break her. Now. Before she gets a lawyer."

It was perfectly legal. The cops and CPS workers did it whenever necessary. A suspect could not be interrogated by police without counsel. But a social worker could interview the suspect in order to secure information that might affect the welfare of that suspect's children. Whatever was said in that interview would be submitted to juvenile court in a confidential report prepared to document recommendations for the child's placement and protection. In theory, that report could be seen by no one outside juvenile court. In practice, the report or even the social worker could be subpoenaed to other courts, and the CPS worker could simply tell the cops anything she or he thought they needed to know. In actuality, if Bonnie Franer chose to tell Bo Bradley that her live-in boyfriend, Paul Massieu, raped her three-year-old daughter, Samantha, in a Satanic ritual involving bug-eyed masks, she might as well have told KTUV's evening news.

Bo experienced the weight of her own role in the mercurial sequence of events, and sighed. A hundred-pound raven perched on her head would have been more comfortable.

"Mind if I smoke in your car?" she asked Reinert, lighting a Gauloise and exhaling thoughtfully.

"Hang it out the window," Reinert replied.

Bo bit her lip and did not produce any of the twenty-seven possible comebacks crossing her mind.

Andrew LaMarche clasped long, bony fingers atop a desk calendar advertising soy-based infant formula. On a bookcase to his right a Seth Thomas clock informed Bo in gilded Roman numerals that it was 2:15 and that time, in fact, possessed wings.

"Why do you have to interview the poor woman right now, Bo?" he asked quietly. The edge of a French accent never lost from his New Orleans upbringing betrayed emotion otherwise scrupulously contained. The death of Samantha Franer seemed to have upset him inordinately. Bo wondered why. As director of the hospital's child abuse unit, the world-famous expert on brutalized children had undoubtedly seen more than one small cadaver.

"The suspected perp has taken off with the older sister," Bo explained. "The mother may know where he's taken her." On the physician's desk was a rough potter's clay sculpture of a human baby in the arms of a Barbary ape. "Where did you find that piece?" she asked, intrigued. The ape's eyes were wide with fear.

"I made it," he replied without interest. "Bo, Bonnie Franer had nothing to do with the death of her daughter. Neither did Paul Massieu. They're both innocent. I'm sure of it."

Bo raised her eyes from the sculpture to gaze levelly at Andrew LaMarche. "The police think differently."

"The police think obviously," he said from beneath a graying mustache. "I had expected better from you. I simply can't allow you to interrogate Bonnie Franer right now, Bo." His voice dropped to a husky whisper. "She's just lost a child."

Bo examined her patience and found it worn to translucent thinness. Every minute ticking by might increase the danger to Hannah. "I know she's just lost a child! And I'm not here to discuss it with you. I'm here to get information that might just save the sister from a similar fate. Now where's Bonnie Franer?"

The baritone voice rasped with anger. "Do you think I don't know what you and Reinert are up to? The woman's in shock. She could say anything. You'll concoct enough evidence to hang her by tomorrow. I won't permit it!"

His hands, Bo noticed as he stood and wrenched a mole-gray pinstriped jacket from the back of his desk chair, seemed wooden. Beneath close-cropped hair the color of loam his eyes swept the room as if searching for hidden assassins. Bo would not have been surprised if he'd grabbed the odd little sculpture and smashed it against the wall of diplomas at her back. The framed documents proclaimed Andrew Jacques LaMarche a doctor of pediatrics, a fellow at three universities, and a legal expert on criminal pediatric trauma. None of them mentioned that the dashing baby doctor had the temperament of a coloratura soprano opening La Traviata at the Met. But the peculiar thing was the direction of his anger. Long a defender of the rights of children, Andrew LaMarche had never before evinced any interest in the feelings of parents.

Puzzled, Bo showed her ace. "I think Bonnie Franer has told you what happened to Samantha, and I think she's told you where Paul Massieu has taken Hannah."

"She told me Samantha seemed strange last night, refusing to eat her dinner. She said that Paul Massieu returned from the property their group is purchasing out in the desert near Jamul at about 7:00, when he and the mother checked on Samantha, who was asleep, and decided not to call a doctor because she wasn't feverish. After that, she said she, Paul, and the older sister, Hannah, watched television until Hannah went to bed at 9:00. Apparently there was some muted talking and activity in the girls' room at that time, indicating that Samantha had awakened when her sister came to bed. But since neither girl came back out to say anything was wrong, Bonnie and Paul didn't check further. Bonnie said that Paul was not alone with Samantha at any time last night, and so couldn't have been the one who raped her, even if he'd been capable of such a thing. The couple went to bed at 10:00 and heard nothing from the girl's room during the night. Paul rose at 5:00 to breakfast with an earthmoving contractor they've apparently hired to clear a road into the desert property. He was gone when Bonnie heard Samantha's cries from the bathroom and then saw that the child was pale and bleeding from the pelvic region. She told me she phoned a local pediatrician's service then, at about 6:30, and made arrangements to meet in the doctor's office after dropping the older sister at her school." There was a pause. "And that's it, Bo. Anything else she may have said is privileged."

"Another child's life is at risk," Bo told him. "Against that fact your privilege means nothing. If Hannah is harmed because you kept me from interviewing the mother, you're accountable."

They'd both known it all along. Bo couldn't imagine what lay behind the verbal grandstanding. His eyes were the color of wet slate.

"She's in the surgical social worker's office with a priest," he muttered, tugging French cuffs to a point precisely a half inch below his jacket sleeves. "But you're wasting your time."

Bo had scraped knuckles on the renowned LaMarche pomposity before. "Oh, thank you, massa," she bowed, shuffling across what she realized was an Aubusson carpet. "I's jus' doin' my job."

"Don't push me, Bo." The deep voice held an unaccountable dagger edge.

Bo merely pulled the office door closed behind her and wondered why everyone seemed mad as hatters. The thought found form on an imaginary canvas in her head. LaMarche in a top hat and cutaway coat, pouring tea for a March Hare who was Madge Aldenhoven, while a burly dormouse with a Ruger revolver in its belt snored with its head in a plate of crumpets. The day was not going well, despite its bland beginning. Bo found a measure of comfort in the accuracy of her earlier foreboding. And in her decision to explore the possibility of quitting this torturous job. In the surgical social worker's office that comfort evaporated like water on a heated stone.

"Hannah is fine," Bonnie Franer pronounced with wrenching effort after Bo explained her own function in the nightmare. "Please, dear God please, just leave me alone!" The gaunt woman had doubled over in a series of shallow, racking gulps that would only later become sobs. The gulping and breathing created a rocking motion. Bo watched with growing alarm as Bonnie Franer's tattered fingers roamed aimlessly over the suede surface of a purse. Most of her fingernails were bitten to the quick. A glance at the woman's skeletal forearms revealed long, fine scratches threading the pallid skin. Similar marks raked the sides of her face and neck. Some were fresh, trickling spidery filaments of blood. More were dried and healing. Bo had seen it before. Even with her gnawed fingernails, Bonnie Franer made a habit of scratching herself. A bad sign.

The priest, who in Bo's estimation couldn't have been a day over fourteen, sat boyishly on the social worker's desk and reeked concern. "I'm Frank Goodman," he curbed a naturally wide smile tugging at the corners of his mouth, "from St. Theresa's."

"Hi, Father," Bo replied and ran a freckled hand through her hair, then tapped a Bic pen against her teeth. Bonnie Franer presented a textbook picture that screamed "victim." Had Paul Massieu done this as well? Stripped the mother of her very personality while using her daughters as sexual toys? Maybe this was one of those tabloid cases beloved of talk show hosts, cases in which secretly monstrous men held thrall over helpless women and their children. In three years with Child Protective Services, Bo had never seen such a case. They were never that simple. But this might be a first.

Bonnie Franer's agitated, crablike hands seemed to be searching for something. Bo recognized the behavior. A pair of scissors, a drapery cord, even a ballpoint pen might become a weapon in those hands. A weapon turned against the woman holding it. Bonnie Franer, Bo noted glumly, was a Class A candidate for suicide.

"Did Paul Massieu ever molest or sexually assault your daughter Samantha?" Bo forced herself to address the pathetic figure.

What do you do for an encore, Bradley? Bite the heads off kittens?

As the woman continued to rock from the waist, hanks of fine, dust-blonde hair pulled loose from a hastily brushed bun at the nape of her neck. In the artificial light of the social worker's office, the floating tendrils might have been the hair of a swimmer. Underwater. Riding currents no words could penetrate.

The tiny office seemed to be shrinking. There was no air. Bo wished the priest would go out into the hall rather than witness the spectacular barbarism indigenous to her job. But he merely sat gazing with kind, basset-brown eyes at the grieving mother.

"Paul loves the girls," Bonnie Franer whispered in a final attempt at coherence. Then her eyes rolled back and she began to rock harder. "It's my fault, my fault, always all my fault." The last words emerged as a moan, continued as a mindless chant. The rocking and moaning would go on, Bo realized, until the woman was medicated. There would be no more communication. Gently Bo placed a hand on the woman's frail wrist, but there was no response.

"Let me." Father Frank Goodman jumped off the desk and slid a muscular arm around the woman's shoulders. Inexplicably, he began to sing something that sounded remarkably like "Send in the Clowns" in a soft tenor. His singing actually seemed to relax the frenzied rocking.

Bo wondered what had happened to the Catholic church since she left it twenty years ago.

"Had enough?"

It was Andrew LaMarche, glacially present at the door.

"Reinert's issued a warrant," she said in tones designed to encourage a professional response. "But this woman won't survive a night in jail. She'll ..." her voice began to crack, "she'll find a way to . . ." The words were cardboard stuck in her throat. The same words required in describing Laurie's death. "She's got to have a suicide watch."