The Liar's Lullaby (11 page)

An officer called, “Are you all right?”

“Man’s hurt. He needs rescue.”

The moan came again, like the lowing of an animal. She followed the sound and found him half-buried in creepers and mucky earth.

God, scalp wounds were bloody. If she hadn’t seen the rock smash against Chennault’s head, Jo would have thought he’d been shot.

She crouched at his side. “Hold still. The police are calling the paramedics.”

“Damn,” he moaned. “Bastard brained me, didn’t he?”

Wild vines had wrapped around him. Beneath the copious blood his face was white. He tried to sit up, and screamed. His left arm was fractured and his elbow dislocated.

Jo gently held him down. “Stay still.”

“Make a great postscript for the book,” he said, and passed out.

W
HEN JO GOT HOME THE SUN WASHIGH IN THE SKY. SHE PARKED the Tacoma beyond the park and hiked toward her house, feeling spooked.

Chennault had been evacuated by the paramedics to UCSF Medical Center. He couldn’t give the police much information about the attacker. Neither could she.

When her phone rang she grabbed it and peered at the display. A pang went through her, disappointment covering worry.

“So, have the police discovered how the guy got into Tasia’s house?” she said.

“The property manager opened the back door before you came,” said Amy Tang. “He snuck in while nobody was looking. Bigger question—who was he?”

“And what did he want?”

“Thief?”

“Ghoul? Somebody seeking relics to sell on eBay?”

The cool wind shook the Monterey pines in the park. A cable car clattered past, bulging with tourists. The gripman rang his bell.

“I have another question,” Jo said. “Will he be back?”

“Watch yourself.”

“You bet.”

She hung up but clutched the phone in her palm as she walked.
Come on. Ring.

How could it be that modern life was saturated with communications devices, that the information age spewed gossip and barking commentary night and day, that the entire electromagnetic spectrum was alight with phone calls and texts and breaking news about celebrity boob jobs—but when she wanted news that the PJs of the 129th had safely touched down at Moffett Field, she was utterly in the dark?

She tucked the phone in her back pocket. A second later she pulled it out again and called Vienna Hicks. When she told her about being attacked by the intruder at Tasia’s home, Vienna said, “Holy crap, are you okay?”

“Aside from a rug burn on my face, I’m perfect. But Ace Chennault was taken away in an ambulance.”

“Poor bastard. The guy never did look like he could duck.”

Jo smiled. “Do you know anybody who might want to break into your sister’s house?”

She tossed it out like chum on choppy water, not really expecting an answer. She checked for traffic and jogged across the street toward her house.

“Maybe,” Vienna said.

Jo slowed. “Really?”

“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, Dr. Beckett. Can you meet me at Waymire and Fong this evening?”

“Certainly.”

“Bring your secret psychiatric decoder ring.”

“Want to clarify that?”

“Six o’clock. I’ll tell you when I see you.”

Jo saw the green VW Bug drive past at the same moment the driver saw her. The woman’s head swiveled sharply. She whipped a U-turn and double-parked in front of Jo’s house. The VW’s air-cooled engine squealed. Exhaust stank from its tailpipe. The driver climbed out.

The concrete beneath Jo’s feet abruptly felt hot. She didn’t move.

The woman marched toward her. “I thought you’d have a secretary, or an office at least, that would be open for normal business hours.”

She was slight and colorful, with bangly red earrings that clicked in the sunlight. Her hair was dyed skidmark-black, with a magenta streak along her forehead. She wore silver rings on her fingers and toes. Her T-shirt said MARKHAM PRINTING. Ink was her thing. She had a Gothic tattoo on her left forearm. SOPHIE
.

She approached, scowling. “You’re Jo Beckett, aren’t you?”

She looked like a butterfly whose wings had been pulled off and sewn back on. Beautiful and damaged, struggling to stay airborne, and angry about it. She was Dawn Parnell, Sophie Quintana’s mother, Gabe’s ex-girlfriend.

Jo couldn’t conceive of a good reason for Dawn to know where she lived. Or to be there. Not a happy reason, not . . .

“Is it Gabe?”

“Yeah,” Dawn said.

The sun all at once seemed to hum, a high-pitched tone that drilled through Jo’s chest. “Did something happen?”

Dawn’s eyes were the hazel of a kaleidoscope, too bright, spinning with emotion.
Not Gabe. Don’t tell me. Please, Jesus.

“Where is he?” Dawn said.

“Did they—didn’t the Wing tell you . . .”

“I’m late for work. My shift started at noon, and it’s his day.”

“What?”

Dawn pointed up the street, perhaps toward the print shop where she worked. “Gabe has Sophie during the week. But she got sick at school and the nurse couldn’t find him. So they had to call me. And now I’m late.”

“Wait.” Jo raised her hands. She heard the beseeching note in her voice. “Don’t you know where Gabe is?”

“No. That’s why I’m here.” Dawn said it slowly, as if to a recalcitrant child.

“You haven’t heard anything from his family, or the one- twenty-ninth?”

“No. And I can’t afford to miss my shift. I do that, I get docked. And if I lose my job, I get in trouble with the custody people.”

Jo’s heart was banging like a kettledrum. She felt like she was trying to grab a handhold on a wall of cotton candy.

“Nothing’s happened to Gabe?” she said.

Dawn looked at her crooked. “Except I can’t find him. I had to pick Sophie up from the school nurse’s office.”

Jo’s vision throbbed. Gabe was all right. She walked toward the idling VW. “Is Sophie okay?”

“Fever and vomiting. Stomach flu’s going around the school.”

Sophie wasn’t in the car. Jo stopped and figured it out.

Dawn crossed her arms. “I can’t take her to work.”

“Did you bring her here?”

“Gabe spends time with you, right?”

Jo turned toward her front porch. “Where is she?”

“I have to book. I’m already in deep with the boss.” Dawn marched back to the car. “You should tape a note to the door when you leave. Let people know where you are.”

“Where’s Sophie?” Jo said.

Dawn pointed next door at the redbrick mansion that dominated the street. “Your neighbor said she could stay with him until you got home.”

She opened the car door, and paused. Her gaze slid over Jo. For a moment, she seemed ready to comment on what she was looking at. Then she got in and drove away in a film of gray exhaust.

Jo pressed her fingers to her eyes, trying to stop the hum and the heat and the acid pulse of the adrenaline that coursed through her veins. Be fair, she told herself. Dawn was monitored by the courts to make sure she was clean. To maintain her visitation rights with Sophie she had to submit to random drug testing, and she had to keep her job.

Dawn had been through rehab twice. She was eking it out, day by day, watched over by her parents. According to Gabe, they seemed at once broken and hopeful because their beautiful girl—who had enrolled at San Francisco State to study marine biology, dropped out when she got pregnant, and recovered from childbirth with a variety of self-chosen chemical pick-me-ups—was now living independently, and employed in a business that didn’t get raided by the DEA.

Maybe.

Jo walked next door to the mansion. From the balcony, plaster statues of Roman gods gazed down at her. As she climbed the steps, footsteps bundled along the hardwood hallway inside.

“Coming, Jo.”

She pinched the bridge of her nose. Did he have an infrared Jocam that alerted him when she neared his porch? The deadbolt flipped and Ferd Bismuth opened the door. His eyes crinkled behind his glasses as he smiled.

“Of course you’re here. I told Sophie’s mom you’d come. I knew it.”

“Thanks for stepping up to the plate,” she said.

He ushered her in. “I couldn’t let Sophie wait on your front porch, for Pete’s sake.”

“But please, take off the surgical mask.”

He slumped. Reluctantly he unhooked the mask from his ears. “Come on.”

He led her toward the living room. The mansion had high ceilings, huge windows, and a staircase with a heavy wooden banister. Jo envisioned Bette Davis at the top of the forbidding stairs, dressed as Baby Jane, ready to pitch Joan Crawford from her wheelchair. Ferd lived in the mansion as a long-term house sitter. The owners had taken a nine-month trip to Italy. They’d been gone sixteen. If the Spitzers stayed away much longer, Ferd could gain squatter’s rights.

From the living room sofa, bundled under thermal blankets, Sophie gave Jo a finger wave. Pillows were piled around her like sandbags, perhaps in the event that she exploded. A can of 7UP sat on the coffee table beside packets of moistened towelettes and a box of latex gloves. Sophie’s chocolate-chip hair curled against her forehead with sweat. Her eyes, bright with fever, looked like glazed marbles.

Perched on the arm of the sofa was Ferd’s monkey, Mr. Peebles. He had a thermometer in his busy little hands.

“And I see that today we’re playing
Outbreak
,” Jo said.

Mr. Peebles shook the thermometer like a pro. He squinted at it, bared his teeth, and cooed in alarm. He must have seen Ferd do the same a hundred times. He stuck the wrong end in his mouth and posed like FDR smoking from his cigarette holder. He pulled it out again. Jo crossed the room and grabbed it before he could insert it anyplace else.

Welcome to Ferd’s palace of hypochondria.

The little capuchin, officially Ferd’s “emotional support companion,” fixed her with an unnerving stare, like he was silently adding her to his shit list. And with a monkey, that term was literal.

“Don’t get cocky,” she said. “I can outwit you just by counting to three.”

Mr. Peebles scampered across the sofa and jumped onto Ferd’s shoulder. Jo sat on the edge of the sofa and rubbed Sophie’s arm.

“Look like you hit rock bottom, champ. You hanging in?”

Sophie shrugged. Jo put the back of her hand to the girl’s forehead.

Ferd approached. “Her temp was a hundred one point three when I checked ten minutes ago.”

Sophie turned her shining eyes to Jo. “When’s my dad going to get here?”

“As soon as he can after he gets back.”

“Gets back? Where’d he go?”

Jo mentally slapped herself on the forehead. Don’t
increase
the kid’s anxiety, you dork. “He’s out with the Wing. But I know he’ll pick you up as soon as possible.” She brushed Sophie’s damp hair off her face. “Feel pretty lousy?”

“Hideous.”

Jo raised her eyebrows. “Not merely disgusting?”

“H-i-d-e-o-u-s. It was on my vocabulary quiz today. I barfed on the test paper.”

Jo smiled. Sophie’s sense of humor always took her by surprise. “I’ll vouch for your ability to use the word in conversation.”

Jo’s smile waned. Her day was packed to the gills and she felt like a heavy stick was prodding her between the shoulder blades.

“Think you can walk next door to my house? My guest room has a big warm bed. You can watch TV and sleep until your dad gets here.”

Sophie nodded. Ferd got her backpack and Jo helped her on with her shoes. At the door Jo turned to thank Ferd, and saw the can of Lysol in his hand. She glared. He hid it behind his back.

“Feel better, Sophie,” he said.

She replied without expression. “Wilco.”

Jo paused on the top step. “I’m glad you were home. Really.”

“It was fortunate.”

Ferd’s face, so often tangled with anxiety or dreamy with unrequited love for her, was sober. He didn’t have to say anything else. They were both thinking it. Nobody could count on good fortune.

J
O TUCKED SOPHIE IN BED, UPSTAIRS IN HER GUEST ROOM. SHE PULLED A down comforter over the little girl and turned the television to Nickelodeon.

“If you want, I can call your aunt Regina and see if she can pick you up.”

“Aunt Regina’s at traffic school.”

“Then we’ll wait for your dad.” She handed Sophie the remote. “I’ll be downstairs. Call if you need me.”

“If I do, you’ll come back?” Sophie sounded like she was on a rickety bridge, crossing a canyon alone.

“Of course I will. I know you’d rather be in your own bed, but look at this as a field trip to Dr. Jo’s House of No School and all the TV you can sleep through.”

Sophie nodded tightly. Her lips were pressed together, white. Jo told herself: Get the anxiety out of your voice, your face, your posture. She sat on the edge of the bed and smoothed the little girl’s hair back from her face.

“Did you always know you wanted to be a doctor?” Sophie said.

“Actually, I started thinking about it when I was a little older than you.”

“Really?” Sophie’s eyes brightened. “Is it hard?”

Jo thought about her answer. “It’s a challenge. But I think challenges are a good thing. Medicine is fascinating. And best of all, you get to help people. There’s a lot to learn, but lucky for me, I liked school.”

“I do, too.”

“Tell you what. When you feel better, I’ll tell you stories about medical school. Funny ones.”

“And about gruesome diseases? Like flesh-eating bacteria.” Sophie was smiling. She turned serious. “I wouldn’t be afraid to talk about it. It would be fascinating.”

Jo swallowed a smile, strangely touched. “Was that word also on your vocabulary test?”