Turtle Baby (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Three)

by Abigail Padgett

"Dewayne Singleton attacked two police officers with a knife on the beach at Oceanside," he muttered, tracing the paneling on the coffee table with the side of his thumb. "It happened in a public restroom at the lifeguard station. They shot him, Bo. Dewayne's dead."

  "Oh, shit," she whispered, biting her lip. "I'm going to bed, Andy. I've got to think."

  On the dimly lit stairway wall she saw her shadow and imagined it crumpled and falling from the impact of a police bullet. It could happen, she knew. It happened all the time when untrained, authoritarian police types encountered people who were psychotic, who wouldn't, couldn't, obey them. Dewayne had been a brother, his picture with the others on her bulletin board at the office. At the moment, nothing else mattered.

  As she snapped on a light in Liz's study, Bo realized that she could never forgive Andrew LaMarche for withholding the truth while she danced to a fiddle and accordion. For deliberately controlling her experience of reality, which was not his to control.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Cave by the Water

  At breakfast Bo was somber.

  "What did you mean last night when you said the news about the poison in my water jug confirms the identity of the killer?" she asked Andrew, dressed in polo shirt and jeans to spend the day with his nieces and nephew. "I assume you mean Chris Joe Gavin?"

  The kitchen, a long, glass-walled room with a view of bamboo fronted by hollyhocks in the backyard, smelled of coffee, bacon, and the cinnamon vanilla French toast Stoney was frying on an iron grill. Gus and Angie, having already eaten, were hanging around making a production of loading the dishwasher. Bo could hear Jeanne-Marie on the hall phone, saying, "Oh, gross, Rosalee. Doesn't your mother know nobody's worn those creepy long gloves since the fifties? Tell her you can't go to Julia's stupid tea unless you have the short kind with the pearl button at the wrist. Then you cut out three fingers on each hand, and ..."

  The teenager's need to define herself as an authority. Be seen as knowledgeable, with-it, dependably trendy.

  "Out," Liz told the lurking children. "We need to talk about things that don't concern you."

  Bo was pleased when Gus and Angie trooped into the yard, accepting that adults own certain privileges not granted to the young.

  "Tell me about this case," Liz said over her coffee. "Maybe I can help."

  Bo outlined the high points as Andrew filled in details. At the end he said, "You can see that the culprit must be the boy. No one else had the means and motivation to eliminate all three—the baby, the mother, and the father. He couldn't find Bo after he'd tracked her into the blind canyon, and he probably thought she'd seen him. He poisoned the water at her car so she couldn't identify him."

  "Chac as the woman he loved and couldn't have," Liz said, frowning. "The family formed by her, Terrell, and Acito as doomed as his own biological family had been. It could happen, I suppose. If he were a ticking bomb, a social isolate wrapped up in his own world. What do you think, Bo?"

  Lighting a cigarette, Bo moved to sit near Stoney, who was smoking a pipe. The mingled smoke wafted over their shoulders and out an open screen door into the backyard.

  "What matters is what Chac thought," Bo answered. "She's left us clues about her life, about what happened to her and Acito. She trusted Chris Joe, lived with him, put his name on her bank account. He's Jeanne-Marie's age. Just a kid."

  Bo exhaled and watched a sparrow pull a worm from beneath the Barrileaux's hollyhocks. Angie was climbing a huge podocarpus tree while Gus did something with a can of 3-in-l Oil to a ten-speed trail bike.

  "And like a kid," she went on, "he sent me Chac's bank statement as proof that somebody treated him as a responsible adult. The phony name Chac used isn't relevant. He sent that so we'd know how grown-up he is. How competent. I just realized that, listening to Jeanne-Marie on the phone. And there's nothing we know about him that suggests he was an isolated character living in his own head. I don't think Chris Joe's our killer. I think it's somebody else."

  Andrew poured more coffee for everybody. "Then why did he run, Bo? Why's he hiding and sending arcane messages?"

  "He's seventeen, Andy. A runaway from a life in foster care. Who knows what he thinks will happen to him if he shows up?"

  Bo remembered razor wire and cinder block walls. "To a kid, foster care can seem like a prison," she said. "No control over your life, no sense of belonging to the real world where other kids have parents that don't change every year or two."

  "Well, I think it was the wife, this Kee," Stoney volunteered, checking his watch. "Philandering husband sires a woods colt on his sexy singer, the little wife goes ballistic. Seems obvious to me. By the way, Bo, we need to get over to Franklin soon if we don't want to steam ourselves on that bayou."

  "I'm ready," Bo agreed, tucking one of Gus's T-shirts into the loose waist of a pair of khaki shorts borrowed from Liz. "And I'd suspect Kee, too, except for one thing. She'd never harm a baby, especially an Indian baby. She literally worships a sort of romantic ideal of native cultures, native people. She won't even have her own kid because she wants to devote herself to indigenous children. Kee would no more poison Acito than I'd poison a dog. It's not possible."

  "Then who do you think it is?" Liz asked as they prepared to leave.

  "It's got to be Munson Terrell," Bo answered. "He's the only one who fits the folk tale Chac sang to me right before she died. I thought it through last night. It has to be Terrell."

  "Impossible," Andrew insisted, handing Bo her briefcase. "Somebody was out in that desert training a gun on him. And if he'd left the group long enough to poison your water jug, Martin would have noticed. But he said Terrell was with them the entire evening."

  Bo stopped at the door on her way to the car with Stoney.

  "I was asleep with Mildred on a cot out there most of the afternoon," she admitted. "And Martin said they went off alone on a quest for totems or something in the afternoon. Munson Terrell could have poisoned the water then, while I was asleep."

  "Assuming he happens to carry rare natural poisons with him everywhere on the off chance that nosy investigators will be sleeping nearby? That's a bit farfetched, Bo," Andrew said.

  "And what about the stalker with the rifle?" Liz asked, puzzled.

  Bo felt her interpretation of probable events in Canyon Sin Nombre deserved a careful hearing, even if everybody else did not.

  "The wilds around San Diego are full of, well, marginal types, especially on weekends," she explained. "Survivalists, right-wing wackos, gun-freaks who go out there to shoot anything that moves. There's nobody to stop them. The guy stalking me may just have been some half-drunk loner with a cheap rifle playing soldier, pretending he was on a secret mission to wipe out liberals or something. Remember, he didn't fire a shot."

  "I want to hear about this folk story Chac sang," Stone said. "But right now we've got to head out."

  In less than an hour Stone eased the Volvo into a service station in Franklin, and went inside to arrange for the rental of an aluminum skiff. The boat, he told Bo, was the only way to reach the Singleton residence other than miles of muddy canefield roads on which they'd surely get lost. With the skiff they could float the Bayou Teche straight to the shotgun shack on the edge of a canefield only five miles away, as the crow flies.

  Driving to the bayou, Bo noticed a beautifully restored Greek Revival plantation home complete with fluted capital columns and enough Southern atmosphere to cheer the corpse of Robert E. Lee.

  "Franklin was full of Northern sympathizers during the war," Stone Barrileaux mentioned with a trace of animosity. "That's why the plantations here weren't burned to the ground."

  Bo decided she wouldn't touch that topic with a mine detector. The Civil War, she observed privately, would probably always be a source of bitterness to the inheritors of a lost way of life. But at least Southerners had their landmarks, their Confederate flags and recipes for pecan pie. The banished Maya would have nothing.

  "I'm certain Chac meant Munson Terrel
l when she referred to a man eating in front of a pregnant woman," she told Stone, thinking it through again. "She had been pregnant with his child, yet the distance between them was incredible. The have and the have-not. I think she was saying his wealth and sophistication had no right to tantalize her poverty and desperation. I think she was saying he was selfish and blind."

  Stone parked the car in a bare area beside the bayou, paved with broken oyster shells. Bo stepped into the boat and tied her briefcase to an oarlock with a length of wet rope lying on the boat's floor.

  "She might have been saying he was a total bastard," the big man noted. "But she didn't say he was going to kill her."

  "But that's implied," Bo answered, wondering why she didn't feel more confident of her interpretation. She'd gone over and over it half the night.

  The swamp was nothing like what Bo had expected. Instead of green slime and fetid odors there was dark, clear water matted with lavender water hyacinths. The boat moved through them with a slooshing sound. Cypress trees and their above-water roots called "knees" rose smoothly toward the sky. Among them Bo felt like a visitor at a convention of sorcerers. From the watery field of flowers she saw a blue heron rise and fly to a distant cypress. A snapping turtle slid off a log as the boat passed.

  "This is lovely." She smiled. "I had no idea. And what are those black swimming birds? They look like chickens."

  "They are chickens," he nodded. "Poule d'eau, they're called. Water chickens. Make a great gumbo."

  "Pool-doo?" Bo repeated.

  "Oui." The Cajun smiled. "I can feed my family from these swamps if I need to. At least until the runoff from the canefields kills everything."

  "Runoff?" Bo splashed her face with the cool water and waited for an explanation. Two swimming chickens further betrayed her assumptions about chickens in general by taking wing and flying away. The swamp might have been a storyboard for the Disney version of the Uncle Remus Tales.

  "Insecticides," Stone muttered. "The sugar-growers spray the fields and the sharecropping families who live along them, like these people you're going to see. It all percolates down, runs off in the bayous."

  As he slowed the boat in its approach to a rickety dock, Bo wondered if insecticide poisoning had contributed to Dewayne Singleton's ruined life. When he had a life.

  "I'll wait in the boat," Stone said as he tied it to the dock and helped Bo climb out. "These folks aren't used to company, and they've just lost a son. It'd be rude for me to go in there."

  Bo couldn't recall ever feeling quite as ungainly as she did standing on the Singletons' wobbling dock in tennis shoes and borrowed shorts, holding a briefcase with a wet rope hanging from its handle. The word "unprofessional" came to mind but was quickly dispelled by the fact that there was nothing professional about what she was doing, anyway. Madge Aldenhoven would be the first to point that out.

  "Mr. Singleton, I apologize for intruding on you in this way," she said to a wiry black man in corduroy pants and a tan work shirt who looked like Dewayne would have looked if he'd lived to be sixty, sitting in a webbed lawn chair on the dock. "I've come all the way from California to see you because your son's wife had a baby, and there are some questions ..."

  The whites of the man's eyes were actually a creamy yellow, and bloodshot. A lifetime of anger looked out from them. For a split second Bo thought he was going to hit her.

  "Don't know nuthin' about that," he said, glaring at Stone sitting in the skiff. "The sheriff's man already come to tell us Dewayne be dead. My wife, she talk to you if she want." He gestured toward a ramp leading into the house, which was on stilts.

  Bo couldn't help thinking of the Russian folk-witch, Baba Yaga, and her house on fowls' legs. And then the Irish story of Maurya Ni Keerwaun, the dying witch in her hut like this beside a lake, who made Paudyeen O'Kelly a rich man because he bought Masses to save her soul. Witches always lived in houses like this. The cypress trees, dripping with Spanish moss, cast unnerving shadows in the bright sunlight. The night world hidden inside the day.

  Shape up, Bradley. Stoney's right there in the boat, and your name isn't Gretel. Do what you have to do, onerous as it is.

  "Thank you." She nodded, and climbed the ramp into the house on stilts. In the hazy interior light a woman in a faded red sweatshirt and flowered cotton skirt sat reading a Bible, her thin fingers following the words as if smoothing them on the page. She could have been any age between fifty and seventy, and behind drugstore reading glasses her eyes, too, were bloodshot. She was not a witch, but a woman still in shock from the news of her son's murder by police in a state two thousand miles away. Bo cursed herself for not bringing flowers, a sympathy card, something, to Dewayne's mourning parents.

  "I'm so sorry," she began, and felt tears spilling on her face. Whether they were for Dewayne or for herself and every other "mental patient" the world wouldn't miss, she didn't know. "I met Dewayne briefly while he was in the hospital. He seemed like a gentle man. My name is Bo Bradley, by the way. I work for Child Protective Services in San Diego."

  "And my name is Sarah Mae Singleton," the woman said, looking up from her Bible slowly. "I just had me the two boys, you know, Dewayne and Buster. Now they both gone."

  Bo walked across the bare board floor and took Sarah Mae Singleton's hand. It was all sinew, and trembled slightly in Bo's. After a while the woman said as if closing a prayer, "His name be praised. Miz Bo Bradley, what you want with me?" In the grieving face Bo saw an enviable willingness to face just about anything.

  "It's about a little Indian baby," she began, and settled on a wooden stool to tell Sarah Mae Singleton the whole story.

  Forty-five minutes later Stoney and the husband, William, were invited in for sweet chicory coffee so strong Bo was surprised it didn't dissolve the spoon. When Stone admired a collection of bamboo fishing poles leaning in a corner, William Singleton insisted on giving him one.

  "You done brought good news to this house," he said, staring at his steel-toed work boots. "I always thought Dewayne had the devil in him. But I was wrong. Sarah Mae know now at least one of her boys weren't bad, jus' sick in the head. That be a comfort to her."

  Bo couldn't imagine what comfort until William Singleton described events leading to Dewayne's brother, Buster's, life sentence at Louisiana's maximum-security prison at Angola for the murder of a convenience store clerk in Breaux Bridge.

  "I wish we could take in that little baby, even though Dewayne weren't the real daddy," Sarah Mae Singleton said as Bo and Stoney were leaving. "But we jus' too old. Buster lef' five children we tryin' to help as it is. You let me know what happens to that little Indian now, won't you?" she asked Bo.

  "I will," Bo promised.

  On the way back she and Stone Barrileaux admired the swamp in silence, lost in their own thoughts.

  Later she and Andrew did much the same thing on flights to New Orleans from Lafayette, and then to San Diego. At the airport she hugged him briefly in the cool evening air, and then took a cab alone to her Ocean Beach apartment. The solitude was worth every penny of the twenty dollar cab fare. And she needed it to plan her next move, which involved a visit to the well-appointed Rancho Santa Fe home of a coldblooded murderer.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  "But their faces did not die."—Popol Vuh

  Bo phoned Estrella from the chipped phone on her kitchen counter as soon as she got home. Mildred, Es reported, was doing fine. Madge Aldenhoven wasn't. Nick Paratore, the other investigator in Madge's unit, had tangled with an octopus while skin-diving Sunday afternoon, and wouldn't be out of the hospital until Thursday. Cases up for investigation were being shuffled all over the system. Madge's case census was down by two thirds with Nick and Bo out, threatening her weekly lead in the number-of-cases-petitioned race.

  "You'd better show up early tomorrow," Estrella warned, "because she'll expect you to file two more cases this week and that means one Wednesday and one Friday. You're going to have to haul ass, as they say."

 
Bo had long ignored Madge's insistence that every case under investigation required intervention by the court and the removal of children from their homes.

  "You know I don't file petitions for court custody unless I really think it's necessary." She sighed. "That isn't going to change just because Nick Paratore never got over his first reading of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea."

  "There's more bad news," Estrella went on. "When Madge heard that Dewayne Singleton was ... had passed away, she personally gave foster care the go-ahead to move Acito to a pre-adopt. They picked out a couple, and the authorization from the court came through yesterday afternoon. I told foster care I had to interview the new parents in order to close the investigations file on Acito, and they bought it. I got the address and made a visit."

  "And ...?" Bo lit a cigarette and exhaled angrily at her refrigerator.

  "And Acito's going to a pre-adopt foster home where he will eventually be adopted by the only Latin people I have ever met who hate music. Their name's Estan. And get this— they both work for the county. He's in revenue recovery and she's a guard at the county jail. His boss is the brother-in-law of one of the supervisors over in adoptions, who just happens to have been the one who kept the new foster care worker from getting fired when somebody noticed she'd lied about her education on her initial application. Turns out the foster care worker is living with the adoptions supervisor's husband's son from a previous marriage. Are you tracking this?"

  "I'm tracking it," Bo answered through clenched teeth. "The bureaucracy's finest hour. They can't get away with this, Es. We can't let them."

  "The Estans already have two kids of their own, two girls." Es sighed. "The missus told me they want to adopt so they'll be sure to get a boy. They plan to send him to military school."

  "Oh, shit. When do the Dooleys have to relinquish Acito?"

  "Tomorrow afternoon."

  Bo glanced at her kitchen wall clock, a yard-sale find shaped like a coiled plaster snake. She'd repainted it in a beige and cream diamond design and glued tiny sunglasses to the snake's head. With the two-hour difference between New Orleans and San Diego, the time was still only six o'clock.