As Bo strapped the weak and wailing baby into the car seat she thought again of Janny Malcolm's doll. There was something about babies, about baby dolls, but it didn't scan, didn't go anywhere. And after a few minutes the tiny boy's piercing cry began to make her ears ring, give her a headache. He was moving about inside the sweaters, his little fists batting the air. He was angry. Well, he had good reason. But the sound of his anger was getting to her, combined with Dar's siren just ahead.
"I'll bet you've never even heard of Handel," she told the baby, "but you're going to love The Messiah." Jamming the tape in the tape deck, she ran it forward and pushed the play button. "This is called 'The Hallelujah Chorus,'" she grinned, turning up the volume. "Sing your heart out."
Chapter 11
The cafeteria of St. Mary's Hospital for Children had been decorated, Bo decided, by a committee savagely devoted to political correctness. Attached to the usual garlands of fake and fireproof greenery over the doors were colorful plastic Hanukkah dreidels, while a Styrofoam snow woman beside the cash register held a sign urging eaters to celebrate kwanza! There was no Christmas tree, but the bottlebrush trees surrounding the patio had been strung with tiny white lights.
"Let's sit by the patio so we can enjoy the lights," she told Dar Reinert, who was ambling behind her with a large coffee and a dish of rice pudding. She could smell the extra nutmeg he'd sprinkled on the pudding from a shaker by the coffee urns.
"I haven't had rice pudding since I was a kid," he grinned. "But when it's gone, so am I. Can't spend the whole damn day on a CPS case. So listen. I pulled an old file on this Kimberly Malcolm. Sucker goes back thirteen years. She was beaten, hit over the head with a flat object. Something with an edge. The medical report from this hospital said the injuries were consistent with a two-story fall onto the side of a cement block. Except the injury occurred in a one-story cottage with no cement blocks anywhere in the vicinity. The detective on the case, guy named Pete Cullen, ran down everybody who'd ever been near those kids but got nada. It was never solved. It never will be."
"Wait a minute," Bo said, breathing coffee steam, her elbows braced on the small table. "This Kimberly Malcolm was head-injured thirteen years ago and just now died? I thought you said it was murder. That can't be murder, and who was Kimberly? I thought she might be Janny's mother. Why was she seen at a children's hospital?"
"Mother?" he scowled into the rapidly vanishing rice. "Kimberly and Janet Malcolm were sisters, Bo. Twins. Identical twins. They weren't quite two years old when it happened. The mother said somebody broke into her place down in Mission Beach and grabbed the little girls, and there was a scuffle in the dark. Both the kids sustained injuries, but Kimberly got the worst of it. Massive brain injury. The mom said she never saw the guy, that he threw the kids down and ran out. Nobody believed her, but nobody ever put the pieces together, either. Now that Kimberly's dead we could reopen the investigation as a murder, but it's a waste of time. Cullen had a reputation as one of the best. If he couldn't crack it, nobody could. The damn thing's cold now, stone cold."
Bo stared at the lights outside and tried not to think about stone cold. "Where is this Cullen now and where has Kimberly Malcolm been for the last thirteen years?" she asked. "There was no mention of a twin in Janny's case file."
"Impossible," Reinert boomed. "CPS was all over the case, made all the arrangements. I forget the social worker's name, but it's in the file. 'Reindeer' or something. I put a copy under your front seat while you were in the ER with the baby. Maybe it's somebody you know. And Pete Cullen retired a couple of years before Deb and I moved down here from L A. He lives up in Julian, drops in downtown now and then. The guy's a legend, Bo. A real cop's cop. If he couldn't pop the Malcolm thing it couldn't be done."
Bo ran her hands through her hair and watched as the detective chased a final grain of rice with a plastic spoon. There had obviously been a comprehensive CPS file on this case, and that file had obviously been withheld. It wasn't difficult to guess who had simply run a copy of the current face sheet and fastened it into a new folder. But it was impossible to guess why.
"Gotta run," Reinert sighed, standing and eyeing his empty pudding dish with affection. “Tell the doc hello. Guess Deb and I will see him at your tree-trimming thing Sunday, huh?"
"Oh, yeah," Bo nodded. She'd forgotten about her impulsive decision to have a party. And hadn't she promised to take Janny Malcolm out for lunch and shopping on the same day? Janny apparently remembered nothing of the grisly past Dar had just outlined. Or did she? And where was this mother who said someone had broken in and attacked her toddlers thirteen years ago? Bo couldn't wait to get her hands on the police file.
"And Dar," she smiled as he left, "thanks for the backup!"
"Just promise me you'll call uniforms next time, okay?"
Bo stared into her cooling coffee until a rustle of attention among the lunching hospital staff announced the arrival of Dr. Andrew LaMarche, director of the Child Abuse Unit and a celebrity at St. Mary's due to his often highly publicized expert testimony on criminal cases. At the moment he looked less expert than frazzled, Bo noted. Although the warmth that leaped to his gray eyes when he saw her suggested a reserve of energy set aside for concerns other than the professional.
"Alone at last," he whispered dramatically, taking the chair just vacated by Dar Reinert and leaning to kiss Bo's cheek. "I've missed you, Bo. Let's run away to Las Vegas and get married!"
"Andy, you promised to stop proposing," Bo chided.
"That was before my young cousin, Teless, arrived," he said, sighing. "You have to marry me now, rescue me from my own home, save me!"
"It can't be that bad."
"She plays rap music. Her favorite is by a group of women who yell things about food. I was awakened this morning by the sound of a woman chanting 'Artichoke hearts can't break' over and over. Then the workmen arrived to finish grouting the kitchen tile, and they liked the artichoke thing and she got one of them dancing—"
"Andy, she sounds relatively normal. You'll survive. Right now I need to know about the baby."
"He'll make it. He's dehydrated, malnourished, has three different skin diseases plus acute diaper rash, an eye infection that could have resulted in blindness if left untreated, and pinworms. I've ordered x-rays, but it'll be a while before I can confirm healing fractures if there are any. He also has some chest congestion, so I ordered a TB test just to be sure, and of course HIV tests. I don't think he's ever had a bath and his nails have never been cut, resulting in infected scratches on his face, neck, and abdomen. This is one of the worst neglect cases I've seen. He was filthy. Where did you find him, Bo, in a sewer?"
"Essentially, yes," Bo answered. "I'll need a copy of your preliminary report so I can petition this one today. I don't want to take a chance on the mother showing up and taking him out of the hospital over the weekend."
"I already faxed the report to your office and put a hospital hold on the baby. He's not going anywhere. We work well together, Bo. Surely you can see the importance of saving me from a complete emotional collapse."
His graying chestnut-brown hair and mustache were as neatly trimmed as ever, Bo observed fondly. And the expensive tweed jacket over an oyster-gray French-cuffed shirt made him look like an English professor.
"I won't marry you, but I will rescue you from rap music tonight if you promise to read Victorian poetry by candlelight in that jacket."
His answering smile stopped just short of excessive enthusiasm. "Browning?" he queried.
"No, Tennyson," Bo answered.
"Oh, dear."
“Tennyson's so sleazy," she went on, fanning herself with a napkin. "I can hardly wait."
"Mon dieu," Andrew LaMarche exhaled, blushing.
"Molly and I will come by tonight," Bo said as she stood to leave. "Maybe your cousin can help me plan the tree-trimming party. And I want to hear you play the harpsichord, now that it's finished."
"The sheet music that accompanied t
he kit is a selection of Beatles hits, Bo."
"I'll pick up some Bach and some Christmas carols this afternoon," she grimaced. “Take care of my baby for me, okay?"
A darkness flitted across his face at the remark. Bo pretended not to see it and bit her lip as she hit the cafeteria doors with both hands.
How long are you going to drag this out, Bradley? He's a lovely, wonderful man who wants marriage and a family. Neither of you is young and as long as you're around, he's not going to have that. The only honorable thing for you to do is to change your name and move to Czechoslovakia. Now!
The troubling train of thought was filed for later consideration when Bo saw the paperwork Dar had left for her in the Pathfinder. A thick file folder of Xeroxed police files dating back thirteen years, it would provide not only a view into Janny Malcolm's past but information which might explain Madge Aldenhoven's more recent behavior. Settling into the driver's seat, she turned on the radio to a pop station playing Christmas carols and began to read. In less than a minute her brow was knit in ridges. It was the most puzzling story she'd seen in a lifetime of social work.
"Answered call to home of TAMLIN LISETTE LAFFERTY, 720 Nantasket Street, Mission Beach, at 6:42 a.m.," the first officer on the scene had written.
Found LAFFERTY and three minors—JEFFREY LAFFERTY, 5; KIMBERLY MALCOLM, 18 mos. and JANET MALCOLM, 18 mos.—in the house, which is owned by LAFFERTY's father-in-law, GEORGE LAFFERTY. TAMLIN LAFFERTY stated that she awakened around 5:30 a.m. when she heard an intruder in the house. She further stated that she saw a "tall, skinny man in a light-colored nylon jacket" in the bedroom she shared with the twin girls holding one of them under his arm and grabbing into the crib for the other. LAFFERTY said that she screamed and fought with the man who then threw both minors down and fled. She then attempted to phone her estranged husband RICHARD ("RICK") LAFFERTY at the home of his father in El Cajon. When no one answered she gave the twin girls bottles and put them back in their cribs. She stated that an hour after the incident she found KIMBERLY rigid and with her eyes rolled back, at which time she phoned the SDPD. Response time: 22 minutes.
Bo stared out at St. Mary's parking lot and listened as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sang "Oh Holy Night" through speakers mounted under her dashboard. The night documented in the police report had been anything but holy. Something terrible had happened. And even from a thirteen-year vantage, the story told by Tamlin Lafferty sounded contrived, unlikely.
Why had she waited an hour after a break-in to call the police? What was she doing in that hour? And where was the estranged husband? Bo had seen a sufficient number of unhealthy marital relationships in her work to predict from the one paragraph she'd read what the Lafferty marriage was probably like. "Codependent" was the current catchphrase, but "pathetic" more closely approximated Bo's assessment. Tamlin Lafferty had been unable to think of anything to do in an apparent emergency involving three very young children except to call her husband in a suburban area of San Diego from which it would take him at least a half hour to reach Mission Beach. Unless, of course, the unanswered and therefore unprovable phone call was a lie designed to mask the fact that the "intruder" was the estranged husband, Rick Lafferty. But what had happened? Who were these people, and where were they now? Why had they not been at Kimberly's strange funeral? Where had Kimberly been for thirteen years? And why had they abandoned Janny to a lifetime of anonymity in the foster care system? Bo felt a satisfying energy begin to throb softly inside her skull. It was like opening a new book
or smoothing the first brush of paint on a blank canvas. Curiosity warming dormant synapses and creating light.
The bulk of the report had been written by Pete Cullen in an informal style not intended for official use. These were the notes from his investigation, Bo realized. As messy and yet as thorough as her own. When appropriate he'd attached copies of germane documents. Bo noticed Rick Lafferty's dishonorable discharge from the U.S. Army for "frequent unauthorized absence from duty, malingering and insubordination." A marriage license indicating that Tamlin Malcolm and Rick Lafferty had married at eighteen, some twelve years before the incident in which a baby girl had sustained a head injury that would take thirteen years to kill her. Bo added the years on her fingers, calculating that the parents of Janny and Kimberly Malcolm would be forty-three now. But where were they?
Cullen had also attached copies of forms legally changing the surname of Kimberly and Janet from "Lafferty" to "Malcolm," although further perusal of the file revealed no divorce papers. Bo drew a series of question marks on the dust filming her dashboard. Tamlin Lafferty had legally changed the names of her daughters to her own maiden name, but not her son's name. Estranged from her husband, she nonetheless lived in a house owned by her father-in-law while her thirty-year-old husband lived with his father. Bo shook her head and read on.
"Rick Lafferty works intermittently as a construction laborer, usually on jobs provided by his father, George Lafferty," Cullen wrote. “Both father and son are regarded as master bricklayers in the local construction community, but Rick is seen as a loose cannon who can't be relied on to finish projects on time or within budget. Some of the men who have worked with Rick say he has a drug or drinking problem, some say his wife drives him crazy with demands for things he can't afford to buy, and another bunch just says there's something wrong with the guy but they don't know what it is. He isn't disliked by co-workers, but he isn't friends with them either. Apparently he hangs out mostly with his father and keeps his business to himself. Both Rick and George Lafferty state that they were asleep in George Lafferty's home at the time of the attack on Kimberly Malcolm and that they did not hear the phone ring. Helen "Dizzy" Lafferty, wife of George and mother of Rick, also states that she was asleep with her husband at the time of the attack, and that their bedside phone did not ring.
"Okay, so the phone call thing was a lie," Bo told the Pathfinder's steering wheel. "Or at least Pete Cullen thought it was."
Flipping through the voluminous file, Bo found the section she was looking for. "Department of Social Services' Child Welfare Division has assigned the Malcolm case to Child Protective Services," Cullen noted. "The social worker, Mary Mandeer, has been cooperative but unable to provide any additional information which might help conclude this case successfully. See attached."
The DSS forms were thirteen years old, relics no longer used anywhere in the system. Still, they provided the answer to at least one question troubling Bo. Mary Mandeer's hand had been unsteady when she signed the last "change of placement" form for Kimberly Malcolm eighteen months after the intake forms and the original face sheet. Eighteen months after something that had been like a two-story fall onto the side of a cement block. Bo felt her own hand tremble as she read the disposition.
"Kimberly Malcolm will be transferred to the Kelton Institute where courtesy supervision will be provided by Child Protective Services of Los Angeles County," a clerk had typed. The inked letters looked strange, old-fashioned. The enclosed tops of the e's were solid black. Bo tried to remember the last time she'd seen a typewriter, tried not to think about Kimberly Malcolm at three, caught in the shadows between life and death. Somehow the blackened e's hinted at old secrets hidden between the lines, behind the words. Bo felt a chill that made her palms sting. This case was something worse than she'd imagined. This case involved the unthinkable.
Nobody talked about Kelton. Workers in the grisliest cases, the head-trauma cases, knew about it but never discussed it over lunch or even after a few drinks at a unit cocktail party. The name, if spoken at all, was whispered, after which all eyes looked away and the subject was quickly changed. There were rumors about Kelton. That the nearly dead there sometimes awakened immediately before death and insisted that no time had gone by, that they were as they had been.
A story drifted over from the Adult Protective Services workers, who routinely dealt with the elderly, that an eighty-six-year-old man profoundly brain-damaged by street thugs when he was
seventy-nine had somehow managed to leave his bed (if indeed there were beds) at Kelton on the night of his death, and to board a city bus, where he terrified nine passengers by recognizing each of them and calling them by name before he fell in the aisle and was still. The passengers believed that the boundaries of their own lives were revealed in the way he pronounced their names. The passengers believed that death itself had crept onto the bus.
Estrella, Bo remembered, had told her the story years ago. And when Bo asked what the Kelton Institute was, Estrella had talked about a facility where the bodies of those whose brains exhibited almost no electrical activity were maintained until final, physical death occurred. Head injuries and massive strokes, mostly. A few whose families couldn't bring themselves to authorize the cessation of life-support systems and were willing to pay to keep the heart and lung machines and intravenous feedings going indefinitely. A place of stopped transition. Like an abandoned subway station.
The realization was like an icy breath inside Bo's shoulders and back. The dream. It was the dream. Shivering, Bo glanced at the authorizing signature below Mary Mandeer's.
"M. Aldenhoven," it said, "for the San Diego County Department of Social Services."
As she eased the Pathfinder out of St. Mary's parking lot Bo heard a train whistle slicing the air from someplace east, toward the desert. Its Doppler effect, the eerie two-note moan created by moving sound and stationary listener, brought tears to her eyes with its message of inevitable loss.
"Aye, Cally," she whispered, "it's your feast it is now, your time. But there's more to this than death. Something it is in this that's evil. Something rotten that never should have been."
In the distance the train howled softly and then was silent as Bo drove back to her office, drumming her fingers on the record of an old but exhaustive police investigation that had missed something. Something that was still there, still hidden. Still, she thought while snapping her teeth together just for the sound, waiting.
The Dollmaker's Daughters (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Five) Page 10
