Strawgirl (Bo Bradley Mysteies, Book Two)

by Abigail Padgett

  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.

  Chapter 5

  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.

&
nbsp; 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."

  "I've called for a psychiatric consult." LaMarche conceded the point while ignoring Bo's discomfiture. "Mrs. Franer will be taken to County Psychiatric. I hope this will end the involvement of Child Protective Services with this unfortunate woman."

  Bo regarded the man who'd sent long-stemmed roses to her office and phoned every week since saving her life in an unusual case the previous fall. A tin statue would have produced more warmth.

  "Nothing would please me more, Doctor," she emphasized the title, "but a child has been killed. The district attorney will order the immediate filing of a sibling petition. Fifteen minutes after I leave here, Hannah Franer will legally be in the custody of San Diego County's Juvenile Court for her own protection. It's my case until she's found and her safety is protected."

  "You're destroying innocent people. Can't you see that?"

  "At least one innocent person has already been destroyed," Bo said as she pushed past him. "Or had you forgotten?"

  In the parking lot Bo found a small picture of St. Theresa under her drivers-side windshield wiper. On the back a large hand had penned, "This is clergy parking, bozo! Fr. F. Goodman"

  Climbing on the hood of her car, Bo tucked the prayer card onto the left foot of Mabel Mammoth, clambered down and lit a cigarette.

  "I have the most noxious job on the planet," she told the creature, "involving not only malignant acts and vile individuals, but pompous pediatricians and priests who should still be playing video games after school. Someone has slaughtered a child, and I have a sense that everyone connected to the case is locked into dead-end viewpoints that are obscuring the truth. I don't know why I feel that way, Mabel, but I do. Is it because I stopped the lithium? Am I getting too imaginative here? And is there any chance I can find a job somewhere that doesn't surpass Dante's Inferno in wretchedness?"

  The magenta mammoth said nothing but continued to smile at an oleander blooming profusely at its feet. Bo sighed and scrounged through the jumble of tape cassettes in her glove compartment until she found the one she was looking for. Carmina Burana. Its "O Fortuna" had been the anthem of her adolescent rebellion, wholly approved by her violinist mother.

  "If you've got to lurk about in excessive eye makeup," Margot O'Reilly had said one long-past Boston morning, "then I suppose it's best you lurk to some enduring music."

  Bo drove the few blocks back to her office with a dog-Latin chorus to spring and fate blasting from her car. Its invocation of rebellion created a focus for her discomfort with everything so far connected to the Franer case. A child brutally dead, her mother plunging into a hellish depression, her sister vanished with the only suspect, and the odd coincidence of a Satanic workshop the same day a purportedly Satanic case turned up. None of the pieces really fit. But then they never did. Not at first. Bo decided to start eliminating pieces, narrow the field. And she knew just where to start.

  Back in her office she nudged the door closed and picked up the phone. "Information for Quantico, Virginia, please. I'd like the number for the Federal Bureau of Investigation's task force on ritual crime."

  It was after 5:00 in Virginia, but somebody answered his phone anyway. And in ten minutes provided Bo with enough information to tar and feather Cynthia Ganage. Not that anybody would listen.

  Bo mentally filed what she'd heard and then stared into her own green eyes in the mirror on the office door. Those eyes didn't always see exactly what everybody else saw. The brain behind them was different, its neural pathways prone to the odd bypass, the occasional derailment. But that brain, her brain, her self, would never cling to an insubstantial fantasy to avoid facing a truth. The realization was centering, like opening the door to a personal integrity she'd known was there but couldn't name. She was pretty tough, she acknowledged, to be able to face a world in which human behavior could not be blamed on a Satan. One tough crazy lady. She wished everyone else involved in the Franer case could say the same.

  Chapter 6

  An early ground fog already drifted luminously in the stand of paper birch east of the lake path. Towering behind her, Eva Broussard felt more than saw the thick, crumbled silhouette of Shadow Mountain. Its vastness had taken form countless millions of years in some unknowable past. Webbed at its base by veins of glassy quartz and pink feldspar, its highest peak was of a rare stone found also in lunar rock samples—anorthosite. In a leap of near-mindless concatenation Eva had at one point allowed herself to wonder if the moon rock itself might somehow figure in the curious experience related by Paul Massieu and the others. The Adirondack peaks consisted of some fifteen hundred square miles of erosion-resistant, metamorphosed anorthosite. A huge expanse. Did it in its massiveness create a magnetic field capable of producing realistic hallucinations? The theory made as much sense as any. Which wasn't saying much. After three years Eva Broussard had yet to frame a coherent theory of why a number of demonstrably rational people insisted they'd had contact with extraterrestrials on or near Shadow Mountain.

  Padding across the porch to the inlaid maple floor in fringed moccasins pulled on against the evening chill, the graceful woman knelt to lay a fire in the largest of three fireplaces. There would be a community meeting after dinner to deal with the grim news of Samantha Franer's death. Later she would drive to Albany to pick up Paul Massieu and Hannah at the airport. After settling Hannah, Paul would flee to Canada. The decision had not been an easy one to make. Yet everyone was certain Paul was innocent, and that by the time he could be extradited from Canada, Samantha's real murderer would have been apprehended. The level of confidence exhibited by the group in California's law enforcement agencies reflected nothing so much as a familiarity with American television. Eva found herself staring into the stacked wood.

  Could she be wrong about Paul? Could her fondness for the quiet, lonely man have obscured her judgment? Could Paul Massieu be a pederast, a child-molester, the rapist and murderer of a little girl?

  As she lit a match to the kindling she stripped herself of the layered identities that might blind her to a distasteful truth. Like barely perceptible cloaks, she removed the personae of psychiatrist, Bolduc Chair in Social Psychology at the Seminaire de Sainte Jeanne d'Arc, and author of the popular self-help serie
s, The Meaning of Your Life, as well as a highly praised biography of the Christian mystic Hildegard of Bingen. When the intellectual trappings of forty years had fallen away, Eva addressed her core being—a mature Iroquois woman. The fire caught and flared, its dancing light a filigree on her broad hands.

  "What do I want?" she thought inwardly to a gallery of masks floating near her subconscious. "Do I need to believe in the normalcy of this man's personality so much for the sake of my own research that I've overlooked a terrible inadequacy? Have I wanted the project more than the truth?"

  The Iroquois mask Eva named "Pride," an elongated visage woven of age-darkened willow with mere slits for eyes and a clown's wide smile, did not drift into view behind her closed eyes. She'd more than half expected it, the quality called pride

  having been a continual stumbling block in her adult life. But it wasn't there. Nothing was there. Just a reversed-out image of flames, black on a gray background. If Eva Broussard had failed to perceive a disturbing sickness in Paul Massieu, there was nothing in her mind to account for it. Still, she acknowledged, there was always the minuscule margin for error. The margin in which wholly inexplicable events could occur. This might be one of them, but Eva was prepared to contend that it wasn't. Eva was comfortable with a ninety-eight percent certainty that Paul Massieu was innocent.