Nobody's Child (The Jeri Howard Series Book 5)

by Janet Dawson

  Beating the odds. I didn’t know what the odds were for kids. Had Maureen Smith passed along her HIV infection to her daughter Dyese? Getting an answer to that question moved to the top of my to-do list.

  What Sid had just told me opened a new page on motives for murder. “You think she tossed that particular time bomb into some guy’s lap and he killed her?”

  “The thought occurred to me.” He picked up his coffee. “But what if she didn’t know she was infected?”

  “Did you tell Naomi Smith?”

  “The mother?” Sid’s chin inclined in what I took to be a nod. “Yeah, we told her. Wayne and I went to see her this morning. We’d just gotten back, not half an hour before you showed up.”

  “What was her reaction?”

  “She didn’t have one,” Sid said. “She didn’t say anything. It was like she didn’t even hear us.”

  “Or didn’t want to. From what little I’ve seen of her, I’d say Naomi Smith is heavily into denial. About a lot of things. After all, this is a woman who didn’t bother to report her daughter missing. She only seems to be interested in having the body released so she can bury her daughter and get on with it.”

  “That’s a normal reaction with some people, when they’ve come to terms with the fact that a relative’s dead.” Sid set his mug on the table. “But I don’t read Mrs. Smith that way. Your client’s got a problem, Jeri. With booze. Either that, or she’s taking too many pills.”

  “Booze,” I said succinctly.

  “Does she even care about finding the kid?”

  I sighed. “She seems to be fairly ambivalent about it.” Thinking about two-year-old Dyese Smith depressed the hell out of me. Talk about a kid with the cards stacked against her.

  “No luck, huh?”

  “Not so far. I’ve got a couple of leads to check out.”

  He ran his fingers around the rim of the coffee mug. “You’ve been talking to people about Maureen Smith.”

  “That’s the only way I can think of to get a lead on the little girl,” I said. “Toddlers don’t go very far without grown-ups.”

  “I know that. What have you found out about Maureen?”

  Was this Sergeant Vernon, the tough homicide cop who didn’t like private investigators mucking up the landscape during his investigation? I didn’t answer right away, sipping my latte.

  “You’re not having any luck either. Are we trading information, Sid?”

  “I knew you were gonna say that.” His yellow eyes glittered at me. “Okay, I’ll trade. Within reason. And you have to understand there are things I can’t tell you.”

  “I understand. Maureen was one of the vanish-into-the-woodwork kind. Shy, decent student, not many friends, except two from high school, named Kara Jenner and Emory Marland. I’ve talked with Kara a couple of times. I’m not sure she’s telling me the whole story.”

  I gave Sid an edited version of that morning’s conversation with Kara. “So evidently Maureen was panhandling on Telegraph near the campus. And seen in the company of a homeless man who’s considered a regular. They call him Rio.”

  “If she was homeless, what did she do with the kid?” Sid asked.

  I shook my head. “Naomi Smith’s housekeeper, Ramona Clark. She took care of the child for a while. But she says Maureen came and took the child. Nobody’s seen Dyese since then.” I sighed. “I wonder if she’s dead, like her mother.”

  “I checked the state computers,” Sid told me. “No unidentified bodies of children under the age of three, at least not this week. Of course, it’s a lot easier to hide a child’s corpse. It’s damned easy to hide an adult too. If that construction crew hadn’t decided to do some work on that lot before the winter rains started, Maureen Smith might still be buried.”

  “I checked to see who owns the lot.”

  “I figured you would,” Sid said. “Some developer over in San Francisco. He bought up a bunch of property after the Oakland fire. People who couldn’t face rebuilding, for one reason or another.”

  “Before that, the lot belonged to someone named Kelton. I’m not having any luck tracing them.”

  “Wayne’s working on that angle. If we find out anything, I’ll let you know.” Sid looked at his watch. “Speaking of Wayne, I’d better get back to the office. This isn’t the only homicide case I’m working. Our drive-by shooter is still taking potshots at people on the MacArthur Freeway. He nailed another one two nights ago.”

  I nodded and watched as he left the cafe. All this trading information stuff usually worked more to the police’s advantage than it did to mine, though the news of Maureen’s HIV status was important—and disturbing. The fact that Sid was willing to play ball with me meant that he and Wayne could use all the help they could get. They were up against a brick wall trying to find out how Maureen Smith wound up in that unmarked grave in the Oakland hills. They had other, more pressing cases, like the drive-by killer he’d mentioned, who had by now shot and killed four victims, either from a freeway overpass or another vehicle. That was Sid’s high-profile case, the one that got the headlines in the Oakland Tribune. The lonely death of a runaway and the disappearance of her child didn’t have the same urgency.

  Besides, we are all inured to runaways and missing children, aren’t we? We see the faces on posters and milk cartons and we walk right by, or pour milk on our cereal and put the carton back in the refrigerator. For each instance of a snatched child that grabs media attention, there are dozens of others, the ones who fall through the cracks. These are the kids who leave home because home isn’t the haven it’s supposed to be, searching for something else on the city streets here in the Bay Area. I’d seen them congregating on Telegraph in Berkeley or San Pablo Avenue here in Oakland. Over in San Francisco they roamed Polk Street or the Haight. I knew homeless kids sometimes fell prey to the older, tougher denizens of streets. Sometimes both boys and girls turned tricks just to get enough money together to survive.

  Is that how Maureen became infected with HIV, while living on the streets? Or had it been earlier, even as far back as high school? From what I’d read, that was quite possible. Teenagers were at great risk of infection.

  I considered the timetable of Maureen’s life in the nearly three years since she’d run away from home. She’d gone from panhandling on Telegraph to the safety of Mother Earth Farm in Sonoma County. A year ago she’d been making the rounds of the farmers’ markets with Aditi, selling vegetables out of a blue van and looking well. Then she decided to leave, and six months later she was back on Telegraph, begging for money.

  Now she was a corpse in a refrigerated tray down at the Alameda County Coroner’s office, waiting for rest and resolution.

  How did you get from there to here? I asked Maureen’s specter. And where did you leave your baby?

  Twenty-eight

  THE SECURITY GUARD AT THE ENTRANCE OF Children’s Hospital Oakland had his hands full. The adult members of the family gathered in front of him didn’t speak English. The guard was communicating with a young girl who looked about ten. She in turn translated his questions to her parents in what sounded like an Asian language.

  During one of these translation phases he glanced at me. “Who you here to see?”

  “Dr. Helvig, Infectious Diseases,” I told him. “She’s expecting me.”

  “Name?” As I responded, the guard quickly consulted something I couldn’t see, hidden behind the counter. He reached for a phone, then put it down again as the little girl began to relay a question from her parents. Now another group of people stepped up to the counter and started talking, this time in Spanish.

  “Wait a minute.” The guard sighed and held up one hand. “One at a time, please.” He looked at the people arrayed in front of him and decided I was the easiest to deal with, and thus could be gotten out of the way first. He leaned over and quickly scribbled a few words. “Third floor,” he said as he peeled a paper rectangle from a sheet and handed it to me.

  He’d written my last name,
that of the doctor, and the initials “I.D.” on the blue and white visitor pass. It had adhesive backing, so I stuck it on my shirt as I moved down the corridor in search of the elevator.

  After talking with Sid on Thursday, I’d made a few phone calls. Someone at the Alameda County Health Department informed me that Children’s Hospital had a pediatric HIV/AIDS program headed by Dr. Jane Helvig. When I finally got her on the phone, she suggested I come over to the hospital Friday morning. She was sure she could find a few minutes to talk with me.

  Now I found an elevator and rode the car up to the third floor. I took a right and went down a corridor, stopping at a work station to ask a nurse in pale blue pants and shirt where I could find Dr. Helvig.

  “I think I saw her down in ICU,” the nurse told me. I continued down the corridor until I reached three open doorways, two on one side of the hallway. Here a sign and a flurry of activity marked the pediatric intensive care unit. I looked through one door and saw a big open room lined with hospital beds and cribs with high sides, most occupied by patients who ranged in age from infants to adolescents.

  The staff members I saw were casually dressed, identifiable only by their ID badges, worn on chains around their necks or clipped to collars. They moved quickly across the hallway, from room to room. I must have looked totally lost now, because one woman who had an R.N. behind her name stopped and said, “May I help you?”

  “I’m looking for Dr. Helvig. She’s expecting me.”

  “She was here a little while ago. Let me see if I can find her.”

  She stepped into one of the ICU wards. I turned and peered into the opposite doorway and saw again the beds filled with children. Directly in front of me I noticed a woman dressing a little girl in a bright red and green dress while a man and an older boy watched. The child seemed excited, as though she were going on an adventure. Periodically her hands fluttered toward her throat, where she placed her finger lightly on a plastic circle that seemed suspended around her neck.

  “What’s that thing that little girl keeps touching?” I asked the nurse I’d spoken with earlier, as she returned from the other ward.

  She glanced into the room. “She’s got a tracheotomy tube in her neck. She has to put her finger over the airway in order to talk. Here’s Dr. Helvig now.”

  I turned in the direction she pointed and saw a gurney heading my way, pushed by an orderly, two women walking along either side. The older woman was tall with short gray hair. She wore a blue denim dress and sensible low-heeled shoes, a stethoscope around her neck obscuring her name badge. The younger woman was about my age, slender, with brown hair hanging limply to her shoulders. Her hand held that of the child who lay on the gurney, a pale little girl who clutched a worn brown teddy bear with her other hand. Her blue eyes gazed steadily up at this woman who had to be her mother, one face so mirrored the planes of the other.

  The gurney stopped, then moved again as the orderly angled it through the door to ICU. The nurse at my side moved toward the gray-haired woman, who was saying something about respiratory distress. As the nurse spoke, the doctor looked at me, then quickly crossed the corridor to where I stood.

  “Ms. Howard, I’m Dr. Helvig.” She had a quick, firm handshake. “Sorry, I can’t talk with you now.” She glanced back at the child on the gurney. “I have an emergency. If you’ll wait here, I’ll find someone to answer your questions.”

  I nodded and started to say I’d come back later, but she’d already moved through the doorway into ICU. I walked a few steps down the corridor, wondering if I should just leave and get out of everyone’s way.

  “Ms. Howard?”

  I turned. He had a shiny stethoscope slung over the left shoulder of the gray sweatshirt he wore with his black jeans and a pair of running shoes. His curly black hair was streaked here and there with silver, caught into a short stubby ponytail at the nape of his neck. Nice smile, I thought, and those eyes. They were an incredibly deep blue, set in an angular face. I caught myself admiring the view.

  Wait a minute, Jeri. Remember why you’re here. To ask questions, not scope out good-looking doctors.

  “Dr. Helvig asked me to talk with you,” he said in a pleasant-sounding, low-pitched voice. Those eyes glanced at my visitor pass as he tucked a clipboard under one arm. “Are you a family member?”

  “I’m a private investigator, Doctor...” I focused on the identification badge clipped to the collarless neckline of his sweatshirt, men looked up and smiled into those blue eyes. “Kazimir Pellegrino?”

  He laughed. “Polish and Italian. What can I say? Private investigator? How can I help you?”

  I handed him one of my business cards. “I need some information about children and AIDS. It concerns a case I’m working on. Is there somewhere we can talk privately? I’d rather not launch into a complicated explanation out here in the corridor.”

  “I work with Dr. Helvig in Infectious Diseases,” Dr. Pellegrino said with a smile. “I’d be happy to answer your questions. Though I can’t talk about specific patients. Confidentiality.”

  “I understand. I’m looking for general information.”

  “Fine. I have a few things I need to do first If you want to tag along with me for a little while, men we can talk.”

  It soon became apparent why Dr. Pellegrino was wearing running shoes. He took off down the corridor I’d just come up, flying low. I caught up with him as he went through a doorway to a stairwell and hustled down a flight to the second floor. He led the way past the entrance to the hospital cafeteria, down another corridor, around a corner, and into a room with a rack full of folders and a lighted wall viewer. Radiology, according to the sign.

  I watched Dr. Pellegrino sift through the folders. He picked up a set of X rays and jammed four sheets of blue-gray film into the holders above a lighted wall viewer. I peered over his shoulder and saw a small rib cage fanned over two vertical blobs that even to my untrained eyes were identifiable as lungs. Each film had a fuzzy mass on the left that wasn’t matched on the right The doctor muttered to himself, pulled a ballpoint pen from the clamp on his clipboard, and scribbled some notes.

  “What’s this?” I asked, pointing at the fuzzy area.

  “Fluid on the lung,” he said. “Had to put in a chest tube.”

  He pulled the films from the wall viewer and shoved them back into the folder. Then we were off again, up two flights of stairs to the fifth floor. “This is our largest inpatient ward,” he told me as we pushed through a doorway. “When our kids are in the hospital, they’re up here.”

  I followed him along the hallway, its white linoleum floor marked by a dark blue stripe down its middle. At the work station he greeted a man and two women who I guessed were nurses. He grabbed a blue five-ring binder from a circular rack, opened it, and began flipping through the pages.

  I stepped back, off the blue flooring and onto the white, trying to stay out of the way. I was between two doorways. On the right I saw a mother sitting on a bed, tying her daughter’s shoelaces. The room to my left held a high crib occupied by a baby who didn’t look more than a year old. He—or she—had a clear plastic nasal tube. Then I heard laughter behind me. I turned. Bearing down on me I saw a giggling child of about two, dressed only in diapers and a yellow hospital gown that gapped in the back. He had a brace on one arm and a grandma in hot pursuit The gray-haired woman caught up with the kid and grabbed him by his unbandaged arm, leading him back down the corridor.

  When I glanced at Dr. Pellegrino, I saw him close one binder and reach for another. He nodded slowly as he read what was written on the patient’s chart. Then he stuck it back in the circular rack and walked down the hallway where I’d seen the kid in the yellow hospital gown. He went through an open doorway into a patient’s room, where I saw a young woman sitting in a chair. “Hi, Mickey,” I heard the doctor say, his words addressed to the baby the woman was cradling in her arms.

  I couldn’t even guess how old the little boy was. He had a tube sticking out of h
is nose and he looked incredibly thin and frail, reminding me of those pictures that frequently haunt television screens, of starving children in Africa. The youngster sucked calmly, almost resignedly, on a pacifier as Dr. Pellegrino knelt next to the chair. He talked with the mother as his hands moved gently over the child. A few minutes later the doctor stood and crossed the room to the sink, where he washed and dried his hands.

  “What’s wrong with that little boy?” I asked when the doctor rejoined me in the corridor.

  “Lung disease. Probably cystic fibrosis.” He stopped at the work station once more and pulled out a chart, presumably that of the child he’d just examined. He flipped to the last page and made some notations. Then he shut the binder, replaced it in the rack, and led the way down the corridor. “Back down to three,” he said, pushing through the stairwell door.

  We wound up back where we’d started, at the pediatric intensive care unit only this time Dr. Pellegrino motioned me to follow him into one of the big wide-open rooms. All the beds and cribs were occupied and each one had a colorful paper Winnie the Pooh sign at the foot, with the child’s name written on it It was too soon for a sign on the nearest bed, occupied by the little girl I’d seen earlier. She lay on the elevated bed, still clutching the plush brown fur of her teddy bear, her other hand free because her mother was conferring with Dr. Helvig. Now she raised it and her fingers waggled at Dr. Pellegrino.

  “Hey, Mary,” he said, leaning over her. “How’s my sweetheart? Lots of presents under that Christmas tree?” She grinned, the smile lighting her pale face, then she whispered something. He leaned closer, trying to hear the words. “A party on Christmas Eve? Great I’ll be there.”