"I'll go down and get Linda," the woman said.
Bo followed her down the stairs and told Lindsey she'd come by tomorrow morning and take her and Gretel to a neat place nearby where they sold great stuff for dogs. "I'll bring my ID badge so you'll know I'm who I say I am," she told the girl's mother. "You can check it out by calling the child abuse hotline. Then I'll take Lindsey and her puppy out for a while, give you and that pinnacle of manhood another chance to be 'alone.' " Between the lines was a clear message—"I'll be back."
The woman blushed under the motel's security lights. "It's just that he's been on a tour for three months. And we only got married just before that..."
"Spare me," Bo said, and turned to walk home. She felt better than she had in months. Too good, probably. Eva was right. Time to cut back the antidepressants before she went too far the other way and got manic. But for the moment she was enjoying the upswing, and completely forgot to think about sharks.
Chapter 11
The shark had washed ashore during the night on a rocky beach north of Ensenada, Mexico, about eighty-five miles south of San Diego. Her death had occurred several hours before the tides beached her body amid moonlit rocks and ropes of seaweed. At dawn an old man beachcombing for plastic bottles dumped into the ocean from hundreds of pleasure boats cruising the coast saw the shark, and quickly cut off her dorsal fin with the curved knife he carried hidden in his boot. Then he packed the fin in seaweed and walked eight miles into Ensenada where he sold it for twenty American dollars to a fancy restaurant. The fin, he knew, would be made into soup.
After that he walked two more miles to the Escuela Ciencias Marinas, the School of Oceanography, on Calle Primera where a man named Professor Hector Vincente Ortiz would pay five dollars to anybody who told him when a whale or any big fish washed up on the beach. Since it was Saturday Dr. Ortiz wasn't there, but a man at a desk inside the door phoned Ortiz at his home and was instructed to establish the precise location of the shark cadaver and to give the old man his five-dollar mordida.
Hector Ortiz was excited about the availability of a great white for dissection, but he had to attend his son's soccer game and then drive his aging father-in-law to a doctor's appointment for the prostate problem that was making the old man meaner than a scorpion. There was no honorable way for a man of his character and position to avoid either of these responsibilities, but by afternoon the great white shark would be hacked to pieces for food and souvenirs. Hector Ortiz thought about this for exactly two minutes and then phoned a promising student in his graduate marine biology seminar named Jose Mendez.
"I'm particularly concerned with stomach contents, crustacean-load in the gill areas, and the brain," he told Mendez. "Get those and then we'll try to take samples of everything else we can before it's too late. Don't forget ice. I'll be there as soon as possible."
An hour later Jose Mendez and his girlfriend, Bianca Escobedo, hauled an old metal Coleman cooler across the gray sand and black rocks to a beach between Ensenada and a village called San Miguel. In the cooler were a bag of ice, a hack saw, a keyhole saw, two pairs of pliers, a tape measure, knives in four sizes, two large C-clamps, boxes of sandwich bags and half-gallon freezer bags, a waterproof marker, and tape.
Ahead on the beach people stood in clusters staring at the shark, whose double-lobed tail, eyes, and most of its teeth had already been removed by human scavengers. Jose and Bianca both knew that the shark's eyes and teeth, along with mummified toads, straw dolls, jimsonweed, playing cards, snake skins, and black chickens, would be used in primitive rituals by people like the servants who had raised them both. The tail, more easily hauled away than the unwieldy body, would be ground for fertilizer in somebody's garden.
"Ycchh," Bianca said when they were twenty yards from the baking carcass. "I'm glad I majored in business instead of this. It smells."
"Wait until I cut open the stomach." Jose grinned at the young woman who would be his bride after he graduated and got a job. His father had wanted him to stay in medical school, but Jose loved the beach and its freedom. Marine biology seemed like the easiest way to avoid having to get what he thought of as a real job. "You're going to throw up," he told her gleefully.
"I will not! I can take anything you can."
Approaching a middle-aged man with a machete who was ineffectively trying to saw chunks of flesh from the cadaver, Jose explained who he was and asked the man to wait until he had completed his scientific duties before hacking off stew meat to take home for his wife. The man nodded and stood back three feet, establishing Jose's authority in the eyes of the onlookers. Removing his shirt, Jose flexed his shoulder muscles, showing off for Bianca and demonstrating to the crowd how manly the field of marine biology could be. Then he selected the largest knife from the cooler and assessed the task before him.
The shark, a massive female great white, had come to rest on its left side parallel to the shore and facing south. Several metal harpoons trailed black nylon cord onto the sand. The stomach would be, Jose calculated, just below one of the harpoons. Measuring the distance with his eyes, he plunged the knife into the shark's side with both hands and pulled the blade laterally until the cut was wide enough to accommodate the hack saw.
"I need the big saw," he told Bianca, who was standing behind him, "then the second-smallest knife, and then the big plastic bags. When I get the stomach open I'll scoop the contents into the bags and then you seal them, okay?"
"What women do for love." Bianca grinned and handed him the hack saw.
After exposing the stomach Jose waited for a strong breeze off the water, made a small, vertical cut through the organ's side, and then pushed against the shark's belly with his knee. The gaseous stench escaping through the cut brought bile into his throat and made his hands shake. Bianca had a white line above her upper lip and tears in her eyes, but she didn't move even though the onlookers moaned and held their noses. In minutes he'd widened the incision and plunged an open plastic gag into the stomach.
Bones. There were bones amid the expected contents of the shark's stomach, and they weren't from fish. Bigger bones, and lacking that opaque flexibility characteristic of skeletons that would swim but never walk. In the second sample was a straight bone with three sides, too long to fit in the bag. Some animal must have fallen into the sea, he thought, and been devoured by the shark. Maybe a goat or a large dog.
Curious, he explored the stomach with his right hand and found another, larger bone, cylindrical with a big round knob at one end that was fastened to the shaft at nearly a right angle by a pyramid-shaped neck. As an undergraduate in premed, Jose had taken an anatomy class. He was certain this bone was a femur, a thighbone. The round knob was what fit into the animal's pelvis. And the other long bone had been a tibia. Holding the bigger bone next to his own thigh, he saw that it was somewhat shorter.
"What is it?" Bianca asked.
"I don't know. An animal of some kind that the shark ate. Could you hand me the tape measure?"
The femur was sixteen and a half inches long. But what sort of animal would have this long, straight thighbone? Maybe an ape of some kind, Jose thought. Except there were no wild primates for thousands of miles. The shark could have eaten a monkey that fell into the ocean somewhere, but the bones would been digested or excreted long before the shark could have swum to Baja, Mexico. These bones had only been in the shark's stomach for a few days.
From his anatomy class Jose remembered a formula. The femur was supposed to be a fourth of total body height. So this femur, he calculated, was from an animal that had been about five feet, six inches tall. Except that formula was only for human femurs.
The thought brought a sense of horror that was like frost spreading inside the muscles of his chest and back. What if this bone were human? Jose held it in both hands, turning it in the bright sunlight. Had it belonged to a man or a woman? Either one could be five feet, six inches tall. But there was something about the angle of the knob, where the bone fit into the p
elvis. Women's pelvises were much wider than men's in order to accommodate babies. So the angle of that knob was almost ninety degrees in women, he remembered. Professor Guitierrez had made dumb jokes about it in class. This femur, Jose Mendez predicted, would turn out to be from a female, and a human. The realization intensified his curiosity, but also intensified his discomfort. In Mexico human remains were honored, their resting places visited by their families for celebrations. To be standing on a beach holding a dead woman's thighbone was unthinkable.
Jose didn't know what to do. He wanted to throw the thing down in the sand and run, but that was childish. It was just a bone. Probably a cemetery in some little seaside village had been eaten away by the surf, and... But no, he reminded himself, the shark wouldn't have been attracted to a dead body and besides, where was the rest of it? Well, maybe an amputation in a hospital somewhere, and the hospital had been careless about disposing of the amputated leg and it had wound up in the sea? The nausea came back, this time from someplace deep inside him. Unconsciously he rubbed his thumb against the bone where he held it along the shaft about four inches beneath the big knob.
"Jose, you're bleeding!" Bianca cried. "Look at your thumb!"
Looking down he saw the slice of skin from which a rivulet of his blood ran over the side of the bone. He'd cut himself on something sharp that shouldn't be there. Looking closely at the femur he saw, highlighted by his own blood, a cut in the bone. Something had gouged it and glanced off the surface, chipping the bone and leaving a small, straight, razor-sharp flap.
No triangular, serrated shark's tooth could leave a slice like that, he thought. Only something thin and straight, like a knife. When he turned the femur forward he realized that the gouge would have cut directly through her femoral artery. If the injury occurred prior to her death it would have killed her in minutes, her blood pumping in torrents from the large artery at its most unprotected point low in her groin. And if this injury happened in the sea, the pumping blood would attract sharks.
Jose placed the femur in the ice chest and stared at the shark, which no longer interested him. He'd used his mind to figure out part of a story. That interested him. The fact that he could do that interested him a lot. He wondered who the woman was, what had happened to her. Weren't there police doctors, medical examiners, who did this for a living? It would mean going back to medical school, but he could be such a doctor. The thought was exciting.
"This shark has devoured the leg of a woman," he told the crowd with authority. "It will be necessary for someone to notify the police."
Chapter 12
By six-thirty on Saturday morning Bo had already been to an all-night supermarket and bought groceries. Free-range eggs, a tub of medium-hot salsa, freshly ground coffee in three flavors, and a pack of cigarettes. After breakfast and two cups of hazelnut-mocha she phoned Eva Broussard.
"I'm starving, I bought a pack of cigarettes, and I've realized I need new towels," she announced without preamble. "I've cleaned out my linen closet and bagged the towels so I can take them to a women's shelter someplace. When the stores open I'm going to shop for new ones, thinner ones that don't take an hour in the dryer. I didn't sleep much last night, kept thinking of ways to conserve energy. If everyone used thinner towels like they do in Europe—"
"Bo." Eva Broussard's voice was deep with concern. "Don't take any more of the antidepressants. Throw the ones you have left into the toilet and plan a quiet schedule for the rest of the weekend. You know what's happening."
"Yeah, you said it might," Bo agreed. "You said the antidepressant might alter my normal cycle and throw me into a manic episode. But I'm not really manic, and besides, it feels good after an entire month of wanting to dig a hole, get in it, and die, and hating myself for not having enough energy to pick up a shovel. This is better. I'm okay."
"It may not stay better, and you wouldn't have called me at this hour if you were okay. Keep taking the mood-stabilizing medication; with luck it will even you out in a couple of days. In the meantime, exercise, keep the sun out of your eyes, and avoid stimulants."
Bo eyed the pack of cigarettes lying on the Formica counter between her tiny kitchen and the dining area of her beach apartment. A familiar comfort. "Does that include nicotine?" she asked.
"Yes," her psychiatrist laughed, "and as usual, I refuse to discuss smoking with patients whose vision and hearing are not so impaired as to preclude access to books, magazines, television, and billboards. I'm a little worried about you, Bo. Will you call me this evening to check in?"
"Sure," Bo answered. "And thanks, Eva. You're my lifeline."
After hanging up, Bo went out onto the redwood deck over the beach and lit a cigarette. It tasted rubbery and made her dizzy, but the physical movements, the arc of her arm and the tipping of her head back to exhale, were calming, pleasant. Beneath the light haze over the ocean a string of pelicans soared with ragged grace. When one plunged into the blue-green swells she held her breath until it emerged clasping a small fish in its beak. The day was clean and breezy with possibility, she thought. A good day to be alive.
After dressing conservatively in khakis and a clean white polo shirt, she tied a blue cotton crewneck sweater over her shoulders and added tiny lapis earrings for the necessary touch of class. The outfit would do for lunch somewhere on Cape Cod, she thought. It would also intimidate the parents of Lindsey Sandifer.
The little girl was waiting, again wearing her blue-checked dress, when Bo arrived at the motel. Gretel, recognizing Bo from the night before, scampered across several crushed beer cans littering the floor and then stopped to place a warm paw on Bo's instep as she sniffed her leather sandals appraisingly.
"Don't even think of it!" Bo told the puppy as she handed her CPS identification card to Lindsey's mother. "Just hang on and we'll get you something even better to teethe on."
To the woman she said politely, "With your permission I'd like to take Lindsey and Gretel to a dogwash about three blocks from here. The owners have a lovely boutique and will be delighted to talk with Lindsey about how to care for her puppy. Then we'll probably have an ice cream before returning. We shouldn't be gone longer than two hours. I've put the phone number of the dogwash on one of my business cards for you, and the address as well in case you'd care to join us later." The tone was the one Bo's violinist mother had used when dealing with salesmen and representatives of ladies clubs who expected her to provide free "musical interludes" for creamed-chicken fashion lunches.
"Sure." The child's mother nodded, glancing at the closed bathroom door from behind which a shower could be heard. "Go ahead."
"My stepfather says you're fustered," Lindsey mentioned when they reached the sidewalk, a worried frown narrowing her large eyes.
Bo pondered the term, momentarily taken aback. "Ah, I think he meant 'frustrated,'” she said when she'd deciphered the second-grade version. "That's just a word some men use when women aren't afraid of them. It doesn't really mean anything."
"My mom's afraid of him. She's afraid he won't stay with us," the girl went on. "I can tell. It's because of me, because I'm not his kid and he has to pay for me." The child's blond head was hunched over the puppy in her arms.
Bo entertained a private fantasy of murder, but said, "He's young and doesn't know how to be a daddy, since he wasn't there when you were a baby and didn't get to learn. He's still just like a teenager, you know? But he might shape up after he learns how to be important to you and your mom." Always disgusting to toe the conciliatory social worker line, but there was no point in doing anything else.
"Oh," Lindsey said thoughtfully. "Teenagers act dumb."
"But then sometimes they grow up, right?"
"I guess. Can Gretel have ice cream, too?"
The limits of seven-year-old insight had been reached. "No, but she can have dog candy. That's what she'd like."
The dogwash was busy as Bo steered Lindsey past several raised bathtubs in which large dogs were being lathered and scrubbed. Gretel,
now riding on Bo's left shoulder, registered her alarm at these activities by sinking her tiny, sharp claws into Bo's neck and diving into her collar.
"I don't think she wants a bath," Lindsey giggled.
"Aagghh!" Bo yelped. "Mindy, Jane, get out here and sell us a harness and leash so I can get this beast out of my blouse!"
One of the shop's owners, Jane Jenkins, appeared from an office in the back. "I thought your beast was still in Germany." She grinned beneath short, wavy hair so red it made Bo's seem dull by comparison. "Oh, you mean this little scamp. And you," she addressed Lindsey, "must be the proud owner. Let's go over here and pick out something really smashing for your dachsie."
"It's 'dachshund,' " Lindsey replied regally. "But at least you didn't call her 'weenie' or something. Don't you think it's dumb when people call dachshunds 'weenie dogs'?"
"I do," Jane agreed.
Bo watched as they sorted through an array of small harnesses made of nylon webbing, holding each one next to the puppy's coat.
"Red clashes with her fur," Jane noted.
"And pink does, too," Lindsey said.
It was serious business. Finally they selected a deep yellow harness with matching leash, and Jane spent twenty minutes introducing Gretel to her new wardrobe. In her harness the little dog looked like a bright autumn leaf, Bo thought approvingly. And Lindsey was ecstatic.
After additional purchases of rawhide chewsticks, a squeaking rubber porcupine in Day-Glo orange, and a box of canine cookies, Bo and Lindsey sauntered back up the beachfront walk to an ice cream bistro and made their selections.
"We're going home tomorrow," Lindsey said without enthusiasm as they sat on the seawall licking their cones. "To El Paso. I guess Danny's gonna quit being in the navy and come live with us. He says my mom has to get a different job to make more money. She's a waitress now. He says she has to pay him back for all the money he spent when I had my tonsils out in the navy's hospital."
Moonbird Boy (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Four) Page 8
