Moonbird Boy (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Four)

by Abigail Padgett

  "You've lost me," Andrew LaMarche said as if this were nothing new. "But why would a young woman of Hopper Mead's background get involved with—"

  "Watch it, Andy," Bo said in tones usually reserved for street predators. "Don't say what I think you're going to say. Just don't."

  "I was going to say," he went on imperturbably, "... get involved with someone in the entertainment industry. She was wealthy, probably privately educated, well-traveled, even pampered. The social register set. They hire entertainers, Bo, but they don't marry them."

  Bo drew an ascot tie decorated in dollar signs on a dog food label. "You sound just like your parents," she said brightly, aware as the words left her mouth that her relationship with Andrew LaMarche had in the moment donned a terrible cloak of intimacy, the verbal trappings of people who know each other's secrets. The awareness had a loamy scent, like plowed fields or a dense forest floor.

  "Mon dieu," he sighed. "I do."

  In the silence that followed, Bo felt the swooping weight of ten thousand moments like this one, moments between friends, lovers, parents, and children. Moments on which whole dramas hinged, when a flawed human reality would meet acceptance, denial, or attack.

  "It comes with having parents." She laughed softly. "They live in your head and blurt things out at inappropriate moments." Acceptance. She couldn't imagine where the inclination had come from, but it felt good.

  "My parents were pompous and pathetic," he groaned. "I can't believe I—"

  "You're definitely not pathetic," Bo replied. "But since you now owe me a little struggle to even things out, help me with Mort's murder. I can't figure out who, or why ..."

  "If your guess about their relationship is on target, then a connection between the two deaths seems likely. So what's the common link?"

  "Ghost Flower Lodge. Hopper Mead invested in it and then Mort was a patient there. Also MedNet, sort of. But I want to focus on the lodge."

  "Well ..." Andrew drew out the word thoughtfully, "What's there?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "In the military it's called reconnoitering. It means getting the lay of the land, what's nearby, who's around, when, why. It's like a map with buildings and people. So what's out there? Remember, I was never there."

  Bo thought about the desert wasteland "given" the Kumeyaay when invaders seized all the desirable properties. "Nothing," she said. "Just two or three Kumeyaay reservations, some Bureau of Land Management lands, a few parcels of private property, a state road. Lots of chollas, baked dirt, the occasional ghostly mule train with a headless driver."

  Andrew LaMarche was all business. "What about the Neji property? Is there anyplace that allows easy access other than the road?"

  “‘Easy’ isn't a term I'd use anywhere out there," Bo answered, "and there's really nothing. Well, there is a dirt road into a geological dig, or at least I think it's a geological dig. There's a sign. It's called Had-a-something with a Roman numeral two. Had-a-sea, I thought, no... Had-a-mar. I think it's a university dig called Hadamar II."

  "Hadamar!" Andrew's voice boomed through twenty miles of fiber-optic filaments and Pacific Bell relays. "Is that what you said?"

  "Well, yeah. It's just some cutesy geologist pun on the old seabed, Andy. It doesn't have anything to do with Ghost Flower Lodge."

  "A psychiatric care facility." His voice was an octave deeper than usual and tremulous with anger.

  "Ghost Flower Lodge is a psychiatric care facility," Bo confirmed. "So what?"

  "Hadamar is a small town in Germany, Bo. I happened to visit it one day when I was touring. I intended never to tell you what I saw there."

  Bo sighed. "Andy, every time you try to protect me from something there's trouble. What on earth are you talking about?"

  "Sit down, Bo," he said. "This may be nothing more than a coincidence, but then again it may not be."

  "There are too many coincidences already, Andy. Tell me what this is all about."

  "All right," he said, and began a tale that fell through Bo's mind like an intolerable light, explaining everything, illuminating a face Bo realized she had never seen. Illuminating the face of a killer hiding in fog.

  When Andrew was finished with the gruesome story, she merely said, "Let me think about this, Andy. I have to think about this alone."

  Then she checked a name in the San Diego police report on Hopper Mead's death, found the address in a San Diego phone directory, and grabbed her keys. If she were right, she'd just identified Mort Wagman's killer and her own tormentor. A man so obsessed with his own superiority that he'd buried a knife in his sister's groin, effectively preventing any "unworthy" new life from growing there.

  They'd all been suspicious of MedNet, Bo realized, for the same reasons that the hospital staff had mistrusted a mother with a tarantula tattooed on her neck. Corporations and tattooed people were known for their nasty agendas. But not this time. Bo flung herself into the darkness beyond her door, determined to uncover the truth. Afterward, she'd notify the police. But first she had to be sure.

  Chapter 32

  San Diego's night streets seemed innocuous as Bo drove to the suburban University City address she'd found in the phone book. Yellow porch lights highlighted junipers, bottlebrush trees, poisonous oleander with blossoms of white, pink, or a rich buttery color precisely the hue, Bo observed, of homemade shortbread. Ordinary Southern California landscaping, ordinary residential streets. But then probably nothing in its shrubbery had advertised the town of Hadamar's hideous secret, either.

  At the corner of Genesee and Governor Bo turned at a clump of decorative sycamores into the condo complex where he lived. Somebody named Anselm Tucker. Clerk to Randolph Mead, Jr., whom Bo had never met and yet knew, now, intimately. Hopper Mead's older brother, whose voice was nothing more than a distilled version of the hate spewing in rivers from a thousand gun clubs, talk shows, and diseased affinity groups masquerading in the word "Christian." Their message, Bo thought, was elegant in its simplicity. "Be like us or perish." Randolph Mead had become their very personal soldier.

  After finding Tucker's address in the maze of beige stucco, Bo parked in the alley-sized street behind his numbered garage door and contemplated the lighted steps leading to a walkway fronting the building. There were four attached condos, each a two-story town house resting heavily on its ground-floor garage. Over the walkway, jutting corners of adjacent buildings came within three feet of touching. Bo climbed the steps into a sense of imprisonment created by architectural closeness. And Anselm Tucker wasn't home.

  "Damn!" she whispered, standing at the gate of a front patio so small it seemed crushed between thick stucco walls. A window overlooking the patio's bare Mexican pavers was dark, as was an upstairs window sliced with wide vertical blinds. Bo rang the bell again, and looked around.

  People kept to themselves in places like this, she knew. The suffocating proximity of a badly planned condo complex forced inhabitants to ignore each other, maintain an illusion of privacy. Anselm Tucker's immediate neighbors probably didn't even know his name, but Bo tried the bell outside the next patio anyway.

  "Yes?" a delicate Asian woman answered, moving toward Bo through an attractive arrangement of potted shrubs.

  "My uncle, next door," Bo improvised smoothly, "asked me to come by and pick up some things, but he's not home. Do you have any idea when he'll be back?"

  "Uncle?" the woman said softly.

  Bo realized that she had no idea how old Anselm Tucker was. The name "Anselm" had just sounded, even to her maturing ears, old. "It's a family joke," she grinned. "He isn't really my uncle." That, at least, was the truth.

  "He is gone," the woman went on. "My husband saw him load things in his car four days ago and then leave. We don't really know him. I'm sorry."

  "Thanks." Bo nodded, pondering this new information. Had Randolph Mead's only alibi for the time in which his sister met her death just blown town? If he had, it was a smart move.

  Bo hurried back to her ca
r, got in, and then noticed that Tucker's garage door padlock, while locked, actually secured nothing. Through haste or carelessness, Tucker had neglected to flip the sliding bolt over the hardware's slot before snapping the padlock shut. And the presence of the padlock meant there was no automatic door-opener. Like many basementless Californians, Tucker probably used his garage for storage and parked his car on the street. In case anyone was watching, Bo waved enthusiastically to an empty window in the Asian woman's condo and called, "It's okay! He left the garage door open for me." Then she pulled up the door, slid under, and let it fall softly behind her.

  In the gloom she saw the white outlines of a washer and dryer, some boxes, clothes in laundry baskets. An interior door stood open, revealing a short set of stairs that would, she was sure, lead to a kitchen. The garage felt abandoned.

  The kitchen proved to be more of the same. Fiestaware dishes in a white plastic drainer, clean. Microwave under a cabinet. Toaster oven. A faint smell of bleach. The odor wafted from a larger refrigerator next to the sink. Bo stared at the appliance for a full minute before tugging skittishly at its handle, half expecting to find something unspeakable inside. But the refrigerator was glaringly empty. Disinfected. Ready to sell with the condo. The immaculate refrigerator confirmed Bo's suspicion. Whoever Anselm Tucker was, he wouldn't be coming back.

  In the living room Bo could see furniture in the amber glow of the sodium lights outside. A dark leather couch with a plaid blanket folded at one end, two chairs, a glass-topped coffee table, TV. Something about the blanket felt familiar, and Bo carried it to the window.

  "Ah," she breathed as a thousand short, white dog hairs became visible, caught in the weave. This would be the dog on the tape. Anselm Tucker's dog, borrowed from his factotum by Randolph Mead for the purposes of terrorism. Bo wondered what Mead had done to elicit that last, frightened yip that had enabled her to identify the sound as a recording.

  At the top of a carpeted stairway were two small bedrooms and a bath. One of the bedrooms was empty. From the other the red operating light of a fax/answering machine pierced the dark atop a low dresser. Beside the machine was a framed snapshot that explained the neighbor's reaction to Bo's "uncle." The photo was of a sixtyish black man in a pink polo shirt, holding a bright-eyed Dandie Dinmont terrier in his arms. Bo wondered when Tucker had realized that his employer was a murderer as she pulled her sleeve over her hand and pushed the machine's playback button.

  "It's Tuesday at about ten and I have your quitclaim of the condo to Randolph Mead, Jr.," an efficient female voice said, "and I'll list the property, including furnishings, with an asking price of two hundred and five thousand as we agreed. It's been a pleasure working with you, Mr. Tucker, and good luck with your new job in Alaska!"

  The second and final message was less polite. "You're dead, Tucker," a deep voice snarled. "Nobody steals from me, nobody! I'm coming after you, Tucker. I've got one more thing to do here, and then I'll find you. You're too stupid to live, Tucker. You're defective. Remember that when I come for you." Before the tape clicked off Bo heard one last sound that made her bare her teeth in the darkened room. A familiar, cruel chuckle. The second message, she knew, was from Randolph Mead.

  The empty condo seemed suddenly musty, tomblike. Bo felt a film of sweat coating her forehead as she raced down two sets of stairs and across the shadowy garage. What if he'd come, locked the garage door? What if he'd set a trap for her and... But the garage door opened as easily as before, and in seconds she was safe in the Pathfinder.

  Chill, Bradley. This was stupid, but you were lucky. Now go home and call the police.

  Tucker wasn't going to Alaska, she was sure. He'd apparently embezzled money from Mead, and was bailing out. Maybe the condo was his idea of a fair exchange. It made sense to Bo.

  At home she left a message for the detective investigating Hopper Mead's murder. "It's her brother," she recited for a tape nobody would hear until tomorrow. "He must have bribed his employee, Anselm Tucker, to say he was at his office when she died, but he wasn't. I'm sure that if you search Tucker's residence you'll find enough evidence to pick up Randolph Mead. And alert the Backcountry Sheriffs Department to check out a dirt road near the Neji Reservation with a sign saying Hadamar II. I think it's Mead's camp. I think he stalked and killed Mort Wagman from there."

  What she didn't say was, "and he may kill again." Too dramatic for the police, and in actuality there was nothing they could do without evidence. After moving furniture over the front door and deck doors, Bo found the corkscrew and fastened its flanges up with duct tape. Placing it under her pillow, she scooped Molly from her box and curled around the little dog in sheets that still smelled like Andy's shaving cream.

  She wouldn't think about Randolph Mead, Jr., she decided. Although she was sure he was thinking about her.

  Chapter 33

  At some point between four and five A.M., the last of several pillows fell on the floor and Bo gave up on sleep. It had been a lost cause after Andrew's story in any event. An anger still throbbing in the large muscles of her legs and arms made her movements feel jerky as she stood and walked into the kitchen to make coffee.

  "So we were the first," she whispered into the damp cold released by the refrigerator door. "They practiced on us, killed more than seventy thousand of us perfecting the method. Then they built the death camps. And no one knows. No one cares."

  The soft thud as the door closed on its rubber insulator brought tears to her eyes, but she curbed the impulse to cry. There would be time for that later. Plenty of time after she'd explained what she knew to Zach and then waited for Randolph Mead to make his next move, as she was certain he would. The certainty ran through every vein and artery, fed every cell, every molecule. The certainty felt cool and clean and oddly businesslike.

  Hadamar. Bo couldn't stop the three-syllable drumbeat in her head. One of six German mental asylums used as extermination centers for the mentally ill, the "defective," many of whom were only small children at the time of their extermination. "Life unworthy of life," these had been named, and then their lives had been snuffed out.

  The psychiatric hospital at Hadamar, Andy said, had been fitted in cellars below the right wing with a realistic "shower room" complete with benches beneath which ran perforated pipes fitted to cans of carbon monoxide outside the sealed room. A simple turn of a valve killed seventy people at a time. An hour later ventilators were turned on, and then the bodies were loaded into carts on a miniature railway leading to two crematoria. A hundred people worked directly with the extermination of the mentally ill, Andy said, and everyone in town saw trains and buses with their windows painted over disgorging thousands to a building that could only house hundreds. And then they saw the black, greasy smoke and inhaled the scent of burning flesh, and did nothing. The dead were only crazy people, after all. Defective people unworthy of life.

  Bo watched coffee dripping through the filter and breathed its aroma. The sensation reminded her that she was alive, she could drink coffee, walk on the beach, mourn a beloved dog, and allow another to waddle into her heart. She could love a man and welcome him to her body, laugh with a friend, work, be tired, be bored, but be alive. The fact seemed suddenly fragile.

  "This is the way it really is, Mil," she whispered to Mildred's portrait on its easel. "I can't tell the puppy; she's too young. But I know you can cope. It's not just Germany under the Reich, Mil, it's everywhere. When times are hard, the mentally ill are always the first scapegoats. It's happening here. There's no more money for services, desperately ill people are thrown out of hospitals because they're poor and can't get insurance. They're dying out there, Mil, and now somebody's named the property next to the Neji Reservation for a Nazi psychiatric extermination center. Two people are dead and their killer is trying to drive me crazy. Things are weirder than usual, Mil."

  The bright old terrier eyes in the painting shined an encouragement Bo knew was already a part of her soul. Mildred would live as long as she did, B
o realized. And now it was time to clean up the world a little bit for a dachshund puppy who didn't yet have a clue about how tough you had to be just to make it. Bo squared her shoulders and knocked back a Depakote with a swig of good coffee. Then she pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt, tucked the sleeping puppy's hindquarters into her bra and headed out into the predawn chill. It was quiet all the way up Interstate 8 to the Campo cutoff that would loop under the highway and become a two-lane desert road. In the hollow created by her collarbone a wet, black nose breathed softly.

  Once off the freeway, Bo thought about Andrew LaMarche. He'd done well with this, she nodded to herself. He'd told her what she needed to know and then left her alone to process the information in her own way. It was a gift the value of which he wouldn't understand for years, if ever. The gift of space in which to think thoughts qualitatively different from the thoughts of other people. Even children, she mused, were not subject to the mental scrutiny and attempts at control people with psychiatric illness had to face daily.

  In younger, wilder days she'd tried to make people listen, make them consider the value in a skewed perception. Depressed, Abraham Lincoln had walked the White House grounds night after sleepless night alone with the ghost of his mother, whom he said was always with him. But like all depressives, Lincoln saw reality without the scrim of comforting lies and delusion enjoyed by "normal" folk. And so he could see uncompromisingly the evil that was slavery.

  "For every Lincoln, every Charlotte Perkins Gilman, there are thousands more of us with valuable viewpoints. We're important!" the young Bo had insisted. "We're irritating, weird, even scary sometimes, but we have a purpose. So listen."

  But nobody had listened. Nobody ever listened. And Bo had learned to protect her reality in a loop of solitude like a carbon-steel ribbon. It was unassailable. And Andrew LaMarche had mustered the grace to respect it.

  "He's one in a million," she told the sleeping puppy nestled in her sweatshirt. "When this is over we'll weave him a crown of laurel, maybe even cook dinner, huh?"