Moonbird Boy (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Four)

by Abigail Padgett

  By the time she reached the Hadamar II sign, the sun had topped the high desert mountains and begun to pour glare like hazy yellow tea on the parched remains of an ancient seabed. Bo put on her sunglasses, turned onto the dirt track, and engaged the four-wheel drive. Then she wheeled the Pathfinder sharply to the left in second gear, and rammed the sign. Its cedar upright splintered on impact, throwing the bolted sign onto her hood. Smiling, Bo reversed onto the track, stopped, got out and gave some water to Molly, and then grabbed a hammer and screwdriver from the small tool kit behind the front seat. In minutes she'd gouged the name from the wood, if not off the face of the earth.

  This would be how Jews felt about names like Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Treblinka, she thought. This icy, absolute loathing. But trashing a sign wasn't enough, wasn't anything. Just a personal catharsis. Tying Molly's leash to the fastened seatbelt on the passenger's side, Bo revved the Pathfinder up the dirt track past clumps of bristling chollas and spindly ocotillo as the sun lay purple morning shadows across the quiet.

  There was nobody there. Bo sensed the absence of human life even before she carefully circled the precise little encampment. Just two lightweight tents in desert camouflage, carefully lashed and pegged with the long, barbed tent pegs necessary in sand. One of the pegs on the windward side of the smaller tent had pulled loose and all the ropes sagged. He hadn't been there in a while. Several days, she thought. Maybe a week.

  Carefully Bo propelled the Pathfinder into the corner of the smaller tent, which collapsed soundlessly as the forward movement of the vehicle tore out its supports. One of the ropes caught on the bumper, and Bo simply dragged the tan and cream mottled shell away as if unveiling a sculpture. Then she sat and stared at six five-gallon jugs of water, a propane stove leveled with packed mud atop a large rock, and a clear plastic storage chest through the sides of which she could see a box of instant oatmeal, cans of salt-free soup, a jar of Folger's instant coffee. The small tent had been a kitchen and storage area. And whoever camped here had been desert-smart. Salt-free soup would provide both fluid and nutrition without tissue-leeching sodium.

  The larger tent presented a problem. Bo hadn't intended to get out of the car, just to demolish whatever was there and then leave. She didn't want her feet on the ground. Not this ground with its bitter, soul-eating name. But there might be something in there, some clue that would prove the identity of the man who had camped in a hollow just outside the Neji Reservation, less than a mile from Yucca Canyon, and then lay in wait for Mort Wagman. Reluctantly Bo switched off the ignition and jumped softly to the ground. There was nothing useful in the big tent. A camp table and folding stool, clean and bare. An empty army surplus trunk, also painted in desert camouflage. And a folding cot with some fabric tossed at one end. In the buzzing desert silence Bo frowned at the cot. The fabric wasn't a rumpled sheet or blanket, it was too small. And it was flowered, or part of it was. Forcing herself to go closer, Bo realized it was a pile of scarves, tablecloths, an old nylon blouse in lavender with sparkling, star-shaped buttons. Incongruous in the spartan setting. And familiar. Bo had seen those scarves and tablecloths before, obscuring the face and body of an old black woman lost in schizophrenia.

  "Old Ayma!" Bo said aloud, suddenly shivering in the mottled light. "What happened?"

  Outside the tent a tumbleweed rolled past the open flap like some brittle, sentient being pursued by demons. Bo left the tent with equal alacrity and stood watching as the tumbleweed hurried downhill, snagged on a clump of cholla, and

  then broke free only to be swept into a small blind canyon at the bottom of a wash.

  Had Ayma wandered here the night she vanished? Bo wondered. And what would happen to a psychotic old black woman in a place named Hadamar II? Had Ayma been exterminated? Had Mort? Maybe Ann Lee Keith was wrong and MedNet had nothing to do with Mort's death at all. Maybe some neo-Nazi fanatic was just camping out here and picking off lunatics for fun!

  Determinedly, Bo skirted the perimeter of the campsite, watching the ground. If whoever was here had killed Old Ayma, he would have to stash the body, get it away somewhere so the coyotes and vultures, then the insects, could do their work downwind and out of sight. But Old Ayma had been a big woman, nearly six feet tall. There was only one cot in the tent, only one person. And nobody could haul Ayma's body very far.

  The tumbleweed was shivering in the wind, jammed into the blind canyon. Bo scrambled downhill on instinct, watching. Maybe the tumbleweed was speaking, or maybe the wind was. But something was pulling her toward an inconsequential little slot canyon she wouldn't have noticed if the tumbleweed hadn't found it first.

  "Aagghh!" she howled within feet of the canyon. A sharp pain shot messages from her left foot to her brain. In the downhill rush she'd come too close to a cholla, and one of its fat, spiny burrs was imbedded in the nylon of her sneaker. Sitting, she scraped the burr away with a rock and then removed her shoe and sock. Only one spine had made it through to the tender flesh of her arch, but she couldn't get it out. The spines were barbed like fishhooks, and once embedded had to be surgically removed.

  "Damn," she said, limping to pull the tumbleweed from the canyon mouth. "This is the last thing I need."

  The canyon was like a thousand others carved in granite and sedimentary stone by centuries of powerful and quickly vanished runoff from spring rains. Wider at its sandy base than at its top, it meandered crookedly between pale pocked walls for twenty yards and stopped blind at a wall of speckled, pinkish granite. Bo limped quickly to the end and turned back. There was nothing there. Just the usual burnt-looking stems of creosote bushes, a tattered yucca, bees. Nothing had been dug, disturbed. Or had it?

  Halfway out of the canyon under a rocky overhang at knee-level, she noticed an excessive accumulation of charcoal-colored creosote twigs. The strange little tubes dried and hollowed in the sun, leaving nothing but their diamond-shaped webbing like spindles of latticework. Bo had seen them everywhere in the desert, but never in clumps. Nudging the cluster apart with her good foot, she noticed something black in the sand beneath them. Something rubbery. Another sweep of her foot scattered the gray spindles and enough sand to suggest that the black shape might be a knee. It looked like a knee, bent and still.

  "Oh, no," she whispered. "It wouldn't look like this. No."

  Overhead a raven swooped to peer into the canyon, but said nothing. Bo watched the bird rather than her foot, which was scraping more sand off the knee. In the raven's thin shadow she imagined Mort Wagman, grinning. She had to do this, had to find what the backcountry deputies, the search parties, the cadaver dogs had not found. She had to do it for Mort.

  The thing was, in fact, a knee. Bo stared at it for close to a minute before touching it. It was a black knee, but not any part of Old Ayma. It was a rubber knee attached to a rubber leg, flattened under two feet of sand, which fell away with a hiss as Bo pulled the thing from its burial. The leg was connected to a body, arms. It was a wetsuit, Bo realized, with a ten-inch, double-edged diver's knife still belted about its waist.

  Sweating, she draped the heavy garment over her shoulder and hobbled out of the canyon. So he'd camped here and buried a wetsuit and a diver's knife in a blind canyon, and Bo knew why. This was the wetsuit he'd worn for the long swim away from his sister's blood, staining the water, rousing things with teeth.

  "Hang in there, Mort," she yelled at the raven, still swooping in zigzags overhead. "I'm gonna find him, I promise."

  Only minutes later as she gunned the Pathfinder back toward the state road did she recognize the flaw in her choice of pronouns.

  "Him?" she bellowed, causing Molly's ears to lay back in alarm. "What if it was Old Ayma and not Mead at all? What if she wasn't sick but pretending to be so she could kill Mort? No wonder she was cheeking her meds—she didn't need them! And her shawls and tablecloths were in that tent. But who was she and what did she have to do with Mort, or Hopper Mead, or Bo? Was she the one making those phone calls, playing the taped terrier in the
fog? Why?"

  Molly scratched her ear with a hind paw but offered no answers.

  Ten minutes later Bo roared to a stop in the driveway of Ghost Flower Lodge only to be met by Dura in the Indian version of hysteria, her eyes wild inside ashen flesh.

  "Zach is going to kill a man," she said softly, and then collapsed on the ground beside Bo's car.

  Chapter 34

  "Where is Zach?" Bo asked after several of the Neji carried Dura into the lodge and elevated her feet. "Tell me where Zach is."

  "I don't know," Dura barely whispered. "He's going to kill that man, Henderson."

  Henderson. Bo struggled to retrieve information attached to the name and found nothing. But she'd heard the name before, she was sure. A rental car parked in her field of vision brought it back. She'd seen Henderson there a week ago, talking to Zach. He'd looked like George Washington. But his eyes as he surveyed the lodge had been those of a shark.

  "MedNet!" Bo whispered to herself. Henderson must be a representative of MedNet. And if Zach were about to murder him, then Zach must share Ann Keith's conviction that MedNet was responsible for Mort Wagman's murder as well as the ruin of the Neji's dream. But Ann Lee Keith had been wrong. The killer's agenda, Bo knew, was measurably more diabolical than the worst a mere corporation could envision. More diabolical because it derived from twisted human feeling that had grown to obsession. Bo was sure she knew who the killer was in spite of her suspicions about Old Ayma, knew who had stalked and tormented her. Zach in his bitterness and self-loathing was about to kill the wrong man!

  And there was no way to stop him. Bo shuddered as she identified something in the air. A sort of resigned shock. The aura of the hospital waiting room after disaster has claimed lives as yet unidentified. Barely seven o'clock in the morning, she thought, and time for the Neji had run out. Zachary Crooked Owl, raised as an Indian with no comprehension of the barbaric culture around him, was about to join it. And with that the dream of the Neji would vanish as if it had never been.

  Finding Zach and Dura's oldest daughter, Maria Jueh, Bo handed the girl Molly's leash and said, "Your job is to care for this puppy until I get back." Then she found Ojo, tremulous as a young deer, hiding in the kitchen.

  "Do you know where your father's gun is, the twenty-two?" she asked the boy.

  "Dad took it the other night."

  "Took it where?"

  "Took it out somewhere, I don't know, didn't bring it back."

  His clear, dark eyes were swimming with tears. Bo feigned interest in a cabinet door, turning her back to spare his pride. He was only eleven, but he was an adult in Indian terms, a man. He couldn't cry even though his father was about to blow his world apart.

  "You know your father very well," she said to the cabinet. "Where do you think he stashed the gun? Where do you think he will try to kill this man?"

  "Henderson is stealing everything the Neji worked for for so long," Ojo recited, trying for macho. "He deserves to die."

  "Oh, crap," Bo exploded, turning to knot the boy's T-shirt in her fist. "Henderson's a business deal. He's nothing. But the killer's been living in a tent right next to the reservation. Now where's Zach?"

  "I saw the man with the army tent," Ojo said, wide-eyed. "And I think Dad'll go to Yucca Canyon. That's where he always goes."

  Bo took off at a dead run, ignoring the cholla barb in her foot. If she could just get to Zach in time, she could stop whatever was going on. She could save Ghost Flower Lodge.

  "Call the Sheriff's Department now" she yelled over her shoulder to Ojo as another car pulled into the lodge driveway.

  "I'm Bob Thompson, from MedNet," she heard the well-dressed driver tell one of the Neji. In the bright morning sun, Bo could see that the man had had a facelift. Somehow the fact made her run faster.

  Ten minutes later she was there, gasping painfully in the growing glare. Mort's cairn was visible, several stones larger than she had left it. The creosote shrubs, smoke trees, cholla, ocotillo, and yucca were there, as well as the million hidden lives scritching between boulders or between grains of sand. The lip of the canyon teemed with unseen things, but not with Zachary Crooked Owl, a rifle, and a man named Henderson.

  "Zach!" Bo yelled into clean air that suddenly felt thick, ragged in the throat. "Zach, don't do anything until you hear what I found. It's important, Zach. You need to know this!"

  But the wind merely juggled her words like birdsong and then dispersed them over the desert rubble like bits of chaff. It was pointless to yell. Zach wasn't there, unless he was in the canyon instead of at its lip. Bo limped to the edge and glanced downward ten stories at a drama made soundless by a warm surface wind sliding over the cooler air mass in the canyon below. Zach was yelling at a man in a suit, the man who, but for his crew cut, might have been the nation's first president. Henderson. Bo watched Zach's mouth moving without sound, watched him raise the .22, watched Henderson turn to run only to realize there was nowhere to run. He was trapped.

  Then from a fall of rock on the canyon's western slope, still lost in morning shadow, something moved. A figure, nearly as big as Zach, flinging itself from a rock to land on the black man.

  For a moment the figure seemed suspended, floating below like a dark bottle on a river, seen from a bridge. Then it crashed into Zach, a shot exploded, and the man in the suit flung his arms over his face as if he were weeping. The rifle lay on parched rock, and Bo could hear nothing but a sound like a huge pellet spinning in a metal can. A throb that hummed. The sound of the rifle shot, she realized, trapped between the canyon walls. Then something behind her, a crunch of dry gravel, made her turn and move away from the precipice just as a long arm pushed hard through the space where she'd just stood. Above it two flat blue eyes regarded her with distaste.

  "Come here," the man told her in a voice used to address children by people who hate children. "You're going to die now."

  "You're going to hell now," Bo answered as events began to shine with speed.

  He grabbed her arm in lean, wiry fingers and she fell, only to be dragged toward the canyon lip a few feet away.

  "A suicide," he pronounced in cultured tones. "You've been depressed." The humorless chuckle that followed was familiar. Bo had heard it inside fog, and panicked. But not this time.

  "Hadamar," a voice chanted in her head, over and over. Beneath the word she felt clear and certain as the wind she could actually see as she wrapped her right hand around the only weapon available, a single cholla growing feebly between slabs of granite. The pain made everything dark, slammed up her arm and into the base of her brain as she let him pull her upright. Then she smashed the agony in her hand against his face. Into his eyes.

  Later she would remember that he clawed at his face, that he reeled away from her into singing air. She would remember that his scream as he fell was weak, like a bit of fence wire whining in a breeze. But at the moment all she could remember was to fall backward onto warming granite as the pain made her vomit, and then lose consciousness.

  Chapter 35

  Someone had placed two boulders in a small blue room. Bo blinked as the image refused to go away. She knew she was in a hospital; she could remember parts of the drive down from the desert. A man named Bob had driven her to the hospital in a rental car that smelled like licorice. He'd been strangely cheerful, she recalled. As if the drive were a social event. But after that things were a blur.

  Shock, they said in the emergency room. She was in shock. No sedation then, but maybe a little local anesthesia for that hand? They had bustled about as she lay on a gurney under white flannel blankets. Occasionally a nurse or emergency room tech would pause over the blood pressure cuff and whisper, "You grabbed a cholla?"

  Eventually Andrew had arrived accompanied by an Arab sheik with the most spectacular eyelashes Bo had ever seen. A hand surgeon, Andy said. Dr. Something-Or-Other. He would be, she thought as the boulders moved slightly, the one responsible for the gauze balloon full of tubes swathing her right hand. The
balloon was swelling and deflating regularly, pushing her hand against a Ping-Pong paddle to which it was taped. The sound was oddly reassuring, and it didn't hurt. Nothing hurt.

  "Why are there rocks in here?" she said aloud, causing both rocks to stand and move toward her bed. They were both Zach Crooked Owl, except that one of them was a woman. Zach had lost weight, Bo noticed, and the woman was wearing a dramatic ensemble with a cape. And scarves. Bo recognized the use of scarves.

  "Ayma!" Bo greeted her. "I thought you were dead!"

  "Bo, I'd like to introduce my mother," Zach said proudly.

  "Mother?" Bo hauled out of memory the story of a woman who left the Neji Reservation thirty years ago and never came back. A woman who might or might not have killed her brother, who'd been her pimp. "How can you be Zach's mother? You're Old Ayma. What's going on?"

  "Let's just say my line of work requires discretion," the woman said in a voice like rustling silk. "When I read in the papers about this MedNet thing trying to rip off my son, I did some checkin' around, found out somethin' else was goin' down out there as well. Rich white dude campin' out there, watchin'. Thought I'd watch him back."

  Bo's head was clearing, but not fast enough to make sense of the information. "Rich white dude?" she said.

  "Dead rich white dude," Zach answered with satisfaction. "Randolph Mead, Jr. He got the other end of what they just dug out of your hand. Long fall, too."

  "I knew who it was. But why...?"

  "A sick man," the female Crooked Owl noted with distaste. "I knew he was up to somethin', just wasn't sure what. Best way to keep an eye on him, watch out for Zachary and all those beautiful grandchildren of mine was to get myself in the place, right? So I got crazy."

  Bo wiggled her nose to clear the fuzz from her brain. "You put on a terrific act," she said. The fuzz was tenacious.