Strawgirl Read online

  Stepping across the office to lock the door, he unzipped his pants and masturbated quickly into a flyer advertising tumbling mats. The flyer showed a girl in leotards, doing a cartwheel. He came almost as soon as he grabbed himself, thinking about yesterday. Then he zipped his pants, stuffed the flyer to the bottom of his wastebasket, and unlocked the door. The kid was the best he'd ever done, better than anything in his

  whole life. He felt like superman, like a king. He wondered if part of that was because he'd rammed himself through the very core, some barrier there, and into death. He'd never killed by mistake before. John Litten didn't make mistakes. He wondered if killing with your cock was like some kind of key to another world. Or maybe it was just killing, period.

  Word was all over the papers that some psychologist was blaming devil-worshipers for what happened to the kid. A devil-worshiper who lived with the kid's mother and a sister. John Litten thought about that as he examined the shine on his black hand-sewn loafers. The psychologist wasn't stupid. People loved to hear pooky like that. People could face anything but the truth. He'd known that since he was four and Gramma saw what he did to her one-eyed old cat named Scoot. She just dug a hole in the sunflowers along the front fence, and buried Scoot with the rope still around his scrawny neck. And said, "I know it was an accident, Jonny. I know you didn't mean to hurt Scoot. You was just playin', up in that tree."

  Everybody in Estherville said Jonny Dale was a liar just like his no-good whore of a mother. They said she just dropped her bastard like some little, screaming turd and took off. Jonny knew he was the bastard. And after a while he figured out that bastard meant smart.

  Four years later they found Dewey Ray Clyde, the shell-shocked Korean war vet, burned up in the rusting truck cab down at the dump where he liked to drink till he passed out. They said he'd blown himself to kingdom come down there by dropping a cigarette into his jar of hundred-proof. Gramma had believed that, too, even when Jonny didn't try to hide the gasoline can. From then on Jonny Dale knew exactly how stupid people could be. How much people only wanted to see what they wanted to see. It was always easy to figure out. Usually, they'd just tell you.

  "Jonny, I expect you to come to school on time, and do your lessons."

  That was Mrs. Myer, who had a rubber stamp in the shape of a clown's head and ink pads in different colors. Jonny Dale liked the clown head stamped on his second-grade spelling papers when he got all the words right.

  "Goody," Mrs. Myer would say, walking up and down the rows with her ink pad, "Goody for you."

  Jonny didn't usually get all the words right, just most of them.

  Later he heard, "Litten! Your test scores qualify you for Naval Procurement Training. Report to training at 0800 hours Monday. If you rank in the top ten percent, it's an upgrade for you."

  You just did whatever they said, and then when they weren't looking you could do whatever you wanted.

  But the psychologist named Ganage had given him an idea. Maybe he wouldn't leave right away. San Diego was big enough to hide in for a while before moving on. It might be fun to stay around and set the stupid town on its ear before heading to Seattle or Tucson or wherever it would be. It might be fun to show them, just this once, how really, really stupid they were.

  John Litten straightened his tie over the white pima cotton of his shirt and headed for the club's employee lounge. The clerk he'd been pretending to pursue for months always ate at 1:00. He'd flirt with her again today, enhancing the cultivated image of randy recently divorced young accountant, just out for a lay like all the other guys. The women who worked at the club's three-block-long facility thought he was harmless, a little cute with his pale blue eyes and Southern drawl. That was what he wanted them to think, in case anybody ever asked. He wanted them to think John Litten, known here as James Brenner, was just a short, skinny Southern boy who wouldn't hurt a fly.

  "Hey, Brenner! How's it goin?" It was Ben Skiff, a coworker who'd invited John Litten to dinner at his home several times. Lisa, Ben's wife, was always trying to fix John up with her divorced friends.

  "So-so," John grinned good-naturedly, falling in step with Skiff. "I'm gonna see an old squeeze up in Phoenix this weekend. Who knows? Maybe light an old flame."

  The plan was falling easily into place. And it was going to be fun.

  Chapter 14

  Bo drove back toward Albany through Adirondack shadows, plagued by doubt and a metallic ache behind her nose. Finally she pulled off the narrow road into a picnic area beside the Saranac River. Wide and shallow, the river produced flutelike mutterings as it coursed over its bed of rounded stones. Miles of Boston ferns framed the water in a double band of green. In Bo's mind the ferns were associated with funerals. They'd banked Laurie's casket at Sullivan's Mortuary twelve years ago. And Grandma Bridget's casket, and then both her parents' after a faulty wall furnace claimed their lives in Mexico. Bo watched the postcard scene blur, and realized she was crying. It had been sneaking up for hours and it had nothing to do with ferns.

  "I'm too old for this!" she yelled over the broad river. "Mature women do not blubber into scenery."

  In the rushing water Bo heard the Bavarian accents of Lois Bittner, chortling. "Who said life was easy? Just take care of yourself, Bo. Be careful."

  Bo inhaled what she was sure was almost pure oxygen, given the number of plants in the vicinity, and sighed. "I'm sick of people telling me I'm crazy when I'm not," she sniffled at the water. "The minute anybody knows about the manic depression, they feel compelled to watch me like a mutating virus and provide unsolicited opinions about medication on the hour. No matter what I do, it's suspect. I hate it!"

  The river continued to mutter and chirp in a language that seemed almost comprehensible. Bo threw in excess of twenty pebbles at a midstream boulder. The last twelve hit.

  Are you finished with your nauseating foray into self-pity, Bradley? Good. Now, forget Dr. Centerfold, remember that you've dealt with this for two decades, go home, and figure out who really murdered Samantha Franer.

  Bo grinned at her own unspoken lecture and flung herself back into the rental car. Andrew LaMarche had already flown back to New York City and his conference. For the rest of the trip to Albany, she enjoyed a fantasy of him in his underwear in the lobby of the Ritz Carlton, struggling to remove a sesame bagel impossibly baked around his neck.

  Marriage! Couldn't he see how inappropriate that concept was? How antiquated? Marriage was for people like Estrella and her husband, Henry. Younger people. Mainstream people who would buy matching lawn furniture, talk about mutual funds investment, maybe have babies. Marriage was not for free-spirited, manicky artists with jobs requiring lots of overtime. Still, he was attractive. So why couldn't he just settle for a nice, invigorating affair like every other man on the planet?

  The answer nagged at Bo throughout her flight back to San Diego. Andrew LaMarche wasn't like every other man on the planet. Not at all. Madge Aldenhoven was a pillar of bureaucratic indignation when, after crossing the continent, Bo straggled into the office at 3:15.

  "How could you let this happen?" Madge seethed, pointing to a newspaper on Bo's desk. "All you had to do was get the local police, go in there, and seize the child. Instead, you let them escape."

  Bo glanced at the article's header. "Cult-Related Kidnapping in New York—Leader Evades San Diego Child Abuse Professional." It would not be necessary to read the article. She knew perfectly well what it would say. It would say that Dr. Cynthia Ganage, through a confidential source, had learned of a further development in the shocking Franer case. It would say that a mysterious dark woman, head of the cult in which accused rapist and murderer Paul Massieu held membership, had fled with the slaughtered child's sister to an unknown destination in Canada.

  "I'm exhausted, Madge," Bo said, slumping into her desk chair. "There's a three-hour time difference and I haven't had much sleep ..."

  "I've placed you on probation, Bo," Aldenhoven snapped. "Your incompetence has made a laughi
ngstock of the department and fueled an already dangerous public hysteria. If you'd bothered to read the department's directive on handling Satanic cases..."

  Bo felt an absence of patience that demanded a voice. "There are no Satanic cases," she began, allowing her green eyes to widen. "I checked with the FBI's task force on cult-related crime. There has not been a single documentable case of ritualized child torture or murder anywhere in the United States. It's all media hype, Madge, nothing more. Some people rape, torture, and murder women and children. Sometimes they dress up in devil suits, clerical robes, or uniforms of the Confederate Army. Some of them get off on costumes, which conveniently serve the purpose of hindering identification by their victims. But it has nothing to do with Satanism or any other ism, and anybody who buys that crap is more interested in checkout line reading at the grocery store than in protecting children. If anybody's making a laughingstock of the Department of Social Services, it's you and whoever paid that entrepreneurial shark Ganage to peddle her pamphlets in San Diego."

  Aldenhoven's face, pale under normal circumstances, had turned a greenish white that reminded Bo of kohlrabi. A throbbing vein in the woman's neck provided a dash of color. Bo wondered if her supervisor were going to hit her. She hadn't been in a real fight since bloodying Mary Margaret Fagin's nose during Mass in the third grade after Mary Margaret said dogs couldn't go to heaven. The present conflict, Bo realized, had its origins in the same muddy conceptual pool. The need to impose rational order on irrational pain. For many, a storybook Satan provided comfort when unspeakable human behavior crept out of hiding.

  "You're fired," Aldenhoven said through thin, long teeth.

  "You can't fire me without going through procedures, hearings, appeals," Bo countered tiredly. "I belong to the union, remember? It'll take months and you know it. By then maybe we'll have found whoever raped and killed Samantha Franer. That's all I care about."

  "Your job was to protect Samantha's sister," Madge said and stormed out in a billow of Estee Lauder Youth Dew perfume and dry-cleaned polyester.

  "Precisely!" Bo hissed back at her slamming office door. What would Madge Aldenhoven do, she wondered, if she ever actually saw one of the small, frightened lives CPS purported to protect? The question was moot. Madge would do whatever the procedures manual dictated, even if it dictated dropping the child off a cliff.

  Sighing, Bo glanced at the newspaper article while placing a call to a rental agent in the coastal San Diego suburb of Del Mar. The agent had the perfect place—a quiet studio apartment on the beach. The summer season wouldn't begin until late June. Not too many people around. And the early-season tourists who were there—retired academics, writers, and artists—kept to themselves and wouldn't take any particular

  notice of an Iroquois woman and blonde, silent child. But something was wrong with the article in the paper. More there than Bo had expected.

  "Police deny any connection between the victimized Franer children and last night's desecration of statuary and a grave at the city's historic Mission San Diego de Alcala," a staff writer reported. It seemed that someone had broken into the mother church of California's fabled chain of twenty-one Franciscan missions and spray-painted crude genitalia and the words "Satan rules" on floors, walls, and priceless antique statues. Since an oil-based enamel had been used, the damage was estimated at over a million dollars. The grave of Padre Luis Jayme, California's first Christian martyr, who had been killed in 1775 when local Indians burned the original mission, was also desecrated. The article concluded with a lukewarm denial by a representative of the San Diego/Imperial County Intertribal Council that local Indian activists had anything to do with the desecrations. Bo was left with a sense that he wished they had.

  The article bothered her. Something new and appalling seemed to have taken form in the newsprint. Something unusual, even in her unusual line of work. What if the police were wrong and Samantha's killer really had vandalized the mission? A proud symbol of the city's history, its desecration was bound to feed the hysteria orchestrated by Cynthia Ganage. But why would the killer want further attention? Child molesters were invariably furtive, preferring to enjoy their activities in secret. Bo had encountered many, and not one would have courted publicity, even to mislead a criminal investigation. If Samantha's killer had spray-painted penises on religious statues just for kicks, then he was a different bird entirely from the pedophiles documented in CPS case files.

  "You're tired; you're getting paranoid," she told herself. But the gnawing suspicion didn't go away.

  A phone call to Dar Reinert helped.

  "Probably just some kids," he grumbled. "Town's full of garage bands dreaming of heavy metal big-time. My bet is it's one of them, hoping for some spin-off publicity. They love the Satanic stuff. It frightens their parents."

  His gruff assessment was reassuring.

  "But what if wasn't kids, Dar, just for the sake of argument. What if it was the same guy that killed Samantha?"

  "Then Ganage would be right, and we've got a Satanist," Reinert replied, yawning. "Except the Satanist we've got is already in jail, so he couldn't have vandalized the mission last night, so it was kids. What's bothering you, Bradley? Jet lag?"

  "Dar, this ritual Satanic abuse stuff is a crock and you know it! The FBI's done a huge investigation and found absolutely nothing. How can you—"

  "How long you been at CPS?" the detective interrupted. "Two, three years, right? And when you can't take it anymore you'll get a transfer over to County Employment Services, or you'll get a job with the Red Cross or a church or the human services department of some company. You're a social worker. I'm a cop."

  Bo wondered what can of worms she'd opened. "So?"

  There was a long silence.

  "So cops can't go be cops out there in the real world. Cops can only make it down in the puddle of day-old jizz that stays alive by preying on the rest of humanity. Did you know that yesterday I just happened to bust a guy who kept his retarded sister chained in a closet while he collected her Social Security disability? Thing is, the sister died at least four years ago, but he left her chained in the closet and kept cashing those checks. Bought himself a plastic lady with real cat-fur pussy and the biggest collection of hard porn on his block. Somebody called when he started inviting the neighborhood boys in to look. I think it was the mother of the five-year-old. I only stumbled on the body by accident when one of the kids said he'd heard there was a real plastic lady in the closet. Do I need to tell you there was about a pound of dried semen in—"

  "Dar!" Bo interrupted, tasting bile, "I was talking about the FBI's report on Satanism."

  "Cops see this stuff for a lifetime, like trying to dam a river of shit that just keeps coming. A lotta cops don't mind it when evil seems to have a name. Someplace it comes from. Makes it easier to understand. Lotta people out there are just like cops ... and Satan's as good a name as any."

  "So, is there anything else new on the case?" Bo asked in a fervent attempt to change the subject. In three years of professional association she'd never known Dar Reinert to talk this much.

  "Only that you screwed up getting the sister back here," the detective said glumly, "and the damn ACLU's crawled in bed with Massieu, which we need like a case of jock itch."

  "The American Civil Liberties Union? Why?" Bo ran her left hand through her hair and considered one of the fashionable new crew cuts. She felt weighted with unfriendly, cartoon hair.

  "They're claiming he's being persecuted because of his religious beliefs, because he's in this cult. Yammering, in fact, for his immediate release based on lack of evidence. A handful of New Age types in crystals are picketing for him in front of the jail right now, opposed by a larger handful of right-wing Bible whackers with signs demanding the death penalty for Satan's disciple. I've put in for vacation time. This thing's turning into a circus."

  Bo listened to her stomach growling and tried not to remember the ice-cold poultry by-product sandwich provided by the airline for
lunch. It had been accompanied by one miniature chocolate mint, frozen solid. "What's this lawyer's name?" she asked.

  "Gentzler.Solon Gentzler. Has a practice in L. A. but spends most of his time running up and down the state filing amicus briefs for the ACLU in religious freedom cases. He's the one that handled the Freeway Witch two years ago, remember?"

  Bo grimaced. The Freeway Witch had been nothing more than a women's studies graduate student who at Christmas spelled "Mary Was Used" in twinkling lights along the chain link fence bordering a rental property she shared with three other graduate students. The fence was visible for a mile and a half in both directions along I-805, and had so incensed members of a nearby fundamentalist group that they'd petitioned the city council for removal of the lights as a violation of community standards of decency. Gentzler had gotten miles of publicity for the concept of free speech by leaking to the press elaborate defenses that would, in fact, never be needed since the student would graduate and take a job in South America within months, the petition forgotten. A radical lawyer on the case could prove to be a threat, Bo realized. Could confuse the real issue, which was simply the preservation of Hannah Franer's sanity.

  "I'll need to see Gentzler," she told the detective. "What's his number here?"

  Reinert provided the number, puzzled. "What do you need to see him for?"

  "Oh, just to get a sense of what he thinks of Massieu," she answered vaguely. "Technically, I'll have to hang on to this case until Hannah Franer is located. It can't be transferred or closed until then. I have to document everything I can about the suspected perp so that if Hannah is found and returned—"

  "Yeah, yeah," Reinert interrupted. "Except thanks to you the poor kid's been ripped off to Canada with some loony. Great work, Bradley."

  "Thanks, Dar. It's so good to know I can count on your support."

  Gentzler would be sure to foul up the plan worked out with Eva Broussard. He'd operate from an agenda featuring the rights of an accused man, not the uncodified rights of a vulnerable, hurt child to heal. Bo lay her head on her desk and groaned. At this rate she might well find herself waiting tables at some desert truck stop by the end of the month, and for nothing. But maybe she could convince Solon Gentzler to back off, diminish the focus of media attention on Paul Massieu, wait for the police to wise up and find the real killer. Maybe.