Strawgirl Page 2

  Stuffing the case file back into a saddle-stitched cowhide briefcase whose brass clasp was the Mayan snake-head glyph for rain, Bo tugged down the cuffs of her black knit slacks and headed toward the hospital's lobby. A sound truck from local TV station KTUV was parked in front of the hospital's sliding glass doors.

  "Uh-oh ..." Bo breathed uneasily, and grabbed for the case file again. No TV news team worth its journalism credentials would sink to invading a hospital where children lay sick and in pain. Not unless the story were irresistible. And TV station "K-TOUGH," as it chose to be known, had built a reputation on scooping San Diego's most bizarre, or bloodthirsty, events.

  "A symbol of some sort has been painted on the child's lower abdomen in what appears to be yellow Magic Marker," Dr. Ling's report went on. "It is a strange face surrounded by spikes. This may or may not have any bearing on the child's injuries, which I do not hesitate to define as having resulted from rape."

  "Shit," Bo said flatly as the automatic doors opened with a whoosh. Dr. Ling, obviously new to San Diego County and its procedures for reporting child abuse, had phoned her report directly to the police instead of to the Child Abuse Hotline. In the systemic relay of the report to an assignment desk and then back out to detectives in the field, the information might have been carried on one of the standard police radio bands. Accessible to anyone with a short-wave radio who happened to be listening. And somebody had been listening. The sound truck made that evident.

  "It's somebody from Child Protective Services!" a voice noted from a cluster of people surrounding the lobby information desk. Bo watched a woman approaching her from the group. She was followed by an unshaven boy with stringy blond hair wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt and carrying a Minicam. The woman was still wearing the oversized ecru silk jacket she'd chosen for the morning workshop. Bo had hoped never to see the matching bleached lizard three-inch heels again. It was Dr. Devil, the sensationalist psychologist from L.A. who could find Satan-worshippers at any convenience store but clearly couldn't grasp the concept of cruelty-free footwear. A sound bite of the woman being gummed to death by geckos flashed across Bo's brain.

  "I'm afraid I've forgotten your name," Bo said, cheerfully jerking her elbow out of the woman's well-manicured grasp. "What on earth are you doing here at St. Mary's?"

  Besides skating on a child's pain right into your own personal spotlight?

  "Cynthia Ganage. Doctor Cynthia Ganage," the woman announced urgently. At close range Bo could see lipstick in two shades, skillfully applied with a brush, a dusting of blush over flawlessly creamy cheekbones, smallish hazel eyes set too close together but widened by artful application of gray eyeliner. The hammered hoop earrings were not brass, but gold. "As you know from my workshop this morning," Ganage went on,

  "I'm a psychologist specializing in the cult-related ritual abuse of children."

  Ganage's voice, Bo realized with renewed contempt, was just loud enough to be heard by two newspaper reporters hurrying through a side door from the ambulance bay. The lobby of St. Mary's was gradually assuming the frenzied atmosphere of a shark tank at feeding time.

  "I'd love to chat, but duty calls," Bo smiled with patent insincerity, handing her identification badge to a security guard at the elevators.

  Cynthia Ganage raised her voice another two notches. "Are you here to investigate the Franer case? From available information I'm certain that Satanism is involved. I'm here to volunteer my professional services, free of charge—"

  As the elevator doors smothered the blonde woman's words, Bo took deliberately deep breaths and reminded herself that sensationalism was not really a criminal offense, even though it should be. In publicly revealing the child's name and details of the case, Cynthia Ganage had just violated every protocol observed by police and Child Protective Services personnel alike. Staring at the Mayan snake-face clasp on her briefcase, Bo decided that compared to Ganage the snake was actually cute.

  "I'm here on the Franer case," she said at the fifth-floor nurses' station. "Is the child still being examined? I need to speak with the mother, too. I assume she's with Samantha?"

  "The child's still in surgery," a heavyset black nurse with whom Bo had worked on previous cases answered quietly. A look in the hooded eyes issued a warning. Bo had seen the look before. The silent language of medical personnel.

  "Put the walls up," it said. "Get ready to face the intolerable."

  "You can go on down to the observation deck," the nurse suggested. "See how much longer it'll be. The mother's in the surgical waiting room."

  Every nuance of the softly spoken words told Bo things were not going well. Nodding, she forced herself to walk through the unmarked door at the back of an office behind the nurses' station. The door opened into a short corridor that led to a small observation cage through which activities in the operating room could be observed. The observation chamber, always dark, held a row of chairs bolted to the floor for silence, and a speaker projecting voices from the brightly lit operating arena below. It was, Bo thought, like entering the interior of a Christmas tree ornament.

  "... unable to effect substantive prophylactic measures already described ..." the familiar voice of Dr. Andrew LaMarche pronounced slowly as Bo made herself focus on the scene seven feet beneath her. Something wasn't right. The green-clad surgical team was too quiet, moving too slowly. The surgical nurse empty-handed. The anesthesiologist failing to monitor his bank of screens, which appeared to be blank. One surgeon walking away, another closing a wide incision across the child's abdomen with unusually large stitches. The little girl's skin was as pale as the cap of short blonde curls above her closed eyes. She seemed more representational than real, a chunky Raphaelesque cherub on an unfinished canvas. In the intense operating room lights the tousled blonde curls seemed crystalline. Like spun glass. Bo fought a realization that blurred her vision. The realization that the child's body was merely an empty and fading husk from which the personality of someone named Samantha Alice Franer had already fled.

  "The cause of death ..." Andrew LaMarche pronounced into a microphone suspended above the operating table, "is internal hemorrhage secondary to . . ."

  Bo turned back into the small corridor and pressed her forehead against its cool tile wall. What was it like to be three years old? She searched her memory and found very little. A favorite green plaid sunsuit with white eyelet ruffles on the straps. Her grandmother had embroidered the first three bars of "Kitty of Coleraine" on the sunsuit's bib and taught Bo to pick out the melody with one finger on the piano. And a Cairn terrier named McDermott who howled when her mother practiced the violin and slept every night with his head on Bo's pillow. Vague, innocent memories devoid of the complexity only possible after the brain has completed its circuitry between five and six years of age. "The age of reason" defined by the ancients. The age when it is possible to learn to read, to manipulate symbols, to frame ideas of right and wrong. Samantha Franer would never be six years old now. She would remain forever three, just a memory of a flaxen-curled toddler frozen in the minds of those who loved her. Like Bo's sister, Laurie, who twelve years after her death was still twenty. Who would always be twenty.

  Bo squeezed her eyes shut and felt tears spill and run down her flushed cheeks. But was she crying for the dead child on the operating table or for her own sister whose suicide twelve years ago had triggered in Bo a depression so profound she'd been hospitalized for three months? It was hard to tell. But she was going to have to get control of herself.

  "So what will it take?" the imagined voice of her best-loved psychiatrist, the sprightly Dr. Lois Bittner, echoed from the past. "A piano has to drop on your head out of the sky before you see you're in trouble?"

  "I'm not in trouble," Bo told the gray ceramic wall. "I'm okay without the lithium. I've just never seen a child dead on an operating table before. I mean anybody might decompensate a little. . ." she exaggerated the psychiatric term, ". . .seeing that."

  "You're not anybody," the memory
pointed out with dogged good cheer. "You have manic depression. You have to protect yourself."

  Bo considered the savage arrogance necessary for the act of rape, and realized that she would never comprehend it, only hate it. An act somehow generated in the chemistry of the male, where apelike charades of dominance could go wrong and become brutal defilement. But to defile a thing with no defenses, no hope of resistance or self-protection? Even though her job required near-daily brushes with its not uncommon reality, the rape of children continued to shock Bo. A sickening horror endured by millions of children every day. And this one was magnified by its deadly outcome—the pale, still body below.

  Bo wished Lois Bittner were still alive. Wished she could talk about what she'd just seen. Wished she could climb the wooden stairs to the shrink’s comfortable loft office in a seasoned downtown St. Louis building that had been new when Teddy Roosevelt took office, kick off her shoes, and talk. Bittner had been a complete fluke, a coincidence, a mistake. And the best thing that had happened in Bo's train wreck of a life.

  Turning to hunker on her heels with her back to the wall, Bo massaged her skull to erase the scene in the operating room and let herself remember Lois Bittner. A reassuring memory in spite of its beginning. A mental earthwork buffering the shadowless image of the dead child below.

  A depression, the worst ever, had crept like an iron fog into Bo's brain after Laurie's funeral. In the beginning she'd thought she could handle it. Driving the new BMW Mark had bequeathed her as compensation for annulling their marriage of three years, she'd left Boston a week after the funeral and begun the cross-country trek. The long drive back to Los Alamos where she'd continued to work on the Navajo reservation after her husband left to find a wife who would bear his children. A wife with no history of psychiatric problems. The BMW had held up well, but by St. Louis the same could not be said of Bo. Everything had turned dark, colorless, without hope.

  Waking in a Holiday Inn overlooking the Mississippi River, Bo had looked out the window and understood that to go outside was to succumb. To go outside was to walk over the roughly cobbled bank and into mud-brown water that would swiftly cover her, swiftly drag her downward to an utter, final silence. There was no question about it; something in her brain had signaled that it was time to die. The neurochemical pathway for dissolution, hardwired into every brain for an inevitable future when it would be needed, could be activated prematurely. It could happen in an acute depression. It had happened.

  But something else said "No!" Something in the very cells of her body screamed that death made no sense. It was an intelligence even more primitive than the most ancient segment of her brain, the pons, nestled at the base of her skull. An intelligence of a billion mere cells that pulled her from the window and locked her body in a fetal curl on the floor of a hotel room closet. It would not let her go outside to the cold, swift water. It would hide her in the preconscious darkness of the unborn until something came to derail the brain's grim command.

  Twelve hours later the hotel manager, alerted by complaints of a guttural moaning heard in the next room, had unlocked the door with a passkey, and phoned the police. In the emergency room of a state mental hospital Bo was asked to select a psychiatrist from a typed list. Unable to talk, she had barely succeeded in organizing her thoughts sufficiently to identify the first letter of each name. Somehow the letter B seemed familiar, and Bo pointed to one of the B names.

  "Lois Bittner?" The emergency room physician chuckled. "She's a little unorthodox. You sure you want Bittner?"

  Bo was sure of nothing but the battle raging between her own life and the urge to drown in a strange midcontinental river whose name she couldn't at the moment pronounce, much less spell. "Uh," she'd answered, nodding. A pain like dull acid filled her, outlining her body darkly against the white room. She felt like a demon, a cartoon figure filled with black ink. When the admitting psychiatrist muttered, "This is thorazine; it'll pinch a little," and eased a sparkling hypodermic needle into her left hip, she couldn't feel it.

  They'd taken her to a musty, high-ceilinged room and fastened leather cuffs to her wrists. At some point the door opened and a pastrami-scented woman who looked like a miniature schnauzer in a batik dashiki, long skirt, and Frye boots, burst in. "I'm Lois Bittner," the woman said as if her name were the answer to some amusing conundrum. "So why are you here?" The accent was clearly German, the aging dark eyes full of mirth. Bo felt a smile struggle through the darkness inside her and twitch at the corners of her mouth. The smile had felt like a lifeline, a hint of a way out.

  That night Lois Bittner sat by Bo's bedside and regaled her with tales of St. Louis eateries—the fried ravioli at Garivelli's, floating in butter, the Steak'n'Shake French fry, perfect in its crispness, the Caesar salad at A1 Baker's, mouth-watering. "Good food here," the diminutive doctor had grinned, "not a place for death."

  Not a place for death.

  Bo shook her head and forced herself back to the present. San Diego was not a place for death, either. Just a sun-washed desert city with a beach. A pastel city of nursery colors where three-year-olds in ruffled sunsuits would build things in sand, not be buried in it. "I've got to find another way to make a living," she told the empty corridor as she struggled to her feet. "My psychiatrist recommends something involving fried foods."

  In the office behind the nurses' station Bo recognized the oxlike frame of Dar Reinert, the San Diego Police Department's most experienced child abuse detective. A former tackle at Notre Dame, the hulking cop had yet to find a suit that didn't make him look like one of Rembrandt's syndics.

  "She didn't make it," Bo answered the question in Reinert's gentle, delft blue eyes. "She's dead."

  "Sonofabitch," Reinert huffed softly. "You'd better grab the sister now! We figure the perp's this wacko boyfriend of mom's—guy named Paul Massieu—lives with 'em. Better get the eight-year-old outta the loop. I'll send a coupla uniforms out to the kid's school, back you up. You meet 'em there. What's the older one's name?"

  "Hannah," Bo remembered from the case file. "Hannah Franer. Why do you think the boyfriend's the perp?"

  The small room was airless, dim.

  "Nine times outta ten it is, isn't it?" Reinert sighed, jabbing numbers into the phone. "You look like spoiled milk, Bradley. Go out in the hall. Get a drink of water or something. Besides," he said into a blue and gold striped tie askew over a blue oxford cloth shirt unbuttoned at its size eighteen collar, "this Massieu's known to be involved with a cult."

  Bo noted the small stainless-steel Ruger revolver tucked in the waistband of Dar Reinert's wash-and-wear dress pants, and grimaced. This was the job. It often felt like an old episode of Dragnet.

  Over a water fountain in the hall she breathed the flat chemical scent of San Diego's multiply recycled water, and assessed her future. How many more months, years of this could she take? How many more tortured children? And how many more officious remarks from Madge Aldenhoven, who would undoubtedly die on the job at ninety-three? In the living room of Bo's beach apartment a newly stretched canvas waited on its easel. Two coats of gesso applied over the weekend would be thoroughly dry. Time to paint, but paint what? No inspiration twitched before her eyes. Only the lifeless image of a chubby blonde girl.

  Get a grip, Bradley. Let it go. Just go pick up the sister and then do something fun tonight, something distracting.

  Bo tried to imagine what fun, distracting thing she could do that wouldn't involve sugar or saturated fats, and drew a blank.

  At the end of the hall she could see Andrew LaMarche, elegant even in green surgical scrubs, somberly closing the door of the waiting room. His head was bowed. In seconds Samantha Franer's mother would be told as compassionately as possible that her younger daughter had ceased to exist. Bo considered the reality behind the closed door and shuddered.

  "Bradley!" Dar Reinert's scratchy tenor voice bawled from the nurses' station, "you're going with me. Come on!"

  "Going where?" Bo asked, joining the bur
ly detective at a near-run toward the elevators.

  "Franer place," came the reply. "Seems this Paul Massieu character showed up at the sister's school forty-five minutes ago, told the staff Samantha was in the hospital, and took Hannah. There's an outside chance they're still at home."

  In the elevator Reinert shrugged on a navy blazer that effectively hid the gun in his belt. Bo could taste his fear like a metallic film in her own mouth. They both knew that if the older child had been victimized as well, the perpetrator might kill her to ensure her silence.

  "Any news?" Cynthia Ganage asked in the lobby.

  "Rats live on no evil star," Bo said, her eyes wide with apparent meaning.

  "What was that all about?" Reinert scowled.

  "The woman's a snake," Bo answered as Ganage made a note of the remark. "Do you really think we'll find Hannah with this Paul Massieu at home?" she asked once they were out of earshot.

  Dar Reinert glared at the horizon beyond the hospital parking lot as if it had just maligned his mother's virtue. "Ganage may be a snake, but she may also be right," he said. "And no, I don't think we're going to find Hannah Franer at all."

  Chapter 3

  By 4:30 in the afternoon the windows of the five-sided tower atop the Victorian lodge gleamed amber in the setting sun. The tower had been added to the sprawling camp when the original owner's young wife contracted tuberculosis. Local Adirondack legend maintained that the desperate man confined his beloved in the tower, imploring her to breathe the famous, healing air. But before the renowned mountain cure could return the blush to her cheeks, the frail consumptive had tumbled mysteriously from one of the tower's windows. In the three-story fall her neck snapped cleanly as a twig, killing her in a second that, had her death not filled it, would surely have escaped the notice of history. A cascade of flowers, century-wild descendants of those the young wife had planted, still spilled beside the lawn. Her ghost was said to roam among them, weeping.