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  Bo stared at the photographs pinned to the bulletin board over her desk. Every face seemed to share with her an uneasy perception of what voodoo bug-vitamins might mean. "Uh, Dar, do you know if he had a name for these ... vitamins?"

  "Funny you should ask." He was audibly rummaging through paper. "It was in this report they faxed ... here it is. 'Jean Baptiste.' Called 'em 'Jean Baptiste Vitamins.' Musta named 'em after his girlfriend, huh?"

  Uh-oh.

  "Not exactly, Dar," Bo concluded the conversation. "Did you get a current address?"

  "Sure. Home address, R.R. 3, Franklin, Louisiana. Current address, Wade Correctional Center, Haynesville, Louisiana. Except he's not there."

  "What do you mean he's not there?"

  "Walked off a work crew eight days ago. They sent dogs after him, of course, but the dogs came back empty-handed. The guy flew the coop."

  Bo couldn't help smiling at the image of empty-handed dogs.

  "Thanks, Dar," she sighed, turning her own hands up in a gesture of futility. "I'm back at square one."

  A brief phone call to Henderson, Kentucky's, Department of Child Welfare netted Bo the name of the social worker who'd supervised Chris Joe Gavin's last foster care placement.

  "Mexico?" the gravely voice of a woman named Gracie Belker exclaimed after Bo informed her of Chris Joe's whereabouts. "What in hell's he doin' in Mexico?"

  Gracie Belker was friendly and informative. Christopher Joseph Gavin, she told Bo, had been placed in foster care at the age of two on the occasion of his mother's first incarceration for accessory to auto theft. She had since graduated to more serious offenses and was never out of prison long enough to reclaim her son, although she refused to free the boy for adoption. Chris Joe, Belker said, had been in no fewer than twenty-three foster homes in fifteen years. The last, a particularly big-hearted family named Springer, had gone to enormous lengths to keep the boy with them when they had to move out of state. Chris Joe and their older son were like real brothers, and had formed a garage band called Ghost Pony. In Belker's view, the loss of the Springers' love and support when their legal appeal failed and they had to leave without him broke Chris Joe Gavin's heart. The night before he was to go to his twenty-fourth foster home, he ran away.

  "He's a good kid," Gracie Belker informed Bo. "Did well in school in spite of being changed every whipstitch, never in any real trouble. Five or six of the foster families wanted to adopt him along the way, including the Springers, but Mom wouldn't let go. Guess he just couldn't take any more, huh?"

  Bo thanked the Kentucky social worker and sighed. At seventeen, Chris Joe Gavin had been about to lose someone else he loved. Was the pain so great that he'd been driven to kill what he was about to lose? The thought was troubling.

  Several carefully documented calls to Louisiana later, Bo knew nothing more definitive than she'd learned in Kentucky. The authorities at Wade Correctional Center had no idea where Dewayne Singleton might be, but would be delighted to mail copies of pertinent files just as soon as their copier got fixed. The sheriff responsible for Franklin, Louisiana, was visiting his sister down in Cocodrie, but two deputies, both named Fontenot and distantly related, were certain Dewayne Singleton hadn't come home to his family because his family ran him off in the first place. Besides, everybody in town knew he'd escaped from Wade. Any one of the townspeople would call the sheriff's office if he showed up. And no, his family didn't have a phone. The Franklin Public Schools had no record at all of a Dewayne Singleton, but then their available records only went back four years. And the secretary of every church in Franklin professed much too forcefully her certainty that nobody by that name had ever been a member.

  By 11:15 Bo was dropping Gs randomly and using "y'all" as a generic nominative of address. When the phone rang almost as soon as she replaced it in its cradle, she answered "Gud mawnin' " without missing a beat.

  "Bo?" It was Andrew LaMarche. "I'm in the reception area of your building. Mrs. Aldenhoven has refused permission for me to come to your office even though your line's been busy for hours. I need to talk to you, and Estrella. Are you free for lunch?"

  His voice seemed unusually edgy, even under the circumstances.

  "We'll be right there," Bo agreed. "But what's wrong?"

  "I have some rather disturbing news," he said softly. "Just meet me in front of the building."

  Chapter Twelve

  Fox and Coyote

  Rombo Perry paced the length of the new living room, turned, and skated back to the Dutch door. His socks, he noted, remained immaculate. The recently stripped, sanded, and refinished floor reflected dappled sunlight filtering through a superb deodar cedar that filled the front yard and obviated any need for grass. The dwarf periwinkle Martin had planted would soon cover any bare spots.

  "What time do you have to be at the hospital?" Martin St. John inquired from a hall office where he lay on the floor surrounded by open cookbooks. His tone suggested casual, almost careless interest.

  Rombo peered through black wire-framed glasses at the street for the twelfth time in fifteen minutes. "Twelve thirty. You know perfectly well it's twelve thirty. But I wanted to be here when they brought it. I can't believe we've bought an entertainment center, Martin. It's so seventies. What if it overwhelms the couch?"

  "The couch will survive, Rom," Martin grinned, ambling into the room barefooted. "But you won't if you don't get out of here before that truck arrives." He flung long arms above his curly dark hair in a rough approximation of a ballet position, then bowed clumsily to the floor. "They're going to have shoes on." His hands caressed the surface of the floor as he cocked his head and smiled impishly upward. "Our floor's virginity will be sacrificed to hobnailed ruffians, uncouth deliverymen groaning beneath the weight of handcrafted cabinetry designed to disguise the fact that the Industrial Revolution has already happened." He stood and straightened the hem of a gray sweatshirt as if it were a military tunic. "You can't handle it, Rom. Your patients are waiting. Go on to the hospital."

  "Social workers use the term 'clients,' not 'patients,' even psychiatric social workers, and we've been working on this floor for two solid weeks." Rombo sighed. "It's perfect. Do you really think these ballet classes you've been taking are helping your back?"

  "Yep," Martin replied, "best thing for baker's back. That's what Madame Anouchka said. I can't wait to get the CD player in so I can listen to Les Sylphides while the rolls rise. It'll be good for Watson, too. We want him to have musical taste, right?"

  Watson, the golden retriever puppy for whom Rombo and Martin had bartered a three-year supply of St. John Catering's popular whole wheat yeast rolls, was scheduled to leave his mother in less than two weeks.

  "What's baker's back?" Rombo's crooked nose, broken by somebody named Billy Beloit on the Midwest boxing circuit in another life, flared in disbelief. He'd been trying to interest Martin in physical fitness for years, but the lanky caterer had, until now, shown total disinterest.

  "Occupational hazard of kneading, lifting trays in and out of the ovens. Overworks minor muscle groups while the rest of my classically well-proportioned body atrophies into something approximating string cheese. I'm trying to talk Bo into joining the class. She'd like the music."

  Rombo glanced out the window again. "I think that's the truck. Are she and Andy coming for dinner on Sunday? Or did we decide to wait for them to 'define their relationship'?" He shook his head fondly. "With all the encouragement straight people get, you'd think they'd have the drill down by now, wouldn't you?"

  "It is the truck." Martin nodded as the hall phone rang. "I'll get that. Go to work."

  Rombo opened the top of the Dutch door and caught a dried bougainvillea bract blowing in from the spectacular plant trellised to the Spanish cottage next door. "I'm not leaving until I see it against the wall," he said. "What if the doors won't close over the TV? What if they didn't put the speaker-cord holes where we told them?"

  "It's for you," Martin called from the Berber-carpeted
hall. "It's the ER."

  "What's up?" Rombo said into a replica of a 1920s wall phone friends had provided as a housewarming gift. "Sure. I guess so."

  Outside a gleaming van embossed with the name "Pickwick Furniture" in heavily serifed lettering backed into the driveway.

  "I don't believe it," Rombo fumed, hopping while tying polished black Italian dress shoes. "The cops have brought over some guy they picked up at the border last night, stopping cars on the U.S. side and warning people about a curse. They kept him in county jail all night, can you believe? Then they bring him over to the hospital, where he should have been from the beginning, at noon, when of course the duty intake worker's gone to lunch. I've got to get over there to do the intake. Guy's name is Dee-wayne something-or-other. Sounds Southern. The desk clerk says he looks like he's been beaten pretty badly, too, but he's in no shape to tell anybody what happened."

  "Have I told you lately that you're about the most exceptional guy I've ever met?" Martin asked, opening the lower half of the door for Rombo.

  "I hate it when you get emotional." Rombo blushed as he pulled a lightweight gray blazer over his polo shirt and grabbed his keys.

  "No you don't, you love it." Martin nodded, hugging the muscular social worker. "Call Bo and check on Sunday, okay?"

  From the furniture van two women in tennis shoes deftly maneuvered the first section of a hand-rubbed cypress wall unit onto a rubber-wheeled dolly.

  "Don't worry," one beamed at Rombo. "We won't scratch your floor."

  Chapter Thirteen

  "No cleanly blotted blood..."—Popol Vuh

  "Unquestionably, Chac was poisoned. I knew from the almond smell when I leaned over her," Andrew LaMarche told Bo and Estrella over a plate of broken rice with squid at one of the many Vietnamese restaurants in the neighborhood surrounding CPS headquarters. "But in the excitement I couldn't quite recall what that odor meant, just that it meant poison."

  "So you grabbed Chac's glass off our table when you left, and then had the residue tested this morning. Andy, you're a genius! If it weren't for you, nobody would ever have known. I mean, I just assumed it was a drug overdose, and so did the Mexican police."

  Estrella was using her chopsticks to push a plateful of barbecued pork fried rice into a landscape of small hills. "I keep seeing that foam bubbling out of her mouth," she whispered. "That's what smelled like almonds, isn't it?"

  "Probably," LaMarche answered. "The odor is characteristic of cyanide poisoning. But the foaming would have been caused by a second poison, also found in the shot glass. It's an alcohol called cicutoxin. Comes from a wild herb that, according to the chief toxicologist at the Poison Control Center, doesn't grow naturally in this climate. Some kind of hemlock. Looks like parsley, he said. Grows wild near streams or in wet meadows."

  "There isn't a wet meadow within five hundred miles of here," Bo told a serving of ground shrimp on sugarcane she'd ordered to impress Andrew LaMarche with the sophistication of her palate. The dish, while odd, wasn't half bad. From the determination with which he was chewing his squid, Bo feared the same could not be said of Andrew LaMarche's' own attempt at culinary broadmindedness. Estrella appeared to have discovered some troubling message beneath her fried rice, and was frowning at it.

  "So there were two poisons in Chac's shot of tequila," Bo went on. "But why two? Wouldn't either one of them have been enough to kill her?"

  "It's quite strange," LaMarche continued. "Almost as if her murderer particularly wanted the cyanide to be present, but didn't trust its efficacy." He leaned forward and poked with a chopstick at the red plastic dragon topping their table lamp. "Cyanide's volatile, a gas. Even in a suspension, the molecules won't stay put. And this particular cyanogenic glycoside appears to have been extracted from a fruit. The lab thinks it was probably apple."

  Bo registered disbelief. "A cyanide apple? Come on, Andy. The groceries haven't run a special on those in ages."

  "Oh, the fleshy part of apples is, obviously, perfectly safe to eat. But the seeds contain cyanide, Bo. A few won't hurt you, but a couple of handfuls would be lethal."

  "Kind of ruins the Johnny Appleseed story, doesn't it?" Bo mused, eyeing the rice paper on her plate.

  "Bo?" It was Estrella, her face a mask of dismay.

  "Are you okay, Es? You haven't eaten much. Want to go walk around outside for a minute?"

  "No. It's not that." Estrella's dark eyes were troubled. "Chac's death is my fault, Bo. If it weren't for me, she'd still be alive."

  "Oh, Es," Bo said with sympathy. "I felt that way, too. Like we never should have opened this investigation. We should just have left Chac and Acito alone. But—"

  Estrella took a deep breath. "The poisons were in her drink, right?" she asked. "Well, she almost knocked her drink over when she was yelling at you. If I hadn't caught the glass, it would have spilled, and she wouldn't have drunk it, and ..."

  Bo placed her hand over Estrella's trembling one as LaMarche shook his head. "Estrella," he insisted, "somebody wanted Chac dead. If that drink had spilled, there would have been another one. What it looks like to me," he scowled, "is that both the baby and his mother were targeted for death by someone well versed in natural poisons. It's really quite peculiar."

  "Peculiar," Estrella repeated, shuddering.

  "It's out of our hands now, Es," Bo said, recognizing the response as rational and sane. "It's a criminal case. I'm sure the police will find Chac's killer. In the meantime, I'm going to request a confidential foster care placement for Acito. What did the police say when you told them about the lab report on Chac's glass, Andy?"

  The waiter had brought the check and LaMarche made a production out of figuring the tip, then getting a doggy bag for Estrella's fried rice. Once outside the restaurant he launched into a monologue about the very shopping center in which they now stood. "It's the first in the nation," he expounded, "built in the forties when—"

  "Andy!" Bo interrupted. "What did the police say?"

  "The San Diego Police said," Estrella answered, climbing into the passenger's side of Bo's vehicle, "that the crime took place in Tijuana and its investigation is therefore the responsibility of the Mexican police."

  "So?" Bo asked, looking quizzically at LaMarche, who was elaborately adjusting a windshield wiper on his maroon Jaguar, parked next to Bo's Pathfinder under a coral tree. On the sidewalk beyond the tree an ancient woman in traditional loose black trousers held a flowered umbrella over her head as she carried a baby in a shawl on her back. Bo thought the baby could win a Buddha look-alike contest, if only one of the three Oriental supermarkets in the shopping center would sponsor one.

  "Um," Andrew LaMarche said, watching the progress of the baby Buddha. "The San Diego Police have contacted the Mexican authorities, and will send both the glass and the toxicology report to Tijuana by courier this afternoon." His tone attempted businesslike closure on the subject, a ploy Bo hadn't fallen for since the last time her mother tried it when Bo was about five.

  "And then what?" she insisted, standing on the Pathfinder's narrow runningboard and tossing her hair.

  Andrew LaMarche seemed miserable. "An investigation of some sort, I assume," he said, pulling at a corner of his mustache. "Probably not right away ..."

  "What do you mean, 'not right away'? A woman's been murdered! Detective Reinert told me they went to Chris Joe's last night, looking for drugs when they thought Chac died of an overdose. Chris Joe's gone. Won't they search for him, interview us and everybody else they can find who was at the bar last night? What's an investigation of 'some sort'? What are you saying, Andy?"

  Estrella sighed and pulled the door on her side of Bo's car closed. "Mexican police procedures are different," she said. "We need to get back to the office, Bo."

  Andrew LaMarche nodded at Estrella's words as if they contained profound and immutable wisdom. "Dinner tonight, Bo?" he suggested with abrupt lightheartedness. "I'm cooking."

  "Sure, Andy, dinner." Bo scowled from her perch on the
runningboard. "We've just witnessed the gruesome murder of an innocent woman. A woman about whom I think you're telling me the police in Mexico don't really give a damn. I think you're telling me they're not even going to try to find her killer. Her orphaned baby, also poisoned, now gives new meaning to the phrase 'stranger in a strange land,' and has the double misfortune to be trapped in the hands of an agency made up of people like Madge Aldenhoven. So of course we have nothing to think about except dinner."

  "Chac was not a Mexican citizen," he said, picking invisible lint from the Jaguar's gleaming roof. "And her, uh, occupational history prior to the success of her singing career had brought her to the attention of the Tijuana police. I learned this morning that she'd been arrested for prostitution, Bo, more than once. A dangerous way to make a living. And I'm afraid it's a fact of life that police on either side of the border—"

  Bo felt a snap behind her eyes, and a rush of anger that writhed in her shoulders. What good did it do to take your medication and behave at all times with overweening rationality, when the world itself was devoid of reason?

  "So it's just okay to murder prostitutes?" she yelled, more at the coral tree than at Andrew LaMarche, who was gesturing helplessly to Estrella. "Chac exchanged sex for money in a world structured entirely around the hormonal habits of men, and because of that she and her baby ceased to be human, right? They became animals. Humans are allowed to kill animals anytime they damn well please. That's it, isn't it?"

  A small crowd was gathering, drifting toward Bo from the parking lot and the doorways of several establishments selling jewelry, live eels, and videos whose titles were spelled in Oriental pictograms. Bo hit the top of the Pathfinder with a fist, then climbed inside.

  "Okay, okay," she breathed before Estrella could say anything. "But I'm not being crazy, Es. If I hadn't been born in Boston to a fairly wealthy family, if I hadn't been educated, if I hadn't found psychiatrists who could teach me how to keep going with an illness that leaves thousands of women on the streets every year, I could be Chac! I've never even been hungry, Es. But I know perfectly well I'd sell my body if I were starving and there were no other way to get food."