Child of Silence (14 page)

Madge's voice, strung tight as a violin string.

“Bo, something's happened.”

No kidding
,
Madge
!
Thanks for sharing that
.

Madge seemed to be choosing every word from a dictionary before pronouncing it. A slow narration. On the wrong speed.

“Angela Reavey has been attacked. Her husband and children came home and found her only minutes ago. She was apparently beaten and hit over the head. She's still alive, but there's some question about whether she'll make it. They're on the way to the hospital in an ambulance now.”

There was a brief pause.

“I don't know why, but I think there's some connection to your Johnny Doe. I'm calling to tell you, don't stay there! If you come home, leave! Go over to Estrella's, or go to a motel. The department will pay for it. And call me.”

Madge hung up as Bo went into overdrive.

Angela Reavey? Angela Reavey wasn't involved in Weppo's case at any level. Reavey worked over in reunification, in the back end, assessing the point at which families were rehabilitated and ready to retrieve kids from foster care. Why would killers go after Reavey?

Bo let her eyes roam jerkily about the room as she thought. Barstools. Navajo rug. Her boots, kicked off when she came in the door. The clump of newspapers she'd bought in Houston and mindlessly carried from the plane to the car, and from the car into the apartment.

Newspapers
!

That was it. Angela Reavey's name had been all over the papers because of the Martinelli case. Anybody, literally anybody, could know that Reavey worked for Child Protective Services. And anybody who didn't work for Child Protective Services wouldn't know the system's intricacies. Wouldn't know. . . but wait. Reavey would have an identification number, just like any other CPS worker. With it, she could get information on any case, and child, in the system.

Bo took deep breaths and released them slowly. Then she moved toward the phone.

The killers had gone to Angela Reavey to find out where Weppo was. Beaten her. Had she told them? Bo tried to remember Angela Reavey, and couldn't. Most of the back end workers were motherly types. They spent a lot of time with the kids in foster care. Nice people. Social workers. Could one of them stand up to brutality, torture, the threat of death?

Bo dialed St. Mary's Hospital and reminded herself to speak slowly.

“Discharge desk? This is Bo Bradley. My number is 20-035. I'm calling about a Johnny Doe on my caseload released today—”

“Yes, Ms. Bradley,” the clerk interrupted. “We know about the MediCal documentation. Ms. Reavey phoned just a little while ago. It's all taken care of.”

“What MediCal documentation? What in bloody hell are you talking about? Did you give Reavey the address of the foster home where my kid is?”

Bo could feel rivers of rage in her arms and hands.

“Yes, but I'm afraid I can't give you that information...”

The clerk, nervous, was falling back on the stubborn nasality known to every lower-echelon member of every bureaucratic system in the Western world. Bo would happily have broken the nose through which the woman continued to whine.

“There's a memo in the computer. It's flagged from a, uh, Marge Alderhaven, that Bo Bradley is to get no information. . .”

“You will die slowly from a rare and disfiguring gum disease,” Bo promised the woman, “and nobody will come to your funeral!”

Bo slammed the phone onto the machine and sent a chip of its beige plastic flying into the sink.

How was she going to find out what the killers already knew? Who would tell her where Weppo was? Not the hospital. Not Madge. What about the police? They could get there in time, with sirens. They could save Weppo, if she could not.

“Let me speak to Bill Denny,' Bo said after dialing the San Diego Police Department number.

“Denny's not in. Shift's over. Could I connect you to someone else in his unit?”

“No. Yes. I guess so. But hurry!”

“Homicide,” a casual voice answered. “Detective Gottleib.”

“This is Bo Bradley at CPS. Somebody's going to kill a kid, the one that got shot at last night at St. Mary's Hospital. They're on their way to the foster home, the killers I mean.
Now
! You've got to send squad cars. Use sirens. . .”

“I know the case,” Gottleib acknowledged. “Bill Denny's. Or at least it
was
Denny's. I think it's being reassigned.. .”

“Please listen to me,” Bo tried to speak softly. She was shaking, shuddering. “There's very little time. Call St. Mary's and find out where the foster home is. They'll tell the police. Then you need to send a SWAT team immediately.”

It was hopeless. Even if Gottleib followed up, it would be half an hour before he could make all the phone calls necessary to confirm what she'd said. And in a half hour Weppo could be as still and lifeless as Laurie.

“It up to you. . .” Delilah Brasseur's words echoed inside the music flooding the room. “You, you, you. . .”

Bo knotted her fists and sobbed. She wanted to smash everything in her apartment, gouge out the walls, kick the entire building piece by piece into the sea.

But the Bach was there, melodic, repetitive, precise. The music traveled along her arteries like smoke. Calming, but insistent.

“Either calm down,” it prompted, “or plan what to wear to the boy's funeral.”

Pouring three-fourths of the powder from one of the capsules into the sink, Bo swallowed what was left in the open end with gulps of water. On an empty stomach the effect was almost immediate.

The tremors subsided. Her rage went from boil to simmer. She could think a little.

Empty stomach
.
Eat something or you'll throw up
.

A bag of seven-grain bread bought in a rare moment of health consciousness lay on the counter. Bo seized a slice and wolfed it, pacing.

How could she find out where Weppo was? Who would tell her?

Bo ran through the sequence of people who would know. Madge. The discharge clerk. Bill Denny. Useless. There was a conspiracy to keep her away from Weppo. A conspiracy that would ensure his death.

She could see his huge eyes pleading with her, as they'd done in the hospital when he made the beer-drinking sign and then threw the cup on the floor, angering the nurse.

The nurse
!

A last chance, and a feeble one. But a chance.

“I'd like to talk to the charge nurse who was on yesterday morning,” Bo told the third-floor nursing student who answered. “I don't remember her name, but she offered to lend me some books, and I'm really interested. . . Uh, this is Barbara O'Reilly. I work for Child Protective Services. You know. . .”

The use of her childhood name carried a ring of honesty while avoiding immediate recognition.

“Sure,” the student nurse replied. “That's Susan Cooper. She's always reading those religious books. Her home number's 570-5782.”

“Thanks,” Bo said carefully, and hung up.

Susan Cooper was overjoyed at Bo's change of heart.

“God works in mysterious ways,” she murmured. “I just knew when I saw you looking at Dr. Hinckle's book yesterday morning that you were special.”

In the length of time it took Susan Cooper to pronounce “special,” Bo could have retiled the kitchen.

“Well, I thought about Dr. Hinckle, working on this case,” Bo sing-songed, replicating Cooper's inflection. “You know, I sometimes feel a need for guidance, seeing all these poor children...”

“Oh, I'm
sure
you do! And that
sweet
little deaf boy— how's he doing?”

Nurse Sailboat didn't know Bo was off the case. This was it. The one chance.

“A
wonderful
foster home,” Bo twittered. “Such
loving
,
caring
, people! Did you get to meet them when they came to get Weppo?”

“The Chandlers? I sure did! They came right before my shift was over at 3:30. They seemed so nice.”

Bo tried to remember to breathe, and went for the goal.

“A lovely home too. I was so glad that Weppo would get to be close to... you know. . .”

“The beach? Yes, that'll be a treat for the little guy, and there’s that fabulous ice cream place right on Garnet. . .”

Garnet
—
that meant Pacific Beach
.

Bo replaced the receiver and checked her purse. Lithium. Sedatives. She stuffed the seven-grain bread on top of the drugs with one hand, and found the Cs in the phone book with the other. Richard and Caroline Chandler lived at forty-nine seventeen Bayard in Pacific Beach. One beach community north of Bo, a five-minute drive.

Bo hit the door running. She might just make it. There might be just enough time.

Estrella Benedict stroked the smooth fur of the fox terrier in her lap. Mildred was safe. But what to do about Bo? Surely Bo wasn't still asleep. She should have called by now.

Letting the dog have the brocade chair, Estrella rose to pace the length of her living room, again.

“We just got the carpet,” her husband, Henry, remarked from the couch. “You're wearing a path.”

“Cute,” she replied. “
Muy Undo
. I'm worried about Bo. She hasn't called.”

“So call her,” Henry Benedict suggested.

“She won't answer, even if she's there. Not when she gets, you know, a little out of it. She just stays in that apartment and paints those Indian things, doesn't answer the phone. She says it's good for her.”

“Then it's probably good for her.”

A man of few words and clear ideas, Henry readjusted the sights on the rifle he'd just cleaned, and snapped it back in the gun rack inside a custom-made cabinet. He left the cabinet unlocked.

“Do you want to drive over there again?”

“No.” Estrella sighed. “We were just there two hours ago. I didn't see her car. Maybe she's gone to a motel, like Madge said. But Madge never really talked to her, just left a message. I don't think Bo got the message about what happened to Angela Reavey. I know she'd call me. And she'd come to get Mildred. She'd never leave Mildred this long unless something was wrong.”

“Madge'll call when they know more about Reavey,” Henry pointed out the fourth time in an hour. “Until then there's nothing we can do but wait.”

Henry Benedict hoped the men who had shot the child would come to his house looking for his wife's friend. He was ready. Earlier he'd surprised two Jehovah's Witnesses by shoving them off the porch with the screen door and then training a rifle on them as they sprawled on the lawn. Estrella knew she'd laugh at the scene later when she could describe it to Bo. The men had left a stack of little magazines and a Bible on the grass in their haste to retreat. Henry had bitten a plastic toothpick in half and spit the pieces on the lawn.

“
Damn
,” he'd sighed. “Wish it'd been the dirtbags that shot up the hospital.”

“I'm going to call Madge,” Estrella spoke directly to the new maroon carpeting under her feet.

“Madge's at the hospital with Reavey's supervisor. You know that,” Henry, rather than the carpet, replied.

An elaborate beveled mirror over the fireplace, a wedding present from two aunts in Culiacán, reflected slices of the room. Estrella entertained the idea of breaking it over her husband's head. She had to do something, call somebody.

“Andrew LaMarche liked the way Bo handled this case,” she mentioned.

“So?”

“So I'm going to call him.”

Henry Benedict picked up a paperback history of the Civil War he'd been reading earlier. He knew his Latina wife. Impulsive, and she'd just reached the flash point. There would be no stopping her. So he didn't try.

Andrew LaMarche accepted the call, patched through from his service.

“
Bueno
,” Estrella began excitedly, her accent deepening. “I'm Bo Bradley's friend. We share an office. I'm worried sick. I think something's wrong. I think Bo's tied up somehow in this case with the deaf boy and may get hurt.”

Andrew LaMarche listened somberly. He knew about Angela Reavey, and felt a growing shame at his use of her name in yesterday's well-choreographed attack on Child Protective Services. The surgeon attending Reavey had phoned, at LaMarche’ s request, to say that the woman's condition was critical, but she had a chance.

And now this.

Bo Bradley was missing. LaMarche remembered the woman's deep excitement about the deaf boy. And her anger at his arrogance. He admired Bo Bradley. The thought of her coming to harm was painful.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked Estrella.

“I don't know,” she answered, wound down now. “But there's got to be something.”

“I'll think on it,” LaMarche offered.