Moonbird Boy (20 page)

"Charles. Adam named him Charles for Baudelaire. His name is Charles Duncan Keith. He would be six now, almost seven. I haven't seen him since he was four."

Bo could actually feel her brain filing bits of information like tumblers moving in a lock. Grandson. Charles. Adam. Baudelaire. Little conceptual thunks. Then an awareness that discretion might be called for here. If Charles were Bird, his father had not wanted this woman to know his whereabouts. And this woman would either be Mort Wagman's mother or Bird's mother's mother. An advisor to MedNet. And a once-prominent scientist with a scandal in her past.

"Dr. Keith," Bo said, casting about for a way to get information without providing too much in return, "I'm investigating a case involving a murder near a treatment facility which is about to be taken over by a corporation called MedNet. I'm contacting you in your capacity as an advisor to that corporation." It sounded official, Bo thought, and it said absolutely nothing.

"Murder!" the woman said. "Are you telling me that my grandson is dead? What treatment facility? And why would a representative of a children's agency be investigating a murder?"

Then her voice changed. "I'm tired of this," she pronounced in low, angry tones. "I don't know who you are or what you want, but whatever it is, I don't have it. I have nothing to do with MedNet. Those vultures bought my name, nothing more. The message you left at my home means nothing to me, except that you've somehow kidnapped Charles. The St. Louis police have your note, and now the San Diego police will have this phone number. You're not going to get away with this!"

Before Bo could reply, Ann Lee Keith hung up.

In the hall outside her office door Bo heard Nick Paratore urging somebody to join his save-the-fish group, Scales of Justice.

"It's only fifteen dollars," he insisted.

"Madre de Dios!" another voice answered. "I already gave you five dollars. Hit up somebody else." It was Estrella.

"Am I glad to see you!" Bo said as her friend dumped case files, purse, and briefcase on the desk across from Bo's, and slumped into a desk chair. "I can't make sense out of this Wagman case no matter what I do, and it's getting worse. Ann Lee Keith may be Bird's grandmother, but at the moment she's phoning San Diego police to have me arrested. Did you have lunch?"

Estrella grinned. "No, and I'm eating for two. Let's go up to the lunchroom before they padlock the sandwich cooler. The baby wants tuna salad on sourdough, a bag of chips, and one of those chocolate chip cookies the size of a Frisbee. I'll just have skim milk."

"That's wise," Bo agreed.

The lunch crowd had already cleared as Bo and Estrella sat facing the CPS building's overgrown courtyard. Half an immense chocolate chip cookie lay on each of their paper plates.

"Mmm," Estrella said, savoring a bite of cookie as Bo finished a narrative of the morning's discoveries. "I think you'd better tell Madge about your call to Dr. Keith before a SWAT team arrives to blow you away. Keith sounds like the type who really will call the police, file complaints, the whole thing."

"Yeah," Bo agreed halfheartedly. It was nothing unusual. Parents and relatives of children picked up by CPS often called the police demanding help, as if the police and CPS weren't two sides of the same coin. And when the parents' demands weren't met, they often filed complaints, creating another whole office just to shuffle the paper. But Ann Lee Keith wasn't just another disgruntled relative. Bo didn't know what she was.

"Keith doesn't know I really work here," she explained as Estrella continued to erode the slab of cookie. "I didn't want to tell her anything about Bird until I knew more about her, about why Mort wasn't in contact with her. So I handed her a line of bureaucratic bull and she saw straight through it. Now she thinks I'm part of whoever's threatening her, leaving messages at her house. That was Zach and the gangster, Es. They left that note in her mailbox. But I don't want to tell Madge about that."

"Don't. She'd have you in a straitjacket before you got out of her office if she knew about your little trip on Saturday."

Bo sighed. "California outlawed straitjackets in public facilities thirty years ago. People choke to death in the damn things. They're barbaric!"

"It was a figure of speech, Bo. Sorry."

"Keith will find out I'm legitimate as soon as she does some checking," Bo went on. "Then she'll call back. I need to know something about her before then. I can't keep putting her off if she really is Bird's grandmother."

"Why not?" Estrella grinned. "This system's set up to put people off."

"Because Bird needs somebody to take care of him now. Somebody who can understand him and love him and provide the environment he needs. A grandmother would do nicely, but is Bird really this Charles she talks about, and who's Adam?"

"Maybe Adam was Mort," Estrella offered. "He looked like an Adam, don't you think?"

"He looked like a raven," Bo mumbled through her last bite of cookie. "The Neji called him Raven. My brother Raven and his fledgling, the Moonbird, backlit by moonlight atop a desert mesa. That's the picture in my mind."

"Um," Estrella answered, standing and brushing crumbs from a gold knit maternity top. "Don't put that in the court report."

Five minutes later Bo was on the phone with Eva Broussard.

"I need to learn something about a neurophysiologist on the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis," she told her psychiatrist. "It's Ann Lee Keith, the woman at whose house Zach and that organized crime guy left the weird note. Andy says she's famous, or was. There was some kind of scandal. How can I find out about her?"

"First, how are you doing?" Broussard asked. "Are you sleeping, eating, moody, manic? All the usual questions."

"Actually, I'm fine," Bo answered. "This case is really interesting, I'm taking my meds right on schedule, and it helps that Andy's back. It's funny, but the depression seems like something that happened a long time ago. I don't think about it."

"Less than a week ago you were still in a psych rehab facility," Eva pointed out. "Of course you don't want to remember why you were there, but you have to. Am I being too direct?"

"You're shattering my illusion of normalcy." Bo grinned, drawing a row of round, imbecilic "happy faces" on the margin of a county directive regarding possible changes in dental insurance. "But thank you."

"Always delighted to help. And as to your question—I'd recommend the medical library at the University of California, here in San Diego. Do you know Keith's area of research?"

"Something about fetal implants," Bo answered. "Andy said it was controversial."

"He's correct. It's an area fraught with ethical dilemmas, but also one of the most exciting new fields in medicine. Your research should be fascinating."

"I'll let you know," Bo concluded. "Thanks, Eva."

After explaining to Madge Aldenhoven that an irate grandmother would probably be phoning the San Diego police to complain that Bo Bradley was impersonating a child abuse investigator, Bo made her own call to the police. Specifically, to Dar Reinert, a detective in the San Diego Police Department's Child Abuse Unit. Bo had worked with the crusty detective on previous cases and knew he wouldn't flinch at a little rule bending.

"Dar," she began, "I need to see a copy of the report on that shark attack. You know, the Hopper Mead thing."

"Mead didn't have any kids," Reinert resisted. "What the hell does CPS want with a shark story?"

There was no point in trying to con Dar Reinert. "I don't really know, but there's some kind of connection to this case I've got. A money connection. When Mead died her trust went to a corporation called MedNet, and—"

"MedNet was her daddy," Reinert growled knowledgeably. "Guy that's heading the investigation is a buddy of mine, told me all about it waiting in line at the firing range Saturday night."

"What did he say?"

"Daddy was Randolph Mead, Sr. Started the first chain hospitals years ago after he married into money, wife's name was Delores Hopper. Hopper Feeds. Big poultry feed company outta Kansas. It's defunct now, but—"

"Dar," Bo interrupted, "chicken feed isn't what I'm looking for. Did the investigation turn up anything suspicious about Hopper Mead's death?"

"You and the whole town wanna think she was murdered," he laughed. "You and the whole town and some Mexican graduate student named Jose Mendez who dug Mead's leg out of a dead shark down near Ensenada. The kid's been up here, hanging around the investigation. But our guys have run every possible lead. Bottom line—no motive, no suspects, no crime. An old sow of a shark saw lunch and chomped it. End of story."

"A shark can't be an old sow," Bo said defensively. Impossible to explain to Reinert why the term got her Irish up. "And a copy of that police report would really help me get a picture of how MedNet figures in what's happened to the boy in my case. He's only six, Dar. And in the hospital after some kids in a group home used him for a soccer ball."

"Quit," the detective said. "You know I'm a sucker for kid stories. But you owe me one for this, Bradley. I'll bring a copy by your place tonight. Read it and shred it. This didn't happen, got it?"

"I don't even know you," Bo agreed.

By late afternoon Bo had read and copied a score of articles by Dr. Ann L. Keith at the university library. All were published at least ten years in the past. Most were incomprehensible, but Bo managed to grasp the theory underlying them.

Fetal cells, taken from embryos, would adapt to host organisms and grow into whatever they were originally programmed to grow into. And the host organism would not reject them as it would identical cells taken from an adult. Thus, Bo read, mouse embryo cells programmed to become skin could be implanted in an adult mouse, and would grow into a patch of skin. The problem of tissue incompatibility was diminished, but the ethical considerations were staggering.

Most of Ann Lee Keith's research seemed to involve Parkinson's disease and the possibility for use of dopamine cells from human fetal brains in reducing its symptoms. Bo felt her eyes glazing over words like "mesencephalic" and "putamen," but beneath the technical jargon she could see a chilling beauty in what the researcher had held out as a possibility to her peers. The repair of broken people. A way of healing never before imaginable.

But something had stopped Dr. Keith's research almost overnight. One year her name was mentioned in eight of every twelve scholarly articles, and the next year it was mentioned nowhere. What had Keith done, Bo wondered, to merit such universal disapprobation that her work was not cited even in historical articles?

It was late afternoon by the time Bo decided she couldn't face another word like "immunosuppression." The reading had provided a glimpse into a world about which she knew nothing, and the view was unsettling. A futuristic science-fiction fantasy in which new body organs would be grown in place from the seeds of embryonic cells. The technology was available. Only time would reveal what the human race might do with it.

From the exterior, Bo thought as she left, the library looked less academic than theatrical. The building's unusual architecture suggested a Martian civic center or Andromedan hospital. A set from Star Trek, dropped amid eucalyptus trees in Southern California. From hidden speakers in the grove of tall, shaggy trees between the library and its parking lot, students broadcast music, poetry, dramatic readings. Bo found the experience eerie as disembodied electronic music followed her on the dusty path through the grove. Minor chords accompanied by a tinkling percussion that sounded like crystal chandeliers being hit with marshmallows.

You're tired, Bradley. And hungry. Get out of here before you start seeing gnomes. Selling hamburgers.

She was almost to the parking lot when she saw it. A narrow flag of red at eye level on one of the trees beside the path, almost lost in late afternoon shadow. A circle of red fastened over a delicate, lower limb.

"Oh, my God," Bo whispered.

It was a little red leather dog collar, hanging empty in the weak breeze. The music seemed suddenly sad, unbearable. Bo felt tears burn her eyes, the hurt all over again. And beneath that a murderous anger.

"You... have... no... right," she yelled into the camphor-scented air, "to... do... this!"

Nothing stirred in the grove, but Bo could feel an alien awareness bathing her, hating her, laughing at her. The feeling followed her all the way to her car.

Before going home, Bo made a detour inland to St. Mary's Hospital for Children. Bird was up and dressed, watching a video of Pocahontas in a dayroom with several other children. But he sat apart, Bo noticed, hugging his ribs with both arms and rhythmically scuffing his heels against the tile floor.

"Hey," she said when the film was over, "I found a lady who says she's your grandmother. She's worried about you, Bird. She wants to take care of you."

"What grandmother?" he asked, his blue eyes following the pink-smocked volunteer as she took the cassette from the VCR and turned off the monitor. "I don't have any grandmother."

"Her name is Ann Lee Keith."

"She's Annabel Lee," he said immediately, turning to face Bo with a curious expression animating his small face. "The moon never beams without bringing me dreams of my beautiful Annabel Lee. That's what we say about her." The expression was sadness, Bo realized, mixed with comfort at hearing a familiar name. The Poe was pure Mort Wagman.

"That's what who says? You and your dad?"

"Yep. It's iambic."

Bo remembered Mort Wagman's endless collection of unusual information, quips, quotes, lines of poetry. She knew he used these in his stand-up routines, which were geared to an educated audience with quirky sensibilities. Apparently he used them to teach his son as well. And it worked.

"Come over here." Bo smiled, taking his hand and pulling him toward a padded rocker. "Sit right here in my lap. We're going to say a poem."

"Okay," Bird agreed.

"There was an old parrot with teeth," she made up, "who ate crackers above and beneath. With a mouthful of snarls, he phoned his friend Charles, whose other names were... uh..."