Moonbird Boy (29 page)

In the living room Bo could see furniture in the amber glow of the sodium lights outside. A dark leather couch with a plaid blanket folded at one end, two chairs, a glass-topped coffee table, TV. Something about the blanket felt familiar, and Bo carried it to the window.

"Ah," she breathed as a thousand short, white dog hairs became visible, caught in the weave. This would be the dog on the tape. Anselm Tucker's dog, borrowed from his factotum by Randolph Mead for the purposes of terrorism. Bo wondered what Mead had done to elicit that last, frightened yip that had enabled her to identify the sound as a recording.

At the top of a carpeted stairway were two small bedrooms and a bath. One of the bedrooms was empty. From the other the red operating light of a fax/answering machine pierced the dark atop a low dresser. Beside the machine was a framed snapshot that explained the neighbor's reaction to Bo's "uncle." The photo was of a sixtyish black man in a pink polo shirt, holding a bright-eyed Dandie Dinmont terrier in his arms. Bo wondered when Tucker had realized that his employer was a murderer as she pulled her sleeve over her hand and pushed the machine's playback button.

"It's Tuesday at about ten and I have your quitclaim of the condo to Randolph Mead, Jr.," an efficient female voice said, "and I'll list the property, including furnishings, with an asking price of two hundred and five thousand as we agreed. It's been a pleasure working with you, Mr. Tucker, and good luck with your new job in Alaska!"

The second and final message was less polite. "You're dead, Tucker," a deep voice snarled. "Nobody steals from me, nobody! I'm coming after you, Tucker. I've got one more thing to do here, and then I'll find you. You're too stupid to live, Tucker. You're defective. Remember that when I come for you." Before the tape clicked off Bo heard one last sound that made her bare her teeth in the darkened room. A familiar, cruel chuckle. The second message, she knew, was from Randolph Mead.

The empty condo seemed suddenly musty, tomblike. Bo felt a film of sweat coating her forehead as she raced down two sets of stairs and across the shadowy garage. What if he'd come, locked the garage door? What if he'd set a trap for her and... But the garage door opened as easily as before, and in seconds she was safe in the Pathfinder.

Chill, Bradley. This was stupid, but you were lucky. Now go home and call the police.

Tucker wasn't going to Alaska, she was sure. He'd apparently embezzled money from Mead, and was bailing out. Maybe the condo was his idea of a fair exchange. It made sense to Bo.

At home she left a message for the detective investigating Hopper Mead's murder. "It's her brother," she recited for a tape nobody would hear until tomorrow. "He must have bribed his employee, Anselm Tucker, to say he was at his office when she died, but he wasn't. I'm sure that if you search Tucker's residence you'll find enough evidence to pick up Randolph Mead. And alert the Backcountry Sheriffs Department to check out a dirt road near the Neji Reservation with a sign saying Hadamar II. I think it's Mead's camp. I think he stalked and killed Mort Wagman from there."

What she didn't say was, "and he may kill again." Too dramatic for the police, and in actuality there was nothing they could do without evidence. After moving furniture over the front door and deck doors, Bo found the corkscrew and fastened its flanges up with duct tape. Placing it under her pillow, she scooped Molly from her box and curled around the little dog in sheets that still smelled like Andy's shaving cream.

She wouldn't think about Randolph Mead, Jr., she decided. Although she was sure he was thinking about her.

At some point between four and five A.M., the last of several pillows fell on the floor and Bo gave up on sleep. It had been a lost cause after Andrew's story in any event. An anger still throbbing in the large muscles of her legs and arms made her movements feel jerky as she stood and walked into the kitchen to make coffee.

"So we were the first," she whispered into the damp cold released by the refrigerator door. "They practiced on us, killed more than seventy thousand of us perfecting the method. Then they built the death camps. And no one knows. No one cares."

The soft thud as the door closed on its rubber insulator brought tears to her eyes, but she curbed the impulse to cry. There would be time for that later. Plenty of time after she'd explained what she knew to Zach and then waited for Randolph Mead to make his next move, as she was certain he would. The certainty ran through every vein and artery, fed every cell, every molecule. The certainty felt cool and clean and oddly businesslike.

Hadamar. Bo couldn't stop the three-syllable drumbeat in her head. One of six German mental asylums used as extermination centers for the mentally ill, the "defective," many of whom were only small children at the time of their extermination. "Life unworthy of life," these had been named, and then their lives had been snuffed out.

The psychiatric hospital at Hadamar, Andy said, had been fitted in cellars below the right wing with a realistic "shower room" complete with benches beneath which ran perforated pipes fitted to cans of carbon monoxide outside the sealed room. A simple turn of a valve killed seventy people at a time. An hour later ventilators were turned on, and then the bodies were loaded into carts on a miniature railway leading to two crematoria. A hundred people worked directly with the extermination of the mentally ill, Andy said, and everyone in town saw trains and buses with their windows painted over disgorging thousands to a building that could only house hundreds. And then they saw the black, greasy smoke and inhaled the scent of burning flesh, and did nothing. The dead were only crazy people, after all. Defective people unworthy of life.

Bo watched coffee dripping through the filter and breathed its aroma. The sensation reminded her that she was alive, she could drink coffee, walk on the beach, mourn a beloved dog, and allow another to waddle into her heart. She could love a man and welcome him to her body, laugh with a friend, work, be tired, be bored, but be alive. The fact seemed suddenly fragile.

"This is the way it really is, Mil," she whispered to Mildred's portrait on its easel. "I can't tell the puppy; she's too young. But I know you can cope. It's not just Germany under the Reich, Mil, it's everywhere. When times are hard, the mentally ill are always the first scapegoats. It's happening here. There's no more money for services, desperately ill people are thrown out of hospitals because they're poor and can't get insurance. They're dying out there, Mil, and now somebody's named the property next to the Neji Reservation for a Nazi psychiatric extermination center. Two people are dead and their killer is trying to drive me crazy. Things are weirder than usual, Mil."

The bright old terrier eyes in the painting shined an encouragement Bo knew was already a part of her soul. Mildred would live as long as she did, Bo realized. And now it was time to clean up the world a little bit for a dachshund puppy who didn't yet have a clue about how tough you had to be just to make it. Bo squared her shoulders and knocked back a Depakote with a swig of good coffee. Then she pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt, tucked the sleeping puppy's hindquarters into her bra and headed out into the predawn chill. It was quiet all the way up Interstate 8 to the Campo cutoff that would loop under the highway and become a two-lane desert road. In the hollow created by her collarbone a wet, black nose breathed softly.

Once off the freeway, Bo thought about Andrew LaMarche. He'd done well with this, she nodded to herself. He'd told her what she needed to know and then left her alone to process the information in her own way. It was a gift the value of which he wouldn't understand for years, if ever. The gift of space in which to think thoughts qualitatively different from the thoughts of other people. Even children, she mused, were not subject to the mental scrutiny and attempts at control people with psychiatric illness had to face daily.

In younger, wilder days she'd tried to make people listen, make them consider the value in a skewed perception. Depressed, Abraham Lincoln had walked the White House grounds night after sleepless night alone with the ghost of his mother, whom he said was always with him. But like all depressives, Lincoln saw reality without the scrim of comforting lies and delusion enjoyed by "normal" folk. And so he could see uncompromisingly the evil that was slavery.

"For every Lincoln, every Charlotte Perkins Gilman, there are thousands more of us with valuable viewpoints. We're important!" the young Bo had insisted. "We're irritating, weird, even scary sometimes, but we have a purpose. So listen."

But nobody had listened. Nobody ever listened. And Bo had learned to protect her reality in a loop of solitude like a carbon-steel ribbon. It was unassailable. And Andrew LaMarche had mustered the grace to respect it.

"He's one in a million," she told the sleeping puppy nestled in her sweatshirt. "When this is over we'll weave him a crown of laurel, maybe even cook dinner, huh?"

By the time she reached the Hadamar II sign, the sun had topped the high desert mountains and begun to pour glare like hazy yellow tea on the parched remains of an ancient seabed. Bo put on her sunglasses, turned onto the dirt track, and engaged the four-wheel drive. Then she wheeled the Pathfinder sharply to the left in second gear, and rammed the sign. Its cedar upright splintered on impact, throwing the bolted sign onto her hood. Smiling, Bo reversed onto the track, stopped, got out and gave some water to Molly, and then grabbed a hammer and screwdriver from the small tool kit behind the front seat. In minutes she'd gouged the name from the wood, if not off the face of the earth.

This would be how Jews felt about names like Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Treblinka, she thought. This icy, absolute loathing. But trashing a sign wasn't enough, wasn't anything. Just a personal catharsis. Tying Molly's leash to the fastened seatbelt on the passenger's side, Bo revved the Pathfinder up the dirt track past clumps of bristling chollas and spindly ocotillo as the sun lay purple morning shadows across the quiet.

There was nobody there. Bo sensed the absence of human life even before she carefully circled the precise little encampment. Just two lightweight tents in desert camouflage, carefully lashed and pegged with the long, barbed tent pegs necessary in sand. One of the pegs on the windward side of the smaller tent had pulled loose and all the ropes sagged. He hadn't been there in a while. Several days, she thought. Maybe a week.

Carefully Bo propelled the Pathfinder into the corner of the smaller tent, which collapsed soundlessly as the forward movement of the vehicle tore out its supports. One of the ropes caught on the bumper, and Bo simply dragged the tan and cream mottled shell away as if unveiling a sculpture. Then she sat and stared at six five-gallon jugs of water, a propane stove leveled with packed mud atop a large rock, and a clear plastic storage chest through the sides of which she could see a box of instant oatmeal, cans of salt-free soup, a jar of Folger's instant coffee. The small tent had been a kitchen and storage area. And whoever camped here had been desert-smart. Salt-free soup would provide both fluid and nutrition without tissue-leeching sodium.

The larger tent presented a problem. Bo hadn't intended to get out of the car, just to demolish whatever was there and then leave. She didn't want her feet on the ground. Not this ground with its bitter, soul-eating name. But there might be something in there, some clue that would prove the identity of the man who had camped in a hollow just outside the Neji Reservation, less than a mile from Yucca Canyon, and then lay in wait for Mort Wagman. Reluctantly Bo switched off the ignition and jumped softly to the ground. There was nothing useful in the big tent. A camp table and folding stool, clean and bare. An empty army surplus trunk, also painted in desert camouflage. And a folding cot with some fabric tossed at one end. In the buzzing desert silence Bo frowned at the cot. The fabric wasn't a rumpled sheet or blanket, it was too small. And it was flowered, or part of it was. Forcing herself to go closer, Bo realized it was a pile of scarves, tablecloths, an old nylon blouse in lavender with sparkling, star-shaped buttons. Incongruous in the spartan setting. And familiar. Bo had seen those scarves and tablecloths before, obscuring the face and body of an old black woman lost in schizophrenia.

"Old Ayma!" Bo said aloud, suddenly shivering in the mottled light. "What happened?"

Outside the tent a tumbleweed rolled past the open flap like some brittle, sentient being pursued by demons. Bo left the tent with equal alacrity and stood watching as the tumbleweed hurried downhill, snagged on a clump of cholla, and

then broke free only to be swept into a small blind canyon at the bottom of a wash.

Had Ayma wandered here the night she vanished? Bo wondered. And what would happen to a psychotic old black woman in a place named Hadamar II? Had Ayma been exterminated? Had Mort? Maybe Ann Lee Keith was wrong and MedNet had nothing to do with Mort's death at all. Maybe some neo-Nazi fanatic was just camping out here and picking off lunatics for fun!

Determinedly, Bo skirted the perimeter of the campsite, watching the ground. If whoever was here had killed Old Ayma, he would have to stash the body, get it away somewhere so the coyotes and vultures, then the insects, could do their work downwind and out of sight. But Old Ayma had been a big woman, nearly six feet tall. There was only one cot in the tent, only one person. And nobody could haul Ayma's body very far.

The tumbleweed was shivering in the wind, jammed into the blind canyon. Bo scrambled downhill on instinct, watching. Maybe the tumbleweed was speaking, or maybe the wind was. But something was pulling her toward an inconsequential little slot canyon she wouldn't have noticed if the tumbleweed hadn't found it first.

"Aagghh!" she howled within feet of the canyon. A sharp pain shot messages from her left foot to her brain. In the downhill rush she'd come too close to a cholla, and one of its fat, spiny burrs was imbedded in the nylon of her sneaker. Sitting, she scraped the burr away with a rock and then removed her shoe and sock. Only one spine had made it through to the tender flesh of her arch, but she couldn't get it out. The spines were barbed like fishhooks, and once embedded had to be surgically removed.