Turtle Baby (32 page)

"I'm afraid not," Bo pronounced in a practiced monotone. "I couldn't stand to be in an enclosed space with you."

Kee's dark eyes filled with tears. "It wasn't my fault Mundy killed himself," she wailed shrilly. "I did everything right. It's not my fault he got that woman pregnant and then tried to kill the baby so I wouldn't know when I saw its hair. The baby has Mundy's hair, you know. That white streak. Mundy told me she tried to hide it with hair dye so he wouldn't know the baby was his. Can you believe somebody doing that?"

Bo felt as though she were gossiping with a thirteen-year-old about the behavior of some heartthrob movie star. That sense of overemotional fantasy. Kee shook her head dramatically.

"What I can't believe is that Chac managed to fight her way out of Guatemala," Bo began softly, "survive prostitution and heroin addiction, make a career for herself singing, and give birth to a lovely, healthy baby, only to be murdered by a selfish brat who thinks she can buy anything, including children to match her artwork."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Kee muttered, but Bo didn't miss the change in her eyes. The self-righteous cruelty there.

"What was your favorite fairy tale, Kee? Snow White? You know, I could have put it together days ago and maybe saved your husband's life if I'd thought about Snow White instead of pretending to understand a Maya story that wasn't mine. But that's what happens when you try to live in someone else's world, isn't it? You screw up, don't you?"

Bo had been moving closer to Kee as she spoke, pacing her steps to her words.

"I didn't screw up," the younger woman answered, casting a sidelong look at Bo and rising abruptly. "She did. She was a liar and a thief. I hate her!"

Bo was again struck by Kee's juvenile peevishness. It was unnerving, attacking what seemed to be a child. Bo had a sense of loose conceptual footing, as if she were roller-skating in grease.

"What did she steal, Kee? Her own son? How could Chac steal her own son from you?"

Kee Terrell turned to face Bo, another change creasing her narrow face with a sneer. She seemed to be taking Bo's measure. And she was taking her time. Finally she spoke, this time in the chilling voice of an angry adult.

"Kylie isn't her son, he's mine. That was the agreement. Mundy arranged it."

"Kylie?" Bo blurted, laughing deliberately. "Kee and Kylie? Sounds like a twin water-skiing act. You've got to be kidding."

An already-present darkness hardened in Kee's eyes.

"Mundy agreed to promote her career, make her a star. All she had to do was let him get her pregnant with my ... with our baby. But when Kylie was born, she lied. She told Mundy she'd been screwing around with other men, and the baby was one of theirs. She dyed Kylie's hair so Mundy wouldn't know, but I didn't care. That baby was mine whether Mundy was the father or not!

"One night I went down to that filthy bar and told the bartender, Jorge, that I knew she was lying, that the baby was mine. I told him she'd better turn Kylie over to me or I'd make Mundy drop her, pull the money out. That's when she hid Kylie away from me and said he'd been adopted by a family from Mexico City. Then Mundy tried to poison Kylie."

Bo narrowed her eyes. "You're getting your stories mixed up, Kee. Not that it matters. Your husband didn't poison Acito, and neither did anyone else. He was poisoned by a bead in a rosary he was teething on. It was a freak accident, but Chac's death wasn't, and Munson Terrell's death was no suicide. You murdered them both, Kee. Why?"

Strangely, Kee was moving in an arc to Bo's left, gradually getting behind her. "You're crazy," she sneered.

"Sometimes, but that doesn't answer my question. Did you think Chac's death would get you the baby?"

"Mundy's baby," Kee insisted. "I hired a private detective to follow Chac and that stupid boy she moved in with. He followed them to that place in San Ysidro and took pictures of Kylie for me when those awful people brought him outside. Sometimes you could see the white hair in the pictures, when the dye wore off. But Mundy wouldn't do anything to make her give Kylie to me. He said it was all a big mistake and we should just forget about it. He said Kylie should stay with that woman. Can you believe that? Forget about my own baby! You can see that Chac had to die in order for Mundy to bring the baby home to me. He was the father, you see. I'm the mother."

In Kee's face Bo saw the duende Chac had described in her song for Acito. Something evil, crazed by nature. Maddened. And dangerous. Bo turned again to face the woman now standing behind her.

"The politically correct poisons were a nice touch," she said. "I especially like the apple-seed cyanide. Poisoned apples are such a staple in our folklore, and it was clever of you to juxtapose the symbol of fertile womanhood, the ripe apple, with the symbol for your self-imposed barrenness, the poisoned core. So poetic, just like that doggerel note you left on the computer monitor. But where on earth did you find the second poison, the one called cicutoxin? The herb it comes from doesn't grow naturally around here."

Kee pointed into the canyon beyond the edge of the deck. "It grows here, if it's planted and cultivated," she snarled, "by the stream down there. But you don't have to take my word for it, you're going to get to see it!"

In that instant Bo understood with disconcerting clarity Kee Terrell's intent in moving between her and the mission doors leading back into the house.

"A terrible accident," Kee whined sweetly. "I may even sue the contractor for the mental anguish I endured because of your death due to their negligence. But not until my attorneys get Kylie out of that foster home and safely in his beautiful bed right here with his mother." Her eyes glinted like coal in a poorly lit cellar. "They tell me my chances for a legal adoption are excellent, since Kylie is all I have left of my beloved husband."

"Over my dead body," Bo said with feeling.

"Yes," Kee replied, and lunged, burying her right shoulder in Bo's upper abdomen and toppling them both to the deck's floor before leaning back to slam her fist into Bo's face. Bo felt blood spurt from her nose and dizzying pain. Kee was holding Bo's ears and pounding her head against the deck floor. Bo pulled her knees close to her chest and then kicked the other woman away. A dull cracking sound created some hope that Kee Terrell now had a broken rib. If so, Bo noted with despair as Kee stood up quickly, it wasn't slowing her down.

Bo struggled to her feet as well, pulling up the hem of her now-bloody sweater to reveal a miniature tape recorder secured to her flesh with adhesive tape.

"You're busted," she burbled through the blood in her mouth. "Everything you said is right here. You're finished, Kee."

But Kee wasn't finished. The wild, adrenaline-pumped glaze in her eyes was sufficient evidence. It occurred to Bo that Kee Terrell was actually going to kill her. In the seconds it took the thin, muscular woman to lunge again, Bo opened the tight little package of rage stored behind her eyes and let its power flood her body. It was that or die.

"Do you know," she yelled suddenly, grabbing the other woman by the arms and throwing her against the remaining bench, "that you almost killed my dog out there in the desert?" The words, maniacal and fierce, reinforced a strength Bo had known was there but never touched. A burning anger that pulled her lips back from her teeth and coiled in her hands. An ugly, terrifying feeling. She wanted to kill Kee Terrell, not because Kee had murdered two innocent people, but because Kee had almost destroyed the life closest to her own. The sensation was mindless, and oddly existential.

When Kee rose and came at her again Bo simply shoved her away. The movement was effortless, almost dancelike in its simplicity. But Kee flew backward as if hit by a wrecking ball. Backward toward the unprotected edge of the deck and its five-story drop to certain death.

Oh no, Bradley. She's going over the edge and you're going to prison and you'll never see Mildred again anyway. Stop her!

In agonizing slow motion Bo flung herself facedown and grabbed a thin arm as the rest of Kee Terrell slid off the deck into late afternoon sunlight. A muffled pop followed by screams indicated that Kee's shoulder had dislocated, the arm pulled from its socket by the dangling weight of her body.

"Let go of me!" Kee screamed, invisible under the lip of the deck. "Let me die!" Even in extremis, Bo noted, Kee Terrell somehow managed to whine.

"Not a chance," Bo gasped, wrapping a leg around a deck rail to avoid being pulled over. "I've got a dog to walk, my best friend's going to have a baby, and there's a man in my life who makes coffee fudge. I'm not killing anybody!"

In seconds pounding footsteps crossed the deck behind Bo, and a pair of long-fingered hands grabbed Kee Terrell's pale arm. There were followed immediately by another pair, wide and stubby.

"Let go, Bradley, we've got her," Detective Dar Reinert roared into the lean shoulders of Chris Joe Gavin. "Get out of the way."

"I can't," Bo told him, giggling in a manner she privately thought sounded insane. "I can't let go of her. My fingers won't move."

"Well then, roll out of the way. We're pulling her up."

"Where are the police when you need them?" Bo asked shortly after that when her locked hands had been eased from Kee Terrell's right arm by the practiced skill of Andrew Jacques LaMarche, M.D.

"Madre de dios," Estrella Benedict whispered with genuine spiritual verve. "I never should have let you take this case. I knew it from the beginning. That woman's crazy, Bo. She almost killed you."

Bo sighed through the cold compress Andrew was holding against her nose. "I've got to have a cigarette," she decided. "And she's not crazy, Es. People like Kee give us crazy people a bad name. She's just a rotten, spoiled, egotistical crybaby determined to have whatever she wants at whatever cost."

Chris Joe Gavin was watching Dar Reinert escort Kee, moaning, through her own mission doors to a phone where he would call for an ambulance. "I wish Chac could see this," he said sadly.

"Maybe she can," Estrella replied.

Andrew had ordered an immense antipasto salad and tub of sausage-stuffed manicotti in garlic-Parmesan sauce delivered to his condo, the oyster rarebit having barely sufficed as an appetizer. Chris Joe Gavin was helping himself to a third plateful as Estrella leaned back in her chair, beaming.

"I can't believe we actually pulled it off, Bo," she sighed with satisfaction. "If you hadn't talked Reinert into wiring you with that recorder and then waiting—"

"That was the hardest part," Chris Joe interjected, raking the sides of his long blond hair with Lincolnesque fingers. "I thought she was gonna do you, Miss Bradley. Man, I couldn't get there fast enough!"

"Fast?" Bo queried with false sweetness from the kitchen. "You call that fast? You were just outside in Dar's car. How could it take you five minutes to run fifteen yards? I saw my life flash before my eyes."

"It was less than a minute, Bo," Andrew noted, wadding his napkin into a tight sphere. "Although a lot can happen in a minute."

Bo readjusted the icepack on her swollen face as she brought another bottle of wine to the table. It would be best, she thought, never to mention everything that had happened in that minute. From her spot by the fireplace, Mildred glanced expectantly into Andrew's dining area. The possibility of table scraps had created a canine smile on her furry face.

"If you hadn't called us," Estrella told Chris Joe for the fifth time, "she would have gotten away with it. And she would have gotten Acito."

The young guitarist pushed his chair from the table and strode to the window, his long thumbs hooked in the belt loops of his Levi's. "That couldn't happen," he said angrily. "I would have stayed around. I wouldn't have let that happen. I couldn't prove she killed Chac, but I knew enough to stop her from getting the baby." He turned to gaze levelly at Bo, Andrew, and Estrella. "That is, if anybody would have believed me."

"You're right," Bo agreed. "That's why you ran, isn't it? After Chac ... after that night at the club."

The shadow of pain crossing his eyes was difficult to watch.

"I just wanted to help her, take care of her," he went on, ducking his head to curtain his face with hair. "She was, you know, like a hooker before Terrell set her up singing. She said she married Singleton because they were both lost souls, but then he went back to Louisiana and was supposed to send for her, but he never did. When Terrell asked her to have his baby I guess she couldn't really say no, could she? I know what it's like when you're just so tired of moving around and not really belonging anyplace or to anybody. She meant to give them the baby like they agreed, but then she just couldn't. I loved her."

His voice dropped to a ragged baritone. "When I knew she was dead that didn't stop, but I didn't know what to do so I ran. Later I thought if I showed you how she'd saved money for the baby, and showed you how she tried to tell you who was after her, you'd, you know, do something."

"That was a smart move," Bo complimented him. "But the best thing you did was returning Estrella's call this morning. Without you we couldn't do anything but guess. You had the critical information. You knew about the deal Kee and Munson Terrell had made to exchange career promotion for Kee's idea of the perfect baby. And you knew Chac was reneging on the deal."

"She loved Acito," Chris Joe said proudly. "She'd never give him up. She was going to keep him right with her, just as soon as she could get away from Kee."

In his voice Bo heard a lifetime of longing for somebody who had done just the opposite. His own mother, who would neither love him nor permit anyone else that role. A sorrow too late now to remedy, for which he found expression in music. The gangly, sullen teenager was, Bo thought, going to make a fine man.

"So what will you do now?" Andrew asked. "We'd be happy to help you settle here, get into school, the military, whatever you'd like."

"Thank you," Chris Joe answered, stuffing his hands into his pockets, "but I'll be eighteen in August. This family I was with, the Springers, they want me to come and live with them in Ohio, go to night school, and finish my senior year. They've been sending me money. I can live with them as soon as I'm eighteen and out of the system. That's why I went to Mexico, so the system couldn't get me and put me in another foster home. I'll be heading for Ohio in a few days." He shook his head. "You know, it's funny, Mundy Terrell wanted to help me, too. He wasn't a bad guy. He just loved the wrong woman."