Turtle Baby by Abigail Padgett Page A

picked up a sort of wooden flute. As he played a haunting refrain that Bo found vaguely familiar, Chac began to sing softly in Spanish. Or at least it was partly Spanish. And the voice filling the dingy room, Bo realized, might be that of an angel. A trained voice, molding invisible fire out of vibrating air. At the song's end Bo heard the phrase "Mi Acito."
    "It is the song of my love for my son," Chac whispered. "He is my heart. Do you understand? I cannot lose him!"
    Bo felt tears swimming in her eyes. The song was the one she'd heard on the radio. Live, it was mesmerizing. And so was this team of musicians who had her crying in a Mexican hovel in broad daylight. She felt dizzy, as though she were slipping in and out of differing points of view.
    Get out of here, Bradley. This is too weird!
    "Acito isn't really my case," she stammered, backing toward the door. "You need to contact my co-worker, Estrella Benedict. She'll tell you what to do. Here's the number."
    Handing her own CPS business card to Chac, Bo pushed aside the doorway curtain and bolted into the alleyway. The old man in the basket was gone, and so was the Duroc sow. In the mile hike to the nearest paved street where she could catch a bus, Bo saw only a succession of crumbling walls that seemed to hide peculiar and incomprehensible dangers. She hoped if she looked straight ahead, whatever lay behind those baked adobe walls would ignore her as well.

Chapter Seven
Chi Pixab, the Place of Advice
    Madge Aldenhoven was characteristically sullen when Bo returned to the CPS offices at 3:00.
    "Your new case is on your desk, and where's Estrella?" she called from her office without looking up as Bo passed the door. Amid stacks of manila case files piled on the desk, three chairs, and the floor, the supervisor seemed dwarfed by paper. Bo couldn't help thinking of Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado." Of Madge Aldenhoven sealed forever in her office behind thick walls of case files, eventually becoming a cobwebby skeleton with three Bic pens stuck in its spun-sugar hair. The skeleton, Bo fantasized, would be found centuries in the future by archaeologists excavating San Diego after an earthquake separated the city from the continental U.S. The archaeologists would think Madge had been the priestess of a cult that worshipped paper.
    "I don't know, but I'm sure she'll be back soon." Bo smiled at Madge's door frame. "Why?"
    "Dr. LaMarche called an hour ago," Madge said into a box of tissues on her desk. "The Mexican baby poisoning was not accidental. Estrella needs to pick up those lab reports before filing the case."
    "I'll call St. Mary's and have them faxed over." Bo stated the obvious, turning the corner into her own office. Once inside, she pressed her head against the wall for a moment, picturing the little Indian baby in her mind. He was so strong and eloquent in his preverbal way. How could anyone deliberately hurt him?
    The news was sickening, but then so was most of the news useful to San Diego County's Child Protective Services. People sometimes murdered children, who could be an intolerable nuisance, or burden. But why Acito? And who? One of the paid caretakers in the little San Ysidro apartment? Bo thought it unlikely. Acito had been a source of desperately needed income to them, and besides, why would they then have taken him to a hospital?
    Chac said she'd visited Acito only this morning. Had Chris Joe accompanied her? Could the mother or the strange expatriate hillbilly have wanted a burdensome baby out of the way? Bo didn't like the picture framing itself in her mind. The picture San Diego's police would be sure to see as well. A struggling singer with a history of drug abuse, clawing her way to stardom in the Tijuana music scene. A talented young accompanist, angry at the world and devoted to Chac in a way that could easily become distorted. The police would assume that either one of them could have done it, Bo admitted. The thought made her teeth taste like