The Dollmaker's Daughters (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Five) by Abigail Padgett Read Free Book Online Page A

transported to a hospital now! The shock may have brought on—"
    "Oh, jeez," the chunky, bespectacled cop murmured as his rosy cheeks turned pale. "This is a crime scene; witnesses have to remain for interrogation. But she's going to have a baby?”
    "Well, she's not going to have a chrysanthemum," Bo replied, noticing that one of the cop's lug-soled boots stood in a pool of darkening blood. "And we walked here, so we'll need a squad car to transport her."
    "Lady, I can't just order that. You'll have to call an ambulance. We're not running a taxi service here. We've got a homicide to investigate."
    Bo looked at his name tag. wm. beader , it said. No rank. Meaning Bill Beader was a rookie working out of the storefront SDPD Community Relations Office across Linda Vista Road. That's how he'd gotten there so fast.
    "Beader," Bo intoned, "you're looking at either a commendation for close cooperation with Child Protective Services or a write-up for failing to come to the aid of another law- enforcement officer in distress. Either one will stay in your record forever, but that second one will chain your career to a desk because no cop in the world will work on the streets with a guy who puts procedure before helping one of his own. You choose."
    "Get her in the car," he sighed, gesturing to the black and white at the curb. "I'll drive her myself as soon as the homicide guys get here."
    Bo cocked an ear at the sound of sirens howling up Linda Vista Road.
    "They're here," she noted. "Es, what hospital?"
    "Mercy," Estrella answered, her face pale. "Bo, I think this might be for real!"
    "Oh, jeez," Bo and the young cop breathed in unison, then helped Estrella down the steps and through the crowd to the squad car.
    "Lights and sirens," Bo insisted from the steel-caged back seat.
    "No kidding," Bill Beader replied, and took off as if vampires were at his back.
     
    Chapter 4
     
    On the tarmac at San Diego's Lindbergh Field, an American Airlines commuter flight from Los Angeles International Airport concluded its thirty-minute low-altitude cruise just off the California shoreline. The passengers, mostly tourists and businesspeople, exited the plane through the jetway. Within three minutes none could have described the color of the plane's upholstery or remembered the row in which they'd sat. None noticed how closely the flight crew watched them deboard. And none knew that the ground crew unloading baggage below was waiting for one of two coded messages: "Move before unloading cadaver" or "Wait fifteen minutes, unload cadaver at this gate." If procedures went smoothly, as they did at hundreds of airports every day, the passengers would never know that they had flown in the company of a dead body.
    Optimally, the plane would be moved to another gate for the unloading of the unobtrusive but carefully secured cardboard box. That way if a passenger from the flight remained in the gate area and happened to glimpse the unloading through a window, he or she would assume the body had been on a different plane. Nothing the airlines industry tried had succeeded in persuading baggage handlers to treat these necessary shipments as they wou ld treat any other parcel. Some thing in the strong, young people employed at this vigorous work seemed to insist on respectful ritual. They would shoulder the box as if it were actually a coffin, go to extraordinary lengths to pad and brace it on the transport trailer, remove their caps, make religious gestures, even pray over it. And if these behaviors were witnessed by a passenger who'd just flown on that plane, there could be trouble. Because even the most rational people, the industry had learned, are made uncomfortable by confinement in an enclosed space with the dead. And this discomfort may find expression retroactively in diminished ticket sales. It was a long-standing industry rule that passengers must never know the nature of certain cargo with which they might be traveling.
    Today the plane was not