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

moved. The box from a Los Angeles mortician was unloaded and transported without notice to the unmarked van of a San Diego mortician, parked at an assigned space inside the baggage area. The baggage crew, having waited uneasily the fifteen minutes presumed necessary to clear the gate area of deboarding passengers, were as usual relieved when the mortician's van joined the stream of outgoing airport traffic. A sad and vaguely scary responsibility was out of their hands.
    Twenty minutes later the van's driver, also an embalmer and cosmetologist, pushed a remote control and backed into the garage of a mid-city mortuary. Then he quickly closed the garage door behind him. He'd worked for a number of these establishments in his sixty years. It was always important to keep the doors closed.
    After sliding the box from the van onto a gurney, he wheeled it into the cold room without turning on the light, set the brake on the gurney, and went out back for a smoke. The body had been embalmed in Los Angeles, so there was nothing much to do except the clothes and makeup. And that had to wait until the family or whoever was responsible came over with clothes and a picture or description he could use. He enjoyed the work and knew he was good at it, even though it wasn't something people liked to hear about.
    Reentering the garage through a side door, he checked the orders pinned to a cork bulletin board by the mortuary's owner/director, who only came in for the big funerals. Most of the time the o wner played golf with a cell phone on his belt for business calls.
    “ Private service to be held tomorrow noon. Economy casket. No public announcements, no press of any kind. All inquiries must be referred to me. Do not confirm identity of deceased to press or any outside inquiry. Expenses to be covered by private individuals Aldenhoven and Man deer. Burial immediately after service in Mt. Hope Cemetery. Aldenhoven will be by after five with clothes. ”
    The driver grinned happily. Plenty of time to catch a matinee of that new sci-fi movie, the one about mutant insects from the future coming through computers. He'd be back well before five.
    Twenty miles from the mortuary Daniel Man Deer stood in a narrow canyon on the south face of Fortuna Mountain, staring at the dried excrement of a large animal. The scat contained the usual mouse fur as well as the longer and more substantial fur of a mule deer. He knew that the deer carcass was probably somewhere north of Highway 52 on the vast expanse of land still owned by the military, off limits to human animals. But not, he judged from the segmented shape of the scat, to the feline variety. The scat had been left in the middle of a "corridor" he'd suspected was the path of a bobcat, and now he knew. The next task would be planning a method for keeping the cat alive.
    Through prescription sunglasses Man Deer scanned the ground for the sheen of old metal that might indicate the presence of unexploded ordnance. The park had been used as a weapons training area during World War II, then neglected by the military for a half century. Now a fifty-three-hundred-acre regional park only eight miles from bustling downtown San Diego, the wild gorges rising from the San Diego River still held the threat of explosives manufactured to stop Hitler's Reich. Seeing nothing suspici ous, he eased his muscular six- foot-two-inch frame to the ground and thought about death. About the dead.
    In nature, he acknowledged, death demanded nothing beyond itself. The mule deer had undoubtedly been ill, injured, or old, and quickly killed, probably by coyotes. The presence of the deer's pelt in the bobcat's waste indicated that the cat had not been the first to feed on the carcass. The first predators invariably claimed the protein-rich liver and other internal organs, leaving the rest for latecomers. The deer had simply taken its place in the food chain without prolonged suffering or unnecessary trauma.
    But human death was another