Strawgirl Read Free

strange. And that the smile and bright colors would make the strangeness friendly. Of course the thing is hideous, but the concept's sound. Young children, basically, are able to identify familiar/unfamiliar and friendly/unfriendly constructs. It's helpful to adorn the hospital with repetitions of a figure that's at once unfamiliar and friendly. Hence, Mabel!"
    Bo sneered dramatically at the Mabel smiling into her windshield and pulled the Franer case file from her briefcase. Samantha Alice Franer, it told her, was a three-and-a-half-year-old Caucasian female who had been brought to St. Mary's Hospital after her mother, Bonnie Corman Franer, had taken her to a local pediatrician. The pediatrician, Susan Ling, M.D., had phoned the police after arranging for an ambulance to transport Samantha from her office to St. Mary's. According to Susan Ling's report, Samantha Franer had suffered internal injuries consistent with a sexual assault perpetrated sometime the previous day. According to Susan Ling, those injuries were serious.
    Stuffing the case file back into a saddle-stitched cowhide briefcase whose brass clasp was the Mayan snake-head glyph for rain, Bo tugged down the cuffs of her black knit slacks and headed toward the hospital's lobby. A sound truck from local TV station KTUV was parked in front of the hospital's sliding glass doors.
    "Uh-oh ..." Bo breathed uneasily, and grabbed for the case file again. No TV news team worth its journalism credentials would sink to invading a hospital where children lay sick and in pain. Not unless the story were irresistible. And TV station "K-TOUGH," as it chose to be known, had built a reputation on scooping San Diego's most bizarre, or bloodthirsty, events.
    "A symbol of some sort has been painted on the child's lower abdomen in what appears to be yellow Magic Marker," Dr. Ling's report went on. "It is a strange face surrounded by spikes. This may or may not have any bearing on the child's injuries, which I do not hesitate to define as having resulted from rape."
    "Shit," Bo said flatly as the automatic doors opened with a whoosh. Dr. Ling, obviously new to San Diego County and its procedures for reporting child abuse, had phoned her report directly to the police instead of to the Child Abuse Hotline. In the systemic relay of the report to an assignment desk and then back out to detectives in the field, the information might have been carried on one of the standard police radio bands. Accessible to anyone with a short-wave radio who happened to be listening. And somebody had been listening. The sound truck made that evident.
    "It's somebody from Child Protective Services!" a voice noted from a cluster of people surrounding the lobby information desk. Bo watched a woman approaching her from the group. She was followed by an unshaven boy with stringy blond hair wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt and carrying a Minicam. The woman was still wearing the oversized ecru silk jacket she'd chosen for the morning workshop. Bo had hoped never to see the matching bleached lizard three-inch heels again. It was Dr. Devil, the sensationalist psychologist from L.A. who could find Satan-worshippers at any convenience store but clearly couldn't grasp the concept of cruelty-free footwear. A sound bite of the woman being gummed to death by geckos flashed across Bo's brain.
    "I'm afraid I've forgotten your name," Bo said, cheerfully jerking her elbow out of the woman's well-manicured grasp. "What on earth are you doing here at St. Mary's?"
    Besides skating on a child's pain right into your own personal spotlight?
    "Cynthia Ganage. Doctor Cynthia Ganage," the woman announced urgently. At close range Bo could see lipstick in two shades, skillfully applied with a brush, a dusting of blush over flawlessly creamy cheekbones, smallish hazel eyes set too close together but widened by artful application of gray eyeliner. The hammered hoop earrings were not brass, but gold. "As you know from my workshop this morning,"