That she had any compassion at all for St. Croix was remarkable, considering that, when the woman fell, a knife slipped from her sleeve. A switchblade, judging by the operative button on the handle.
The suppressed sound of the two shots did not crash wall to wall, but was like quick words whispered in some incomprehensible language, absorbed without echo by the layered fabrics and the plush upholstery of the Victorian parlor. Even in that muffled moment, as Dr. St. Croix changed from person to remains, Chubb Coy lowered his weapon, thereby making it clear that he would not shoot Bibi, though he did not holster the gun.
“What the hell?” she said, letting the words out in a rush of pent-up breath. “Why?”
Coy said, “Such rage. The foolish woman lost control of herself. That babbling. Tongue so loose it might have fallen out of her mouth. I’ve got interests to protect.”
“What interests? She was one of you. You had breakfast with her this morning.”
Those blue-flecked steel-gray eyes, which previously were as sharp as scalpels, carving in search of lies to reveal them like tumors, were now blunt bulkheads keeping secret all thoughts that lay behind them. “You don’t understand the situation, Miss Blair. There are many factions in this. Some factions may be allied with others now and then, but we aren’t all on the same side. This is a high-stakes game, and in a high-stakes game, most people are out for themselves.”
“What game?” Bibi demanded. “What’s all this about? Where is Ashley Bell? What are they going to do to her?”
His round and amiable face produced an infuriatingly charming smile. “You don’t need to know.”
“I do. I need to know. People want to kill me.”
“And they will,” he assured her. “To keep the secret, they will kill you six ways at once.”
“What secret?”
He only smiled.
When she aimed the pistol at him, he continued to smile—and put away his weapon. “You don’t have what it takes to kill a man in cold blood.”
“I do. I will.”
He shook his head. “Cop intuition. Anyway, I’d rather die than share anything with you.”
Bibi lowered the pistol. She said, “Ashley is just a child. Twelve? Thirteen? Why does she have to die?”
He shrugged. “Why does anyone? Some say we’ll never know, that to the gods we’re like the flies that boys kill on a summer day.”
She hated him for his studied indifference. “What kind of bastard are you?”
That smile again. “Any kind you want me to be, Miss Blair.”
When he started to turn away from her, she said, “Are you with him, with Terezin?”
His blunt eyes sharpened briefly as he turned to her once more. “That vicious fascist creep and his crypto-Nazi cult? Miss Blair, you almost make me want to kill you for that suggestion. I despise him.”
“Well, then, the enemy of your enemy—”
“Is still my enemy. Accept the inevitable, girl. You’re easy prey. As a boy, Terezin was a dog, and now he has gone back to the wild. He’s a wolf now, like and yet unlike all other wolves, always running at the head of the pack. He dreams of turning the world backward, of a younger world, which is the world of the pack. They’ll drag you down sooner than later. You think it’s a cult, and it is, but it’s bigger than you think. There are a lot of these cockroaches, and they have resources.”
He walked out of the Victorian suite. She started after him, but then stopped, halted by a suspicion that at some point in the past few minutes, he had given her a clue that she had missed, had left for her the frayed end of a thread that, if she were to wind it on a spool, would unravel the mystery in which she found herself, revealing every warp and weft of this intricately woven conspiracy. She stood there in the company of the corpse, in the colorful riot of Victoriana, looking but perhaps not seeing, listening in memory to their conversation but perhaps not hearing.
If Chubb Coy had left a thread for her, a clue, Bibi could not find it in the third-floor parlor or remember their conversation vividly enough to tweeze out that frayed end. Baffled, exasperated with herself, she pocketed Dr. St. Croix’s switchblade. She snatched up a decorative pillow from the sofa, unzipped the fringed cover, stripped it off, and slipped it over her right hand as if it were a glove. As she made her way down through the house, she tried to recall everything that she had touched, and she paused to wipe each item clean of any fingerprints she might have left.
If she was charged with the murder of Solange St. Croix, that would bring an end to her search for Ashley Bell as certainly as if Terezin murdered her. And if it happened that the arresting officer was one of the Wrong People, he might claim that she had resisted arrest, whether she had or not, justifying a bullet in the head.
She wondered what she would be like if she got through this alive. Paranoia was now in her blood, like a viral infection, and there might not be a cure for it. She could envision herself in the grip of agoraphobia and social phobia, afraid of open spaces and of people, unable to leave her apartment, living behind a locked door and blinds closed tight.
“Screw that,” she said as she crossed the living room.
In the kitchen, on the island, stood a large designer purse that had not been there when Bibi had first entered the house. It must be St. Croix’s, left when the woman came through the ruined door from the garage. Whatever else might be said about the professor, no one could deny that she had guts, seeking out the intruder on her own, although she had most likely somehow known the identity of her quarry. Bibi took the purse and continued wiping away fingerprints into the garage, where the dead woman’s Mercedes still ticked and pinged as the engine cooled.
There she paused to open St. Croix’s handbag, in which she found, as expected, a smartphone. She used it to call her father’s cell number, which wouldn’t compromise her disposable model if the Wrong People were monitoring Murphy’s phone traffic.
He answered on the second ring. “You got Murph.”
“Hi, Daddy.”
“Bibi! We’ve been trying to reach you all morning.”
“I’ve been dodging calls.”
“Dodging even your own parents? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong. I’m fine.”
“Don’t flow me a load of feel-good.”
“Relax, old man. It’s just that I was dying two days ago, and I need a little me time to get a handle on that.”
“Tell me! All morning, I’m one minute grinning like a dog and the next minute all verklempt.”
Hearing the strong emotion in his voice, Bibi said, “Don’t get verklempt on me, Dad.”
“I just love you so much, honey.”
“I love you, too. But, you know, I want to keep this quick. I’m going down the coast a little, find a cool place to hang out for a couple days.”
“A little time to chill.”
“Exactly. Maybe Carlsbad. Or La Jolla. I’ll let you know when I have a motel. I’m sorry I didn’t bring back Mom’s BMW this morning.”
“That’s when we started to worry. But don’t you worry, kiddo. We’ll hustle over there and fetch it ourselves. Hey, last night, how was Calida?”
“Memorable,” Bibi said. “We’ll talk about it in a couple days, when I see you.”
She almost asked about the silver bowl and lettered tiles in his office, about the packet of needles and the white-cotton rag with the bloodstains. But she didn’t know where that question would lead, and she didn’t want to know. She wouldn’t doubt her parents. Couldn’t. In times as turbulent as these, but also in the seeming humdrum of daily life, which always proved to be more meaningful and consequential in retrospect, each of us needed to rely on people of constant character and truths that were immutable. She knew her parents’ weaknesses, which were minor and easily forgiven, and she believed, based on long experience, that they were as reliable as anything in this world. If she ever discovered that they were not what they seemed, she would be devastated, and the word heartbroken, m
ade trite by overuse, would have fresh and poignant meaning for her.
“Tell Mom I love her.”
“She’ll worry anyway. So will I.”
“I’m walkin’ the board, Dad.”
“If you say so. Nobody walks it better.”
“Okay, then. Just remember that. Bye.”
She hung up and was wiping the phone clean when it rang. She took the call but didn’t say anything.
Terezin evidently now maintained a round-the-clock monitored tap on Murphy’s cell. He said, “Ah, there you are, lovely Bibi.”
Hoping to unsettle the arrogant bastard just a little, she said, “Hello, Bobby.”
“So the girl detective has made some progress. You must have visited my father. Once I’m done with you, perhaps I’ll visit yours.”
Crossing to the door that earlier she had kicked open, she said, “You’re thirty-three, but you’ve never grown up. Your taunting is childish. Tedious.”
“You want tedious, read your novel. I just did. It’s a toss-up which needs burning the most—that book or its author. Anyway, day after tomorrow, I’ll be thirty-four. I promise to be all grown up then. Too bad you can’t come to the party. Ashley will be there. My guest of honor. It’ll be the last chance you’ll have to find her alive. It all begins again. The little Jewess’s role is historic.”
She thought he was trying to keep her talking, to get a GPS fix on the phone, but he terminated the call. Maybe he already knew where to find her.
Bibi wiped the phone clean once more and threw it across the garage.
Although it might be a sunny March day inland, the fog would not relent along the coast. As noon approached and the lowering element failed to lift, there was every reason to expect that it would remain throughout the afternoon.
In the Honda, Bibi tossed the professor’s handbag and decorative pillow cover on the passenger seat. She fished her keys from a pocket of her blazer and started the engine.
The immediacy with which Terezin had traced and called back the professor’s cell number alarmed Bibi. Maybe Homeland Security could do that trick. But how wired into the government security apparatus could this vicious mother-killer be? His quickness seemed more supernatural than techno-savvy.
She didn’t think he could drop a couple of assassins into the neighborhood by drone or circus cannon as fast as he had placed the call. But she remembered what Chubb Coy had said: There are a lot of these cockroaches, and they have resources. She wanted out of there yesterday.
She drove uphill, under a canopy of tree limbs, and on the left-hand sidewalk, near the corner, she spotted a man walking a dog. A tall man in a hoodie. Walking a golden retriever. Bibi almost failed to see them in the fog, a ghostly pair, hardly more substantial than an apparition, and then they turned the corner, out of sight.
With the thick mist and the chill in the air, a hoodie made sense. Dozens of people would be wearing hoodies to walk their dogs in this weather. And a golden retriever wasn’t unusual. This wasn’t the guy from the hospital the night before last. Couldn’t be. Ridiculous.
At the intersection, she didn’t brake for the stop sign, wheeled left around the corner, and scanned the street. More trees. Parked cars and SUVs and light trucks. There, on the right-hand sidewalk, man and dog moved away through the earthbound clouds, less real now than they’d been when she had first glimpsed them. If this was the night visitor at the hospital, he couldn’t be on the same side of the fence as Terezin. This man had wanted her to live, not die.
She raced forward, and from the right-hand curb, a pickup pulled into traffic. Bibi stamped on the brake pedal and blew the horn, and the Honda yelped and shuddered, and the other driver blew his horn longer than she had, a back-at-you statement. By the time that the pickup jockey reached the next intersection and turned downhill, she had lost track of the man with the dog.
Then she saw them half a block uphill, on the farther side of the street, passing through an opening in a low stone wall, into a park. By the time she drove up there and curbed the Honda in a no-parking zone, the duo had melted into the mist among the cascading branches of a grove of California pepper trees.
As parks went, this wasn’t a sprawling affair, not a destination for tourists, but a modest neighborhood amenity, maybe ten acres that encompassed a walk through the pepper woods, a children’s playground with spiral slide and a safety-first fun-free plastic-eyesore version of a jungle gym, as well as a big open grassy area where dogs could chase Frisbees and tennis balls. At the north end, the ground rolled gently into a canyon, and along that crest were positioned picnic tables and two small gazebos that offered a vista on sunnier days.
The man and dog were to be found in none of those places, and in fact she encountered no one else, either. Into the shifting curtains of mist, she called out, “Hello” and “You, sir, with the beautiful dog,” but no one replied.
The canyon was deep, and the fog appeared to condense in its depths, so that she could not see the bottom or even a significant distance down the slope. The abyss was rugged, and the way eventually grew steep, a kingdom of snakes and bobcats and coyotes into which no sensible person would venture blindly.
In that eeriness of fog-bearded trees and deserted gazebos and abandoned playground equipment, Bibi began to feel that she was being watched. Not only watched, but also manipulated, drawn forward. She was alone, far from the Honda. Although she had the pistol in her shoulder rig, she no longer felt safe.
As she headed back toward the street, a chill like the tip of an icy finger traced her spine from the small of her back to the nape of her neck. She broke into a run, certain that someone or something must be on her heels. When she cleared the opening in the low stone wall and saw Pogo’s aged Honda, she halted and pivoted, tensed for a confrontation. No one pursued her.
She’d always before been able to trust her intuition. Maybe that was another difference about this new reality, this world-gone-mad.
No sooner had this thought troubled her than she was given good reason to trust herself once more. Deep in the park, near the limits of visibility that the fog imposed, the man in the hoodie manifested out of the cold white blear, the leashed dog slightly ahead of him. They faded away and, after several seconds, returned to existence, strolling leisurely among the pepper trees.
The dog-walker had to have heard her seeking him. She almost called out again, but restrained the impulse. Even if this was the man at the hospital, she suddenly knew—without understanding from where this perception came—knew in mind and heart, in blood and bones, that by coming face-to-face with this man in the pepper woods, she would be destroyed. He might not be her enemy, but in some way he was nevertheless a threat to her. An existential dread overcame Bibi, so that she could not for a moment draw breath. Then she got into the car, shut the door, and drove away from there with no destination in mind, drove until she felt…not safe, but safer.
In rebellion against the claustrophobic fog, which had begun to cloud her thoughts almost as effectively as it shrouded the seaside communities, Bibi drove north to Newport Coast Drive and a couple of miles inland to a shopping center bathed in sunshine. She parked in a quiet corner of the lot, in the feathery shade of nonbearing olive trees, as far as possible from the busy Pavilions market.
If Chubb Coy and the dead professor had known what car Bibi was driving, they might have shared that information with others, and she might soon need new transportation. Lacking a GPS, the Honda could not be easily tracked wherever it went. Her enemies would have to be lucky to spot it in the hustle-bustle of Orange County’s millions, but they seemed to have a lot of luck.
According to Coy, arrayed against her were not merely Terezin and his large cult; there were other “factions.” She didn’t know what to make of that information. Only a day ago, had anyone babbled about a secret occult-powered fascist conspiracy, Bibi would have regarded them as citizens of Cuckoo City. Now she was being asked to fold into that idea the existence of other conspirators with
different goals; Chubb Coy was adamantly not a fascist. Could it really be true that, per Shakespeare, our world in all its complexity was a stage and all its people merely players, and at the same time, per H. P. Lovecraft, that below the main stage were unknown others on which different dramas played out, secretly affecting the lives of everyone upstairs?
She didn’t want to believe that. Life was tenuous enough without having to worry about what trolls and molochs might be scheming in the basement. Yet it seemed that, to find Ashley Bell and to hope to survive the search, she needed to proceed as if this paranoid vision of the world was indisputable.
Indeed, as she watched people coming and going from Pavilions and the other stores, she quickly realized that she could adapt to this new “reality” more easily than her parents ever would. Their surrender to fate—it’ll be what it’ll be—encouraged no serious pondering of cause and effect; by laying everything at the doorstep of fate, you were reducing the intellect from the status of a world-changing tool to that of a toy with which to invent amusements that would soften the world’s sharp edges. Bibi liked the sharp edges. They kept her alert. They made her think harder. They added interest to life.
By contrast, there wasn’t much of interest in Dr. St. Croix’s roomy handbag. Bibi hoped to find it crammed full of evidence of criminal acts and nefarious intentions, all of it pointing to the whereabouts of Ashley Bell. But aside from the usual junk, there were only three items of interest.
The first was an envelope containing five thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills. Chances were, this was either money that the professor had been paid under the table or a payment she was prepared to make to someone else. In either case, it was more likely to be related to some dirty business than to a legal transaction.