As she was putting the plastic container in her tote bag, the TV came on. The screen filled with the face of Anabel Claridge, at seventy-five still beautiful. An imperious beauty. High cheekbones, chiseled features. Hair thick and glossy, faded from black to a lustrous silver rather than white. Her eyes were as bright blue as Jane’s, as blue as Petra Quist’s eyes and the eyes of Simon’s wives, a more fierce blue perhaps, but lacking any glint of madness.
Hendrickson stood before the TV, zombified, as Jane had left him. He had apparently inserted another DVD.
But then Anabel said, “Booth, what are you doing there? What stupid thing have you allowed to happen?”
“I’m sorry, Mother. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. She made me do it.”
Anabel was broadcasting live, perhaps via Skype. Behind her a window, beyond the window a palm tree. The estate in La Jolla.
In the grip of morbid fascination, Jane had taken a couple steps away from the desk and had evidently come into the range of the camera built into the TV.
The matriarch’s eyes turned to her. “My son isn’t a weakling like his worthless father. My son is strong. How did you break him so fast?”
Evidently, when Hendrickson accessed the secret space behind the medicine cabinet, he’d triggered an alarm that was phoned not to the police, but to Anabel in faraway La Jolla.
The woman’s gaze shifted from Jane to her son. “Booth, take no chances. Big firepower. Kill her.”
He turned away from the TV, from Jane, and started across the room toward the closet door.
Jane said, “Booth, play Manchurian with me.”
The gasp of shock from Anabel was proof enough that no one had known Jane had acquired ampules of the control mechanism when she’d been in Bertold Shenneck’s house in Napa Valley, weeks earlier.
“Play Manchurian with me,” Jane repeated.
Again he failed to respond as he worked the lever handle on the closet door.
Jane drew her Heckler and fired twice as he darted into the closet, the first round drilling the jamb and showering him with splinters, the second passing through the diminishing gap between the jamb and the closing door, which slammed shut.
“You ignorant skank.” Anabel’s hatred was in fact rancor, the rancidity of mind and heart evolved from cherished malignity that had been long souring, festering, now virulent and implacable. Her venomous rancor had the power to transmogrify her face from that of an elegantly aging grande dame out of the pages of Town & Country into a grotesque countenance both terrifying and beautiful, as might be the face of a fallen angel enraptured by the power to do evil. “You foolish little twat. Your control is layered over the control that I injected a month ago. Mine rules over yours. He’s mine, and he always will be.”
No wonder he had been disintegrating psychologically. One web was woven across the other, his skull crowded with nanostructures, his free will long extinguished.
Big firepower. He was getting a fully automatic weapon, maybe an automatic shotgun with an extended magazine.
Anabel in distant La Jolla was a threat for another day. Booth was now.
One way out.
Jane holstered the pistol, grabbed the tote, and rushed to the door by which they had entered.
As she yanked open the steel slab, a weapon spoke repeatedly inside the closet. A volley of high-powered rounds drilled the door, cracked and shrieked into furniture behind her.
She crossed the threshold, snatched her flashlight from the floor where she had left it, switched it on, and hurried up a ramp of stone into a higher chamber. The steel door closed with a crash that echoed dire warnings through this nautilus of stone.
14
Wearing sunglasses against the nuclear glare of the desert sun, cruising the town, such as it is, in the VelociRaptor, looking for he knows not what, bringing to bear all the pathetic intellectual faculties he possesses and what little knowledge Princeton will have bothered to impart, Dubose drives.
Riding shotgun, wearing sunglasses, more concerned about their situation than he cares to admit, Carter Jergen says, “We never did get lunch. Where should we have dinner? At the quaint Mexican bar and grill, the taco house, a vending machine at some tacky motel?”
“If he sold it to someone who lived in town,” Dubose says, “then he would have seen the Honda more than twice over the years.”
“Possibly,” Jergen acknowledges.
“Definitely. Someone local bought it, but not someone in town. Someone willing and able to pay a boatload of money to avoid having a car registered in his name.”
“I wouldn’t call sixty thousand a boatload.”
“It was a boatload to Fennel Martin.”
“We never did ask him what’s with the name Fennel.”
“I did. While you were putting Ginger in the toilet.”
Jergen winced. “Bathroom.”
“His mother, she’s big into herbal medicine, says eat enough fennel every day, you add twenty years to the average lifespan, so she doesn’t just feed it to him, she names him for it.”
“How old is his mother?”
“She died when she was thirty-two. What we’re going to do is we’re going to cruise around the valley while we have a few hours of light, have a look.”
“Look for what?”
“Something. Anything. You got an iPhone picture of the Honda?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll show it to some people we see here and there. Maybe one of them will know it. For a Honda, it’s a peculiar shade of green.”
This is too much for Jergen, this claim of Sherlockian mastery of esoteric detail. “You know twelve-year-old Honda colors?”
“I love Hondas. My first car was a Honda.”
Dubose still seems as if he stepped out of a comic book, but the difference this time is that Carter Jergen is beginning to feel as though he’s losing substance from association with this hulk and will wind up, himself, like a fumbling detective in some Saturday-morning TV cartoon show.
15
In the reeling and seesawing beam, the smooth wet flowstone seeming to throb, like the peristalsis of some monstrous esophagus trying to swallow her as she struggled upward…Climbing open-mouthed to minimize the gasp and wheeze of respiration, listening intently for sounds of pursuit, which will precede the gunfire…
Out of the cave that adjoined the room where the face of Anabel floated on the LED screen, through the first of the caverns, Jane’s quick footsteps were soft on dry stone, squelching on the wet. She came next into the chamber where, on both sides, the skeletons of children were heaped in a timeless testament to hate and cruelty. The path through that boneyard of innocents brought her to a lich-gate formed from slabs of stone tumbled in one or more ancient quakes. Three passages provided a choice. As she took the one marked by a white arrow of paint, from below came the thunder of the steel door slamming shut, doomful echoes ringing off the stone to all sides of her.
He was in the crooked staircase and climbing.
Bite on the fear. There was a boy to live for.
Pressing forward, she passed through a corridor of sweating stone, droplets of water falling cold on her face, and in the next cavern arrived at a plank that bridged a fissure perhaps more than seven feet wide. When she reached the farther side of the bridge, she put her tote down and probed the cleft with her light. It was about thirty feet deep, with sloped walls that would allow a swift and safe descent of the farther side and a clamberous ascent of this nearer face. He would need a few minutes to transit that territory, precious time in which she could get a safer distance ahead of him.
She put the flashlight on the floor, the beam fanning across the stone to the crude bridge. She knelt and lifted her end of the plank out of the notch in which it rested, and pulled hard, dragging it from the other notch on the farther side. The heavy length of wood slipped from her hands, clattering into the cleft, knocking leaden-bell sounds from the walls of stone.