Carrying the photograph in her left hand, keeping her right free to reach beneath her blazer to the pistol, Bibi descended the stairs through a stillness that no tread disrupted. She passed also through a lens of morning gold admitted by a skylight, in which particles of dust not evident elsewhere were revealed revolving around one another, as though she had been given a glimpse of the otherwise invisible atomic structure of the world.
The ground-floor rooms were without eccentricity, furnished as normally as those in any house. But when she got to the kitchen, she found the aftermath of a visit by the Wrong People. The dinette table had been jammed into one corner; the chairs stood upon it. A heavy-duty white-plastic tarp, fixed to the floor with blue painter’s tape, protected the glazed Mexican tiles. A few stained rags had been left on the tarp; but there was not much blood. Apparently, they killed her in such a way as to avoid a mess, possibly by strangulation. Then the amputations had been performed postmortem, both to minimize the need for cleanup and to ensure there would be no shrill screams to alarm the neighbors. The body had been removed, perhaps in the Range Rover and for disposal, but the ten fingers, each sporting a flashy ring, were on a counter near the refrigerator, lined up neatly on a plate, as if they were petits fours to be served with afternoon tea.
Human cruelty could disgust Bibi, but not shock her. She wasted no time reeling from the hideous sight or wondering for what purpose the fingers had been kept. She understood at once the urgent message the scene conveyed: The cleanup was not finished; either those who had left in the Range Rover would return or another crew would soon arrive to complete the job.
As she started across the kitchen, she heard a vehicle in the driveway and the muffled clatter of the rising garage door.
When she heard the roll-up door rising in the garage, Bibi reached under her blazer, to the holstered pistol, wondering if she would be able to get the drop on whoever might be coming, disarm and restrain and interrogate them. If there was only one of them, the answer was probably not. If two, the answer was definitely not. If more than two, they would butcher her into more pieces than they evidently had rendered Calida. Courage and steadfastness were not enough when you were up against a crew of sociopaths and you weighed 110 pounds on a fat day and your gun had only a ten-round magazine and you weren’t self-deluded. She didn’t hesitate even long enough for the garage door to finish its ascent, fled the kitchen, went directly to the living room and out the front door.
She stayed away from the east end of the porch, where the driveway led past the house to the garage. Avoiding the steps as well, she hurried to the west end of the porch, vaulted over the railing, and landed on her feet. She raced across the front lawn, across the street, and took refuge in Pogo’s Honda, in the deep shadows under the live oak.
She put the photograph of Ashley on the dashboard and extracted her purse from under the driver’s seat. If she could sound genuinely horrified and panicked, which shouldn’t be a problem, a call to 911 might bring the police to Calida’s house while someone remained there to be arrested. Bloody rags. Severed fingers. Murder. If that wasn’t enough to bring out Costa Mesa’s finest, they must be busy filming a reality-TV show. Only as she zippered open the handbag did she recall that she no longer had her phone. She had abandoned it—and its GPS—with her Explorer, the previous night.
If she got out of the car and screamed, trying to rouse the neighbors, she would accomplish nothing except to alert the murderers to her presence and provide them an opportunity to see what she was driving these days. She sat stewing in frustration for a minute or two, but she gained nothing from that, either. When she drove away, she hung a U-turn, heading west, to avoid passing the house.
Instead of sustaining her, a half pint of ice cream before dawn had led to a sugar crash. She went directly to a Norm’s restaurant, the ultimate working man’s eatery, because the food was pretty good and reliable, but also because she had a hunch that the Wrong People wouldn’t be seen in a Norm’s even if they were starving to death and it was the last source of nourishment on the planet. During their short telephone conversation, Birkenau—“Call me Birk”—Terezin had sounded like a snob and a narcissist. His associates were likely to be of the same cloth; power-trippers put a low value on humility. When your enemies were elitist snarky boys, one way you could go off the grid was to eat at Norm’s and buy your clothes at Kmart.
The hostess put her in a small booth at the back of the room, and Bibi chose to sit facing away from most of the other customers. More than food, she wanted coffee. Her thoughts were fuzzy from too little sleep and too much weirdness. She needed to clear her head. The pleasant and efficient waitress brought a second cup of strong black brew with Bibi’s order of fried eggs, bacon, and hash browns, which promised to grease her thought processes for hours.