In the parking lot, behind the wheel of the Honda, Bibi got her money’s worth from the quarters that earlier she’d fed to the meter. She spent a few minutes studying the photo of Ashley Bell, though she didn’t know why and didn’t see anything in the face that she hadn’t seen previously. No less than before, she felt a poignant kindredness and a compelling desire to give everything she had to the search. No, that was not quite right. She wasn’t compelled, wasn’t driven by some exterior force, not by any conventional motive that she could name. Rather, she was impelled to find the imprisoned girl, pressed forward by an urgent inner prompting, not by mere desire but by need, as though she had been born and had lived twenty-two years for one purpose, which was to spare Ashley Bell from whatever outrage her captors intended to perpetrate upon her.
She put aside the photograph, opened her laptop, and dared to go online for a brief monster hunt. She quickly found the story, a sensation at the time, when she had been only five and oblivious of what occurred beyond the sphere of her family. In those days, the Faulkners had lived farther down the coast, in Laguna Beach. Bibi already knew more than she cared to know about the savage details of Robert’s attack on his parents. She wanted photographs of him, and on different sites she located seven, six of them apparently provided to the authorities by people other than his father.
Two snapshots showed him at ages too young to be useful for her purpose, and in the other five, he was between fourteen and sixteen. A handsome boy, even striking, he stared directly into the camera, solemn in every instance except one, when he was fourteen and smiling broadly, posed against a backdrop of palm trees bracketing an ocean view. Bibi resisted the temptation to read wickedness in the tilt of his smile or derangement in the sheen and squint of his eyes; he looked like any other boy and, instead of a future murderer, could as easily have been a saint in the making.
The two photos taken closest to the night of the crime—in the first, he was fifteen, in the other sixteen—revealed that Robert had changed. Undeniably, his posture was more aggressive, and there seemed to be a challenge in his attitude. Bibi was not imagining an arrogance in his expression, almost a sneer. He wore his hair shorter than before, especially on the sides. He parted it on the right, as always, but more severely, so that white scalp showed like a chalk line. Combed to the left across his brow, the hair spilled down his temple in a familiar way, and after a moment she saw that he had styled it after Hitler’s haircut.
She had intended to send the best picture to her parents with a warning to be on the lookout for a dangerous man who resembled this young boy. But now, she realized, seventeen years would have changed Robert so much that a photo from his adolescence would be inadequate proof of his current appearance. Besides, Nancy and Murphy would want to know why he was dangerous, what threat he posed to her, what mess she had gotten into. If she answered their questions, they were more likely to be targeted than if she told them nothing.
Or were they?
On Balboa Boulevard, traffic cruising down-Peninsula toward the Wedge, one of the most famous and dangerous surfing spots on the planet, and traffic headed up-Peninsula roiled the insistent fog. White masses churned around the Honda, as if the world Bibi knew had dissolved, as if from the atomic soup of its diffusion, a new world was forming, one that would be hostile to her at every turn.
Robert Warren Faulkner, alias Birkenau Terezin, living under a more ordinary name as yet unknown, had threatened her mom and dad if she contacted them. He wanted to keep her isolated, the easier to deal with her when he found her. But she suspected that no matter what she did, Nancy and Murphy and Pogo and everyone she loved were already on Terezin’s termination list. Like the genocidal maniac whom he so admired, Terezin would want a final solution, eliminating not just Bibi but also all the people who cared about her enough to ask questions and pursue justice after her death.
Paxton Thorpe could be no help to her in the current crisis, and she didn’t for a moment fantasize about him riding to the rescue from some distant corner of the world. But she allowed herself to dwell on him for a few minutes because the beauty of the man—mind and heart and body—purged some of her anxiety, inflated her hope.
She started the car and pulled onto the street. She knew where she had to go next, but she didn’t have any idea what she would do when she got there. Solange St. Croix lived in Laguna Beach, which Bibi had known for years. But in searching for photographs of Kelsey Faulkner’s homicidal son, she had noticed that the professor’s house and the scene of the crime shared the same address.