“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.