The photograph of Ashley Bell lay on the passenger seat. Rather than just turn it facedown, she rolled it loosely to make it fit in the glove compartment.
When she got out of the car, she couldn’t see the helicopter, but she could hear it in the distance. She needed only a three-second listen to be certain that it was approaching. Glancing at her watch, she saw they had required barely five minutes to determine that their quarry was not aboard the landscaper’s truck and that they had been bamboozled. Coming at once in this direction instead of buzzing off on a random route, they must be tracking another transponder signal in addition to the one emitted by the laptop.
St. Croix’s purse. Nothing left in it had been of interest to Bibi, but perhaps it contained a transponder; maybe the professor had been a subject of interest to them, in which case anything she carried, including the purse itself, might have been switched out with a wired version.
Remarkable, how smoothly the butter of paranoia spread across the bread of life.
Bibi snatched St. Croix’s purse out of the car, eager to be rid of it. At the nearest entrance to the open-air part of the mall, a FedEx driver transferred packages from the back of his truck to the equivalent of a laundry cart, for delivery to various stores. As Bibi passed, his attention was on the cargo in the vehicle. She shoved the handbag out of sight between the boxes in the cart, and she kept moving.
When the noise made by the helicopter abruptly spiked, she glanced back and saw it a couple hundred yards to the northeast, so low that it passed between two of the office towers and hotels that ringed the immense retail island at the heart of the complex. In the open, crossing Newport Center Drive toward the mall, the aircraft began to drift to port, to starboard, to port, as if the searchers aboard were trying to get a final fix on whatever signal they were tracking.
She could see no name or corporate logo on the fuselage, only a registration number on the engine cowling. Whoever they might be, either they were law-enforcement authorities exempt from air-traffic regulations or they were people of such wealth and influence that they felt immune from prosecution.
Having locked his truck, the FedEx driver pushed the cart toward Bibi, whistling a happy tune. Reaching into her purse, she wondered if she should get rid of the electronic key with the wasp encased in the Lucite fob. Even as small as it was, perhaps it, not the purse, emitted the signal that drew the helicopter toward her. Everything could be miniaturized these days. She was loath to throw it away unnecessarily. It meant something. A clue. A key. Eventually she might need it. The deliveryman rolled the cart past her, into the labyrinth of radiating shop-lined avenues where a few thousand people busied from store to store.
She kept the key, zippered her purse shut, and set off in a different direction from that taken by the FedEx guy. The chopper, racketing low over the mall, had a distinctly wasplike quality.
In addition to the department stores that were integrated into the acres of single-story shops, Fashion Island offered a three-story indoor mall, Atrium Court, where the large Barnes & Noble outlet was located. Brooding over a few things that Chubb Coy had said after shooting Dr. St. Croix, Bibi purchased three collections of stories by Flannery O’Connor, Thornton Wilder, and Jack London.
While searching for the London, she shared the aisle with two teenage girls. One was of Asian extraction, with thick, silky black hair and eyes as large as those of a child in a Keane painting; the other was a blonde, wearing eyeglasses with red-plastic frames; both were leggy, as physically awkward as they were attractive. She could not help but hear their conversation, which after a while took an ominous turn.
“What about this one?”
“The movie sucked.”
“Movies usually suck.”
“I like John Green.”
“But his movie sucked.”
“It wasn’t his fault. Hollywood cooked it with crap.”
“Here. What about Alice Hoffman?”
“I get off on Alice Hoffman.”
“Everybody likes Alice Hoffman, except the robots-and-aliens digit-head losers.”
“My sister’s slaving through Herman Melville in college. She says it’s like passing a kidney stone.”
“She ever pass a kidney stone?”
“She is a kidney stone. So who do you think they are?”
“The men in black? Maybe the president’s going shopping.”
“These aren’t cop guys. They’re butthole spiders.”
“So is something bad going down?”
“No. They’re not shoot-and-shout-Allah types. What about Salinger?”
“Holden Caulfield is such a babbling depressive.”
“He’s not a depressive. He’s a screwed-up child of privilege. Anyway, you’re sometimes a depressive.”
“I’m not sometimes a depressive. I’m sometimes a realist. So if they aren’t going to kill everyone for God, what’re they doing?”
“They’re looking for somebody.”
“Who?”