Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(45)

A few minutes later, on a residential street lined with massive old sycamores gone leafless at winter’s end, she parked at the curb to think. She turned off the headlights but not the engine, because she felt safer if she remained able to rocket away from the curb at an instant’s notice.

Think. Since everything had gone screwy in her apartment, she had been reacting with animal emotion to events, instead of with her usual calm and consideration. She had been playing by their rules, the Silly-Putty rules of crazy people. Now she realized that by doing so, she had contributed to the momentum of the insanity. Think. The unreal and flat-out seemingly impossible things that had happened would have logical explanations if she thought about them enough, and the threats that seemed to be rising all around her would then either diminish or even evaporate altogether. Think.

Her phone rang. The caller ID indicated that Bibi was phoning herself. So they were mocking her. Clever bastards. Whatever else the Wrong People might be, they were apparently techno wizards.

She answered with minimal commitment. “Yeah?”

A man with a silken, subtly seductive voice said, “Hello, Bibi. Have you found Ashley Bell yet?”

She told herself that by participating in a conversation, she would be playing by their rules, but if she terminated the call, she stood no chance of learning anything useful. She said, “Who is this?”

“My surname at birth was Faulkner.”

From that peculiar reply, Bibi inferred that obfuscation and evasion would define his style, but she played along. “Any relation to the writer?”

“I’m delighted to say no. I hate most books and bookish people, so I changed my name. I am now—and have been for a long time—known as Birkenau Terezin.” He spelled it for her. “Friends call me Birk.”

She doubted that such a name appeared in any Orange County phone book, on the voter rolls, or in the property-tax records. “What can I do for you, Mr. Terezin?”

“I’m standing now in your apartment.”

She did not take the bait.

“If I may say so,” Terezin continued, “you have taste, but lack the means to afford fine things. The result is an earnest but tacky attempt at interior design. Your parents have resources. Why didn’t you reach into their pockets?”

“Their money is theirs. I’ll make my own.”

“Maybe you will, maybe you won’t. We have found the two hundred forty-eight pages of the novel you’re currently writing, which we’re taking, along with your computer. We will destroy both.”

Bibi glanced at the laptop lying on the passenger seat. The 248 pages were duplicated in its memory.

“We’ll also get the laptop,” Terezin said.

Bibi wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of reacting to that lame attempt to make her think he could read her mind.

“And if you should copy the pages onto a flash drive, we’ll get that as well. And smash it.”

On the sidewalk, a man approached through pools of lamplight and lakes of sycamore darkness. He was walking a German shepherd.

To her caller, Bibi said, “What do you want from me?”

“Only to kill you.”

Man and dog passed the Explorer. She watched them recede in the passenger-side mirror.

Terezin continued, “I’d rather it wasn’t something as common as a bullet to the head. Too banal for a writer whose short stories have appeared in such esteemed magazines. Death by a thousand stab wounds would be nice, especially if we used a thousand sharpened pencils and left you bristling like a porcupine.”

The response that occurred to her was straight out of a low-rent TV drama, so she remained mute.

“We believe in justice, Bibi. Don’t you think all living things deserve justice?”

“You do,” she said.

“Cancer cells are alive, Bibi. Did you ever stop to think about that? They are so enthusiastic about life, they grow far faster than normal cells. A tumor is a living thing. It deserves justice.”

“I haven’t done anything to you,” she said, being careful not to whine and thereby suggest weakness.

“You offended me. You deeply offended us when you allowed your ignorant masseuse to demand answers. Why was Bibi Blair spared from cancer? The answer is simple, as simple as this—so that she could die another way.”

Bibi had no hope that conversing reasonably with a homicidal fanatic would convert him to clear thinking, and there was a chance that she would stoke the fires of his madness and make him more dangerous than he already was.

Neither could she survive by hanging up on him and pretending that he didn’t exist. She went to the quick of it and said, “Who is Ashley Bell?”

The worm of condescension, turning in his voice, was almost as loud as his words. “You aren’t taking this pathetic quest seriously, are you?”

“Why do you care if I am or I’m not?”

Rather than answer her, Terezin said, “To us, you’re just a worm, a pissant, something we step on without noticing. You don’t have a hope of finding her. We’ll find you first and put an end to this. Did you know, lovely Bibi, that every smartphone is also a GPS? Everywhere you go, the traitorous phone reports your whereabouts in real time.”

She knew this, of course, but never imagined that she might be quarry.

“Anyone who has the right connections with the police or with certain tech companies can find you at any moment of any day. And anyone with the ability to hack their systems can find you, too, my lovely pissant.”