Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(56)
This girl. This Ashley Bell. Her face beautiful. Her expression serene. But in that serenity, Bibi saw a hard-won composure, a mask meant to deny the photographer his subject’s true emotions, which were fear and anger. She warned herself that she might be reading into the photo a scenario from her imagination. Maybe the girl was just bored or trying for one of those vacuous expressions that models were encouraged to assume for the haute-couture magazines these days. But no. For Bibi, the proof could be seen in that remarkable stare. If the colors in the picture were true to life, those enchanting reddish-blue eyes were as limpid as distilled water and revealed a profoundly observant and quick mind. They were wide-set eyes but also as wide open as they could be without furrowing her forehead, as if she meant to belie the apparent tranquillity of her face, or as though the photographer or something else beyond the camera disquieted her.
In addition, Bibi perceived in the girl a tenderness and vulnerability that inspired sympathy, a kindredness that she could not—or would not—explain to herself. This reaction, this sense of equivalence, hit her with such force that it changed everything.
Until now, the search for Ashley Bell, such as it was, had been to a degree unreal, a game without rules, a joke quest without many laughs. It might even be a hoax involving a cleverly staged, phony divination session enhanced by hallucinogens, perpetrated by a group of crazies whose motivation was likely forever to elude a sane person. To this point, Bibi had played this dangerous game as though she exclusively stood at the center of it, focus and sole target. Because of the girl’s appearance and demeanor, which were at once radiantly ethereal and as real as stone, Bibi’s perception changed. She was the paladin, the white knight, and a secondary target only because she would act to save the girl. Ashley Bell was the primary target of the Wrong People and the focus of all that would happen hereafter. In surfing terms, Ashley was the grommet, the trainee surf mongrel, and Bibi was the stylin’ waverider who had to save her from being mortally prosecuted by a series of storm-generated behemoths.
Reality had finally resolved out of the chaos of the last twelve hours. It had bitten hard, infecting Bibi with conviction.
Ashley Bell was real. And in desperate trouble. The people who threatened her were in some way weirdly gifted and beyond the reach of the law. Also well organized. Also homicidal.
Calida had printed out a picture of Ashley that someone had emailed to her as an attached JPEG. It would be helpful to know the source of the photograph. Maybe she had printed the email, too.
Like any house, this one produced noises separate from those its people generated. Creaks and ticks and soft groans of expansion, contraction, and subsidence. A series of these caused Bibi to freeze and listen intently, but silence and a guarded sense of safety settled after the building finished complaining about gravity.
She looked through desk drawers for the email. Nothing. An electric shredder fed the waste can, which contained mostly quarter-inch-wide ribbons of paper suitable for celebrating a welcome-home parade of astronauts returning from the moon, but otherwise useless. The remaining contents did not include the email.
She suspected that she’d already spent too much time in the house. Exploring Calida’s computer might be interesting, but it would also require a reckless delay.
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.