Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(63)
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.
Deep in the floating city, Gibb had lain sleepless.
A Navy SEAL was trained to endure things that he once would have thought he could not survive. And if he could not sustain physically and mentally and emotionally through the worst shitstorms of war with his confidence intact, he needed to get out of spec ops and become a mall cop or a librarian, or whatever the hell. As a SEAL, you saw—and confronted—things no one should have to see, horrors that would leave most people in need of therapy for years, but you could not let what you saw make you cynical, diminish you, or in any way corrupt you. Once you bought into valor, it was your residence forever; you could neither sell it like a house nor remodel it into something less grand, and if the day came when you refused to live there anymore, you would also be unable to live any longer with yourself.
Nevertheless, SEALs were of course afraid at times, and like everyone else, they had bad dreams. That first night after taking out Abdullah al-Ghazali and his crew, in a four-bunk cabin aboard ship, Pax Thorpe had muttered and exclaimed in his dreams. Having plunged rather than fallen into sleep, Perry and Danny had not been disturbed by their lead petty officer’s brief and mostly quiet outbursts.
Gibb and Pax were in the lower bunks, a narrow aisle separating them. Although exhausted from the mission, Gibb had been for a while unable to sleep, and he had listened to Pax’s peculiar outbursts, committing some of them to memory.
In the morning, over breakfast, he had said, “Pax, you sounded like you were at a Hitchcock triple feature last night. Who threw acid in whose face?”
Pax had gone pale as he looked up from his mess tray. “Damnedest dream. Crazy bits and pieces, none of it connected, but way vivid.”
“Was it Hitler raped his mother,” Gibb asked, “and whose fingers did he cut off? Man, when you give up spec ops, you should get a job writing for one of the crazier cable-TV shows.”
In Laguna Beach, the murder house stood three stories tall on a steep street, inland of Coast Highway, where the residences faced either north or south, in both cases lacking ocean views but still expensive. There were enormous old trees, shallow front yards, and an eclectic mix of architectural styles, some poorly conceived. The house where Beth Faulkner had died was moderne, slabs of stucco and smooth teak decks piled like the layers of a wedding cake baked for a bloodless bride and groom as romantic as carrots.
At that hour of a weekday, Dr. Solange St. Croix would most likely be at the university, guarding the standards of contemporary American fiction and dispiriting young writers. Bibi parked across the street and watched the house for half an hour. No one appeared on any of the decks or in any of the rooms beyond the expansive windows.
The fog was somewhat thinner than it had been in Newport, though still thick enough to backdrop an urban version of The Hound of the Baskervilles. And of hounds there was no shortage, a parade of Lagunans walking a dog show’s worth of breeds uphill and down. No one seemed to find it odd that a woman in a baseball cap and sunglasses should be slouching in a junker, conducting surveillance. Laguna prided itself on being an artist’s colony that accepted all classes and cultures, not merely tolerating eccentrics but delighting in them.