Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(67)
That she had any compassion at all for St. Croix was remarkable, considering that, when the woman fell, a knife slipped from her sleeve. A switchblade, judging by the operative button on the handle.
The suppressed sound of the two shots did not crash wall to wall, but was like quick words whispered in some incomprehensible language, absorbed without echo by the layered fabrics and the plush upholstery of the Victorian parlor. Even in that muffled moment, as Dr. St. Croix changed from person to remains, Chubb Coy lowered his weapon, thereby making it clear that he would not shoot Bibi, though he did not holster the gun.
“What the hell?” she said, letting the words out in a rush of pent-up breath. “Why?”
Coy said, “Such rage. The foolish woman lost control of herself. That babbling. Tongue so loose it might have fallen out of her mouth. I’ve got interests to protect.”
“What interests? She was one of you. You had breakfast with her this morning.”
Those blue-flecked steel-gray eyes, which previously were as sharp as scalpels, carving in search of lies to reveal them like tumors, were now blunt bulkheads keeping secret all thoughts that lay behind them. “You don’t understand the situation, Miss Blair. There are many factions in this. Some factions may be allied with others now and then, but we aren’t all on the same side. This is a high-stakes game, and in a high-stakes game, most people are out for themselves.”
“What game?” Bibi demanded. “What’s all this about? Where is Ashley Bell? What are they going to do to her?”
His round and amiable face produced an infuriatingly charming smile. “You don’t need to know.”
“I do. I need to know. People want to kill me.”
“And they will,” he assured her. “To keep the secret, they will kill you six ways at once.”
“What secret?”
He only smiled.
When she aimed the pistol at him, he continued to smile—and put away his weapon. “You don’t have what it takes to kill a man in cold blood.”
“I do. I will.”
He shook his head. “Cop intuition. Anyway, I’d rather die than share anything with you.”
Bibi lowered the pistol. She said, “Ashley is just a child. Twelve? Thirteen? Why does she have to die?”
He shrugged. “Why does anyone? Some say we’ll never know, that to the gods we’re like the flies that boys kill on a summer day.”
She hated him for his studied indifference. “What kind of bastard are you?”
That smile again. “Any kind you want me to be, Miss Blair.”
When he started to turn away from her, she said, “Are you with him, with Terezin?”
His blunt eyes sharpened briefly as he turned to her once more. “That vicious fascist creep and his crypto-Nazi cult? Miss Blair, you almost make me want to kill you for that suggestion. I despise him.”
“Well, then, the enemy of your enemy—”
“Is still my enemy. Accept the inevitable, girl. You’re easy prey. As a boy, Terezin was a dog, and now he has gone back to the wild. He’s a wolf now, like and yet unlike all other wolves, always running at the head of the pack. He dreams of turning the world backward, of a younger world, which is the world of the pack. They’ll drag you down sooner than later. You think it’s a cult, and it is, but it’s bigger than you think. There are a lot of these cockroaches, and they have resources.”
He walked out of the Victorian suite. She started after him, but then stopped, halted by a suspicion that at some point in the past few minutes, he had given her a clue that she had missed, had left for her the frayed end of a thread that, if she were to wind it on a spool, would unravel the mystery in which she found herself, revealing every warp and weft of this intricately woven conspiracy. She stood there in the company of the corpse, in the colorful riot of Victoriana, looking but perhaps not seeing, listening in memory to their conversation but perhaps not hearing.
If Chubb Coy had left a thread for her, a clue, Bibi could not find it in the third-floor parlor or remember their conversation vividly enough to tweeze out that frayed end. Baffled, exasperated with herself, she pocketed Dr. St. Croix’s switchblade. She snatched up a decorative pillow from the sofa, unzipped the fringed cover, stripped it off, and slipped it over her right hand as if it were a glove. As she made her way down through the house, she tried to recall everything that she had touched, and she paused to wipe each item clean of any fingerprints she might have left.
If she was charged with the murder of Solange St. Croix, that would bring an end to her search for Ashley Bell as certainly as if Terezin murdered her. And if it happened that the arresting officer was one of the Wrong People, he might claim that she had resisted arrest, whether she had or not, justifying a bullet in the head.
She wondered what she would be like if she got through this alive. Paranoia was now in her blood, like a viral infection, and there might not be a cure for it. She could envision herself in the grip of agoraphobia and social phobia, afraid of open spaces and of people, unable to leave her apartment, living behind a locked door and blinds closed tight.
“Screw that,” she said as she crossed the living room.
In the kitchen, on the island, stood a large designer purse that had not been there when Bibi had first entered the house. It must be St. Croix’s, left when the woman came through the ruined door from the garage. Whatever else might be said about the professor, no one could deny that she had guts, seeking out the intruder on her own, although she had most likely somehow known the identity of her quarry. Bibi took the purse and continued wiping away fingerprints into the garage, where the dead woman’s Mercedes still ticked and pinged as the engine cooled.