“Are you afraid now because of what happened to him?”
She closed her eyes. “Please don’t talk about that.”
“Okay. I understand.” He waited until she opened her eyes before he continued. “I think you’re being very brave.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. You’re here. You’re talking to me. You’re trying to be honest.”
She blinked on that last word. “It’s because I’m afraid, not because I’m brave.”
“You’re trying to do the right thing. You’re helping me figure out what really happened.” He smiled gently. “Now, about that person who recommended Doctor Hammond—”
She interrupted, “I don’t know who that was. I can’t even say for sure that that’s what the call was about.” She hesitated, her eyes on the silver bell in the middle of the table.
The call? What call? Gurney sat back in his chair and waited. He had a feeling that she was trying to get up her courage to go on, and that patience would draw out the facts.
After much hesitation she continued. “All I know is that Stevie got a call from someone; and when I asked him who it was, he got all weirded out and said it was no one. But that was a crazy thing to say, because he was on the phone for a long time. I told him it couldn’t be no one, why was he saying that to me? Then he got real quiet. But later that same night he started talking about a special doctor he’d heard about that could help him stop smoking.”
“And you put two and two together and figured it was the person on the phone who told him about the doctor?”
“Yeah. That’s right. It felt kind of obvious. So I asked him about it. I asked him to his face, was that who told you?”
“What did he say?”
“He just shook his head, sort of like he was denying it. Then he got like pissed off—like nervous pissed off, not really angry pissed off—and said whoever told him about the doctor, that wasn’t something I needed to know, it wasn’t important who told him, and I had no right to bug him about things like that.”
“And after he said that, what did you say?”
“I said he should at least tell me who was on the phone.”
“And what did he say?”
“At first, nothing. Stevie could get real quiet sometimes. But I kept asking him—because he was being so weird about the whole thing. Finally he said that the call came from someone he knew from way back, that the guy’s name wouldn’t mean anything to me, it was just someone he’d been at camp with when they were kids.”
“Did he say anything else at all about him? Think hard.”
“No, nothing.” She was biting her lip more intensely now, and her eyes were fixed on the silver bell with what looked to Gurney like incipient panic.
“Take it easy, Angela, it’s all right. I’m not going to let anything bad happen to you. Remember what we talked about on the phone?”
She blinked confusedly.
“Remember what I said about fear? Sometimes we have to do something we’re afraid of doing—to protect ourselves from a bigger danger. I can see you’re afraid to talk about this, but if you tell me everything you know, everything that Stevie said, it will make you safer. Because the more I know, the more I can protect you.”
She closed her eyes again and seemed to force out the words. “Okay, so the thing is, it was totally weird. That evening, the way he talked about the phone call was like he was pretending it was nothing, a silly little call that didn’t matter, I shouldn’t ask about it because it wasn’t worth talking about.” She paused and took a deep breath.
“Then, at like five o’clock in the morning, like he’d been awake all night thinking about it, he woke me up. He asked me three times am I really awake and am I really listening. And then he told me, real serious like, that I should forget about the call. He said I should never mention it again and I should never never never tell anyone else about it—that if anyone else ever found out about it, we could both end up dead.”
When she opened her eyes, tears came down her cheeks. “And I never did. I swear. I never said anything about it to anyone. Not one word.”
CHAPTER 28
During his jog back to the hotel Gurney was analyzing his meeting with Angela Castro—trying to separate the facts that mattered from the distractions surrounding them.
He wasn’t sure in which category to place Tabitha. There was something odd about that physically dominating woman showing such deference to the anxious little Angela.
Then there was the complicated persona projected by Angela herself, with her rigid hairdo and near-anorectic physique. She appeared frightened, childishly romantic, desperate to lose herself in a make-believe world. Yet she was pragmatic enough to have obtained a loan and a car from her brother.
And there was Steven Pardosa’s dream, with its now-familiar elements—the wolf, the knife. And his contempt for Richard Hammond, expressed in emotionally charged words like “creepy” and “disgusting.”
Gurney felt that the meeting’s key element had been Angela’s recounting of the mysterious phone call—the effect it had on Pardosa, its possible connection to Hammond, and the extreme demand for secrecy that it generated. Gurney wondered if the potentially fatal result of disclosure had been an explicit threat made by the caller or if that was a conclusion reached by Pardosa as he pondered the implications of the call in the wee hours of the night. The latter version seemed more likely given the way Angela told the story.
And there was something else, an element he couldn’t put his finger on. He had a feeling that something Angela had told him wasn’t quite right. He tried playing back their encounter in his mind. But the out-of-place piece remained elusive.
When he got back to the hotel, he found Madeleine and Hardwick at opposite ends of a three-cushion couch in the lobby. Madeleine’s eyes were closed, but the erect position of her head suggested concentration rather than sleep. Hardwick was talking in a low voice on his phone.
Gurney sat in a chair across from them, separated from the couch by a low glass table.
Madeleine opened her eyes. “Did the young lady show up?”
“As promised.”
“What was she like?”
“Odd little creature. Obsessed with dolls. Looks like one herself. Any problems while I was gone?”
She nodded in the direction of Hardwick, who sounded like he was wrapping up his conversation. “He’ll tell you.”
Hardwick ended his call, tapped a series of icons, scrolled through several graphic images, made some adjustments to the final one, and slid the phone across the table to Gurney. “Take a look at that.”
On the screen was a photo of what appeared to be some sort of mechanical framework—which Gurney recognized as the front undercarriage of an automobile.
“My Outback?”
Hardwick nodded. “Zoom in.”
Gurney made the motion, and the center portion of the photo expanded to fill the screen.
“Again,” said Hardwick.
Gurney repeated the motion. Now the screen was filled by a single structural bar and a man’s hand intruding from a shadowy corner of the photo—with the thumb next to what appeared to be the protruding top of a bolt.
“Again.”
The final enlargement showed only the thumb and the protruding object. The scale reference of the thumb indicated the object was the size of a stack of four or five nickels.
Gurney shot Hardwick an incredulous glance, not quite able to believe what he suspected he was seeing on the screen.
“Believe it,” said Hardwick.
Gurney examined the photo more carefully. “That’s maybe one tenth the size of the smallest tracker I’ve ever seen.”