guess.”
Now she could see the name on his laminated badge — Gary Graydon.
But where had Arius gone? There was only one way out of the gallery, and how could he have slipped past the guard unnoticed?
“What’s all that on the floor?” Graydon said, and Beth glanced down at the papers she had utterly forgotten were lying around her feet. She bent down and picked up the folder with the other pages of the secret letter in it. She slipped the page she was still holding — she’d forgotten she was holding that, too — inside, and after casting one last look around the gallery, said, “I’m done here.”
“Good,” Graydon replied. “We’ve got enough on our hands already today.”
“What do you mean?” Beth said, leaving the gallery with the guard close behind.
“The wildfires.”
Beth stopped, “Where?”
“Where aren’t they?” Graydon said. “They’re springing up all over town, from Bel-Air to the Palisades. Even with all the warnings about fireworks and the drought conditions, it looks like some people never listen.”
Beth didn’t need to hear any more. Clutching the folder tightly under her arm, she hurried out of the gallery, and then, with Arius’s warning to go home ringing in her ears, sprinted across the empty plaza toward the tram.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Carter was so absorbed in the work that at first he didn’t even feel the cell phone vibrating in his pocket. He’d turned off the ring the second he came into the museum; he didn’t want anyone — especially Gunderson — finding out he was there, on a national holiday yet, concealed in a storage closet, in the sub-basement, working on the most volatile discovery the La Brea Tar Pits had ever yielded. He’d never be able to finish explaining.
“Look at this fracture line,” Del was saying, indicating with a scalpel a crack in the skull near the temporal lobe. “Tell me that’s not from a blow.”
The phone vibrated again, and this time Carter noticed. “Hang on,” he said.
The connection, as usual down here, was terrible. But it was Beth, and she sounded agitated. She was saying something about… Arius.
“Slow down,” Carter said, instinctively turning away from the table and stepping out in the corridor. “You’re breaking up.”
“Arius,” she said again, “was here, at the Getty.”
Was it just another scare — several times they had thought there was evidence that Arius had survived, and was stalking them — or was it for real this time? Despite all their suspicions and fears, neither of them had ever seen or encountered him for sure.
She was saying something else, but it was coming through in bursts of static.
“I can’t hear you,” Carter said, wondering if she could hear him, either. “Are you okay? Is Joey okay?” That was the crucial thing.
“Yes.”
He heard that. Then something that he couldn’t make out. Then: “… on the tram. I’m going home right now, to Joey. The fires are spreading.”
“What fires?”
“… from fireworks maybe…”
Fourth of July fireworks had already started a wildfire? It was only late afternoon — he’d thought the danger would have come after nightfall.
“Not in Summit View…,” she was saying, “but above Sunset, the Palisades… Bel-Air.”
At the mention of Bel-Air, his ears pricked up. There were fires, approaching Bel-Air? The al-Kalli estate? The bestiary?
“I’ll call you at home,” he said, but already he sensed that the line had gone dead. “Beth — can you hear me?” He could tell that the line was still open, but he had no idea if he was transmitting. “I’m leaving now. I’ll see you at home as soon as I can get there. Beth?”
But the line was definitely dead.
He stuck the phone back in his pocket, went back into the converted storage closet, and said, “I’ve got to go — right now.”
Del looked stunned, and a little bit pissed; Carter knew that Del had been irritated lately by Carter’s elusiveness and seeming lack of commitment to the project at hand. More than once Carter had wished he could simply explain it all to him — not only because he hated to be so evasive with one of his oldest friends, but because he would have welcomed Del’s insights and opinions. Sitting up in Bel-Air, of all places on earth, was, without a doubt, the most astounding discovery in the history of the animal kingdom, a revelation second only to Darwin’s, a glimpse into the earliest origins of reptilian, mammalian, and avian life, and no one would have understood all that more deeply than Del.
“What do you mean, you’ve got to go? We’ve got the whole place to ourselves today — you know how much work we could get done in the next few hours?”
“I do, and I’m sorry.”
Del shook his head and sighed, then dropped the scalpel on the worktable. “Someday, Bones, you’re going to have to tell me what’s really going on.”
“I will,” Carter said, “I swear.”
Carter was already turning to leave when Del said, “So where are we going now?”
And it was only then that Carter remembered he didn’t have his car there; Del had picked him up, and they had planned to go for a hike after working for a few hours at the museum. Del had said there was something he wanted to show him.
Del laughed at the look on Carter’s face. “You forgot, didn’t you?” he said, jangling his car keys in the air. “I’m driving.”
Carter was speechless, wondering what to do next.
Del laughed again, and after quickly covering the remains, grabbed his backpack off the floor, and said, “Now, my friend, you are in my power! You will have to reveal your secret destination.”
Del headed out the door and marched down the corridor, his white hair flying. “Don’t forget to turn out the lights,” he said over his shoulder.
Damn, Carter thought — of all the days to carpool. He snapped the lights off and followed Del, who was heading not for the elevator — that would have required enlisting Hector’s help again — but the stairs to the atrium garden.
The garden where the bones of the La Brea Woman were now lying in an unmarked grave.
Another secret he had never shared with Del.
Outside, where Carter finally caught up to him, a hot Santa Ana wind was blowing. The air was parched and brittle. Del hopped up into the cab of his dusty truck, an all-terrain vehicle perched on monster tires, with a gun rack on top and a dinosaur decal on the bumper, and Carter clambered into the passenger seat. Carter was calculating fast — would it be worth it to have Del drive him home first, where he could pick up his own car, or should he just have him drive straight to Bel-Air? He glanced over at Del, who had the motor rumbling and the truck in gear.
“Where to, boss?”
“Bel-Air,” Carter said.
“Yeah, right. Where really?”
“Really.”
And Del could tell he meant it. “The mystery gets better and better.”
Carter rolled down the window as they drove out of the parking lot. Red, white, and blue bunting, wrapped around the streetlight poles on Wilshire Boulevard, flapped and rustled in the breeze. A bright sun beat down from behind a veil of wispy cirrus clouds. Carter was wondering what, if anything, he should reveal to Del when they got to al-Kalli’s estate. There was no reason he had to tell him, or show him, anything of the actual bestiary. Sure, he’d
