“He have a name?”
“Estes,” Anagkazo said. “Nothing confidential. He’s new in the country, I think… from Europe.”
Ricci kept looking at him.
“Where in Europe?”
“Didn’t say. Or I don’t remember him saying, anyway. But I got the sense he’s one of those people who’s lived everywhere. Money to spend, you know. Has an accent you can’t place… sort of a worldly mix, reminded me of how Yul Brynner, the actor, used to sound. It’s why he could play the part of a pharaoh, the king of Siam, or a Mexican bandit, and it always seemed believable.”
Ricci felt something unnameable rear inside him. Felt its
“The photographer,” he said. His eyes were on the breeder’s face. “Describe him to me.”
Anagkazo straightened a little in his chair. The curiosity he’d first shown at the door had become laced with a certain unease.
“Square chinned. Tall. Strong-looking… a real hard-body type.” He moved his hand up from his shepherd’s neck to his armrest. “Has this fella done anything wrong?”
Ricci’s jaw muscles worked. It was as though, suddenly, his brain had locked around whatever words he might have given in answer, perhaps even his ability to articulate any response at all.
Glenn glanced his way, saw his fixed expression, and turned toward Anagkazo.
“John,” he said. “You’d better tell us exactly where we can find him.”
Thibodeau had spent the morning at his desk answering phone calls, but as each hour passed he had grown increasingly convinced the one call he’d been hoping for wouldn’t come.
When his latest jump at the receiver proved him wrong, he immediately found himself wondering whether to be glad or sorry.
“Ricci. Where’re you now—?”
“Never mind,” Ricci said. “All you need to worry about’s what I tell you.”
“I been leaving messages on your voice mail, waiting to hear from you for hours,” Thibodeau chafed. “Same goes for Megan—”
“Save it and listen.”
Thibodeau reddened. “We got Erickson poking around, trouble piled on top ‘a trouble. And you act like keepin’ in touch be something gonna stunter you—”
“You want to find Julia Gordian and the murdering scum you like to call the Wildcat, you better shut up and listen.”
Thibodeau fell silent, breathing hard. After Erickson had phoned him that morning to ask questions about a break-in at the animal clinic, he’d immediately known Ricci was in it up to his neck… known and only wanted some sort of accounting before he could hang that miserable neck from a rope. But he’d taken care not to alert the detective. Even in his anger, he’d wondered if Ricci might have found something to go on.
Julia, he thought. The Wildcat…
Thibodeau would not in his wildest stretch of imagination have believed he would hear them mentioned in the same sentence.
“Go on,” he said. He was almost panting now. “Can’t waste time.”
“I’m headed to Big Sur. It’ll take me maybe an hour to get up there, and I’ll need support. Ed Seybold from my old team. Newell and Perry if you can get hold of them. Maybe a half a dozen other men, but no more… have Seybold pick the rest.”
Thibodeau swallowed. “Big Sur cover a lot of ground, you gonna narrow it down—?”
“Just make sure those men are pulled together, I’ll be in touch with you,” Ricci interrupted.
And then the line went dead in Thibodeau’s hand.
Siegfried Kuhl was pensive.
Looking out through his terrace doors into the rain, watching it spill down the precipitous wall of the cliff in windblown whirls and ripples, his mind had returned to his abduction of the robin who was now bound to a chair across the room from him, his mind bringing him back to the moment Lido had been attacked by the greyhound.
The bite had done little to injure the Schutzhund, its thick coat preventing the other dog’s teeth from sinking too deeply into its flesh. And Kuhl had been quick to finish things with his weapon. Yet he had wondered ever since if the true harm might have been to his plans, occurring the moment the animals made contact.
The dead flesh and bones of the dog he had shot — might it not hold clues that could eventually lay a path to him? He had been unable to dismiss the thought that there might be blood, fur, or other traceable physical evidence that could identify the shepherd. It was an uncommon creature, after all. And if the evidence were direct enough, and the breeder Anagkazo spoke to those in search of Gordian’s daughter…
If he spoke to them before Kuhl’s men were able to take care of him, the time left until he needed to head out to the fallback might very well be limited to hours, if not minutes. And though the storm would make travel there difficult, he had ordered Anton and Ciras out to fill the Explorer with basic supplies — water, protein bars, first aid — so that he might vacate the cabin as soon as possible.
After all Kuhl’s preparation, it staggered him to think the success of his task might be threatened by a simple miscalculation of how the greyhound would react to his forced entry of the rescue center.
Kuhl turned from the terrace to his captured robin. He looked into her eyes over the cloth gag knotted around her mouth. That particular restraint had been unnecessary except as a precaution, he mused. Realizing she was in a place where cries for help would be of no use, she had held a silence Kuhl found admirable. She had showed no frailty, done no pleading save for the lives of the woman and infant at the rescue center, and the dog that attempted to protect her.
Even now, Kuhl thought, her steady gaze did not present him with any sign of weakness.
He moved away from her, went to the desk where he had sat long nights at his computer, and looked inside its top drawer. Waiting there was the tool steel combat knife he would use when the moment to dispose of her finally came.
Her head pulled back from behind without warning, a deep cut across the throat…
In his admiration, Kuhl would give Julia Gordian as sudden and painless a death as his expert hand could render.
It was, he thought, the very least she deserved.
The clouds had reasserted themselves throughout the morning to form a massive gray band that stretched along the coastline from Half Moon Bay southward to Point Conception and was widest from the Santa Lucia Mountains on east across the Ventana wilderness and Los Padres National Forest. By midday, rain was falling heavily again, the charcoal gray sky cat-clawed with lightning, thunder rumbling like great millstones in its turbulent lower and middle altitudes.
Ricci and Glenn watched two men exit the cabin and stride toward a white Ford Explorer parked only a few straight yards from where they were crouched side by side under cover of the trees. One of the men carried a portage pack, his companion a couple of nylon zip duffels.
Ricci’s eyes briefly went to Glenn.
“I’m betting that’s survival gear,” he whispered.
Glenn nodded.
“Looks to be,” he said.
Water spilling from the porous roof of leaves above them, they observed the pair in silence. In what had seemed almost a reenactment of their previous night’s work at the animal hospital, they had left their car about a half mile back and then climbed the rest of the way up the hillside on foot. The thick frock of woodland on the slope offered vital concealment and also made for some tough going — steep grades, impassable thickets, streams swollen by the unrelenting rains, and patches of soggy ground with unsafe footing had forced several detours. But they’d pushed forward and were mostly able to stay within eyeshot of the paved road, sticking close whenever possible. After about an hour’s hike, they had finally seen one of the huge limestone gateposts described by Anagkazo off to their left, picked up the dirt route that led to the crest of the bluff, and then stolen alongside it to their present spot.
