“What is it?” asked Pendergast.
“I could’ve sworn I bought a dozen whole sole from Wait. But there’s only ten.”
“I’ve been meaning to talk to you all about that,” Adderly said, still trying to overcome his surprise. “I’ve been noticing a regular shortfall on orders versus covers. I think we’ve got ourselves a food thief. You’d better spread the word that I’m not going to be happy about it.”
While Adderly spoke, the FBI agent had stepped into the refrigerator, briefly vanishing from sight. “Aha!” He emerged a moment later, a large, gutted sole in his hands. “Not Dover sole, of course, but it will do. Now, may I have a skillet, please? Cast-iron, well-seasoned?”
Reggie produced one.
“Excellent. Ah, Reggie, what is your last name?”
“Sheraton.”
“Thank you. Mr. Sheraton, how would you go about cooking this?”
“I’d fillet it first.”
“Be my guest.” He laid the fish down on the butcher block and watched with approval as Reggie expertly filleted it.
“Beautifully done,” Pendergast said. “This fills me with hope. Now tell me: How would you cook it?”
“In lard, of course.”
Pendergast shuddered. “Not clarified butter?”
“Clarified?”
There was a moment of silence. “Very well. We will confine ourselves to the simplest of preparations. Would you mind placing that skillet on a high flame?”
Reggie walked over to the commercial stove, turned up one burner, and placed the skillet on it.
“Now add some butter, please. Not too much, just enough to coat the bottom of the pan… Wait, wait, that’s more than sufficient!”
Reggie stepped back from what looked like an impossibly small tab of butter. The rest of the kitchen continued looking on in silent surprise.
Pendergast stood there, holding the fish. “Now, Mr. Sheraton, if you wouldn’t mind assembling the rest of the mise en place—mushrooms, garlic, white wine, flour, salt, pepper, parsley, half a lemon, and cream?”
As Reggie moved around the kitchen, gathering the ingredients in increasingly resentful silence, Pendergast kept an eye on the heating pan. Adderly watched the cooking lesson with increasing amusement and curiosity.
Pendergast salted the fish on both sides and set it aside. “Chef’s knife?”
Stu, the line cook, handed him one.
Pendergast examined it. “This isn’t sharp enough! Don’t you know a dull knife is more dangerous than a sharp one? Where’s your steel?”
A sharpening steel was produced, and Pendergast whetted the knife against it with a few expert strokes. Then he turned to the mushrooms, quartering one of them in a quick, deft motion. He handed the knife to Reggie, who cut up the other mushrooms and minced a clove of garlic and some parsley as Pendergast looked on.
“You have decent knife skills,” he said. “That’s reassuring. Now, let’s pay attention to the fish. If we are going to prepare this sole à la minute, the pan must be very hot, and the fish must cook quickly. It is now at just the right heat.”
He plucked up the fish and slid it into the hot pan with a searing sound. He waited, as if counting seconds, and then said: “Now, you see? It can be turned already. And a subtle fond is developing.” He slid a fish spatula beneath the sole and gently turned it, to a fresh sizzle.
“But in the Navy—” Reggie began.
“You are no longer deep-frying fish sticks for several hundred men. You are cooking for a single, discriminating customer. There—it’s done!” And Pendergast slid the fish onto a clean plate. “Note that I am serving it presentation side up. Now watch, Mr. Sheraton, if you will.” The FBI agent added a splash of white wine to the skillet, and as a plume of steam arose he added flour and a little more butter, deglazing the pan and whisking the ingredients together quickly. “I’m making a rudimentary beurre manié from which to build the sauce,” he explained. A minute later, in went the mushrooms, then the garlic. Holding the handle of the skillet with a chef’s towel, Pendergast quickly sautéed the ingredients, then added a generous dash of cream, standing directly over the stovetop and whisking constantly. After another minute he turned off the heat, picked up a spoon, tasted the sauce, corrected the seasonings, dipped the spoon again, then showed it to Reggie. “Note, Mr. Sheraton, how the sauce lightly coats the spoon. The French call that nappe. In future, I would ask that you make sure your sauce has been reduced to just such a consistency before serving it to me.” He spooned a liberal amount of sauce over the fish, garnished it with parsley, spritzed a trace of lemon juice over it.
“Filets de Poisson Bercy aux Champignons,” he declared with a small flourish. “Or, more correctly, Filets de Sole Pendergast, since under the circumstances I was forced to take several shortcuts in both ingredients and technique. Now, Mr. Sheraton: Do you think you could reproduce this preparation with the greatest exactitude, for my future dinners in this establishment?”
“It’s simple enough,” Reggie said shortly.
“That’s the beauty of it.”
“But…for every dinner?”
“For my every dinner.” Pendergast reached into his pocket, extracted a hundred-dollar bill, and handed it to the cook. “This is for your trouble today.”
Reggie stared at it, the look of resentment changing to surprise.
“Do you regularly work lunches as well as dinners?” Pendergast asked in a hopeful tone.
“Only twice a week,” Reggie replied.
“Ah, well. Let us then content ourselves with dinner, for the time being. Filets de Sole Pendergast for the foreseeable future, if you please. You have my thanks.” And with that, Pendergast scooped up the plate, turned, and left the kitchen.
Adderly turned to Reggie, laughing, and slapped him on the back. “Well, well, Reggie, it looks like we have a new item on our menu. What do you think?”
“I guess so.”
“I’ll add it to the chalkboard.” And Adderly exited the kitchen, chuckling to himself, leaving Reggie and the rest of the staff staring at each other in openmouthed surprise long after the double doors to the restaurant had stopped flapping.
12
Benjamin Franklin Boyle sank the clam hoe into the muck and turned over a big, fat beauty. As he plucked it out it squirted in protest, and he tossed it into the hod, took a few steps forward—his hip waders sucking loudly in protest—sank the hoe in again and pulled open a new gash in the muck, exposing two more clams. A few more steps, another swipe with the hoe, a few more clams into the hod, and then he rested, leaning on his hoe while looking across the mudflats toward the river mouth and the sea beyond. It was slack low tide and the sun was setting behind him, purpling some thunderheads on the sea horizon. It was a lovely fall evening. Boyle inhaled the smell of the salt air, the ripe scent of the mudflats—a scent he loved—and listened to the cries of the gulls as they swept and wheeled over the Exmouth marshes.
Five years ago, at age sixty-five, Boyle had given up fishing and sold his dragger. That was hard work and the scallops just seemed to get smaller and harder to find, and in the last few years mostly what he’d pulled up were useless starfish that wrecked his nets. He was glad to have gotten rid of the boat, he got a fair price for it, and he’d saved up enough money for a penny-pinching retirement. But clamming gave him something to do, brought in a little extra money, and kept him close to the sea he loved.
Having caught his breath, he looked about the shiny flats. He could see the holes of the soft-shell clams everywhere. This was a good flat and nobody had clammed it for a while, because it was so hard to get to, with a walk through sharp marsh grass and a weary trudge across another, closer flat that had already been pretty much clammed out. Getting out wasn’t so bad, really, but returning with a forty-pound hod full of clams was a bitch.
He sank his hoe into the shiny, quivering surface of mud, then pulled back, exposing more clams. He kept up the rhythm, moving a few steps forward each
time, swiping, overturning, plucking, tossing, then repeating the process. As he worked, his line approached the edge of the marsh grass, and once he arrived he paused to look about for another good line. He stamped his foot on the shivering mud, and saw a bunch of squirts go off to his right. That would be a good place to dig. But as he bent down to begin his line, he glimpsed, off in the twilight, something odd: what looked like a bowling ball with hair sticking up from it. It was attached to a lumpy form, partly sunken in the murky channel that snaked through the mud.
He put down the heavy hod and moved over to investigate, his waders making an unholy noise with each step. It didn’t take long for Doyle to realize he was looking at a body, lodged in the muck, and a few more steps brought him up to it. It was a naked man, lying facedown, legs and arms splayed out, face and lower portion of the body buried several inches in the mud. The back of the head was partially bald, with a big shiny spot in the center of a ring of salt-encrusted hair. A tiny green crab, sensing motion, scuttled across from one hair patch to the other and hid cowering in the comb-over.
Boyle had seen plenty of bodies drowned and washed up, and this looked like most of them did, even down to the holes piercing the flesh here and there where ravenous sea life—crabs, fish, lobsters—had begun to feast.
He stood there for a time, wondering if he knew who this person was. He couldn’t recall the bald spot offhand, but a lot of people had bald spots, and without clothes he just couldn’t come up with a possibility. Of course he would have to call the police, but curiosity got the better of him. He still had the rake in hand, so he bent over the corpse and slid the rake into the muck under the belly. With his other hand clutching the corpse’s upper arm, he gave a pull. The body broke free of the grasping muck and flopped over with a hideous sucking-popping sound, the stiff arm smacking down hard into the mud.
Impossible to see anything; the face and torso were completely covered with black mud. Now what? He needed to rinse the mud off the face. Moving around the body, he waded into the shallows of the stream channel, cupped his hands, and began splashing water on the body. The mud ran off quickly, the stark white flesh exposed in rivulets and then sheets.
Boyle stopped, frozen. The face was pretty much eaten off—eyes, lips, nose—not so uncommon with a body immersed in salt water, as he knew. But what had stopped him was not the face, but the man’s torso. He stared at it, trying to make sense of it. What he had thought at first were crude tattoos turned out to be something quite different.
Benjamin Franklin Boyle set down the clam rake, fished in his pocket under the hip waders, and removed his cell phone. He dialed in the number of the Exmouth Police Department. When the dispatcher answered he said, “Doris? This is Ben Boyle, down in the mudflats. There’s a body here, nobody local, looks like it washed out of the marshes. A real artist went to work on it. No, I can’t describe it, you’ll just have to see for yourself.” He explained his location in more detail, and then hung up and slid the phone back into his pocket.
His brow wrinkling, Boyle considered what to do now. Even if the cops left immediately, they wouldn’t get here for at least twenty minutes. There was still time to fill up his hod.
He thumped on the mud with his foot, saw where the little squirts were thickest, and began digging a line through them, building up a rhythm: two steps, sink, turn over, pluck, toss, and repeat.
13
Bradley Gavin, up to his thighs in muck, adjusted the last of the light stands and plugged the cord into the generator. With some effort he extracted his waders from the mud and stepped back onto the temporary boardwalk that ringed the site.
He’d spent the last hour hauling down planks of lumber, laying them out to the scene of the crime, wheeling out the generator, setting up the lights, taping the perimeter, and following the instructions of the Scene of Crime Officer, a big man named Malaga, who had come all the way from Lawrence with a Crime Scene Investigator and a photographer. Those three gentlemen were now waiting at the edge of the marsh for everything to be set up so they could tippy-toe out and do their work without getting muddy.
“Check the fuel gauge on that generator,” said the chief, standing on the boards in shiny new waders that had not yet seen a speck of mud, arms crossed over his chest. The chief had been in a rotten mood ever since Pendergast’s lunchtime visit, and the mood had only grown worse when the body was found. The reason was pretty clear to Gavin: here was something perfectly timed to create actual work, delay his retirement, and possibly compromise the low crime rate he had enjoyed during his tenure as chief. Naturally, the last of his concerns was actually solving the crime.
Gavin shrugged it off. He was used to this. Six more months and it would be over, and with any luck he’d be chief himself.
He checked the gauge. “Still almost full.” He tried not to look over to where the body lay, faceup, left that way by the clammer who had turned him over. The son of a bitch had continued clamming around the body, totally screwing up anything that might have been left there. The SOCO, Malaga, was going to have a fit when he saw that.
“All right,” said Mourdock, interrupting Gavin’s reverie, “looks like we’re set.” He raised his walkie-talkie. “We’re ready for the SOC guys.”
Breathing hard, Gavin tried to scrape the excess mud off his waders with a stick.
“Hey, Gavin, don’t let the mud get on the boardwalk.”
Gavin moved to one side and kept scraping, flicking the mud off into the darkness. A chill evening had settled on the marshes, a clammy mist collecting low above the ground, adding a white pall to the scene. It looked more like some horror movie set than a real crime scene.
He heard voices and saw lights bobbing through the mist. A moment later a tall, dour-looking man walked up: Malaga. He had a shaved and remarkably polished head atop a massive neck covered with black hairs, giving him the look of a bull. A young Asian man followed him—the crime scene investigator—and behind him, grunting and shuffling, an obese man draped with camera equipment.
Malaga parked himself at the edge of the scene and spoke in a deep, melodious voice. “Thank you, Chief Mourdock.” He waved the photographer forward, who was at least a professional, taking photographs from every angle, kneeling down low, stretching up high, the silent flashes going off every few seconds as he moved about with surprising dexterity. Gavin tried to control his deep shock and maintain a professional, disinterested expression on his face. He had never actually been at the scene of a homicide before. As he glanced again at the body, splayed on its back, with those symbols carved brutally into its chest, he felt another wave of surprise and horror. He wondered who could have done such a thing, and why. It made no sense to him; no sense at all. What could possibly be the motivation for such an act? He felt anger, too—anger that his hometown had been violated by a crime like this.
As Malaga worked the crime scene, from time to time he would murmur a suggestion to the photographer, who in turn took more photos. At one point he mounted his camera on a pole and held it over the corpse, photographing almost straight down.
“All good,” said the photographer at last, stepping back.
And now the CSI guy crept into the scene, his hands in latex, wearing booties and white coveralls. He laid down a satchel and removed several rolled-up felt holders, which contained a variety of things—test tubes, tweezers, small ziplock bags, pins, labels, little flags on wires, Q-tips, and a number of spray bottles of chemicals. He bent over the body, picking off hair and fibers, spritzing this and swabbing that. He scraped under the nails and taped plastic bags over the hands, and he examined the carved symbols with a penlight, picking things out and wiping Q-tips here and there, sealing them in test tubes.
All was silent. Even Malaga had nothing to say, no suggestions to offer. The last thing the CSI man did was take the dead man’s fingerprints with an electronic pad. And then he was done; he packed everything up in the satchel and retreated in as cat-like a fashion as he’d arrived.
&nb
sp; Malaga turned to Chief Mourdock. “Well, he’s all yours.” He gave the chief’s hand a hearty shake—he seemed eager to get out of that miasmic swamp—and they turned in preparation for walking back down the boardwalk. Gavin could read pure panic on the chief’s face: What now? It suddenly occurred to him that the chief hadn’t investigated a homicide in the town—ever. He only assumed he had in Boston, but perhaps not, given that Boston had its own specialized homicide squad.
Gavin frowned. Shouldn’t they be calling Pendergast in on this? The chief was clearly in over his head and Pendergast, odd character though he was, seemed capable. “Um,” he said, “Chief, do you think we ought to tell that FBI agent? I mean, he’d probably want to know, and maybe he could even help—”
The chief turned to him with a scowl. “I don’t think we need to bother him. After all, he’s working on such an important case of his own.” The sarcasm fairly dripped.
A velvety voice came out of the night. “My dear chief, thank you for your consideration of my other engagements, but it’s no bother. Really, no bother at all.” And the black-clad figure of the FBI agent emerged from the darkness, his pale face floating ghost-like in the mist.
For a moment, the chief’s expression went utterly blank. Then he swallowed hard. “Agent, ah, Pendergast, we’d of course be very glad to have your input.” He hesitated. “Would this be…official?”
Pendergast waved his hand. “Not at all, just some quiet help on the side. All credit to you—and, of course, the excellent Sergeant Gavin.”
The chief cleared his throat, clearly uncertain of what to do next.
“Do you mind?” Pendergast said, approaching. And behind him a second figure emerged from the darkness—Constance Greene. Gavin couldn’t take his eyes off her. She was dressed in old-fashioned Farmer Brown canvas overalls with high boots, her hair pulled back in a scarf. She was undeniably beautiful in an old-fashioned way—but in the artificial light of the crime scene she looked even more exotic than in daylight. She did not speak, but her eyes roved about, taking in everything.
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