Two Graves

by Douglas Preston

  Between him and the car was about thirty feet of open ground.

  With a sudden burst of speed, Pendergast flitted across the space, then took cover behind the railcar. From this new vantage point he could see the door he had just come through, as well as a large, arched door at the far end of the open space. Debris littered the dusty, concrete floor, and in that dust he could see recent footmarks.

  Edging along the railcar, he ducked across another open space, flattened himself behind one pillar, then another, and a moment later scurried up to the arched door. It was shut but not locked.

  Reaching into his pocket, Pendergast turned on a small LED flashlight, held it against his .45, then spun around and—raising his weapon—burst through the door, panning across the space.

  It was not a room at all, but the long, cool tunnel that had evidently once been used for storing beer, attested to by several stacks of rotting barrels and countless old mold-blown beer bottles.

  Pendergast’s sense of puzzlement deepened. They should be here, waiting for him. They would have guessed he’d be coming. And yet he could see no sign of them.

  A few moments brought him to the far end of the tunnel and a second archway. Beyond that, he could see another vast, open space, speckled with fragments of sunlight, with the great hop kiln dominating one corner.

  His light showed footprints all over the floor now, clustering around the massive riveted iron door of the kiln, which stood ajar. Above, a metal catwalk ran around the walls, just beneath the arched ceiling.

  Creeping along the wall, Pendergast reached a point where he could look up to the catwalk. By now his eyes had fully adjusted to the gloom, and he could see that the catwalk was empty.

  He continued moving against the wall, toward the great door to the kiln. He approached it from the far side, weapon drawn; then skipped past the door frame, coming at it from the other side, pulling it open while using it as a shield against potential fire.

  But there was nothing save the loud groan of rusty iron, and when he shone the light around the interior of the hop kiln, nobody was there.

  The walls were blackened with soot and the floor was strewn with food trash. A bucket sat in the corner. Shackles had been driven into the walls, and on the scorched brick floor underneath were some small stains of blood. A filthy blanket with no mattress lay rucked up in the corner. Some old bloody bandages had been tossed in another corner. Clearly, this had been Tristram’s temporary prison.

  Pendergast sorted through the trash with meticulous care, once in a while retaining something in a test tube or ziplock bag. But he found nothing of interest.

  Back in the large space, he began to explore the area thoroughly. In an alcove he found the spot where Alban had presumably been living: a cot, an empty steamer trunk, a clean bucket. He searched the area, but it had been carefully cleaned out.

  They’d known he was coming—and had abandoned the hideout.

  In another alcove was a raw plywood table, on which sat a hot plate, a ten-dollar coffeemaker, and a mug. Shining the light low to the ground, Pendergast traced the web of footprints in the dust and dirt, hither and yon, and followed them as best he could, looking for other areas that might have been used. When that yielded nothing, he mounted the rickety metal stairs to the catwalk and traversed it, looking for hidden spaces. Nothing.

  Once again, Pendergast searched Alban’s alcove. He next inspected the table. The raw, unsealed top was splattered with coffee stains and rings. He held his flashlight at one edge of the table and began shining it at various raking angles across the surface. On the fourth try, the beam illuminated some faint writing marks in the soft plywood top. There was one mark in particular that had been written with pressure and underlined twice. Laying the light on the table, Pendergast removed a piece of paper and pencil from his suit and placed the paper over the marks, rubbing it ever so lightly with the side of the pencil. Slowly, bits and pieces of a scattering of letters materialized. On a separate piece of paper, Pendergast jotted them down, leaving blank the letters that were too faint to make out. He tried rubbing in several directions, each time getting a slightly different take on the letters, until he had five of the eight.

  BE _ _ _ EST

  He examined the rubbing with a loupe, examined the table itself, and was finally able to add another letter.

  BE _ A _ EST

  He stared at the piece of paper for a long time. And then, with one swift motion of the pencil, he completed the word:

  BETATEST

  34

  DR. JOHN FELDER SAT, A LITTLE DEJECTEDLY, IN THE MAIN room of the Wintour gatehouse. He had spent hours and hours restoring it to a modicum of livability—washing down the walls and floor with bleach, sweeping away the cobwebs, dusting all the surfaces, and dragging the clutter up into a tiny crawl space under the roof—and now he was able to sleep at night without imagining things crawling over his face and hands. He’d brought in just a few items: an air mattress and sleeping bag, a few sticks of furniture, a laptop, a space heater, books and groceries and a hot pot—the kitchen was too terrible to contemplate—and it hardly felt like home.

  Again and again, as he toiled, he’d asked himself: Why am I doing this? But the fact was, he already knew the answer.

  He got up from the lone chair and walked over to the window. It had been cleaned of grime and, through the last dying light of evening, afforded a good prospect of the Wintour mansion—cloaked in gloom, the brick walls straining under the too-large roof, the innumerable black windows like missing teeth. The day before, he’d been invited in for afternoon tea, and he’d found that the inside was just as creepy as the outside. Everything looked like a time capsule from the 1890s: the straight-backed, uncomfortable chairs with their lace antimacassars; the tiny wooden tables set with doilies, little glass figurines, ancient tchotchkes. The carpeting was dark, the wallpaper was dark, the walls were of dark wood, and it seemed as though no light could ever brighten the echoing spaces. Everything smelled faintly of mothballs. It wasn’t dusty, exactly—and yet Felder was aware of a constant desire to scratch his nose. The old, evil house seemed to be watching and listening as they sat in the dreary front parlor, Miss Wintour alternately heaping invective on the town fathers or lamenting how much better the world had been when she was a girl.

  It was past eight: dark enough now so that he could not be seen if he toured the grounds. He bundled himself warmly in his jacket, opened the door, stepped out, and shut the door quietly behind him. As he walked through the tangle of wintry, frozen undergrowth, the house seemed to follow his progress, glaring at him.

  He had decided the old woman was not in any way demented—just highly eccentric. And she was as sharp and prickly as a thistle—the one time he had brought up the subject of her library, in as tactful and offhand a way as possible, she’d practically jumped on him, demanding to know the reason for his interest. It was all he could do to steer the conversation in another direction, smooth down her suspicion. But he had learned its location: beyond a set of pocket doors that were always kept closed and locked. He knew, because he’d seen the room through the mansion’s windows by day: row after row of bookshelves, stuffed full of treasures both known and unknown.

  He approached it now, very quietly, through the tall grass. Despite the light of the moon, the library windows were rectangles of unrelieved black. The house had no security system—he’d noticed that right away. But then, it didn’t need one.

  It had Dukchuk.

  Dukchuk was the towering, always-silent manservant who opened the front door; who brought the tepid, watery tea; who stood behind Miss Wintour’s chair while she spoke, his unreadable gaze on Felder. The man’s tattoos gave him nightmares.

  He returned his attention to the library window. It might well be unlocked—he’d noticed that the windows of the front parlor were. It would be just like Miss Wintour to have four extra locks on the front door but none on the windows. Still, there was Dukchuk. The fellow looked as if he might hav
e his own, extralegal way of dealing with encroachers. Felder knew he would have to be supremely careful if…

  If what? Was he really thinking what he was thinking?

  Yes, he was. He realized now there was no way on earth old Miss Wintour would ever willingly show him the library. If he was going to get in, if he was going to find that portfolio, he would have to find another way.

  He licked his lips. Tomorrow night was forecast to be overcast, moonless. Then—he would do it then.

  35

  PENDERGAST STOOD IN THE WORKROOM OF HIS SPRAWLING apartments in the Dakota. The room was devoid of any decor or ornamentation, anything that would distract or hinder the most intense concentration. Even the color of the walls and the stain of the wooden floor were a cool gunmetal gray, as neutral as possible. The windows overlooking Seventy-Second Street were closed and tightly shuttered. In one corner sat a tall pile of yellowing documents: the papers that Corrie had brought him from the Nazi safe house. The only furniture was a long, oaken table that ran the length of the room. There were no chairs. The table was covered by police reports, SOC data, photographs, FBI profiles, forensic analyses, and other paperwork, all devoted to a single subject: the Hotel Killer murders. Committed by his son, Alban.

  His son. Pendergast was finding this fact to be a most disruptive influence on his deductive processes.

  He paced quickly back and forth along the length of the table, glancing at first one document, then another. Finally, with an exasperated shake of his head, he strode over to an audio player, set flush into one wall, and pressed the PLAY button. Immediately the low, sonorous strains of the Ricercar a 6 from Bach’s Musical Offering began to emerge from hidden speakers.

  This was the only piece that was ever heard in this room. Pendergast did not play it for its beauty—but for the way the complex, intensely mathematical composition settled and sharpened his mind.

  As the music continued, his pacing grew slower, his study of the documents strewn across the tabletop more ordered and nuanced.

  His son, Alban, had committed these murders. Tristram said that Alban loved killing. But why journey all the way to New York from Brazil to commit them? Why leave the body parts of his own brother at the murder sites? Why scrawl bloody messages on the corpses—messages that could only be meant for Pendergast himself?

  BETATEST. Beta test. There was clearly a method, a governing purpose, behind these killings. And Pendergast himself was meant to discover it. Or, perhaps, to try to discover it. Nothing else made sense.

  With Bach’s delicate, fantastically intricate counterpoint weaving softly in the background, Pendergast looked at the data afresh, forming a logical counterpoint of his own, mentally comparing times, dates, addresses, room numbers, external temperatures, ages of victims—anything that might point to a method, or a sequence, or a pattern. This process continued for ten, then twenty minutes. And then—abruptly—Pendergast stiffened.

  Bending over the table, he rearranged several pieces of paper, examined them again. Then, plucking a pen from his pocket, he wrote a series of numbers across the bottom of one of the sheets, double-checking it against the documentation.

  There was no mistake.

  He glanced at his watch. Moving like lightning, he darted down the hall to his study, plucked a tablet computer from the desk, and typed in a query. He examined the response—cursed softly but eloquently in Latin under his breath—and then picked up a telephone and dialed.

  “D’Agosta here,” came the response.

  “Vincent? Where are you?”

  “Pendergast?”

  “I repeat: where are you?”

  “Heading down Broadway, just passing Fifty-Seventh. I was going to—”

  “Turn around and come to the Dakota as quickly as you can. I’ll be waiting at the corner. Hurry—there’s not a moment to lose.”

  “What’s up?” D’Agosta asked.

  “We’ll talk in the car. I just hope we’re not too late.”

  36

  D’AGOSTA DROVE LIKE HELL DOWN PARK AVENUE through the evening traffic, emergency lights flashing, once in a while goosing his siren at the sons of bitches who wouldn’t pull over. Pendergast’s phone call out of the blue, the almost manic urgency in the agent’s voice, had unnerved him. He wasn’t sure if Pendergast was cracking up or actually on to something, but he’d spent enough time around the man to realize he ignored Pendergast’s requests at his own peril.

  Now, as they tore southward toward the Murray Hill Hotel, D’Agosta looked sideways to examine Pendergast. The transformation the special agent had undergone since his wife’s death covered the spectrum—from apathy, to a drug-induced stupor, and now this: a diamond-hard glitter in the man’s eyes, his entire being bursting with coiled-spring tension and fanatical energy.

  “You say another murder’s about to be committed?” D’Agosta began. “Can you fill me in here? How do you know—?”

  “Vincent, we have very little time, and what I have to say is going to seem strange to you, if not mad.”

  “Try me.”

  The briefest of pauses. “I have a son whom I never knew existed. His name is Alban. He’s the killer—not Diogenes, as I had previously suspected. Of this there is no doubt whatsoever.”

  “Whoa, now, just wait a minute, Jesus—”

  A short gesture from Pendergast silenced D’Agosta. “These killings are directed specifically at me. The precise motive is as yet unclear.”

  “I find it hard to—”

  “There is no time for detailed explanations. Suffice to say that the addresses of the hotels, and the times of the killings, follow a pattern, a sequence. The next term in this sequence is twenty-one. And there’s only one Manhattan hotel with twenty-one in its address—the Murray Hill, at Twenty-One Park Avenue. I’ve already checked.”

  “This is—”

  “And have you noticed the times of the killings? It’s another pattern, a simpler one. The first was at seven thirty in the morning. The next at nine PM. The third one, once again at seven thirty AM. He’s alternating times. And it’s almost nine now.”

  They tore through the Helmsley Building tunnel and around the viaduct, wheels squealing. “I don’t buy it,” D’Agosta said as he struggled to straighten the car. “An unknown son, this pattern of yours… it’s frigging nuts.”

  Pendergast made a visible effort to control himself. “I know how strange it must seem. But at least for the time being, I must insist on your full and complete suspension of disbelief.”

  “Disbelief? That’s an understatement. It’s totally crazy.”

  “You’ll find out soon enough. We are here.”

  D’Agosta angled the unmarked car and came to a screeching halt in front of the hotel. Unlike the three previous luxury hotels, this one was old and faintly seedy, its brown-brick façade streaked with soot. Leaving the car parked in the loading zone, D’Agosta got out but Pendergast was already ahead of him, flying into the lobby, his FBI badge out. “Security office!” he cried.

  The concierge came stumbling out all in a panic, and in response to Pendergast’s barked instructions led them past the lobby desk into a small inner office with a wall of CCTV screens. A security officer on duty leapt to his feet as they burst in.

  “FBI,” said Pendergast, waving the shield. “How many lobby tapes do you have online?”

  “Um, one,” the officer said, totally flummoxed.

  “Back it up half an hour. Now.”

  “Yes, um, yes, sir, of course.” The poor guard lumbered about as fast as he could. Fortunately, D’Agosta noticed, it was a recent and modestly advanced system, and the man seemed competent. Within a minute the feed was playing in accelerated motion. D’Agosta watched the monitor, his skepticism growing. This was ridiculous: the Hotel Killer would never pick a dump like this to work in. It didn’t match the M.O. He shot a covert glance at Pendergast: the wife’s death had clearly touched him even more than was obvious.

  “Speed it up,” Pendergast sa
id.

  The man complied. They watched as figures flitted across the lobby with rigid intensity.

  “Stop! That’s him.”

  The security video stopped, then proceeded in real time. It showed a nondescript man walking casually into the lobby, pausing, adjusting his tie, then moving toward the elevators. D’Agosta felt his gut contract. The way the man moved, looked—it was him.

  “Fuck,” he muttered.

  “Switch to the elevator cam,” Pendergast said.

  They followed the man’s progress to the fifth floor, where he got out, walked down the hall, and waited. Then, just as a woman came around the corner, he started up again, following her down the hall, until they passed out of view of the camera. The running time stamp indicated this had taken place just three minutes before.

  “Oh, Christ,” D’Agosta said. “Christ. He’s got another one.”

  “Back up the tape five seconds.” Pendergast pointed at the image of the woman, turning to the concierge. “Do you recognize her? What’s her room number? Quickly, man!”

  “She checked in today.” The concierge stepped back to the front desk, tapped the keys of the registration computer. “Room Five Sixteen.”

  Pendergast turned back to D’Agosta. “Stay here,” he murmured. “Monitor these feeds. When he comes back into view, follow his every movement. I’m going after him. And remember—tell no one of my son.”

  “Whoa,” D’Agosta said. “Hold on just a minute. Tell no one? Pendergast, I hate to say this, but I think you’re way out of line—”

  “Tell no one,” Pendergast repeated firmly. And then in a flash he was gone.

  Pendergast bounded up the five flights of stairs and ran down the hall to Room 516. The door was shut, but a single shot from his .45 blasted off the lock and he kicked the door open.