Blue Labyrinth

by Douglas Preston

  “Please don’t dwell on it.”

  He fell into silence. In the dark room, lit only by the medical instrumentation, Constance was not sure if he was still awake.

  “The lilies have begun to suppurate,” he said.

  “Oh, Aloysius,” she said.

  “There is something worse than the suffering. It’s that I lack answers. This baroque plot at the Salton Sea bears all the hallmarks of something Alban would organize. But who was he working with, and why did they kill him? And… how can I bear this slide into madness?”

  Now Constance gripped his hand in both of hers. “There has to be a cure, an antidote. We’ll conquer this together.”

  In the dimness, Pendergast shook his head. “No, Constance. There is no cure. You must go away. I’ll fly home. I know private doctors who can keep me as comfortable as possible while the end approaches.”

  “No!” said Constance, her voice louder than she had intended. “I’ll never leave you.”

  “I do not care to have you see me like… like this.”

  She stood up and leaned over him. “I’ve got no choice.”

  Pendergast shifted slightly under the covers. “You always have a choice. Please honor my request that you not see me in extremis. Like that man in Indio.”

  In a languorous movement, she bent over the prostrate sufferer and kissed his brow. “I’m sorry. But my choice is to fight this to the end. Because—”

  “But—”

  “Because you are the other half of my heart,” she murmured. She sat down once more, took up his hand, and did not speak again.

  The uniformed police officer pulled the squad car over to the curb. “We’re here, sir,” he said.

  “You’re sure?” Lieutenant D’Agosta said, peering out the passenger window.

  “Forty-One Twenty-Seven Colfax Avenue. Did I get the address wrong?”

  “No, that’s the one.”

  D’Agosta was surprised. He’d expected a trailer park or a grim apartment deep in the projects. But this house in the Miller Beach section of Gary, Indiana, was well tended, and—though it might be small—was freshly painted, and the grounds were neatly pruned. Marquette Park was only a few blocks away.

  D’Agosta turned to the Gary cop. “Would you mind going over his record again for me? Just so I’ve got everything in my head.”

  “Sure thing.” The cop unzipped a case, pulled out a computer printout. “It’s pretty clean. A couple of traffic tickets, one for doing thirty-eight in a thirty zone, another for passing on the shoulder.”

  “Passing on the shoulder?” D’Agosta asked. “They give tickets for that here?”

  “Under the last chief, we did. He was a hard-ass.” The cop looked back at the rap sheet. “Only thing of any substance we have on him was being nabbed during a raid on a known mob hangout. But he was clean—no drugs, no weapons—and since he had no other connections or affiliations we knew of, no charges were pressed. Four months later, his wife reported him missing.” The cop returned the rap sheet to the case. “That’s it. Given possible ties to the mob, we figured he’d been killed. He never showed up again, alive or dead, no body, nothing. It was eventually shelved as a cold case.”

  D’Agosta nodded. “Let me do the talking, if you don’t mind.”

  “Be my guest.”

  D’Agosta glanced at his watch: half past six. Then he opened the door to the cruiser and heaved himself out with a grunt.

  He followed the uniformed officer up the walkway and waited while the doorbell was pressed. A few moments later, a woman appeared at the door. With long practice, D’Agosta took in the details: five foot six, 140 pounds, brunette hair. She held a plate in one hand and a dishcloth in the other, and she was dressed for work in a pantsuit that was dated but clean and well pressed. When she saw the officer, a look went across her face: an expression of both anxiety and hope.

  D’Agosta stepped forward. “Ma’am, are you Carolyn Rudd?”

  The woman nodded.

  D’Agosta flashed his badge. “I’m Lieutenant Vincent D’Agosta of the New York Police Department and this is Officer Hektor Ortillo of the Gary police. I was wondering if we could have a few minutes of your time.”

  There was just the slightest hesitation. “Yes,” the woman said. “Yes, of course. Come in.” She opened the door and ushered them into a small living room. The furniture was, again, old and functional, but well kept and impeccably clean. Once again D’Agosta got the clear impression of a household in which money had grown tight, but form and civility still mattered.

  Ms. Rudd asked them to sit down. “Would you like some lemonade?” she asked. “Coffee?”

  Both men shook their heads.

  Now there were noises on the stairs leading to the second floor and two curious faces appeared: a boy, maybe twelve, and a girl a few years younger.

  “Howie,” the woman said. “Jennifer. I’m just going to have a little chat with these gentlemen. Could you please go back upstairs and finish your homework? I’ll be up soon.”

  The two children looked at the cops, silent and wide-eyed. After a few seconds they crept back upstairs and out of sight.

  “If you’ll excuse me a moment, I’ll just put this dish away.” The woman retreated to the kitchen, then returned and took a seat across from D’Agosta and the Gary cop.

  “What can I do for you?” she asked.

  “We’ve come to talk to you about your husband,” D’Agosta said. “Howard Rudd.”

  The hope he’d seen in her face a few moments earlier returned, much stronger. “Oh!” she said. “Have you… any new evidence? Is he alive? Where is he?”

  The eagerness with which these words tumbled out surprised D’Agosta as much, if not more, than the appearance of the house. Over the last few weeks, he’d developed a distinct portrait of the man who had attacked Agent Pendergast and most likely killed Victor Marsala: a thuggish bastard with no moral code, a venal son of a bitch with few if any redeeming values. When Terry Bonomo and the NYPD facial-detection software identified this man as Howard Rudd, late of Gary, Indiana, D’Agosta had been pretty sure what he’d find when he flew out to speak to the man’s wife. But the hope in her eyes was making him rethink his assumptions. He suddenly felt unsure how to go about this.

  “No, we haven’t ‘found’ him. Not exactly. The reason I’m here, Mrs. Rudd, is to learn more about your husband.”

  She looked from D’Agosta to Officer Ortillo and back again. “Are they reopening the case? I felt they shuffled it off way too soon. I want to help you. Just tell me what I can do.”

  “Well, you can start by telling us what kind of a person he was. As a father and a husband.”

  “Is,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “What kind of a person he is. I know the police think he’s dead, but I’m certain he’s alive out there, somewhere. I can feel it. He wouldn’t have left if he didn’t have a good reason. Someday he’ll come back—and he’ll explain what happened, and why.”

  D’Agosta’s discomfort increased. The conviction in the woman’s voice was unsettling. “If you could just tell us about him, Mrs. Rudd.”

  “What’s there to say?” The woman paused for a moment, reflecting. “He was a good husband, a devoted family man. Hardworking, loyal, a wonderful father. Never went out drinking or gambling, never looked at another woman. His father was a Methodist preacher, and Howard absorbed a lot of his good traits. I’ve never known anyone as dogged as he was. If he started something, he’d see it through, always. Worked his way through the community college washing dishes. He was a Golden Gloves boxer in his younger days. His word was the most important thing to him, save for his family. He sweated to keep that hardware store of his going, sweated night and day, even when the Home Depot opened up on Route 20 and business dried up. It wasn’t his fault he had to borrow money. If only he’d known who…”

  The stream of words stopped suddenly, and the woman’s eyes widened slightly.

  “
Please go on,” D’Agosta said. “If only he’d known what?”

  The woman hesitated. Then she sighed, glanced at the staircase to make sure the children were out of earshot, and continued. “If he’d known the character of those men he borrowed from. You see, the bank felt the store to be a bad risk. They wouldn’t give him a loan. Money got tight.” She clutched her hands together and looked at the floor. “He borrowed from bad people.”

  Suddenly she looked up again, directly at D’Agosta, imploringly. “But you can’t blame him for that—can you?”

  D’Agosta could only shake his head.

  “The nights he spent sitting at the kitchen table, looking at the wall, saying nothing… oh, it broke my heart!” The woman wiped away a tear. “And then, one day, he was gone. Just gone. That was over three years ago. And not a word from him since. But there’s a reason for it—I know there is.” A defiant look came over Mrs. Rudd’s face. “I know what the police think. But I don’t believe it. I won’t.”

  When D’Agosta spoke, it was gently. “Did you have any indication that he was about to leave? Anything at all?”

  The woman shook her head. “No. Nothing but the phone call.”

  “What phone call?”

  “It was the night before he went away. There was a phone call, pretty late. He took it in the kitchen. He kept his voice low—I don’t think he wanted me to hear him. Afterward, he looked devastated. But he wouldn’t talk to me, wouldn’t tell me what it was about.”

  “And you have no idea what could have happened to him or where he’s been all this time?”

  The woman shook her head again.

  “How have you been making ends meet since?”

  “I got a job in an advertising company. I do page layout and design work for the firm. It’s a decent living.”

  “And these people your husband borrowed money from. After he disappeared, were there any threats from them? Any reprisals?”

  “None.”

  “Would you happen to have a picture of your husband?”

  “Of course. Quite a few.” Mrs. Rudd turned, reached toward a small group of framed photographs on a side table, plucked one up, and handed it to D’Agosta. He looked at it. It was a family shot, with parents in the middle, the two children on either side.

  Terry Bonomo had nailed it. The man in the photograph was the spitting image of their computer reconstruction, pre-surgery.

  As he handed the photograph back, Mrs. Rudd suddenly grasped his wrist. Her grip was surprisingly strong. “Please,” she said. “Help me find my husband. Please.”

  D’Agosta couldn’t bear it any longer. “Ma’am, I have bad news for you. Earlier, I told you we hadn’t found your husband. But we do have a body, and I’m afraid it may be him.”

  The grip on his wrist tightened.

  “But we need a sample of his DNA in order to be sure. Could we borrow a few personal effects of his—a hairbrush, say, or a toothbrush? We’ll return them to you, of course.”

  The woman said nothing.

  “Mrs. Rudd,” D’Agosta continued, “sometimes not knowing can be a lot worse than knowing—even if knowing proves to be very painful.”

  For a long moment, the woman did not move. Then, slowly, she released her grip on D’Agosta’s wrist. Her hand slumped into her own lap. Her eyes went distant for a moment. Then, pulling herself together, she stood up, walked toward the steps, and mounted them without a word.

  Twenty minutes later, in the passenger seat of the police car on the way back to O’Hare, the pocket of his suit jacket containing a hairbrush of Howard Rudd’s, carefully sealed in a ziplock bag, D’Agosta pondered ruefully just how wrong one’s assumptions could be. The last thing he’d expected was that tidy house on Colfax Avenue, or the fiercely loyal and determined widow who lived inside.

  Rudd might be a murderer. But he was also, it seemed, at one time a good man who made a bad call and got himself into trouble. D’Agosta had seen it happen before. Sometimes the more you struggled, the deeper into the shit you sank. D’Agosta was forced to reevaluate Rudd. Now he realized that Rudd’s very love of family, and the bind he found himself in—whatever it might have been, exactly—had forced him to do some terrible things, including change his looks and identity. He had little doubt the leverage they had used against him was his little family.

  These were some bad motherfuckers.

  He glanced over at the Gary policeman. “Thank you, Officer.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  D’Agosta returned his gaze to the freeway ahead. It was strange—very strange. They had “Nemo,” Marsala’s likely killer and Pendergast’s attacker, on ice… but with no history, no backstory—except that he had once been a hardworking, decent family man named Howard Rudd. There was a gap of three years between Rudd’s disappearance in Gary and his appearance at the Museum, posing as a phony scientist named Waldron.

  This left D’Agosta with one big question. What the hell happened in between?

  Lieutenant Angler sat in the back room of the Republic Rent-a-Car agency at the Albany airport, gloomily twirling a pencil on the desk in front of him, waiting for Mark Mohlman—the manager—to finish with a customer out front and return to the office. Everything had been going so well, it was like a dream. And now, Angler realized, that’s probably just what it had been. A dream.

  At his request, his team had prepared lists of everyone who’d rented a car in the Albany area during the May window when Alban was in town. Examining the lists himself, Angler got a hit: a certain Abrades Plangent—another anagram for Alban Pendergast—had rented a car from Republic on May 19, the day after he flew to Albany. Angler had made a call to the rental office and got a Mark Mohlman on the line. Yes, they had a record of the rental. Yes, the car was still in active use, and was available, although it was currently at another agency about forty miles away. Yes, Mohlman could arrange to get the vehicle back to Albany. And so Angler and Sergeant Slade got into a pool car and made the three-hour drive from New York City up to the state capital.

  Mohlman had proven to be just the man they needed. An ex-marine and a card-carrying member of the NRA, he helped them with all the enthusiasm of a wannabe cop. Tasks that might have taken all sorts of tiresome paperwork, or perhaps even a court order, became cakewalks in Mohlman’s efficient hands. He found the records of Alban’s rental—a blue Toyota Avalon—and provided them to Angler. Alban had returned the car after three days, having put only 196 miles on the odometer.

  It was at this point that Angler began to feel a nagging suspicion. Alban Pendergast had the annoying ability to disappear just about anytime he wanted to. Putting himself in Alban’s shoes, he decided that the young man would probably have taken additional steps to cover his movements. He asked Mohlman to double-check the fleet tracking information for the car during the period of Alban’s rental. Mohlman was again only too happy to oblige. He logged into Republic’s vehicle tracking system and accessed the fleet records of the Avalon. Angler’s hunch was correct: the tracking data didn’t match the odometer. According to Republic’s tracking system, the car had been driven 426 miles during Alban’s rental.

  And that was when the investigation started to fall apart. All of a sudden, there were too many variables. Alban could have monkeyed with the odometer settings—that was allegedly impossible, but Angler wouldn’t put it past Alban to figure out a way. Or he could have removed the car’s fleet tracker and put it on another vehicle, swapping it back later, thus furnishing false data. Or maybe he hadn’t bothered swapping it back—he’d just left a different tracker on the vehicle to add to the confusion. They needed some way to distinguish among the possibilities, and he didn’t have a clue how to do that.

  At that point, Mohlman had been forced to leave the office to deal with an irate customer. And so Angler sat morosely, twirling the pencil. Sergeant Slade sat across from him, characteristically silent. As he twirled, Angler wondered exactly what he’d hoped to achieve by coming here. Even if he knew ex
actly how many miles Alban had traveled and what kind of car he’d rented, so what? Alban could have gone anywhere in those three days. Blue Avalons were legion. And in the tiny towns that dotted upstate New York, traffic cameras were exceedingly rare.

  But when Mohlman came into the office, there was a smile on his face. “The black box,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “The black box. The event data recorder. Every rental car has one.”

  “They do?” Angler knew about fleet trackers from his own experience with police cruisers, but this was something new to him.

  “Sure. For a few years now. Initially, they were used just to provide info on how and why air bags deployed. The boxes were turned off by default; it took a hard jolt to get them to start recording. But recently the rental companies have paid to get cars with special boxes that are a lot more sophisticated. Nobody who rents a car can get away with anything nowadays.”

  “What information do they collect, exactly?”

  “Well, the newest ones record rudimentary location data. Distance driven per day. Average speed. Steering. Braking. Even the use of seat belts. And it’s tied into the GPS system. When the engine is turned off, the black box records the vehicle’s direction, relative to when the engine was turned on. And, just like with an airplane, a car’s black box can’t be removed or tampered with. People just haven’t realized how much we in the rental business can keep track of what they’re doing with our cars.”

  Can’t be removed or tampered with. Hope began to creep back into Angler’s soul. “But we’re talking about events that happened a year ago. Could this thing still have that data stored inside?”

  “That depends. Once its memory is filled up, the device starts overwriting the oldest data. But you may have caught a break there. This Avalon has been assigned to our Tupper Lake office for the last six months—and they don’t get many rentals out of there. So, yeah, the data still might be there.”