Bloodless

by Douglas Preston

  “How dare you!” Grooms said. “Turn off those cameras!” He gestured furiously at the cameras, which of course kept rolling, zooming in on his face. “This is defamation! I’ll sue!”

  But Gannon kept shooting. God, it was priceless. She was amazed at how Betts had turned this whole fiasco around. And she wondered, not for the first time, if there wasn’t something to Moller’s tricks after all.

  18

  THE CHURCH WAS A twenty-minute walk across town. Even though it was late, the streets were packed with tourists and drunk college students, bars overflowing, restaurants lit up, squares teeming with people. The church lay just outside the old pre–Civil War city limits, edging into an impoverished neighborhood of far less cheer. It was a nondescript brown brick building streaked with damp, missing some of its slate shingles. The small parking lot was full, and Coldmoon noticed the cars in it were expensive—Maseratis, BMWs, Audis. The first-floor windows had all been boarded up. Pendergast had a no-knock warrant, but Coldmoon suspected he was not going to employ the usual direct method of just busting down the front door.

  They went around the corner from Bee Street—busy even at midnight—and examined the building from the rear. There was a small sacristy in the back, along with a modest rectory, its windows boarded up as well. Hopping a low iron railing, Pendergast darted up to the rectory’s back door. Coldmoon followed. It was fitted with a gleaming new lock that looked out of place against the weathered oak. Pendergast reached into his suit and pulled out a set of lock picks nestled within a pouch of folded leather. A moment’s fiddling released the lock.

  Pendergast pressed his ear to the door for a long time and then slowly eased it open. The hinges, Coldmoon noted, were well oiled.

  They slipped into a dark entryway. When Pendergast shut the door, the darkness turned to pitch black. Pendergast snapped on a small penlight and shined it around. The entryway gave onto a small, shabby parlor to the left and a dining room to the right. Straight ahead was a door leading in the direction of the church. Pendergast stepped up, placed his ear to that door as well, then gestured for Coldmoon to do the same.

  When Coldmoon did, he could hear, through the door, the throbbing of voices—a monophonic, ritualistic chanting, slowly rising and falling.

  They retreated from the door. “A cappella,” Coldmoon murmured. “Nice.”

  “There are usually two doors from a rectory to a church,” Pendergast whispered in return. “One for the public entrance of the minister, and one for the private entrance. Let us seek the private one.”

  They went into the dining room, then through it to a small kitchen. The flashlight’s pencil beam illuminated a plastic jeroboam sitting on a counter, full of some unknown liquid. Pendergast swiped a glass from a shelf, held it under the container’s spigot, and turned it.

  A thick red stream came out.

  “Holy shit,” said Coldmoon, taking an involuntary step backward.

  Pendergast slipped out a test tube, swabbed blood out of the glass, placed the swab in the tube, then stoppered it and returned it to his suit coat. He moved to a door at the far end of the room. Coldmoon watched as he tested the handle: unlocked.

  He cracked it open ever so slightly, and the sound of chanting grew louder. A reddish light filtered through the crack. Pendergast stood there for a moment, then motioned for Coldmoon to take a look.

  Beyond lay the sacristy, and beyond that the apse of the church. Where the altar would normally have been there was now a stage, and on the stage was a group of about half a dozen naked people moving in a slow circle, hands above their heads, chanting—and drenched in blood. Most were old and overweight, the men bald, the women with peroxided hair—on their heads, at least. In the middle of the circle was a pentagram with bizarre symbols chalked on its arms. Roaming about the stage was a woman, also naked and covered in blood. A macabre-looking necklace, from which dangled demonic-looking faces stamped in gold, hung from her neck. She held a brush and a copper pot, and periodically she dipped the brush into the pot, then splattered it over the dancers like a basting mop. It appeared to Coldmoon that the pot was full of blood.

  Beyond the stage, in the dim crimson light, was a small audience of similar age. As the chanting grew in intensity, the audience members, too, began to shed their clothes, then gather in groups of two and three, fondling and caressing each other as they watched the ritual.

  Pendergast retreated from the door and Coldmoon followed.

  “Are those Satanic rites?” Coldmoon asked. He felt sick.

  “Something of the sort,” said Pendergast in a disgusted voice. In the reflected reddish glow, he looked disappointed, if not downright crestfallen.

  “Isn’t that what you were expecting?” Coldmoon asked. “Looks like the orgy’s starting up any minute.”

  “I fear I may have miscalculated.” Pendergast paused. “These people are…amateurs.”

  “Amateurs? Looks pretty damn serious to me.”

  At this point, the chanting abruptly slackened. Pendergast hurried to the door, glanced through the crack, then turned to Coldmoon. “Quick, over here. She’s coming.”

  Pendergast and Coldmoon slipped into a dark closet, then half closed the door. A moment later, the woman with the pot came in, fiddled briefly with the spigot—having some difficulty in the dark—then left the way she had come. Obviously, she had refilled the pot with blood.

  A sudden loud pounding sounded on the front door of the church, followed by a voice amplified through a megaphone: “FBI, executing a search warrant! Open up! This is the FBI!”

  “Right on time,” said Pendergast grimly.

  A second later came the boom of a ram, then another, mingled with the screams and surprised cries of the participants and their audience. The main doors flew open, splintering on their hinges, and agents poured in.

  “FBI!” yelled the man with the megaphone, whose voice Coldmoon recognized as Agent Carracci’s. “Everyone on the ground! On the fucking ground! Do it now! Show your hands!”

  At this, Pendergast opened the door wide and strode out through the sacristy, Coldmoon following. The naked group was hastily obeying, getting down on the floor amid slicks of blood. Coldmoon watched as the agents fanned out, weapons drawn, making sure everyone was unarmed and cooperating.

  “Clear!” somebody yelled.

  It did not take long for the agents to complete their search. Pendergast directed them into the kitchen, where they hefted the jug of blood and confiscated it, along with other things—masks, costumes, hoods, chalices, dildos, statuettes, and additional flotsam ridiculous or uncouth. Pendergast watched, lips pursed with dissatisfaction.

  No one was arrested. When the search was concluded, the FBI allowed everyone back on their feet, and—as the would-be Dionysians stood in a line, shamed, their fleshy bodies illuminated by numerous flashlights—took down names one at a time. For a bunch of Satanists, Coldmoon thought, the audience was surprisingly docile, some blubbering with fear, others pleading with the agents not to make their names public. Among the group was Dr. Cobb, who, alone among the rest, took it upon himself to argue that this was a bona fide religious service, that their religious freedom had been trampled upon, and that he would be calling his lawyer first thing in the morning. His complaints were studiously ignored. Coldmoon reflected that he’d preferred the first meeting with Cobb, when the museum director had been fully clothed.

  And then Carracci said tersely: “All right. Get the fuck out of here.” In a mad rush of swaying breasts and bobbing privates, the group broke apart, ran to various corners of the church, grabbed their clothes, then headed for their cars and exited the parking lot, tires screeching. After briefly conferring with Carracci, Pendergast went out the back with Coldmoon.

  “Too bad we can’t hold them,” said Coldmoon.

  “It would be a waste of time.”

  “What are you talking about? You don’t think the case is solved?”

  “I think anything but,” said Pendergast.
His face looked drawn. “I fear I have made a serious miscalculation.”

  “Miscalculation? You saw the tattoos; you made the connection; you found the church. It looks to me like pretty fast footwork, not miscalculation.”

  “All too fast. I did not follow my own advice; I started thinking too early.”

  Coldmoon thought this was ridiculous. “Come on. You saw all that blood.”

  “I’d wager a great deal that it’s animal blood. But more to the point: when I saw that lot full of expensive cars, and those ridiculous rites, I understood the psychological dynamic was wrong. These are dilletantes, playing at Satanism. They are guilty of animal cruelty, perhaps, but not murder. The killer or killers we are seeking are far more insidious than these…these pathetic dabblers in the occult.”

  Coldmoon shook his head. The case had gone from being open, to closed, to open again, so fast he felt almost dizzy.

  “Let this be a lesson to you, my friend, on the dangers of drawing conclusions too early,” Pendergast told him. “As H. L. Mencken once said, ‘There is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.’ This was that neat, plausible, and wrong solution.”

  “If you say so. What now?”

  “We must look elsewhere for answers. Specifically, Ellerby.”

  19

  PENDERGAST DESCENDED THE WORN steps, pausing at the bottom to look around. He felt deeply chagrined at the previous evening’s raid and his central role in it, but for the time being he put such thoughts aside.

  The basement of the Chandler House had a distinctive smell—the smell of time, for want of a better word—that he found most interesting: wet stone, dust, and the distant odor of saltpeter, no doubt from the days when the building had functioned as a munitions factory, with a whiff of burnt rubber. Here they had processed gunpowder, lead, and brass into .54-caliber ringtail bullets for the Sharps rifles favored by Confederate cavalry. How stimulating, he thought, to have the past and the present mingling here in one’s senses, like a fugue.

  He also noted an additional odor: the crushed-walnut scent unique to the toxin prestrycurarine. He paused. It would seem the hotel was troubled with rat infestations. It would also seem they used a backward exterminator, because that particular rodenticide had been deemed ineffective years ago; rats, lacking the physical capacity to vomit, were by nature highly suspicious of unfamiliar odors. No matter; rats in a basement were not his concern.

  The entire space exuded a feeling of desuetude and abandonment. He could see bare lightbulbs hanging from cords, stretching out into the distance, leaving gloom on either side. Even from his position at the foot of the steps, he noticed that the basement was formed out of a layering of building cycles, the stone floor rising or falling to match the periods of additional excavation. In the darker corners, away from the lights, rooms were faintly visible: pantries, a disused kitchen, what looked like a scullery. One section far to the rear was roped off with yellow tape and an official-looking sign that read STRUCTURALLY UNSOUND.

  The antiquarian in him would have enjoyed exploring this underground fastness further, but he was here for a specific purpose: to investigate the room hard by the basement stairs that had been Ellerby’s special office.

  The room was marked by a scuffed wooden door with a pane of frosted glass set into it. Pendergast tried it, found it locked. He took out his set of lock-picking tools and, with a quick movement of his nimble fingers, the door opened noiselessly.

  The room was small and boxy. One of the fluorescent lights affixed to the ceiling had a malfunctioning baffle. Three computer monitors arrayed along one wall were dark, but he could see the computers connected to them were still running, albeit asleep. They were placed upon a long table, a printer at one end. A shorter table was pushed against the opposite wall, its stacks of paper, arranged into folders of various colors. This was where the late Patrick Ellerby had moonlighted as a stock trader.

  As he closed the door and walked into the room, Pendergast reminded himself that moonlighting was misleading: from what the staff had said, Ellerby would drift down here at random times of the day or night. Which was odd, because most traders worked by the clock.

  Pendergast had already examined Ellerby’s rooms, located on the third floor of the hotel. There had been nothing unusual, incriminating, or particularly interesting; the books, magazines, clothing, and electronics were typical of the life of a middle-aged bachelor. Based on what Constance had told him, Pendergast had hoped to uncover something that might shed light on the nature of Ellerby’s relationship with the hotel’s ancient and reclusive proprietress—who had refused to speak to anyone, including the police—but he had found nothing.

  As he scanned the desk, two items caught his eye. One was a set of purchase papers for an F-250 truck, loaded, that had cost just over $70,000, and the other was the receipt for a self-winding Vacheron Constantin watch from a Miami boutique, with a price tag of $30,000.

  While Pendergast did not much care for Ellerby’s choice of vehicle, he certainly approved of his taste in timepieces.

  Both purchases had been made within the last month. Pendergast briefly conjured up the image of somebody wearing that peerless example of haute horlogerie…while driving a pickup. It was ridiculous—but then, his mother had always told him people in Savannah had their own peculiar ways. He had witnessed a few of those ways himself, firsthand, the night before. He riffled through the colored folders, then placed them back on the worktable.

  Constance had taken a peculiar interest in the proprietress, Miss Frost, and had gathered a store of gossip about her. Two days before Ellerby’s death, she had come down here, seeming not at all a frail old recluse…not to mention later that evening when they’d had a ferocious argument in her rooms. Odd indeed.

  He turned toward the computers. Pendergast surveyed the long table for a moment, and then he pulled a penlight out of his jacket pocket, knelt, and examined the closest CPU, feeling its flank with the backs of his knuckles. The whining noise of the fan and the heavy accumulation of dust in its rear grill indicated these machines were turned off rarely, if at all.

  He rose and walked past each computer in turn, wriggling their mice to wake them up. A password field popped up on one of the screens—not surprising, given the financial transactions it presumably controlled. The password provided access to all three machines.

  These computers would be dealt with by the FBI’s digital forensics lab. He glanced at them for a few seconds before his attention turned to a thick, well-scuffed ledger book covered in green cloth, sitting on the desk before the three monitors. He picked it up and began paging through it. It appeared to be a list of transactions, all handwritten in a fanatically neat hand, with each entry containing a date, a cash amount, and a variety of abbreviations and symbols. It went back several years, and had obviously been meticulously kept. With any luck, it would prove to be Ellerby’s magnum opus: the logbook that chronicled all his doings in the market. It seemed odd he didn’t have a safe to put all these papers in, but then again, no one had any interest in his doings until after he was murdered. But it did strike Pendergast as significant that there was no air of secrecy, illicit trading, or deception here. Even the lock on the door was of the most ordinary nature.

  Pendergast flipped through the ledger until he reached the final entries. The most recent had been made eight days before.

  Eight days. Two days before Ellerby died.

  Pendergast ran through the dozen-odd pages leading up to these final entries. A cursory scan indicated that the hotel manager had been actively trading every day of the week, including weekends. There appeared to be no missed days, gaps, or lacunae of any sort…until the trades abruptly ended. He looked at the final entries once again, but there was nothing about them that indicated anything was amiss. The lines of text simply stopped—and forty-eight hours later, Ellerby was dead.

  Putting down the ledger and taking out his penlight, Pendergast got on his hands
and knees and did a painstaking search of the entire floor of the room. This was followed by the undersides of the desks, the chairs, the walls, the single filing cabinet. He took the occasional sample, but he could see nothing of special interest: no traces of blood, no signs of violence or a struggle. It looked as if Ellerby had last come down here on one of his breaks, done some work, then walked out, closing the door behind him…and gone to meet his death.

  Pendergast walked toward the door, opened it, snapped off the light, and stepped into the basement hallway. As he closed the door, his gaze once more turned toward the array of bare bulbs, leading off tantalizingly into the darkness. Then he turned away and began ascending the stairs, pulling out his phone as he did so to arrange for the FBI’s Evidence Response Team to come and take away all traces of Patrick Ellerby’s lucrative hobby.

  20

  AS THEY WERE FINISHING breakfast the morning after the raid, Pendergast’s cell phone rang. While he answered it, Coldmoon stirred his coffee moodily and took a sip. It was terrible, of course. He noticed that Pendergast was listening for a long time to someone on the other end of the line, without saying a word, and wondered idly who it was. Constance—whose breakfast had consisted only of tea—was reading the latest issue of The Lancet. This seemed like odd breakfast reading material, but nothing Constance did would surprise Coldmoon anymore.

  Pendergast finally said, simply, “Yes,” and hung up.

  “Who was that?” Coldmoon asked.

  “Our old friend, Squire Pickett. The senator has asked him to ask us to participate in a press conference.”

  “Press conference? Good God, why?”

  Pendergast smiled wanly. “To discuss the Savannah Vampire, of course.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “The senator is a canny fellow,” Pendergast said. “He doesn’t want this blowing up in his face, and so he’s getting in front of the situation by leveraging his relationship with Pickett. Rumors are running rampant about a vampire, and he wants to put some solid information in front of the public to squelch speculation. Commander Delaplane will be running the conference. The mayor will be there, and we’ll be backing them up.”