The golden light faded as the sun sank below the trees. Pallid mists began to drift across the lawn from the direction of the mangrove swamp. The air smelled of verdure, moss, and bracken. Pendergast stood in the graveyard for a long time, silent and unmoving, as evening settled over the land. Yellow lights—coming up in the windows of the plantation house—filtered through the trees of the arboretum. The scent of burning oak wood drifted on the air; a smell that brought back irresistible memories of childhood summers. Glancing up, Pendergast could see one of the great brick chimneys of the plantation house issuing a lazy stream of blue smoke. Rousing himself, he left the graveyard, walked through the arboretum, and gained the covered porch, the warped boards protesting under his feet.
He knocked on the door, then stood back to wait. A creaking from inside; the sound of slow footsteps; an elaborate unlatching and unchaining; and the great door swung open to reveal a stooped old man of indeterminate race, dressed in an ancient butler’s uniform, his face grave. “Master Aloysius,” he said, with fine reserve, not offering his hand immediately.
Pendergast extended his and the old man responded, the ribbed old hand getting a friendly shake. “Maurice. How are you?”
“Middling,” the old man replied. “I saw the cars drive up. Glass of sherry in the library, sir?”
“That will be fine, thank you.”
Maurice turned and moved slowly through the entry hall toward the library. Pendergast followed. A fire was burning on the hearth, not so much for warmth as to drive out the damp.
With a clinking of bottles, Maurice muddled about the sideboard and poured a measure into a tiny sherry glass, placed it on a silver tray, and carried it over with great ceremony. Pendergast took it, sipped, then glanced around. Nothing had changed for the better. The wallpaper was stained, and balls of dust lay in the corners. He could hear the faint rustle of rats in the walls. The place had gone downhill significantly in the five years since he had last been here.
“I wish you’d let me hire a live-in housekeeper, Maurice. And a cook. It would greatly relieve your burden.”
“Nonsense! I can take care of the house myself.”
“I don’t think it’s safe for you to be here alone.”
“Not safe? Of course it’s safe. I keep the house well locked at night.”
“Naturally.” Pendergast sipped the sherry, which was an excellent dry oloroso. He wondered, a little idly, how many bottles were left in the extensive cellars. Many more, probably, than he could drink in a lifetime, not to mention the wine, port, and fine old cognac. As the collateral branches of his family had died out, all the various wine cellars—like the wealth—had concentrated around him, the last surviving member of sound mind.
He took another sip and put down the glass. “Maurice, I think I’ll take a turn through the house. For old times’ sake.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll be here if you need me.”
Pendergast rose and, opening the pocket doors, stepped into the entry hall. For fifteen minutes, he wandered through the rooms of the first floor: the empty kitchen and sitting rooms, the drawing room, the pantry and saloon. The house smelled faintly of his childhood—of furniture polish, aged oak, and, infinitely distant, his mother’s perfume—all overlaid with a much more recent odor of damp and mildew. Every object, every knickknack and painting and paperweight and silver ashtray, was in its place, and every little thing carried a thousand memories of people long since under earth, of weddings and christenings and wakes, of cocktail parties and masked balls and children stampeding the halls to the warning exclamations of aunts.
Gone, all gone.
He mounted the stairs to the upper landing. Here, two hallways led to bedrooms in the opposite wings of the house, with the upstairs parlor straight ahead, through an arched doorway protected by a brace of elephant tusks.
He entered the parlor. A zebra rug lay on the floor, and the head of a Cape buffalo graced the mantel above the massive fireplace, looking down at him with furious glass eyes. On the walls were numerous other heads: kudu, bushbuck, stag, deer, hind, wild boar, elk.
He clasped his hands behind his back and slowly paced the room. Seeing this array of heads, these silent sentinels to memory and events long past, his thoughts drifted irresistibly to Helen. He’d had the old nightmare the previous night—as vivid and terrible as ever—and the malevolent effects still lingered like a canker in the pit of his stomach. Perhaps this room might exorcise that particular demon, at least for a while. It would never disappear, of course.
On the far side, against the wall, stood the locked gun case that displayed his collection of hunting rifles. It was a savage, bloody sport—driving a five-hundred-grain slug of metal at two thousand feet per second into a wild animal—and he wondered why it attracted him. But it was Helen who had truly loved hunting, a peculiar interest for a woman—but then Helen had been an unusual woman. A most unusual woman.
He gazed through the rippled, dusty glass at Helen’s Krieghoff double-barreled rifle, the side plates exquisitely engraved and inlaid with silver and gold, the walnut stock polished with use. It had been his wedding present to her, just before they went on their honeymoon safari, after Cape buffalo in Tanzania. A beautiful thing, this rifle: six figures’ worth of the finest woods and precious metals—designed for a most cruel purpose.
As he looked, he noted a small edge of rust creeping around the muzzle rim.
He strode to the door of the parlor and called down the stairs. “Maurice? Would you kindly bring me the key to the gun cabinet?”
After a long moment, Maurice appeared in the hall. “Yes, sir.” He turned, disappearing once again. Moments later, he slowly mounted the groaning stairs, an iron key gripped in his veined hand. He creaked past Pendergast and stopped before the gun case, inserted the key, and turned it.
“There you are, sir.” His face remained impassive, but Pendergast was glad to sense in Maurice a feeling of pride: for having the key at his fingertips, for simply being of service.
“Thank you, Maurice.”
A nod and the manservant was gone.
Pendergast reached inside the case and—slowly, slowly—grasped the cold metal of the double barrel. His fingers tingled at the mere touch of her weapon. For some reason his heart was accelerating—the lingering effects of the nightmare, no doubt. He brought it out and placed it on the refectory table in the middle of the room. From a drawer below the cabinet he removed the gun-cleaning paraphernalia, arranging it beside the rifle. He wiped his hands, picked up the gun, and broke open the action, peering down both barrels.
He was faintly surprised: the right barrel was badly fouled; the left one clean. He laid the gun down, thinking. Again he walked to the top of the stairs.
“Maurice?”
The servant appeared once more. “Yes, sir?”
“Do you know if anyone has fired the Krieghoff since… my wife’s death?”
“It was your explicit request, sir, that no one be allowed to handle it. I’ve kept the key myself. No one has even been near the case.”
“Thank you, Maurice.”
“You’re quite welcome, sir.”
Pendergast went back into the parlor, this time shutting the doors. From a writing desk he extracted an old sheet of stationery, which he flipped over and laid on the table. Then he inserted a brush into the right barrel, pushed out some of the fouling onto the paper, and examined it: bits and flakes of some burned, papery substance. Reaching into his suit pocket, he pulled out the loupe he always carried, fixed it to his eye, and examined the bits more intently. There was no doubt: they were the scorched, carbonized fragments of wadding.
But the .500/.416 NE cartridge had no wadding: just the bullet, the casing, and the propellant. Such a cartridge, even a defective one, would never leave this kind of fouling behind.
He examined the left barrel, finding it clean and well oiled. With the cleaning brush he pushed a rag through. There was no fouling at all.
Pendergast straig
htened up, his mind suddenly in furious thought. The last time the gun had been fired had been on that terrible day. He forced himself to think back. This was something he had avoided—while awake—at all costs. But once he began to remember, it wasn’t hard to recall the details: every moment of that hunt was seared forever into his memory.
She had fired the gun only once. The Krieghoff had two triggers, one behind the other. The front trigger fired the right barrel, and that was the trigger normally pulled first. It was the one she pulled. And that shot had fouled the right barrel.
With that single shot, she missed the Red Lion. He’d always chalked it up to bush deflection, or perhaps extreme agitation.
But Helen wasn’t one to display agitation, even under the most extreme of circumstances. She rarely missed. And she hadn’t missed that last time, either… or wouldn’t have missed, if the right barrel had been loaded with a bullet.
Except that it wasn’t loaded with a bullet: it was loaded with a blank.
For a blank to generate a similar sound and recoil, it would have to have a large, tightly wadded plug, which would foul the barrel exactly as he’d observed.
Had Pendergast been a man of lesser control, the hinges of his sanity might have weakened under the emotional intensity of his thoughts. She had loaded the gun with .500/.416 NE soft-points at the camp that morning, just before heading into the bush after the lion. He knew that for a fact: he had watched her. And he knew they were live rounds, not blanks—nobody, especially not Helen, would mistake a wadded blank for a two-ounce round. He himself clearly recalled the blunt heads of the soft-points as she dunked them into the barrels.
Between the time she loaded the Krieghoff with soft-points and the time she fired, someone had removed her unfired cartridges and replaced them with blanks. And then, after the hunt, someone had removed the two blanks—one fired, one not—to cover up what they had done. Only they made a small mistake: they did not clean the fired barrel, leaving the incriminating fouling.
Pendergast sat back in the chair. One hand—trembling ever so slightly—rose to his mouth.
Helen Pendergast’s death had not been a tragic accident. It had been murder.
6
New York City
FOUR AM, SATURDAY. LIEUTENANT VINCENT D’Agosta pushed through the crowd, ducked under the crime-scene tape, and walked over to where the body lay sprawled across the sidewalk outside one of the countless identical Indian restaurants on East 6th Street. A large pool of blood had collected beneath it, reflecting the red and purple neon light in the restaurant’s grimy window with surreal splendor.
The perp had been shot at least half a dozen times and he was dead. Very dead. He lay crumpled on his side, one arm thrown wide, his gun twenty feet away. A crime-scene investigator was laying a tape measure, measuring the distance from the open hand to the gun.
The corpse was a scrawny Caucasian, thirtysomething, with thinning hair. He looked like a broken stick, his legs crooked, one knee hitched up to his chest, the other extended out and back, the arms flung wide. The two cops who had done the shooting, a beefy black guy and a wiry Hispanic, were off to one side, talking with Internal Affairs.
D’Agosta went over, nodded to the Internal Affairs officer, and clasped the hands of the cops. They felt sweaty, nervous.
It’s damn hard, D’Agosta thought, to have killed someone. You never really get over it.
“Lieutenant,” said one of the cops in a rush, anxious to explain yet again to a fresh ear, “the guy had just robbed the restaurant at gunpoint and was running down the street. We identified ourselves, showed our badges, and that’s when he opened on us, motherfucker just emptied his gun, firing while he ran, there were civilians on the street and we had no choice, we had to take him down. No choice, man, no choice—”
D’Agosta grasped the man’s shoulder, gave it a friendly squeeze as he glanced at his nameplate. “Ocampo, don’t sweat it. You did what you had to do. The investigation will show that.”
“I mean, he just opened up like there was no tomorrow—”
“For him there won’t be.” D’Agosta walked aside with the Internal Affairs investigator. “Any problems?”
“I doubt it, sir. These days, of course, there’s always a hearing. But this is about as clear-cut as they come.” He slapped his notebook shut.
D’Agosta lowered his voice. “See those guys get some psychological counseling. And make sure they meet with the union lawyers before they do any more talking.”
“Will do.”
D’Agosta looked thoughtfully at the corpse. “How much did he get?”
“Two hundred and twenty, give or take. Fucking addict, look at him, all eaten up by horse.”
“Sad. Any ID?”
“Warren Zabriskie, address in Far Rockaway.”
D’Agosta shook his head as he glanced over the scene. It was about as straightforward as you could ask for: two cops, both minorities; the dead perp white; witnesses up the wazoo; everything caught on security cams. Open and shut. There would be no protest marches or accusations of police brutality. The shooter got what he deserved—everyone would reluctantly agree on that.
D’Agosta glanced around. Despite the cold, a pretty big crowd had developed beyond the tape, East Village rockers and yupsters and metrosexuals and whatever the hell else you called them these days. The forensic unit was still working the body, the EMTs waiting to one side, the owner of the victimized restaurant being interviewed by detectives. Everyone doing their job. Everything under control. A senseless, stupid, piece-of-shit case that would generate a blizzard of paperwork, interviews, reports, analyses, boxes of evidence, hearings, press conferences. All because of two hundred lousy bucks for a fix.
He was wondering how long it would be before he could gracefully escape when he heard a shout and saw a disturbance at the far edge of the cordoned area. Someone had ducked under the tape and trespassed onto the scene. He turned angrily—only to come face-to-face with Special Agent A. X. L. Pendergast, pursued by two uniformed officers.
“Hey, you—!” one of the cops shouted, grabbing Pendergast roughly by the shoulder. With a deft movement the agent freed himself, extracted his badge, and flashed it into the officer’s face.
“What the—?” the cop said, backing off. “FBI. He’s FBI.”
“What’s he doing here?” asked the other.
“Pendergast!” D’Agosta cried, stepping toward him quickly. “What the hell brings you here? This killing isn’t exactly your kind of—”
Pendergast silenced him with a violent gesture, slashing his hand through the air between them. In the neon gloom, his face was so white he almost looked spectral, dressed as usual like a wealthy undertaker in his trademark tailored black suit. Except this time he somehow looked different—very different. “I must speak with you. Now.”
“Sure, of course. As soon as I wrap things up—”
“I mean now, Vincent.”
D’Agosta stared. This was not the cool, collected Pendergast he knew so well. This was a side of the man he had never seen before, angry, brusque, his movements rushed. Not only that, but—D’Agosta noticed on closer inspection—his normally immaculate suit was creased and rumpled.
Pendergast grasped him by the lapel. “I have a favor to ask you. More than a favor. Come with me.”
D’Agosta was too surprised by his vehemence to do anything but obey. Leaving the scene under the stares of his fellow cops, he followed Pendergast past the crowd and down the street to where the agent’s Rolls was idling. Proctor, the chauffeur, was behind the wheel, his expression studiously blank.
D’Agosta had to practically run to keep up. “You know I’ll help you out any way I can—”
“Don’t say anything, do not speak, until you’ve heard me out.”
“Right, sure,” D’Agosta added hastily.
“Get in.”
Pendergast slipped into the rear passenger compartment, D’Agosta climbing in behind. The agent pulled open a p
anel in the door and swung out a tiny bar. Grasping a cut-glass decanter, he sloshed three fingers of brandy into a glass and drank half of it off with a single gulp. He replaced the decanter and turned to D’Agosta, his silvery eyes glittering with intensity. “This is no ordinary request. If you can’t do it, or won’t do it, I’ll understand. But you must not burden me with questions, Vincent—I don’t have time. I simply don’t—have—time. Listen, and then give me your answer.”
D’Agosta nodded.
“I need you to take a leave of absence from the force. Perhaps as long as a year.”
“A year?”
Pendergast knocked back the rest of the drink. “It could be months, or weeks. There’s no way to know how long this is going to take.”
“What is ‘this’?”
For a moment, the agent did not reply. “I’ve never spoken to you about my late wife, Helen?”
“No.”
“She died twelve years ago, when we were on safari in Africa. She was attacked by a lion.”
“Jesus. I’m sorry.”
“At the time, I believed it to be a terrible accident. Now I know different.”
D’Agosta waited.
“Now I know she was murdered.”
“Oh, God.”
“The trail is cold. I need you, Vincent. I need your skills, your street smarts, your knowledge of the working classes, your way of thinking. I need you to help me track down the person—or persons—who did this. I will of course pay all your expenses and see to it that your salary and health benefits are maintained.”
A silence fell in the car. D’Agosta was stunned. What would this mean for his career, his relationship with Laura Hayward… his future? It was irresponsible. No—it was more than that. It was utterly crazy.
“Is this an official investigation?”
“No. It would be just you and me. The killer might be anywhere in the world. We will operate completely outside the system—any system.”
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