Brimstone p-5

by Douglas Preston

  A low-pitched, menacing voice intruded from behind. "I hate to break up this little conversation." D'Agosta turned to see Lieutenant Braskie.

  Braskie stopped, stared at Pendergast, then turned back to D'Agosta. "Perhaps I'm a little confused here, Sergeant, but isn't this individual trespassing at the scene of a crime ?"

  "Well, uh, Lieutenant, we were-" D'Agosta looked at Pendergast.

  "This man isn't a friend of yours, now, is he?"

  "As a matter of fact-"

  "The sergeant was just telling me to leave," interjected Pendergast smoothly.

  "Oh, he was, was he? And if I may be so bold as to inquire what you were doing here in the first place, sir?"

  "Feeding the ducks."

  "Feeding the ducks." D'Agosta could see Braskie's face flushing. He wished Pendergast would hurry up and pull out his shield.

  "Well, sir," Braskie went on, "that's a beautiful thing to do. Let's see some ID."

  D'Agosta waited smugly. This was going to be good.

  "As I was just explaining to the officer here, I left my wallet back at the house-"

  Braskie turned on D'Agosta, saw the notebook in his hand. "You got this man's information?"

  "Yes." D'Agosta looked at Pendergast almost pleadingly, but the FBI agent's face had shut down completely.

  "Did you ask him how he got through the police cordon?"

  "No-"

  "Don't you think maybe you should?"

  "I came through the side gate in Little Dune Road," Pendergast said.

  "Not possible. It's locked. I checked it myself."

  "Perhaps the lock is defective. At least, it seemed to fall open in my hands."

  Braskie turned to D'Agosta. "Now, at last, there's something useful you can do. Go plug that hole, Sergeant. And report back to me at eleven o'clock sharp . We need to talk. And as for you, sir, I will escort you off the premises."

  "Thank you, Lieutenant."

  D'Agosta looked with dismay at the retreating form of Lieutenant Braskie, with Pendergast strolling along behind him, hands in the pockets of his baggy surfer shorts, head tilted back as if taking the air.

  { 3 }

  Lieutenant L. P. Braskie Jr. of the Southampton Police Department stood beneath the trellis of the mansion's grape arbor, watching the SOC team comb the endless acreage of lawn for clues. His face wore a stolid mask of professionalism as he thought of Chief MacCready playing golf in the Highlands of Scotland. He pictured in his mind the links of St. Andrews in autumn: the narrow doglegs of greensward, the grim castle, the barren moors beyond. He'd wait until tomorrow to give the chief a call, let him know what was going on. MacCready had been chief for twenty years, and this golf trip was one more reason why Southampton needed fresh blood. Braskie was a local boy with roots in the town and friends in City Hall, and he'd also managed to build up some powerful relationships among the summer people. A favor here and a favor there worked wonders. A foot in both worlds. He'd played his cards well.

  And now this. They'd have the perp in the bag in a week or two, and come November and the elections, he'd be a shoo-in. Maybe he'd call MacCready the day after tomorrow: Gee, Chief, I really hesitated to interrupt your hard-earned vacation . ...

  Braskie knew, from long experience in South Fork homicide, that the first twenty-four hours of a murder investigation were often the most crucial. Fact was, if you didn't get on the trail and follow it right away, you might as well hang up your hat. Find ingress and egress, and everything that followed-forensic evidence, murder weapon, witnesses, motive-would form a chain leading to the perp. Braskie's job wasn't to do the work himself but to make sure everyone else did theirs. And there was little question in his mind that the weak link in this chain was Sergeant Vincent D'Agosta. He didn't do what he was told. He knew better. Story was, D'Agosta had once been a homicide lieutenant himself in the NYPD, and a good one. Quit to write mystery novels, moved to Canada, went broke, and had to come back with his tail tucked firmly between his butt cheeks. Couldn't get a job in the city and ended up out here. If Braskie were chief, he'd never have hired someone like that in the first place-the guy might know his stuff, but he was guaranteed trouble. Not a team player. Had a chip on his shoulder the size of Manhattan.

  Braskie checked his watch. Eleven o'clock, and speak of the devil. He watched D'Agosta approach the trellis-a real type, fringe of black hair hanging over his collar, growing gut, attitude oozing from his pores like B.O. Here in Southampton, he stuck out like a bunion. No great surprise the man's wife had decided to stay behind in Canada with their only kid.

  "Sir," said D'Agosta, able to make even that single word a trifle insolent.

  Braskie shifted his gaze back to the SOC team combing the lawn. "We've got an important case here, Sergeant."

  The man nodded.

  Braskie narrowed his eyes, looked toward the mansion, toward the sea. "We don't have the luxury of screwing it up."

  "No, sir."

  "I'm glad to hear you say that. I have to tell you, D'Agosta, that ever since you came on the force, you've made it pretty clear that Southampton isn't where you want to be."

  D'Agosta said nothing.

  He sighed and looked straight at D'Agosta, only to find the pugnacious face staring back at him. His "go ahead, make my day" face. "Sergeant D'Agosta, do I really need to spell it out? You're here . You're a sergeant in the Southampton Police Department. Get over it."

  "I don't understand what you mean, sir."

  This was getting irritating. "D'Agosta, I can read your mind like a book. I don't give a shit what happened before in your life. What I need is for you to get with the program."

  D'Agosta didn't answer.

  "Take this morning. I saw you talking to that intruder for a good five minutes, which is why I had to intervene. I don't want to be riding your ass, but I can't have one of my sergeants eating up his time explaining to some shitcake why he has to leave. That man should've been ejected immediately, no discussion. You think you can do things your way. I can't have that."

  He paused, scrutinizing Sergeant D'Agosta carefully, thinking he might have detected a smirk. This guy really had a problem.

  The lieutenant caught the glimpse of a loudly dressed presence to his right. It was that same scumbag in the Hawaiian shirt, baggy shorts, and expensive sculpted shades, approaching the grape arbor as cool as could be, once again inside the police cordon.

  Braskie turned to D'Agosta, speaking calmly. "Sergeant, arrest that man and read him his rights."

  "Wait, Lieutenant-"

  He couldn't believe it: D'Agosta was going to argue with him. After everything he'd just told him. His voice became even quieter. "Sergeant, I believe I just gave you an order." He turned to the man. "I hope you brought your wallet with you this time."

  "As a matter of fact, I did." The man reached into his pocket.

  "No, I don't want to see it, for chrissakes. Save it for the booking sergeant down at the station."

  But the man had already extracted the wallet in one smooth movement, and as it fell open, Braskie caught the flash of gold.

  "What the-?" The lieutenant stared.

  "Special Agent Pendergast, Federal Bureau of Investigation."

  The lieutenant felt the blood rush to his face. The man had set him up. And there was no reason, none, for the FBI to justify their involvement. Or was there? He swallowed. This needed to be dealt with carefully. "I see."

  The wallet shut with a slap and disappeared.

  "Any particular reason for the federal interest?" asked Braskie, trying to control his voice. "We've been treating it as a simple murder."

  "There's a possibility that the killer or killers might have come and left by boat from across the sound. Perhaps Connecticut."

  "And?"

  "Interstate flight."

  "That's a bit of a stretch, isn't it?"

  "It's a reason."

  Yeah, right. Grove had probably been laundering money or dealing drugs. Or maybe he was even invo
lved in terrorism. These days, with all the shit going down in the world, you couldn't break wind without a phalanx of feds dropping down on you like a ton of manure. Whatever the case, this put a whole new spin on things, and he had to make the best of it.

  The lieutenant swallowed, held out his hand. "Welcome to Southampton, Agent Pendergast. If there's anything I or the Southampton P.D. can do for you, just let me know. While the chief is on vacation, I'm acting chief, so you just come to me for anything. We're here to serve."

  The man's handshake was cool and dry. Just like the man himself. Braskie hadn't seen a fed quite like him before. He looked even paler than that artist who used to come out here-what was his name?-the weird blond guy who did the Marilyn Monroes. Autumn or not, by the end of the day, this guy was going to need a quart of Solarcaine and a pitcher of martinis before he could even sit down.

  "And now that we've straightened things out," the man named Pendergast said pleasantly, "may I ask you for the courtesy of a tour? I trust the immediate workups have been completed, clearing the way for us." He looked at D'Agosta. "You will accompany us, Sergeant?"

  "Yes, sir."

  Braskie sighed. When the FBI arrived, it was like getting the flu: nothing you could do about it but wait for the headache, fever, and diarrhea to go away.

  { 4 }

  Vincent D'Agosta followed Pendergast and Braskie across the lawn. Over in the shade of a vast patio, the South Fork homicide squad had set up an impromptu interrogation center with a video camera. There weren't too many people to interview beyond the domestic who'd found the body, but it was toward this shady spot that Pendergast directed his footsteps, walking so swiftly that D'Agosta and Braskie almost had to jog to keep up.

  The chief detective from East Hampton rose. He was a guy D'Agosta had never seen before, small and dark, with large black eyes and long lashes.

  "Detective Tony Innocente," said Braskie. "Special Agent Pendergast, FBI."

  Innocente rose, held out his hand.

  The domestic sat at the table, a short, stolid-looking woman. For someone who had just discovered a stiff, she looked pretty composed, except for a certain unsettled gleam in the eyes.

  Pendergast bowed to her, held out his hand. "Agent Pendergast."

  "Agnes Torres," she said.

  "May I?" Pendergast looked inquisitively at Innocente.

  "Be my guest. Videotape's rolling, FYI."

  "Mrs. Torres-"

  "Miss."

  "Thank you. Miss Torres, do you believe in God?"

  Innocente exchanged a glance with the other detectives. There was an awkward silence.

  "Yes," she said.

  "You are a devout Catholic?"

  "Yes, I am."

  "Do you believe in the devil?"

  Another long pause.

  "Yes, I do."

  "And you have drawn your own conclusions from what you saw upstairs in the house, have you not?"

  "Yes, I have," said the woman, so matter-of-factly it sent an odd shudder through D'Agosta.

  "Do you really think the lady's beliefs are relevant?" Braskie interjected.

  Pendergast turned his pale eyes on the man. "What we believe, Lieutenant, shapes what we see." He turned back to her. "Thank you, Miss Torres."

  They continued to the side door of the house. A policeman opened it for them, nodding at the lieutenant. They gathered in the foyer, where Braskie paused.

  "We're still trying to get a handle on ingress and egress," he said. "The gate was locked and the grounds were alarmed. Circuit breakers and motion sensors, activated by keypad. We're checking out who had the codes. The doors and windows to the house were also locked and alarmed. There are motion detectors throughout the house as well as infrared sensors and lasers. We've tested the alarm system and it's working perfectly. As you can see, Mr. Grove had a rather valuable collection of art, but nothing seems to be missing."

  Pendergast cast an admiring glance toward one of the nearby paintings. To D'Agosta, it looked like a cross between a pig, a pair of dice, and a naked woman.

  "Mr. Grove had a party last night. It was a small party, five in all."

  "Do you have the guest list?"

  Braskie turned to D'Agosta. "Get the list from Innocente."

  Pendergast stayed D'Agosta with a hand. "I should prefer that the sergeant stay here and listen, Lieutenant, if you could spare another officer."

  Braskie paused long enough to cast a suspicious glance at D'Agosta, then gestured to another cop in the room.

  "Pray continue."

  "By all accounts, the last guest was gone by 12:30. They all pretty much left together. From that point until 7:30 this morning, Grove was alone."

  "Do you have a time of death?"

  "Not yet. The M.E. is still upstairs. We know he was alive at 3:10A.M. because that's when he called a Father Cappi."

  "Grove called a priest?" Pendergast seemed surprised.

  "It seems Cappi had been an old friend, but he hadn't seen Grove in thirty, forty years. They had some kind of falling-out. Anyway, it didn't matter: all Grove got was the answering machine."

  "I'll need a copy of the message."

  "Certainly. Grove was hysterical. He wanted Father Cappi to come over right away."

  "With a Bible, cross, and holy water, by chance?" Pendergast asked.

  "I see you've already heard about the call."

  "No, it was just a guess."

  "Father Cappi arrived at eight this morning. He came straight after getting the message. But, of course, by then it was too late, and all he could do was give the body the last rites."

  "Have the guests been questioned?"

  "Preliminary statements. That's how we know when the party broke up. It seems Grove was not in good form last night. He was excited, garrulous, some say frightened."

  "Could anyone have stayed behind, or perhaps slipped back inside after the guests had left?"

  "That's a theory we're working on. Mr. Grove had, ah, perverse sexual tastes."

  Pendergast raised his eyebrows. "How so?"

  "He liked men and women."

  "And the perverse sexual tastes?"

  "Just what I said. Men and women."

  "You mean he was bisexual? As I understand it, thirty percent of all men have such tendencies."

  "Not in Southampton they don't."

  D'Agosta stifled a laugh with a burst of coughing.

  "Excellent work so far, Lieutenant. Shall we move on to the scene of the crime?"

  Braskie turned, and they followed him through the house. The peculiar smell that D'Agosta had caught a whiff of out on the lawn was much stronger here. Matches, fireworks, gunpowder-what exactly was that? It mingled with a smell of burned wood and a gamy roast of some kind. It reminded D'Agosta of the bear meat he had once tried roasting at his house outside Invermere, British Columbia, brought to him by a friend. His wife had walked out in disgust. They'd ended up ordering pizza.

  They mounted one set of stairs, threaded a winding hallway, came to a second staircase.

  "This door was locked," said Braskie. "The housekeeper opened it."

  They climbed the narrow, creaking staircase to the attic floor. At the top was a long hall with doors left and right. At the far end, one door was open and a bright light shone out. D'Agosta breathed through his mouth.

  "The door to that far room and its window were also locked," Braskie continued. "The deceased, it appears, piled furniture up against it from the inside." He stepped across the threshold, Pendergast and D'Agosta following. The stench was now overpowering.

  It was a small bedroom tucked beneath the eaves of the house, with a single dormer window looking out toward Dune Road. Jeremy Grove lay on the bed at the far side of the room. He was fully dressed, although the clothes had been slit in places to accommodate the M.E.'s investigations. The M.E. was standing beside the bed, back turned, writing on a clipboard.

  D'Agosta dabbed his brow. Maybe it was the sun on the roof, maybe the bright lights in the
room, but it was stifling. The smell of badly baked meat clung to him like greasy perspiration. He waited near the door while Pendergast circled the corpse, his body tensed like an eagle, examining it from every angle, the look on his face so eager it was unsettling.

  The dead man lay on the bed, eyes goggled with blood, his hands clenched. The flesh was a strange tallow color, and its texture seemed off somehow. But it was the expression on the man's face, the rictus of horror and pain, that forced D'Agosta to look away. In his long years as a New York cop, D'Agosta had accumulated a small, unwelcome library of images stored in his mind that he'd never forget as long as he lived. This added one more.

  The M.E. was putting away his tools, and two newly arrived assistants were getting ready to bag the body and load it onto a stretcher. Another cop was kneeling on the floor, cutting out a piece of floorboard that had a mark burned into it.

  "Doctor?" Pendergast said. The M.E. turned and D'Agosta was surprised to see it was a woman, hair hidden under her cap, a young and very attractive blonde. "Yes?"

  Pendergast swept open his shield. "FBI. May I trouble you with a few questions?"

  The woman nodded.

  "Have you established the time of death?"

  "No, and I can tell you that's going to be a problem."

  Pendergast raised his eyebrows. "How so?"

  "We knew we were in trouble when the anal probe came back at one hundred eight degrees."

  "That's what I was going to tell you," said Braskie. "The body's been heated somehow."

  "Correct," said the doctor. "The heating took place most strongly on the inside."

  "The inside?" Pendergast asked.

  D'Agosta could have sworn he'd heard a note of disbelief in the voice.

  "Yes. It was as if-as if the body was cooked from the inside out."

  Pendergast looked closely at the doctor. "Was there any evidence of burning, surface lesions, on the skin?"

  "No. Externally, the body is virtually unmarked. Fully dressed. Aside from a single, rather unusual burn on the chest, the skin appears unbroken and unbruised."