It always surprised her how many of the yachts were dark and seemingly uninhabited, even by crew, as if they were just extravagant art meant only for display. The scene, its darkness softened by the tapestry of light filtering down from the east, reminded her irresistibly of Magritte’s series of paintings L’empire des lumières.
Growing up, Misty had always been smarter and better looking than her classmates, and as a result she’d endured a childhood of resentment and isolation. This all changed when she went to Wellesley, and her hungry intellect suddenly found full flower. There, she learned the art of conversation and the ways to use her good looks as an asset—or, if necessary, a weapon. She ultimately graduated with a triple major in art history, classical languages, and music: a fascinating stockpile of arcane knowledge that, she realized upon receiving her diploma, she had absolutely no idea what to do with.
She had money from a part-time college job, and—with no other plans—decided to blow it on a grand tour before taking her next step. She found she enjoyed sneaking into casinos and private parties, mingling with the highest European circles she could bluff her way into. Nine months later, she ended up in Key Biscayne, where a Jaguar XK nearly ran her over as she was crossing Crandon Boulevard.
The car was driven by sixty-year-old Carmen Held, distracted and distraught from the death of her husband four months earlier. The woman, horrified by what she’d almost done, insisted on helping Misty into the nearest building: as it turned out, an upscale restaurant. Over a long lunch, the two women bonded. Ms. Held—Carmen—unburdened herself to Misty. She was lonely, and sad, and most of all resentful: finally, she had money and time to truly explore life, but no longer anyone to explore it with.
Misty very much enjoyed her lunch. She already knew she appreciated, even preferred, the company of older people. In turn, they clearly relished her ability to talk intelligently about many subjects; the way she made it so easy to confide in her. Students were perpetually hard up, and it was always nice to dine out as a guest of someone who didn’t care how much money they spent. Carmen was sixty, but she’d taken very good care of herself and—if you looked past the incipient wrinkles—was actually attractive. Quite attractive.
A strange and yet perfectly reasonable idea began to take form in Misty’s mind.
She really had no plans for the evening, and when Carmen said she was driving back to Miami Beach and offered Misty a ride, she accepted. In short order, Carmen became her first special friend—and the strange yet reasonable idea of hers soon became a career.
A temporary career, Misty reminded herself as she left the sidewalk and began wending her way beneath the dark palms toward Harry’s yacht. It was fulfilling, it kept her well fed and well dressed, but it wasn’t something you could do forever. Recently, she’d been thinking about applying to law school. She’d saved up two hundred thousand already; that was more than enough. Another six months, and she’d get serious about those applications.
She slowed, frowning again. The yacht whose mooring lights gleamed out of the velvety darkness was unfamiliar. The Liquidity must be moored just beyond it. Harry would be setting out the champagne glasses; she’d better hurry. She quickened her pace, annoyed at how her heels sank into the damp grass. Maybe six months was too soon. She couldn’t just abandon her special friends—certainly not out of the blue. The applications could wait another year. She wasn’t quite ready to give up drinking cru classé Bordeaux, and…
From out of the insect-heavy darkness of the palms, a sharp rustling sound intruded on Misty’s thoughts. She turned toward it, but even as she did so something flashed deep across her neck with horrifying speed but a strange lack of pain. There was a brief involuntary sound and then it was almost like going to sleep.
On the expansive balcony of his presidential suite in the Fontainebleau’s Versailles Tower, Pendergast gingerly took a sip of the tea his waiter had brought him, then nodded his approval. True first-flush Darjeeling, harvested from one of the high-altitude plantations in West Bengal: the grassy notes of its delicate, aromatic bouquet were unmistakable. He watched as the waiter left; took another sip; then replaced the cup beside the teapot, sat back on the padded lounge chair, and closed his eyes.
The chair was flanked by two piles of case folders, each held in place from stray ocean breezes by makeshift paperweights: his Les Baer 1911 on one, and his backup weapon, a Glock 27 Gen4, atop the other. He had read through the folders with minute care; they had nothing further to offer him.
Slowly, he wove the various strands of the recent murders and distant suicides together in his mind: those that fit and, more interestingly, the one that did not. As he did so, the sounds and sensations of the South Florida night gradually receded: the faint smell of the ocean; the murmur of conversations from the bars and alfresco restaurants far below; the delightfully warm, humid atmosphere that mirrored his own skin temperature so exactly.
Now he set the mental weaving aside. He knew what he must do next. The key was to accomplish it while breaking the least amount of crockery in the process.
“If it were done, when ’tis done,” he murmured to himself, “then ’twere well it were done quickly.” And with that he opened his eyes, sat up, and picked up his cup of tea.
As he did so, his keen ears picked up a sound, faint yet discernible—an abrupt, gargling shriek, not at all like the laughter from below, instantly cut off.
Pendergast froze, cup halfway to his lips. He waited, but the sound was not repeated. With the bulk of the hotel curving around him, it was impossible to tell precisely where it had come from. Nevertheless, Pendergast raised the cup to his lips—took a sip, this time regretfully, knowing the tea would be tepid or worse by the time he returned—then replaced the cup, stood, swept up both firearms, and exited.
24
STANDING IN THE vast, cool space, Coldmoon couldn’t help but experience a strong feeling of déjà vu. Understandable: it was just recently they’d been inside a moldy mausoleum, and now they were visiting another home for the dead. They called this one a “columbarium.” He hadn’t known what the word meant until Pendergast explained that it was a building where the jars holding a person’s ashes were placed in niches for eternal rest. It was much nicer than the Flayley mausoleum: there was a rotunda with a dome, all gold leaf and white marble, and the niches were fronted with glass. You could see the jars inside, along with small statues and porcelain or engraved silver plaques on which were written the names and dates of the deceased. Nevertheless, it seemed cruel and barbaric to Coldmoon. What was the point of keeping your ancestor’s ashes around, after the disrespect of burning the body and, thus, impeding their journey to the spirit world?
His eye strayed past the police tape to the niche that was now a crime scene. It contained a jar of pure white marble. But it was white no more; a single streak of blood had issued from underneath the lid and run down the jar’s side, along the glass base of the niche, and from there sent a few small drops to the white marble floor.
“It appears,” Pendergast murmured, gazing at the scene, “that a portion of ashes were taken from the jar.” He indicated a gray pile on the floor, marked with a crime scene flag. “This made room for the heart to fit inside. The note was laid in the niche, propped up between that porcelain figurine of Saint Francis and the deceased’s name.” He turned to Coldmoon. “Do you see anything odd?”
“The whole thing is odd.”
Pendergast looked at him as he might a backward student. “I, on the contrary, find a virtually perfect reprise of the previous modus operandi. What is odd, or at least telling, is the consistency of Brokenhearts’s tableaux.”
“You think this was staged?”
“Exactly. Not for our benefit; but for private reasons. Brokenhearts is not a man of drama. He lives inside his own mind and cares little for us or the investigation. Ah: here comes the note.”
Sandoval was still at the Indian Creek site where Pendergast—along with others—had discovered the lat
est body. Nevertheless, CSU had wasted no time once the location of the heart was reported. Now a CS investigator plucked the note from its resting place and brought it over. Coldmoon photographed it with his cell phone, while Pendergast read aloud:
My dearest Mary,
The angels weep for you, and I weep with them. Please accept this gift with my most profound regrets.
With much affection,
Mister Brokenhearts
P.S. The stars move still, time runs, and Mister Brokenhearts will atone again.
Pendergast nodded and the investigator took the note away. Coldmoon could see a light in Pendergast’s face, a suppressed glow of excitement.
“What do you think?” Coldmoon ventured to ask.
“The note is most revealing.”
“I’m all ears.”
“First, we have another literary quotation, this time from Doctor Faustus. The original reads: ‘The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike.’ I assume you’re as familiar with Christopher Marlowe as you are with Eliot and Shakespeare?”
“Sorry, I didn’t go to Oxford,” Coldmoon said, annoyed despite himself.
“My sympathies. The play is about a man of learning who, in pursuit of greater knowledge, sells his soul to the devil. The clock striking is an allusion to Mephistopheles coming to fetch Faustus and drag him down into hell.”
“And the significance?”
“Hell is the ultimate atonement.”
Coldmoon waited for further explanation, but it wasn’t forthcoming. Typical of Pendergast: he stated that the note was revelatory, but would only dance around the perimeter of why. He decided to offer up an observation of his own. “The P.S. seems to be addressed to us, you realize. That’s a change.”
“Indeed. Although I don’t think he’s stirring the pot—I believe he’s trying to explain.”
Coldmoon almost said Explain what? but decided he didn’t want to give Pendergast another opportunity to be coy.
They watched in silence as CSU continued to comb the scene. Coldmoon could hear, in the distance, the low roar of the media that had gathered at the edge of the columbarium grounds, beyond the police cordon. This third murder had burst the dam; the Brokenhearts story had gone national and everyone was out there, clamoring for information: CNN, Dateline NBC, the whole shebang.
“I wonder how that reporter, Smithback, got the Brokenhearts name,” he said. “Wasn’t that information privileged?”
Instead of answering, Pendergast approached the niche. “Mary S. Adler,” he said, reading the name engraved on the plaque. “April fourteenth, 1980, to July seventh, 2006. We already know she died in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, of suicide by strangulation. And that the date of her suicide is four months before Baxter’s and eight months before Flayley’s.”
“I don’t see how the records are going to tell us anything. Brokenhearts has obviously selected these people because they’re suicides. All we’ll find out from them is what we already know. What I’d ask instead is: why is the killer apparently selecting suicides that occurred within a certain narrow time frame?”
Pendergast turned to him, a not unkindly look in his eye. “Agent Coldmoon, that question is indeed highly germane, and does need to be asked. Yet I sense our killer is operating on a higher plane of logic.”
“What does that mean?”
“Recall my allusion to the Doctor Faustus quote. I sense our killer feels personally responsible for these deaths, which by the way may—or may not—be suicides.”
Coldmoon repressed an urge to roll his eyes. “If they’re not suicides, what are they? According to the profile our guy was, like, fourteen years old at most when those deaths occurred.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“Then what possible link could he have?”
“I’m not necessarily saying he’s physically linked. But the question you just raised about the time line is, in fact, a mystery at the very heart of this case. Our man has been killing with alarming regularity and rapidity. We need to exhume Elise Baxter.”
Oh no. Not again. “Pickett’s going to have a fit if you ask him to do that a second time.”
“We have higher loyalties than a man’s ill temper, do we not, Agent Coldmoon?”
“You really want to piss him off like that?”
“What choice do we have? The only other option is to wait for Mary Adler’s autopsy records. And I would guess they will be about as helpful as the previous ones—which is, not at all. Once the police conclude suicide, that’s all the medical examiner can see.”
Pendergast waited until they got back to their temporary office at Miami FBI before he made the call. Coldmoon could hear only one side of the conversation, but it was short and contained no surprises. Pendergast lowered his phone.
“Pickett has refused—again.”
“So much for that idea.”
“Quite the contrary. I’m the agent in charge, and as such I have the authority to exhume Baxter—despite Pickett, and despite the parents’ wishes.”
“Are you serious? That’s direct insubordination.”
To Coldmoon’s vast surprise, Pendergast smiled. “You shall learn, if you haven’t already, that in life insubordination is not only necessary but even, at times, exhilarating.”
Later that evening, while alone in his hotel room, Coldmoon got the message he’d been both expecting and dreading: Call me now.
He made the call, sweeping empty Twinkie wrappers off the bed, and found Pickett in a state of irritation. “Coldmoon? I’ve been waiting to hear from you ever since my conversation with Pendergast.”
Fact was, Coldmoon had been intending, all afternoon, to make just such a call. He knew he had to inform Pickett about Pendergast’s intentions. And he had every reason to do it. Pendergast’s idea was just another harebrained scheme that would yield nothing and end in disaster. He remembered Pickett’s warning: You’re a promising agent. You’ve already come far, against some damned long odds. I admire your ambition. But you have more to lose here than anyone.
“Sir, I—” Coldmoon began.
“No need to explain.” Pickett’s tone softened. “Look, I know you’re in a tough position. I get it: loyalty to your partner and all that. But that last time we talked, you told me that a storm was coming—and now I think I can guess what it is. Did you get the autopsy records from North Carolina on that latest suicide? What’s her name—Mary Adler?”
“Not yet. It seems they’re having trouble locating them. Something about a mix-up while everything was being digitized.”
“So he’s going for the Baxter exhumation, despite my orders. Isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“I knew it. Okay. Now, don’t try to talk him out of it. Understand?”
Coldmoon didn’t answer.
“Look. It’s all on him—nothing’s going to blow back on you as junior partner. With this clear insubordination, I can transfer the guy out of my hair, send him to some nice, quiet midwestern backwater—and you’ll be senior partner in the case. So just go along with his plan—all right?”
Coldmoon swallowed. “All right.”
25
THE ELISE BAXTER exhumation, while not as disastrous as Agatha Flayley’s, presented its own difficulties. It was scheduled for 6:00 AM, so as not to disturb normal visiting hours, and Coldmoon woke to the sound of rain drumming on his hotel window. Bayside Cemetery was soggy beneath a torrential downpour, and despite all precautions—high-tech lifting equipment, waterproof tarp, a temporary tent erected over the worksite—the hole began flooding and Coldmoon ended up sliding around in the mud, ruining his Walmart suit. By the time they had loaded the coffin into the back of the hearse, Pendergast also was a fright: his black suit soaked, shoes and pant cuffs caked with mud, and a streak of mud on his face that made him look like a freshly exhumed corpse himself. What was worse, Pendergast insisted they accompany the coffin to the morgue and begin the autopsy immediately, without allowing time to change. For some
reason, he was in a god-awful hurry. Coldmoon, feeling guiltier than he’d expected, wondered if perhaps some sixth sense of Pendergast’s anticipated the betrayal he was walking into.
They arrived in the basement receiving area of the morgue, rain still pounding on the car roof. The morgue assistants worked quickly, sliding the coffin out of the hearse, getting it on an electric rolling rack, moving it to a special receiving bay, washing and cleaning the coffin, then at last opening it and transferring the corpse onto a gurney. The entire process took less than half an hour and Coldmoon watched, fascinated at the efficiency. The corpse, moreover, was the opposite of Flayley’s: aside from being a strange color, it looked as if Baxter might have died a week ago.
They followed the remains into the morgue and into an autopsy room. Once inside, Pendergast turned to Coldmoon. “I’ve called ahead to make sure Dr. Fauchet was assigned to the case, and not her supervisor—Moberly.”
Coldmoon nodded his approval. While he didn’t know much about forensic pathology, he knew a first-rate asshole when he met one.
Two dieners began prepping for the autopsy, laying out instruments, readying the video camera, adjusting the lights, and cutting the clothes off the corpse. A strong smell of formalin, wet earth, and rotting flesh filled the room, and Coldmoon found himself studying the walls and ceiling. This entire business was a wild goose chase—but that didn’t make him any happier about how Pickett had maneuvered him into playing Judas. He reminded himself once more that it was Pendergast who seemed determined to sabotage his own career with flagrant insubordination. What could he do? He’d worked too hard, against very long odds, to commit hara-kiri now.
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