Verses for the Dead

by Douglas Preston

  35

  HE SAT ON the floor of the darkened house, the images from the old thirty-two-inch Trinitron throwing jerky patterns on the bare walls. The commercials on the screen unspooled in antic pantomime—he’d managed to mute the sound with the remote, but beyond that he was unable to move. He felt paralyzed.

  It was just chance he’d stumbled upon the program. And there was that FBI man—strange, black-clad, but pale as death itself—standing in front of the camera, talking to him. To him.

  I know you’re there, watching and listening.

  He stared at the screen in such astonishment he could hardly focus on it. No one had ever spoken to him like that. Even when he was very young, in the good times before the Journey, he did not remember such talk, such sympathy, such kindly understanding.

  I know you’ve had a terrible life; that you haven’t had the guidance we all need to tell right from wrong.

  But he did know right from wrong. He did. After all, it was because he knew that he was Atoning. That was the point of the preparation, and the Action. How could this man understand him…yet not understand that?

  While it’s my job to stop you, I want you to know one thing: I’m not your enemy.

  Suddenly, regaining control of his limbs, he hurled the remote control at the screen. It bounced off in pieces and fell to the floor. He looked around for a moment in confusion and misery—at the dust heaped in the corners, the peeling wallpaper, the front door with its two cracked panes, the owl-patterned outside light with its busted bulb…and then suddenly he burst out crying. He had not cried in a dozen years but now he wailed, falling prostrate to the floor, writhing back and forth, grinding his teeth and pounding his fists against the old wooden planks, shrieking as if somehow sound alone could wrench the demons from him, roll back the years, undo the terrible, unspeakable Journey.

  But the demons remained, and eventually the shrieks subsided: first to weeping, then racking sobs, then—at last—nothing. He lay on the floor, body aching, spent.

  While it’s my job to stop you, I’m not your enemy.

  He let the emotion drain from him, breathing now without hurry, letting his humbleness renew itself, bit by bit, in the darkness of the room. He ran through his senses, one by one, ending with sound. All was quiet, save for the background hum that never fully went away.

  The weakness he had just demonstrated was as expected. Despite that weakness, he knew his duty and he still had the power to make things right.

  Now he had something new to prepare for.

  It’s my job to stop you.

  It’s my job to stop you.

  Slowly, slowly, he rose from the floor. He felt the ground firm beneath his feet, and his resolve did not waver. He glanced around the shadowy room, lit only by the muted television.

  That man, clad in black like a judge, reaching out to him like that: Who was he? Was he really just an FBI agent? Or an avenging angel—or the Grand Inquisitor?

  He did not know. What he did know was that there was still crucial work to be done—and so much depended on him.

  Now he strode with purpose toward the only furniture in the room: a scuffed card table and a single folding chair. He sat down, pulling the seat up to the table. On the black vinyl tabletop lay three bundles of soft felt cloth.

  He stared at the bundles as his heart returned to its normal rhythm. Reaching for the left-hand bundle, he opened it, revealing an old carborundum—silicon carbide—whetstone; a tin of theatrical makeup in matte black; and a battered can of light-grade mineral oil. The stone, which was of a quality no longer available, had two different sides: four thousand grit and eight thousand grit. Since he never let his friends get dull, there was no need for a rougher stone.

  Now he moved to the other two bundles, which he opened far more carefully. Archy slept in the first; Mehitabel in the second. He did not want to wake them too rudely.

  Just seeing them in the warm, flickering glow of the television helped remind him of his tragic obligations. So much depends…

  Taking hold of the sharpening stone, he placed it before him, finer-side down, then lubricated the four-thousand-grit side with a few drops of oil. He knew water was now more commonly used, but old ways—like old friends—were what he preferred. With two fingers, he rubbed the oil into the stone until it gave off a dull shine. He wiped his fingers carefully on the leg of his black jeans for sixty seconds. Only then did he pick up Mehitabel; place her blade at a precise fifteen-degree angle against the stone; and then—almost reluctantly, without joy—begin to hone her in long, deliberate strokes.

  36

  THE LETTERS ARRIVING for Smithback had now swelled to three crates, stacked up in his cubicle. This epistolary flood had proved an unexpected boon. Of course, virtually all of them so far—aside from the genuine one from Brokenhearts himself—were from cranks, psychics, crazies, poisonous neighbors, clairvoyants, estranged husbands and wives, and other messed-up people…but they were nevertheless a gold mine of stories. Smithback had been writing nonstop on the case since the story he’d broken roughly a week before.

  There was, for example, the piece about the psychic who broke into the Flayley mausoleum with a spirit pendulum and Ouija board, claiming to be in communication with the dead. And there was the Iron John Men’s poetry group meeting that was “swatted” by a radical feminist. And the luckless heart surgeon who, subjected to a conspiracy theory that went viral, had arrived at his hospital the previous morning to find a mob awaiting him.

  On top of that, Pendergast’s surprise appearance on television the night before, instead of calming things down, had electrified the city. Half of Miami was furious at the apparently sympathetic tone the agent had expressed in his impromptu appeal, while the other half was enraged at the authorities for not having caught Mister Brokenhearts. It was all anyone could talk about.

  Amid this cacophony, the only one who had suddenly gone quiet was Brokenhearts himself. There had been no more killings, no more letters—nothing.

  Smithback was riding high. Except for the damn Bronner lead. What seemed so promising had gone nowhere. Baxter and Flayley had been his patients—but not Adler, the other suicide victim. After his article, the police had launched an investigation, but Smithback learned from his cop informant that Bronner had ironclad alibis for the nights in question. It appeared to be coincidence: Bronner was simply a wife-beating alcoholic asshole with anger management problems, not a serial killer.

  But despite that setback, the rest was gravy. Smithback still had hundreds of letters to open, and God alone knew what juicy stuff and bizarre confessions might surface. He was delivering the goods and Kraski was leaving him alone. It was indeed a gold mine of entertaining stories—and Smithback was going to mine it for all it was worth.

  37

  COLDMOON LOOKED MOROSELY out the louvered window of what he’d started calling Pendergast’s safe house on the outskirts of Little Havana. Traffic was moving sluggishly through the soupy air, and as he watched, Axel’s taxi pulled away from the curb and joined the flow, headed off on yet another mysterious errand. It was not quite eleven in the morning, and already the sun was flaring off the car windows and bare metal shopfronts, filling the air with a blinding heat and light.

  Growing up in South Dakota, Coldmoon had loved the hot, dry summers. But Miami was a different beast entirely. Here it was, just turning April, and already every day seemed hotter than the last. It was so damn humid that your body, in a futile effort to cool down, would get drenched with sweat that wouldn’t evaporate. And the sun didn’t come at you gently, like it did in the northern latitudes, but hammered straight down on you mercilessly, like a white-hot frying pan over the head.

  He turned from the window. Pendergast was sitting at the table, holding a gold chain of some sort, to which was affixed a medallion of what appeared to be a saint. Coldmoon had noticed it in the agent’s hands when he’d been lying on Elise Baxter’s bed in that Maine lodge. Pendergast never said where he got it, or
why he carried it, but he seemed to bring it out and contemplate it at the strangest times—like now.

  He heard the closing of the front door, and a moment later, Dr. Fauchet appeared in the doorway with another armload of files. She was dressed in a crisp yellow dress, and she nodded a greeting to Coldmoon and then bestowed a radiant smile on Pendergast. How the hell did these Floridians manage to get through a morning, let alone an entire day, without wilting?

  Grove came into view in the doorway behind her and the two stepped into the shadowy room. “Morning,” Grove said to Coldmoon and slapped his briefcase on the table, taking a seat.

  Coldmoon noticed the commander’s tone was a trifle formal, not quite his usual avuncular self. Perhaps he was still stewing about the way Pendergast had hijacked last night’s television interview—even though afterward Pendergast had explained his rationale to Grove, with Pickett listening in on speakerphone. To Coldmoon, his partner’s arguments made sense. Given Brokenhearts’s psychological profile and his outreach to Smithback, Pendergast believed he could be influenced by a direct appeal. And maybe it had actually worked: there hadn’t been any killings since Carpenter—at least, not yet. Coldmoon’s gut feeling was that what Grove really minded was being kept in the dark. After all, he was the ranking local officer and he’d been unfailingly helpful in putting the resources of the Miami PD to work on their behalf. It had been a little unsporting of Pendergast to spring that sudden public appeal on him without warning.

  Nevertheless, the commander walked over and greeted Pendergast cordially, shaking his hand. “I got your message,” he said, taking a seat at the table. “I understand you have some more work for us.”

  “I’m afraid so. But first, I have something I would like to show you—to get your thoughts.”

  Nice damage control, Coldmoon thought.

  Pendergast glanced over at the medical examiner. “Dr. Fauchet. I didn’t expect to see you, but I must say it’s a pleasure.”

  “I caught a ride with Commander Grove,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Not in the least—in fact, it’s fortuitous. Though I fear I might be keeping you from your work.”

  “I’m on vacation.”

  Pendergast raised his eyebrows. “Indeed?”

  “Yes. Not that I’m going anywhere special,” she added quickly.

  Coldmoon listened to this exchange. Fauchet—the clipped, efficient young medical examiner—using a vacation day to check on the progress of a criminal case? She seemed oddly self-conscious. If he didn’t know better, he’d have guessed the woman had a crush on someone. Maybe himself? He glanced over and saw her gazing at Pendergast. Nope, wasn’t him.

  “I’d value your thoughts as well,” he told Fauchet, to her evident pleasure and confusion.

  He rose to his feet and strolled over to the rear wall, where the two large corkboards now held three-by-five cards, blue string, and photographs. The one on the left contained the index cards for each of the three recent homicides, arranged chronologically in a column. The other corkboard held one card for each of the suicide/homicides Brokenhearts had visited, along with photos of the victims, brief biographies, and photocopies of his notes to them. A series of parallel blue lines linked each recent Miami killing to the card representing the grave to which it corresponded. Below the three right-hand cards were two others, one for Laurie Winters and another for Jasmine Oriol.

  Pendergast glanced about the table. “There comes a moment when every investigation reaches a tipping point. Thanks to your efforts—” he nodded at Fauchet and Grove— “I believe we’ve reached that point.”

  This rather dramatic announcement caused the tension in the dead air of the room to ratchet up.

  He moved toward the corkboards, pulling a gold pen from his pocket as he did so.

  “Let us start with the three current homicides: Felice Montera, Jenny Rosen, and Louisa May Abernathy, aka Misty Carpenter.” As he spoke, he touched his pen to each of the index cards. “They are linked to three eleven-year-old suicides: Elise Baxter, Agatha Flayley, and Mary Adler.” More touchings of the pen. “I have always believed that these homicides dressed up as suicides are crucial to understanding the new murders.”

  Homicide

  Date

  Suicide/Homicide

  Date

  Location

  Felice Montera

  3/19/18

  Elise Baxter

  11/06

  Katahdin, ME

  Jenny Rosen

  3/22/18

  Agatha Flayley

  3/07

  Ithaca, NY

  L. M. Abernathy

  3/25/18

  Mary Adler

  7/06

  Rocky Mount, NC

  Laurie Winters

  9/06

  Bethesda, MD

  Jasmine Oriol

  5/06

  Savannah, GA

  “But how?” Commander Grove asked. “I mean, they’re all over the map.”

  “But are they?” Pendergast said. “The main investigative thrust has been naturally focused on the recent murders in Miami Beach—in order to find and stop the killer. The older killings have been evidence, used to flesh out the impetus that’s driving the current-day killer. Why put this heart on this grave? What connection does, say, Felice Montera have to Elise Baxter, or Jenny Rosen to Agatha Flayley?”

  Pendergast looked around the table. “And therein lies a logical flaw. The investigation has focused on the relation between the new killings and the old—when in fact there is no relationship. Instead, we should concern ourselves with the internal relation that exists among the eleven-year-old murders themselves.”

  He walked past the corkboards to the maps, stopping at a large one of Greater Miami, on which all the relevant locations had been marked. He turned to Fauchet. “What does this map resemble, Dr. Fauchet? Besides the obvious, I mean.”

  She paused before answering. “A…well, a pincushion.”

  “Precisely! It’s busy with pushpins. Different locations and different colors: red for the new murder sites, green for their domiciles, blue for the graveyards, yellow for the residences of the old murder/suicides. Not to mention orange for Winters and Oriol, who thankfully have not been paired with contemporary murders.” He waved at the map. “Does anyone see any pattern? Any relevance? Any clue to what agenda Mister Brokenhearts—whom we know to be an intelligent, organized killer—might have been pursuing?”

  Silence all around.

  “Understandably not. Because I believe the pattern lies elsewhere—with those who were murdered eleven years ago.” He pointed at the right-hand corkboard. “Baxter, Flayley, Adler, Winters, and Oriol.”

  Fauchet frowned. “But they seem even more random. As Commander Grove said, they’re literally all over the map.”

  “They seem random because we’ve been operating on a false assumption. We’ve been preoccupied with their connection to Mister Brokenhearts, and whether those decade-old deaths were suicides or homicides. Nobody stopped to examine one basic point of evidence: the dates those women died.”

  Now Pendergast moved to another, even larger map: of the eastern seaboard of the United States. He grabbed a handful of black pushpins from a nearby tray. “Let’s examine them, not in the order the hearts were left on their graves, but in the order that they were killed.” He began fixing the pins into position. “Jasmine Oriol, who died eleven years and ten months ago just south of Savannah, Georgia. Mary Adler, who died eleven years and eight months ago in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. Laurie Winters, eleven years and six months ago, just north of DC in Bethesda, Maryland. And Elise Baxter, who died in Katahdin, Maine—almost exactly eleven years and four months ago.” He stepped aside.

  “My God,” Grove said, staring at the map, mouth agape. “It’s a trail. The killer left a goddamned trail!”

  “Right to the Canadian border,” said Coldmoon, wondering when Pendergast had figured this out. “With each murder exactly two months
apart.”

  “There’s something else interesting about these murders,” Pendergast said. He placed his finger beside the southernmost pushpin—Oriol—then slid it slowly up to the northernmost: Baxter.

  “All the deaths took place along I-95,” said Coldmoon.

  Pendergast nodded. “Not only that, but they’re roughly equidistant from each other.” He paused. “So what do we have? Killings done in the same way: strangulation fashioned to look like suicide. Killings separated from each other by equivalent degrees of space and time. Killings that follow an obvious route: mile for mile, from one end to the other, Interstate 95 is the most heavily traveled road in America.”

  He turned toward the group at the table. “I submit to you that, when viewed in such a manner, this series of crimes is almost painful in its regularity. This killer—or killers—was following a careful plan. A deliberate plan. It’s almost as if he wanted law enforcement to notice the pattern.”

  “But you’ve forgotten one,” Coldmoon said.

  Something almost like a smile flitted across Pendergast’s face. “Not forgotten, Agent Coldmoon—just withheld for the moment.” He picked up one more pushpin, pressed it into the map. “Agatha Flayley, the last of the suicide/murders: killed in Ithaca, New York, just eleven years ago. Two hundred miles from I-95. And with a different MO.” And with this he, too, took a seat at the table.

  There was silence for a moment.

  “I don’t understand,” Grove said. “You just laid out a flawless pattern—and then, with this Flayley killing, turned it on its head.”

  “I’d phrase it differently, Commander. It’s quite possible Agent Coldmoon has the perfect Lakota aphorism for this situation, but I hope he’ll permit me to quote a Latin one instead: exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis. The exception that proves the rule. This last of the old murders is different from the others—but it’s that very difference I find most telling.” He clasped his hands on the table and leaned forward. “Consider: It takes place out of sequence—four months after Baxter’s death. All the other strangulations were two months apart. The MO is different. Even though Flayley was strangled, it was done with less force—so much less that she was still alive when she was thrown from the bridge. That, too, is different. The others were all hanged in bedrooms or bathrooms, but Flayley was thrown off a bridge, in a public place.”