Текст книги "White Fire"

Автор книги: Lincoln Child

Соавторы: Douglas Preston
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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

16

Horace P. Fine III stopped, swiveled on his instep, and looked Corrie up and down, as if he had just thought of something.

“Do you have any experience house-sitting?” he asked.

“Yes, absolutely,” Corrie replied immediately. It was sort of true: she’d watched their trailer home overnight more than once when her mother went on an all-night bender. And then there was the time she’d stayed at her father’s apartment six months before, when he’d gone to that job fair in Pittsburgh.

“Never anyplace this big, though,” she added, looking around.

Fine looked at her suspiciously – but then again, maybe it was just the way his face was put together. It seemed that every syllable she’d uttered had been greeted by distrust.

“Well, I don’t have time to check your references,” he replied. “The person I’d arranged to take the position backed out at the last minute, and I’m overdue in New York.” His eyes narrowed slightly. “But I’ll be keeping an eye on you. Come on, I’ll show you to your rooms.”

Corrie, following the man down the long, echoing first-floor hallway, wondered just how Horace P. Fine planned to keep an eye on her from two thousand miles away.

At first it had seemed almost like a miracle. She’d learned of the opening by coincidence: a conversation, overheard at a coffee shop, about a house that needed looking after. A few phone calls led her to the mansion’s owner. It would be an ideal situation – in Roaring Fork no less. No more driving eighteen miles each way to her fleabag motel room. She could even move in that very day. Now she’d be earning money instead of spending it – and doing so in style.

But when she’d dropped by the mansion to meet with the owner, her enthusiasm dimmed. Although the house was technically in Roaring Fork, it was way up in the foothills, completely isolated, at the end of a narrow, winding, mile-long private road. It was huge, to be sure, but of a dreary postmodern design of glass, steel, and slate that was more reminiscent of an upscale dentist’s office than a home. Unlike most of the big houses she’d seen, which were perched on hillsides offering fantastic views, this house was built in a declivity, practically a bowl in the mountains, surrounded on three sides by tall fir trees that seemed to throw the place into perpetual gloom. On the fourth side was a deep, icy ravine that ended in a rockfall of snow-covered boulders. Ironically, most of the vast plate-glass windows of the house overlooked this “feature.” The decor was so aggressively contemporary as to be almost prison-like in austerity, all chrome and glass and marble – not a straight edge to be found anywhere save the doorways – and the walls were covered with grinning masks, hairy weavings, and other creepy-looking African art. And the place was cold, too – almost as cold as the ski warehouse where she did her work. Corrie had kept her coat on during the entire walk-through.

“This leads down to the second basement,” Fine said, pausing to point at a closed door. “The older furnace is down there. It heats the eastern quarter of the house.”

Heats. Yeah, right.“Second basement?” Corrie asked aloud.

“It’s the only part of the original house that still exists. When they demolished the lodge, the developer retained the basement for retrofitting into the new house.”

“There was a lodge here?”

Fine scoffed. “It was called Ravens Ravine Lodge, but it was just an old log cabin. A photographer used it for a home base when he went out into the mountains to take pictures. Adams, the name was. They tell me he was famous.”

Adams. Ansel Adams?Corrie could just picture it. There had probably been a cozy, rustic little cabin here once, nestled in among the pines – until it got razed for this monstrosity. She wasn’t surprised that Fine was not familiar with Adams – only a Philistine, or his soon-to-be ex-wife, could have bought all this freaky art.

Horace Fine himself was almost as cold as the house. He ran a hedge fund back in Manhattan. Or maybe it was the U.S. branch of some foreign investment bank; Corrie hadn’t really been listening when he told her. Hedge, branch – it was all so much shrubbery to her. Luckily, he seemed not to have heard of her or her recent stay in the local jail. He’d made it quite clear that he detested Roaring Fork; he hated the house; and he loathed the woman who had forced him to buy it and who was now making its disposal as difficult as she possibly could. “The virago” was the way he had named her to Corrie over the last twenty minutes. All he wanted to do was get someone in the house and get the hell back to New York, the sooner the better.

He led the way down the corridor. The house was as strangely laid out as it was ugly. It seemed to be made up of a single endless hallway, which veered at an angle now and then to conform with the topography. All the important rooms were on the left, facing the ravine. Everything else – the bathrooms, closets, utility rooms – was on the right, like carbuncles on a limb. From what she could tell, the second floor featured a similar layout.

“What’s in here?” she asked, stopping before a partially open door on the right. There were no overhead lights on inside, but the room was nevertheless lit up with a ghostly gleam from dozens of points of green, red, and amber.

Fine stopped again. “That’s the tech space. You might as well see it, too.”

He opened the door wide and snapped on the light. Corrie looked around at a dizzying array of panels, screens, and instrumentation.

“This is a ‘smart’ house, of course,” Fine said. “Everything’s automated, and you can monitor it all from here: the generator status, the power grid, the security layout, the surveillance system. Cost a fortune, but it ultimately saved me a lot in insurance charges. And it’s all networked and Internet-accessible, too. I can run the whole system from my computers in New York.”

So that’s what he meant by keeping an eye on me, Corrie thought. “How does the surveillance system work?”

Fine pointed to a large flat panel, with a small all-in-one computer to one side and a device below that looked like a DVD player on steroids. “There are a total of twenty-four cameras.” He pressed a button and the flat panel sprang to life, showing a picture of the living room. There was a number in the upper left-hand corner of the image, and time and date stamps running along the bottom. “These twenty-four buttons, here, are each dedicated to one of the cameras.” He pressed the button marked DRIVEWAY and the image changed, showing a picture of, what else, the driveway, with her Rent-a-Junker front and center.

“Can you manipulate the cameras?” Corrie asked.

“No. But any motion picked up by the sensors activates the camera and is recorded on a hard disk. There – take a look.” Fine pointed to the screen, where a deer was now passing across the driveway. As it moved, it became surrounded by a small cloud of black squares – almost like the framing windows of a digital camera – that followed the animal. At the same time, a large red Minside a circle appeared on the screen.

“ Mfor ‘movement,’” Fine said.

The deer had moved off the screen, but the red letter remained. “Why is the Mstill showing?” Corrie asked.

“Because when one of the cameras detects movement, a recording of that video feed is saved to the hard disk, starting a minute before movement begins and continuing one minute past when it stops. Then – if there’s no more movement – the Mgoes away.”

Movement. “And you can monitor all this over the Internet?” Corrie asked. She didn’t like the idea of being the subject of a long-distance voyeur.

“No. That part of the smart system was never connected to the Internet. We stopped the work on the security system when we decided to sell the house. Let the new owner pick up the cost. But it works just fine from in here.” Fine pointed to another button. “You can also split the screen by repeatedly pressing this button.” For the first time, Fine seemed engaged. He demonstrated, and the image split in two: the left half of the monitor showing the original image of the driveway, with the right showing a view looking over the ravine. Repeated pressings of the button split the screen into four, then nine, then sixteen increasingly smaller images, each from a different camera.

Corrie’s curiosity was quickly waning. “And how do I operate the security alarm?” she asked.

“That was never installed, either. That’s why I need someone to keep an eye on the place.”

He snapped off the light and led the way out of the room, down the hallway, and through a door at its end. Suddenly the house became different. Gone was the expensive artwork, the ultramodern furniture, the gleaming professional-grade appliances. Ahead lay a short, narrow hall with two doors on each side, ending in another door leading into a small bathroom with cheap fixtures. The floor was of linoleum, and the pasteboard walls were devoid of pictures. All the surfaces were painted dead white.

“The maid’s quarters,” Fine said proudly. “Where you’ll be staying.”

Corrie stepped forward, peering into the open doors. The two on the left opened into bedrooms of almost monastic size and asceticism. One of the doors on the right led into a kitchen with a dorm-style refrigerator and a cheap stove; the other room appeared to be a minuscule den. It was barely a cut above her motel room in Basalt.

“As I said, I’m leaving almost immediately,” Fine said. “Come back to the den and I’ll give you the key. Any questions?”

“Where’s the thermostat?” Corrie asked, hugging herself to keep from shivering.

“Down here.” Fine stepped out of the maid’s quarters and went back down the hall, turning in to the sitting room. There was a thermostat on the wall, all right – covered in a clear plastic box with a lock on it.

“Fifty degrees,” Fine said.

Corrie looked at him. “I’m sorry?”

“Fifty degrees. That’s what I’ve set the house at and that’s where it’s going to stay. I’m not going to spend a penny more on this goddamn house than I have to. Let the virago pay the utilities if she wants to. And that’s another thing – keep electricity use to a minimum. Just a couple of lights, as absolutely necessary.” A thought seemed to strike the man. “And by the way, the thermostat settings and the kilowatt usage havebeen wired into the Internet. I’ll be able to monitor them from my iPhone.”

Corrie looked at the locked thermostat with a sinking heart. Great. So now I’m going to be freezing my rear off by night as well as by day.She began to understand why the original applicant had decided against the job.

Fine was glancing at her with a look that meant the interview was over. That left just one question.

“How much does the house-sitting job pay?” she asked.

Fine’s eyes widened in surprise. “Pay? You’re getting to stay, free, in a big, beautiful house, right here in Roaring Fork – and you expect a salary? You’re lucky I’m not charging you rent.”

And he led the way back toward the den.

17

Arnaz Johnson, hairdresser to the stars, had seen a lot of unusual people in his day hanging out at the famous Big Pine Lodge on the very top of Roaring Fork Mountain – movie starlets decked out as if for the Oscars; billionaires squiring about their trophy girlfriends in minks and sables; wannabe Indians in ten-thousand-dollar designer buckskins; pseudo-cowboys in Stetson hats, boots, and spurs. Arnaz called it the Parade of the Narcissists. Very few of them could even ski. The Parade was the reason Arnaz bought a season pass and took the gondola to the lodge once or twice a week: that, and the atmosphere of this most famous ski lodge in the West, with its timbered walls hung with antique Navajo rugs, the massive wrought-iron chandeliers, the roaring fireplace so large you could barbecue a bull in it. Not to mention the walls of glass that looked out over a three-hundred-sixty-degree ocean of mountains, currently gray and brooding under a darkening sky.

But Arnaz had never seen anyone quite like the gentleman who sat at a small table by himself before the vast window, a silver flask of some unknown beverage in front of him, gazing out in the direction of snowbound Smuggler’s Cirque, with its complex of ancient, long-abandoned mining structures huddled like acolytes around the vast rickety wooden building that housed the famous Ireland Pump Engine: a magnificent example of nineteenth-century engineering, once the largest pump in the world, now just a rusted hulk.

Arnaz had been observing the ghostly man with fascination for upward of thirty minutes, during which time the man had not moved so much as a pinkie. Arnaz was a fashionista, and he knew his clothes. The man wore a black vicuña overcoat of the finest quality, cut, and style, but of a make that Arnaz did not recognize. The coat was unbuttoned, revealing a bespoke tailored black suit of an English cut, a Zegna tie, and a gorgeous cream-colored silk scarf, loosely draped. To top off the ensemble – literally – the man wore an incongruous, sable-colored trilby hat of 1960s vintage on his pale, skull-like head. Even though it was warm in the great room of the lodge, the man looked as cold as ice.

He wasn’t an actor; Arnaz, a movie buff, knew he had never seen him on the silver screen, even in a bit part. He surely wasn’t a banker, hedge fund manager, CEO, lawyer, or other business or financial wizard; that getup would be entirely unacceptable in such a crowd. He wasn’t a poseur, either; the man wore his clothes casually, nonchalantly, as if he’d been born in them. And he was far too elegant to be in the dot-com business. So what the heck was he?

A gangster.

Now, that made sense. He was a criminal. A very, very successful criminal. Russian, perhaps – he did have a slightly foreign look about him, in those pale eyes and high cheekbones. A Russian oligarch. But no…where were his women? The Russian billionaires that came to Roaring Fork – and there were quite a few – always went about with a passel of spangled, buxom whores.

Arnaz was stumped.

* * *

Pendergast heard himself being addressed and turned, slowly, to see Chief Stanley Morris approaching him from across the vast room.

“May I?”

Pendergast opened his hand in a slow invitation to sit.

“Thank you. I heard you were up here.”

“And how did you hear that?”

“Well…You’re not exactly inconspicuous, Agent Pendergast.”

A silence. And then Pendergast removed a small silver cup from his overcoat, and placed it on the table. “Sherry? This is a rather indifferent Amontillado, but nevertheless palatable.”

“Ah, no thanks.” The chief looked restless, shifting his soft body in the chair once, twice. “Look, I realize I messed up with your, um, protégée, Miss Swanson, and I’m sorry. I daresay I had it coming there at the town meeting. You don’t know what it’s like being chief of police in a town like this, where they’re always pulling you in five different directions at once.”

“I am indeed sorry to say this, but I fear your microscopic problems do not interest me.” Pendergast poured himself a small tot of sherry and tossed it back in one feral motion.

“Listen,” said the chief, shifting about again, “I came to ask your help. We’ve got this horrific quadruple murder, a one-acre crime scene of unbelievable complexity. All my forensic people are arguing with each other and that fire expert, they’re paralyzed, they’ve never seen anything like this before…” His voice cracked, then trailed off. “Look, the girl – Jenny, the older daughter – was my intern. She was a goodkid…” He managed to pull himself together. “I need help. Informally. Advice, that’s all I’m asking. Nothing official. I looked into your background – very impressive.”

The pale hand snaked out again, poured another tot; it was tossed off in turn. There was silence. Finally, Pendergast spoke. “I came here to rescue my protégée – your term, not mine – from your incompetency. My goal – my onlygoal – is to see Miss Swanson finish her work without further meddling from Mrs. Kermode or anyone else. And then I shall leave this perverse town and fly home to New York with all possible alacrity.”

“Yet you were up at the scene of the fire this morning. You showed your badge to get inside the tape.”

Pendergast waved away these words as one might brush off a fly.

“You were there. Why?”

“I saw the fire. I was ever so faintly intrigued.”

“You said there would be more. Why did you say that?”

Another casual wave-off.

“Damn it! What made you say that?”

No answer.

The chief rose. “You said there would be more murders. I looked into your background and I realized that you, of all people, would know. I’m telling you, if there are more – and you refuse to help – then those murders will be on your head. I swear to God.”

This was answered by a shrug.

“Don’t you shrug at me, you son of a bitch!” the chief shouted, losing his temper at last. “You saw what they did to that family. How can you just sit there, drinking your sherry?” He gripped the side of the table and leaned forward. “I have just one thing to say to you, Pendergast – fuck you, and thanks for nothing!”

At this, the smallest hint of a smile crossed the thin lips. “Now, that is more like it.”

“More like what?” Morris roared.

“An old friend of mine in the NYPD has a colorful expression that is appropriate for this situation. What was it again? Ah, yes.” Pendergast glanced up at the chief. “I will help you, but only on the condition that you – as I believe he would put it– grow a pair.”

18

Chief Stanley Morris stared at the ruined house. The residual heat from the previous day’s fire was now gone and a light snow had fallen the night before, covering the scene of horror with a soft white blanket. Plastic tarps had been spread over the main areas of evidence, and now his men were carefully removing them and shaking off the snow in preparation for the walk-through. It was eight o’clock in the morning, sunny, and fifteen degrees above zero. At least there was no wind.

Nothing like this had ever happened to Morris, on either a personal or a professional level, and he steeled himself for the ordeal that lay ahead. He’d hardly slept the night before, and when he finally did a dreadful nightmare had immediately awakened him again. He felt like hell and still hadn’t been able to fully process the depravity and horror of the crime.

He took a deep breath and looked around. To his left stood Chivers, the fire specialist; to his right, the figure of Pendergast, in his vicuña overcoat, incongruously pulled over an electric-blue down jacket. Puffy mittens and a hideous wool hat completed the picture. The man was so pallid he looked like he’d already been stricken by hypothermia. And yet his eyes were very much alive, moving restlessly about the scene.

Morris cleared his throat and made an effort to project the image of a chief of police firmly in control. “Ready, gentlemen?”

“You bet,” said Chivers, with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. He was clearly unhappy about the presence of the FBI agent. Tough shit, thought Morris. He was getting fed up with the disagreements, turf squabbles, and departmental infighting this case was generating.

Pendergast inclined his head.

The chief ducked under the tape, the others following. The fresh snow covered everything save where the tarps had been laid down, and those areas were now large dark squares in an otherwise white landscape. The M.E. had not yet removed the human remains. Forensic flags of various colors dotted the ruins, giving the scene an incongruously festive air. The stench of smoke, burnt electrical wiring, rubber, and plastic still hung heavy and foul.

Now Pendergast took the lead, moving lightly despite the bulky clothing. He darted forward, knelt, and with a small brush whisked away a patch of snow, examining the burnt slate floor. He did this at several apparently random spots as they continued moving through. At one point a glass tube made an appearance from under his coat, into which he put some microscopic sample with tweezers.

Chivers hung back, saying nothing, a frown of displeasure gathering on his thick face.

They finally reached the gruesome bathtub. Morris could hardly look at it. But Pendergast went right over and knelt beside it, bowing over it almost as if he were praying. Removing one glove, he poked around with his white fingers and the pair of long tweezers, putting more samples into tubes. At last he rose and they continued making their way through the ruined house.

They came to the burnt mattress with its loops of wire and bone fragments. Here Pendergast stopped again, gazing at it for the longest time. Morris began to shiver as the inactivity, cold, and a clammy sick feeling all began to penetrate. The agent removed a document from his coat and opened it, revealing a detailed plat of the house – where had he gotten that? – which he consulted at length before folding it up and putting it away. Then he knelt and examined with a magnifying glass the charred remains of the skeleton tied to the mattress, really just bone fragments, and various other things as well. Morris could feel the cold creeping deeper into his clothing. Chivers was becoming restless, moving back and forth and sometimes slapping his gloves together in an effort to keep warm – broadcasting through his body language that he considered this a waste of time.

Pendergast finally straightened up. “Shall we move on?”

“Great idea,” said Chivers.

They continued through the burnt landscape: the ghostly standing sticks covered with hoarfrost, the scorched walls, the heaps of frozen ashes, the glistering puddles of glass and metal. Now the corpse of the dog could be seen to one side, along with the two parallel, crumbled piles of ash and bone representing Jenny Baker’s mother and father.

Morris had to look away. It was too much.

Pendergast knelt and examined everything with the utmost care, taking more samples, maintaining his silence. He seemed particularly interested in the charcoaled fragments of the dog, carefully probing with his long-stemmed tweezers and a tool that looked like a dental pick. They moved into the ruins of the garage, where the burnt and fused hulks of three cars rested. The FBI agent gave them a cursory look.

And then they were done. Beyond the perimeter tape, Pendergast turned. His eyes startled Morris – they glittered so sharply in the bright winter sun.

“It is as I feared,” he said.

Morris waited for more but was greeted only with silence.

“Well,” said Chivers loudly, “this just reinforces what I reported to you earlier, Stanley. All the evidence points toward a botched robbery with at least two perps, maybe more. With a possible sex-crime component.”

“Agent Pendergast?” Morris finally said.

“I’m sorry to say that an accurate reconstruction of the sequence of the crime may be impossible. So much information was taken by the fire. But I am able to salvage a few salient details, if you wish to hear them.”

“I do. Please.”

“There was a single perpetrator. He entered through an unlocked back door. Three members of the family were at home, all upstairs and probably sleeping. The perpetrator immediately killed the dog who came to investigate. Then he – or she – ascended the front staircase to the second floor, surprised a juvenile female in her bedroom, incapacitated and gagged her before she could make significant noise, and wired her to the bed, still alive. He may have been on his way to the parents’ room when the second juvenile female arrived home.”

He turned to Morris. “This would be your intern, Jenny. She came in through the garage and went upstairs. There she was ambushed by the perpetrator, incapacitated, gagged, and placed in the bathtub. This was accomplished with utmost efficiency, but nevertheless this second assault appears to have awakened the parents. There was a short fight, which began upstairs and ended downstairs. I suspect one of the parents was killed there, on the spot, while the other was dragged down later. They may have been beaten.”

“How can you know all this?” said Chivers. “This is sheer speculation!”

Pendergast went on, ignoring this outburst. “The perpetrator returned upstairs, doused both juvenile victims with gasoline, and set them on fire. He then made a – by necessity – rapid exit from the premises, dragging the other parent down the stairs and spreading additional accelerant on his way out. He left on foot – not by car. A pity the snowy woods around the house were trampled by neighbors and firefighters.”

“No way,” said Chivers, shaking his head. “No way can you draw all those conclusions from the information we have – and the conclusions you’ve drawn, well, with all due respect, most of them are wrong.”

“I must say I share Mr. Chivers’s, ah, skepticism as to how you can learn all this from a mere walk-through,” said Morris.

Pendergast replied in the tone of someone explaining to a child. “It’s the only logical sequence that fits the facts. And the facts are these: When Jenny Baker returned home, the perpetrator was already in the house. She came in through the garage – the boyfriend confirmed that – and if the parents had already been killed she would have seen their bodies at the back door. She didn’t see the dog’s body because it was behind a counter that once existed, here.” He pulled out the plat.

“But how do you know he was already upstairs when Jenny arrived home?”

“Because Jenny was ambushed upstairs.”

“She could have been attacked in the garage and forced upstairs.”

“If she was the first victim, and was attacked in the garage, the dog would be alive and would have barked, awakening the parents. No – the very first victim was the dog, killed at the back door, probably with a blow to the head by something like a baseball bat.”

“A bat?” Chivers said in disbelief. “How do you know he didn’t use a knife? Or gun?”

“The neighbors heard no shots. Have you ever tried to kill a German shepherd with a knife? And finally, the dog’s burnt cranium showed green-bone fracture patterns.” He paused. “One needn’t be Sherlock Holmes to analyze a few simple details like these, Mr. Chivers.”

Chivers fell silent.

“Therefore, when Jenny arrived home, the perpetrator was already upstairs and had already incapacitated the sister, as he would not have been able to subdue two at once.”

“Unless there were two perps,” said Chivers.

“Go on,” Morris told Pendergast.

“Using the bat or some other method, he immediately subdued Jenny.”

“Which is exactly why there must have been two perps!” said Chivers. “It was a robbery gone bad. They broke into the house, but things spiraled out of control before they could commence the robbery. Happens all the time.”

“No. The sequence was well planned and the perpetrator had everything under control at all times. The psychological hallmarks of the crime – the savagery of it – suggests a lone perpetrator who had a motive other than robbery.”

Chivers rolled his eyes at Morris.

“And as for your theory about a burglary gone wrong, the perpetrator was well aware there were at least three people at home. An organized burglar doesn’t break into an occupied house.”

“Unless there are a couple of girls they might want to…” Chivers swallowed, glanced at the chief.

“The girls were not molested. If he intended to rape the girls he would have removed the threat of the parents by killing them first. And a rape fits neither the time line nor the sequence. I might point out that the elapsed time between the boyfriend dropping Jenny off and the fire appearing on the mountain was ten minutes or less.”

“And how do you know one of the parents was killed downstairs and the other dragged down later?”

“That is, admittedly, an assumption. But it is the only one that matches the evidence. We are dealing with a lone killer, and it seems unlikely he would have fought both parents, downstairs, simultaneously. This arranging of the parents is another staged element of the attack – a grisly detail, intended to sow additional fear and unrest.”

Chivers shook his head in disgust and disbelief.

“So.” The chief could hardly bring himself to ask the question he knew he had to. “What makes you think there might be more killings like this?”

“This was a crime of hatred, sadism, and brutality, committed by a person who, while probably insane, was still in possession of his faculties. Fire is often the weapon of choice for the insane.”

“A revenge killing?”

“Doubtful. The Baker family was not well known in Roaring Fork. You yourself told me they appear to have no enemies in town and only spend a couple of weeks here a year. So if not revenge, what is the motive? Hard to say definitively, but it may not be one directed at this family specifically – but rather, at what this family represents.”

A silence. “And what does this family represent?” Morris asked.

“Perhaps what this entire town represents.”

“Which is?”

Pendergast paused, and then said: “Money.”