Текст книги "Relic"
Автор книги: Lincoln Child
Соавторы: Douglas Preston
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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 27 страниц)
There were a series of rapid flashes.
“Forceps,” Ziewicz continued. “Three ragged lacerations begin just above the left nipple in the greater pectoral, penetrating and eventually separating the muscle. I am opening and probing the first laceration at the point of entry. Clamp there, Fred.
“I am now probing the wound. There is unidentified foreign matter here. Fred, a glassine? It looks like clothing material, perhaps from the victim’s shirt. Photograph.”
The flash popped, and then she held up a small piece of what looked like bloody lint, dropping it into the glassine envelope. She continued probing in silence for a few moments.
“There is another piece of foreign material deep in the muscle, about four centimeters directly below the right nipple. It is lodged on a rib. It appears to be hard. Photograph. Stick a flag in there, Fred.”
She extracted it and held it up, a bloody lump poised at the end of the long forceps.
D’Agosta ventured forward. “What is it? Rinse it off, maybe, and see?”
[65] She glanced at him with a slight smile. “Fred, bring me a beaker of sterile water.”
As she dipped the object in and stirred, the water turned brownish red.
“Keep the water, we’ll see if there’s anything else in it,” she said, holding her find to the light.
“Jesus H. Christ,” said D’Agosta. “It’s a claw. A fucking claw.”
Ziewicz turned to her assistant. “That will be a charming snippet of monologue for our tape, won’t it, Fred?”
= 11 =
Margo dumped her books and papers on the sofa and glanced at the clock perched atop the television: ten-fifteen. She shook her head. What an unbelievable, horrible day. Staying all those extra hours had only netted three new paragraphs on her dissertation. And she still had to work on the display-case copy for Moriarty. She sighed, sorry she’d ever agreed to the project.
Reflected neon light from a liquor store across the avenue struggled through the lone window of Margo’s living room, throwing the room into electric-blue chiaroscuro. She turned on the small overhead light and leaned against the door, scanning the disorder slowly. Normally, she was neat to excess. But now after just one week of neglect, textbooks, letters of sympathy, legal documents, shoes, and sweaters were scattered across the furniture. Empty cartons from the Chinese restaurant downstairs lay neglected in the sink. Her old Royal typewriter and a fan of research papers were spread out on the hardwood floor.
[67] The shabby neighborhood—not-yet-gentrified upper Amsterdam Avenue—had given her father another reason why she should return home to Boston. “This is no place for a girl like you to live, Midge,” he had said, using her childhood nickname. “And that Museum is no place to work. Cooped up day after day with all those dead, stuffed creatures, things in jars. What kind of a life is that? Come back and work for me. We’d get you a house in Beverly, maybe Marblehead. You’ll be happier there, Midge, I know you will.”
When she noticed her answering machine was blinking, Margo pressed the message button.
“It’s Jan,” the first message began. “I got back into town today, and I just heard. Listen, I’m really, really sorry to hear about your father’s death. I’ll call back later, okay? I want to talk to you. Bye.”
She waited. Another voice came on. “Margo, this is your mother.” And then a click.
She squeezed her eyes tightly for a moment, then took a deep breath. She wouldn’t call Jan, not just yet. And she wouldn’t return her mother’s call, either; not until tomorrow, at least. She knew what her mother would say: You have to come home to your father’s business. It’s what he would have wanted. You owe it to both of us.
Turning away, she settled herself cross-legged in front of the typewriter, and stared at the curators’ notes, catalogue data, and accession listings Moriarty had given her. It was due the day after tomorrow, he’d said, and the next chapter of her dissertation was due the following Monday.
She glanced at the papers for another minute or two, collecting her thoughts. Then she began to type. A few moments later, she stopped and stared into the dusk. She remembered how her father used to make omelettes—the only thing he knew how to cook—on Sunday mornings. “Hey, Midge,” he would always say. “Not bad for an old ex-bachelor, huh?”
[68] Several of the lights outside had been shut off as the shops closed. Margo looked out at the graffiti, the boarded-up windows. Maybe her father was right: Poverty wasn’t much fun.
Poverty. She shook her head, remembering the last time she’d heard that word, remembering the expression on her mother’s face as she’d pronounced it. The two of them had been sitting in the cool, dark office of her father’s executor, listening to all the complex reasons why her father’s debt-to-equity ratio and lack of estate planning was forcing liquidation—unless some family member were to step in to keep his business afloat.
She wondered about the parents of the two little boys. They must have had high hopes for their children, too, she thought. Now, they’ll never know disappointment. Or happiness. Then her thoughts moved to Prine. And the blood on his shoes.
She got up and turned on more lights. Time to start dinner. Tomorrow, she’d lock herself in her office, get that chapter finished. Work on the Cameroon write-up for Moriarty. And put off making a decision—for one more day, at least. By next week’s meeting with Frock, she promised herself, she’d have made up her mind.
The telephone rang. Automatically, she picked it up.
“Hello,” she said. She listened for a moment. “Oh. Hello, Mother.”
= 12 =
Night came early to the Museum of Natural History. As five o’clock neared, the early spring sun was already setting. Inside, the crowds began to thin. Tourists, schoolchildren, and harried parents streamed down the marble staircases toward the exits. Soon the echoes and shouts and clatter of footsteps in the vaulted halls died away. One by one, the exhibit cases went dark, and as the night wore on, the remaining lights threw crazed shadows across the marble floors.
A lone guard wandered along a hall, making his rounds, swinging a long key chain and humming. It was the beginning of his shift, and he was dressed in the standard Museum-issue blue-and-black guard uniform. Long ago the novelty of the Museum had worn off.
The whole joint gives me the creeps, he thought. Look at that son of a bitch in there. Goddamn native shit. Who the hell would pay to look at this stuff? Half of it’s got curses on it, anyway.
The mask leered at him out of a dark case. He hurried [70] on to the next station, where he turned a key in a box. The box recorded the time: 10:23 P.M. As he moved into the next hall, he had the unsettling impression—as he had so often—that his echoing footfalls were being carefully duplicated by some unseen presence.
He came to the next station and turned the key. The box clicked, and registered 10:34 P.M.
It only took four minutes to get to the next station. That gave him six minutes for a toke.
He ducked into a stairwell, closing and locking the door behind him, and peered down toward the darkened basement, where another door opened to an interior courtyard. His hand went for the light switch at the top of the stairs, but then withdrew. No sense calling attention to himself. He gripped the metal handrail tightly as he crept downward. In the basement, he made his way along the wall until he felt a long horizontal handle. He pushed, and frigid night air streamed in. He wedged open the door and lit up a joint, inhaling the bitter smoke with pleasure as he leaned out into the courtyard. A thin light from the deserted cloister beyond gave a pale illumination to his movements. The faint hum of passing traffic, muffled by so many intervening walls, passages, and parapets, seemed to come from another planet. He felt, with relief, the warm rush of the cannabis—another long night made bearable. Smoke finished, he flicked the roach into the dark, ran his fingers through his crew cut, stretched.
Halfway up the stairs, he heard the door slam shut below. He stopped, feeling a sudden chill. Had he left the door open? No. Shit, what if someone had seen him toke up? But they couldn’t have smelt the smoke, and in the dark, it would’ve looked just like a cigarette.
There was a strange, rotten odor in the air that had nothing to do with weed. But no light flicked on, no footstep sounded on the metal steps. He started up toward the landing above.
Just as he reached it, he sensed a swift movement on [71] the stairs behind him. He spun around, and a hard jerk on his chest shoved him backward against the wall. The last thing he saw were his shadowy entrails rolling and slipping down the stairs. After a moment, he stopped wondering where all that gore had suddenly come from.
= 13 =
Tuesday
Bill Smithback sat in a heavy chair, watching the sharp, angular figure of Lavinia Rickman behind her birchwood veneer desk, reading his rumpled manuscript. Two bright red fingernails tapped on the glossy finish. Smithback knew that the fingernail ditty did not bode well. A very gray Tuesday morning sat outside the windows.
The room was not a typical Museum office. The untidy stacks of papers, journals, and books that seemed a fixture in other offices were missing. Instead, the shelves and desk were decorated with knickknacks from around the world: a storyteller doll from New Mexico, a brass Buddha from Tibet, several puppets from Indonesia. The walls were painted light institutional green, and the room smelled of pine air freshener.
Additional curios were arranged on both sides of her desk, as formal and symmetrical as shrubs in a French garden: an agate paperweight, a bone letter opener, a Japanese netsuke. And in the center of the motif hovered Rickman herself, bent primly over the manuscript. The [73] swirled stiff orange hair, Smithback thought, didn’t go well with the green walls.
The tapping speeded, then slowed as Rickman turned the pages. Finally she flicked over the last page, gathered the loose sheets together, and squared them in the precise center of the desk.
“Well,” she said, looking up with a bright smile. “I have a few small suggestions.”
“Oh,” said Smithback.
“This section on Aztec human sacrifice, for example. It’s much too controversial.” She licked her finger daintily and found the page. “Here.”
“Yes, but in the exhibition—“
“Mr. Smithback, the exhibition deals with the subject tastefully. This, on the other hand, is not tasteful. It’s far too graphic.” She zipped a Magic Marker across his work.
“But it’s entirely accurate,” Smithback said, wincing inwardly.
“I am concerned with emphasis, not accuracy. Something can be entirelyaccurate but have the wrong emphasis, and thus give the wrong impression. Allow me to remind you that we have a large Hispanic population here in New York.”
“Yes, but how is this going to offend—”
“Moving on, this section on Gilborg simply must go.” She zipped another line across another page.
“But why—?”
She leaned back in her chair. “Mr. Smithback, the Gilborg expedition was a grotesque failure. They were looking for an island that did not exist. One of them, as you are so zealous in pointing out, raped a native woman. We were careful to keep all mention of Gilborg outof the exhibition. Now, is it really necessary to document the Museum’s failures?”
“But his collections were superb!” Smithback protested feebly.
“Mr. Smithback, I am not convinced that you [74] understand the nature of this assignment.” There was a long silence. The tapping began again. “Do you really think that the Museum hired you, and is payingyou, to document failure and controversy?”
“But failure and controversy are part of science, and who’s going to read a book that—”
“There are many corporations that give money to the Museum, corporations that might very well be disturbed by some of this,” Mrs. Rickman interrupted. “And there are volatile ethnic groups out there, ready to attack, that might take strongexception.”
“But we’re talking about things that happened a hundred years ago, while—”
“Mr. Smithback!” Mrs. Rickman had only raised her voice a little, but the effect was startling. A silence fell. “Mr. Smithback, I must tell you quite frankly …” She paused, then stood up briskly and walked around the desk until she was standing directly behind the writer.
“I must tell you,” Mrs. Rickman continued, “that it seems to be taking you longer than I thought to come around to our point of view. You are not writing a book for a commercial publisher. To put it bluntly, we’re looking for the kind of favorable treatment you gave the Boston Aquarium in your previous—ahem—assignment.” She moved in front of Smithback, perching stiffly on the edge of the desk. “There are certain things we expect, and indeed, that we have a rightto expect. They are—” she ticked them off on bony fingers.
“One: No controversy.
“Two: Nothing that might offend ethnic groups.
“Three: Nothing that might harm the Museum’s reputation.
“Now, is that so unreasonable?” She lowered her voice and, leaning forward, squeezed Smithback’s hand with her dry one.
“I ... no.” Smithback struggled with an almost overwhelming urge to withdraw his hand.
[75] “Well, then, that’s settled.” She moved behind the desk, and slid the manuscript over to him.
“Now, there’s one small matter we need to discuss.” She enunciated very precisely. “There were a few spots in the manuscript where you quoted some interesting comments by people ‘close to the exhibition,’ but neglected to identify the exact sources. Nothing important, you understand, but I’d like a list of those sources—for my files, nothing more.” She smiled expectantly.
Alarms rang in Smithback’s head. “Well,” he replied carefully, “I’d like to help you out, but the ethics of journalism won’t let me.” He shrugged his shoulders. “You know how it is.”
Mrs. Rickman’s smile faded quickly, and she opened her mouth to speak. Just then, to Smithback’s relief, the phone rang. He got up to leave, gathering his manuscript together. As he was closing the door, he heard a sharp intake of breath.
“Not another!”
The door hissed shut.
= 14 =
D’Agosta just couldn’t get used to the Hall of the Great Apes. All those big grinning chimps, stuffed, hanging out of the fake trees, with their hairy arms and hilarious realistic dicks and big human hands with real fingernails. He wondered why it had taken so long for scientists to figure out that man was descended from the apes. Should’ve been obvious the first time they clapped eyes on a chimp. And he’d heard somewhere that chimps were just like humans, violent, excitable, always beating hell out of each other, even murdering and eating each other. Jesus, he thought, there must be some other way to get around the Museum without going through this hall.
“This way,” said the guard, “down this stairway. It’s pretty awful, Lieutenant. I was coming in at—”
“I’ll hear that later,” said D’Agosta. After the kid, D’Agosta was ready for anything. “You say he’s wearing a guard’s uniform. You know him?”
“I don’t know, sir. It’s hard to tell.”
The guard pointed down the dim stairs. The stairway [77] opened onto some kind of courtyard. The body lay at the bottom, in shadow. Everything was streaked and splattered in black—the floor, the walls, the overhead light. D’Agosta knew what the black was.
“You,” he said, turning to one of several policemen following him, “get some lights in here. I want the place dusted and swept for fibers pronto. Is the SOC unit on its way? The man’s obviously dead, so keep the ambulance people out for a while. I don’t want them messing things up.”
D’Agosta looked down the stairs again. “Jesus H. Christ,” he said, “whose footprints are those? Some jackass walked right through that pool of blood, it looks like. Or maybe our murderer decided to leave us a fat clue.
There was a silence.
“Are those yours?” He turned to the guard. “What’s your name?”
“Norris. Eric Norris. As I was saying, I—”
“Yes or no?”
“Yes, but—”
“Shut up. Are those the shoes?”
“Yes. See, I was—”
“Take the shoes off. You’re ruining the carpet.” Fucking doorshaker, D’Agosta thought. “Take them to the forensics lab. Tell them to seal ‘em in a crime bag, they’ll know what to do. Wait for me there. No, don’t wait for me there. I’ll call you later. I’ll have a few questions for you. No, take the fucking shoes off right here.” He didn’t want another Prine on his hands. What was it about this Museum, people liked to go around wading in blood? “You’ll have to walk over there in your socks.”
“Yes, sir.”
One of the cops behind D’Agosta snickered.
D’Agosta looked at him. “You think it’s funny? He tracked blood all over the place. It’s not funny.”
D’Agosta moved halfway down the stairwell. The [78] head was lying in a far corner, face down. He couldn’t see it all that well, but he knew that he’d find the top of the skull punched out, the brains floating around somewhere in all that gore. God, what a mess a body could be if it wanted to.
A step sounded on the stairway behind him. “SOC,” said a short man, followed by a photographer and several other men in lab coats.
“Finally. I want lights there, there, and there, and wherever else the photographer wants ‘em. I want a perimeter set up, I want it set up five minutes ago, I want every speck of lint and grain of sand picked up. I want TraceChem used on everything. I want—well, what else do I want? I want every test known to man, and I want that perimeter observed by everyone, got it? No fuck-ups this time.”
D’Agosta turned. “Is the Crime Lab team on the premises? And the coroner’s investigator? Or are they out for coffee and croissants?” He patted the breast pocket of his jacket, looking for a cigar. “Put cardboard boxes over those footprints. And you guys, when you’re done, squeegee a trail around the body so we can walk without tracking blood everywhere.”
“Excellent.” D’Agosta heard a low, mellifluous voice behind him.
“Who the hell are you?” he said, turning to see a tall, slender man, wearing a crisp black suit, leaning against the top of the stairwell. Hair so blond it was almost white was brushed straight back above pale blue eyes. “The undertaker?”
“Pendergast,” the man said, stepping down and holding out his hand. The photographer, cradling his equipment, pushed past him.
“Well, Pendergast, you better have a good reason to be here, otherwise—”
Pendergast smiled. “Special Agent Pendergast.”
“Oh. FBI? Funny, why aren’t I surprised? Well, how-do, Pendergast. Why the hell don’t you guys phone [79] ahead? Listen, I got a headless, de-brained stiff down there. Where’re the rest of you, anyway?”
Pendergast withdrew his hand. “There’s just me, I’m afraid.”
“What? Don’t kid me. You guys always travel around in packs.”
The lights popped on, and the gore around them was bathed in brilliance. Everything that previously appeared black was suddenly illuminated, all the various shades of the body’s secret workings made visible. Something D’Agosta suspected was Norris’s breakfast was also visible, lying amidst a wash of body fluids. Involuntarily, D’Agosta’s jaw started working. Then his eye caught a piece of skull with the dead guard’s crew cut still on it, lying a good five feet from the body.
“Oh Jesus,” said D’Agosta, stepping back, and then he lost it. Right in front of the FBI guy, in front of SOC, in front of the photographer, he blew his own breakfast. I can’t believe it, he thought. The first time in twenty-two years, and it’s happening at the worst possible moment.
The coroner’s investigator appeared on the stairs, a young woman in a white coat and plastic apron. “Who’s the officer in charge?” she asked, sliding on her gloves.
“I am,” said D’Agosta, wiping his mouth. He looked at Pendergast. “For a few more minutes, anyway. Lieutenant D’Agosta.”
“Dr. Collins,” the investigator replied briskly. Followed by an assistant, she walked down to an area near the body that was being squeegeed free of blood. “Photographer,” she said, “I’m turning the body over. Full series, please.”
D’Agosta averted his gaze. “We got work to do, Pendergast,” he said authoritatively. He pointed at the vomit. “Don’t clean that up until the SOC has finished with these stairs. Got it?”
Everyone nodded.
“I wanna know ingress and egress as soon as possible. [80] See if you can ID the body. If it’s a guard, get Ippolito down here. Pendergast, let’s go up to the command post, get coordinated, or liaised, or whatever the hell you call it, and then let’s return when the team is done for a looksee.”
“Capital” said Pendergast.
Capital?thought D’Agosta. The guy sounded deep South. He’d met types like this before, and they were hopeless in New York City.
Pendergast leaned forward and said quietly, “The blood splattered on the wall is rather interesting.”
D’Agosta looked over. “You don’t say.”
“I’d be interested in the ballistics on that blood.”
D’Agosta looked straight into Pendergast’s pale eyes. “Good idea,” he said finally. “Hey, photographer, get a close-up series of the blood on the wall. And you, you—”
“McHenry, sir.”
“I want a ballistic analysis done on that blood. Looks like it was moving fast at a sharp angle. I want the source pinpointed, speed, force, a full report.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I want it on my desk in thirty minutes.”
McHenry looked a little unhappy.
“Okay, Pendergast, any more ideas?”
“No, that was my only one.”
“Let’s go.”
In the temporary command post, everything was in place. D’Agosta always saw to that. Not one piece of paper was loose, not one file was out, not one tape recorder sitting on a desk. It looked good, and now he was glad that it did. Everyone was busy, the phones were lit up, but things were under control.
Pendergast slipped his lean form into a chair. For a formal-looking guy, he moved like a cat. Briefly, D’Agosta gave him an overview of the investigation. [81] “Okay, Pendergast,” he concluded. “What’s your jurisdiction here? Did we fuck up? Are we out?”
Pendergast smiled. “No, not at all. As far as I can tell, I would not have done anything differently myself. You see, Lieutenant, we’ve been in the case from the very beginning, only we didn’t realize it.”
“How so?”
“I’m from the New Orleans field office. We were working on a series of killings down there, some very odd killings. Not to get into specifics, but the victims had the backs of their skulls removed, and the brains extracted. Same modus operandi.”
“No shit. When was this?”
“Several years ago.”
“Several yearsago? That—”
“Yes. They went unsolved. First it was ATF, because they thought drugs might have been involved, then it was FBI when ATF couldn’t make any progress. But we couldn’t do anything with it, the trail was cold. And then yesterday, I read a wire service report about the double murder here in New York. The MO is too, ah, too peculiar not to make an immediate connection, don’t you think? So I flew up last night. I’m not even officially here. Although I will be tomorrow.”
D’Agosta relaxed. “So you’re from Louisiana. I thought you might be some new boy in the New York office.”
“They’ll be here,” said Pendergast. “When I make my report tonight, they’ll be in on it. But I will be in charge of the case.”
“You? No way, not in New York City.”
Pendergast smiled. “I will be in charge, Lieutenant. I’ve been pursuing this case for years and I am, frankly, interested in it.” The way Pendergast said interestedsent a strange sensation down D’Agosta’s back. “But don’t worry, Lieutenant, I am ready and willing to work with you, side by side, in perhaps a different way than the New York office might. If you’ll meet me halfway, that [82] is. This isn’t my turf and I’m going to need your help. How about it?”
He stood up and held out his hand. Christ, D’Agosta thought, the boys in the New York office will take him apart in two and a half hours and ship the pieces back to New Orleans.
“Deal,” said D’Agosta, grasping his hand. “I’ll introduce you around, starting with the security director, Ippolito. Provided you answer one question. You said the MO of the New Orleans killings was the same. What about the bite marks we found in the brain of the older boy? The claw fragment?”
“From what you told me about the autopsy, Lieutenant, the ME was only speculating about the bite marks,” Pendergast replied. “I’ll be interested to hear the salivase results. Is the claw being tested?”
Later, D’Agosta would remember that his question had been only half answered. Now, he simply replied, “It’s being done today.”
Pendergast leaned back in his chair and made a tent of his fingers, his eyes looking off into space. “I’ll have to pay a visit to Dr. Ziewicz when she examines today’s unpleasantness.”
“Say, Pendergast? You aren’t by any chance related to Andy Warhol, are you?”
“I don’t care much for modern art, Lieutenant.”
The crime scene was packed but orderly, everyone moving swiftly and speaking in undertones, as if in deference to the dead man. The morgue crew had arrived but was standing out of the way, patiently observing the proceedings. Pendergast stood with D’Agosta and Ippolito, the Museum’s Security Director.
“Indulge me if you will,” Pendergast was saying to the photographer. “I’d like a shot from here, like this.” Pendergast demonstrated briefly. “And I’d like a series from the top of the stairs, and a sequence coming down.
[83] Take your time, get a nice play of line, shadow, and light going.”
The photographer looked carefully at Pendergast, then moved off.
Pendergast turned to Ippolito. “Here’s a question. Why was the guard—what did you say his name was, Mr. Ippolito, Jolley, Fred Jolley?—down here in the first place? This wasn’t part of his rounds. Correct?”
“That’s right,” Ippolito said. He was standing in a dry spot near the entrance to the courtyard, his face a poisonous green.
D’Agosta shrugged. “Who knows?”
“Indeed,” Pendergast said. He looked out into the courtyard beyond the stairwell, which was small and deep, brick walls rising on three sides. “And he locked the door behind himself, you say. We have to assume he went outside here, or was headed in that direction. Hmm. The Taurid meteor shower was peaking at about that time last night. Perhaps Jolley here is an aspiring astronomer. But I doubt it.” He stood still for a minute, looking around. Then he turned back toward them. “I believe I can tell you why.”
Christ, a real Sherlock Holmes, thought D’Agosta. “He came down the stairwell to indulge a habit of his. Marijuana. This courtyard is an isolated and well-ventilated spot. A perfect place to, ah, smoke some weed.”
“Marijuana? That’s just a guess.”
“I believe I see the roach,” said Pendergast, pointing into the courtyard. “Just where the door meets the jamb.”
“I can’t see a thing,” said D’Agosta. “Hey, Ed. Check out the base of the door. Right there. What is it?”
“A joint,” said Ed.
“What’s the matter with you guys, can’t find a fucking joint? I told you to pick up every grain of sand, for Chrissake.”
“We haven’t done that grid yet.”
“Right.” He looked at Pendergast. Lucky bastard. Probably wasn’t the guard’s joint anyway.
“Mr. Ippolito,” Pendergast drawled, “is it common for your staff to use illicit drugs while on duty?”
“Absolutely not, but I’m not convinced it was Fred Jolley that—”
Pendergast shut him up with a wave of the hand. “I assume you can account for all these footprints.”
“Those belong to the guard who found the body,” said D’Agosta.
Pendergast bent down. “These completely cover any local evidence that may remain,” he said, frowning. “Really, Mr. Ippolito,” he said, “you should have your men better trained in how to preserve a crime scene.”
Ippolito opened his mouth, then closed it again. D’Agosta suppressed a smirk.
Pendergast was walking carefully back underneath the stairwell, where a large metal door stood partially open. “Orient me, Mr. Ippolito. This door under the stairwell goes where?”
“A hallway.”
“Leading to—?”
“Well, there’s the Secure Area down to the right. But it’s not possible the killer went that way, because …”
“Excuse me for contradicting you, Mr. Ippolito, but I’m sure the killer didgo that way,” Pendergast replied. “Let me guess. Beyond the Secure Area is the Old Basement, am I right?”
“Right,” said Ippolito.
“Where the two children were found.”
“Bingo,” said D’Agosta.
“This Secure Area sounds interesting, Mr. Ippolito. Shall we take a stroll?”
Beyond the rusty metal door, a row of light bulbs stretched down a long basement corridor. The floor was covered in shabby linoleum, and the walls were hung with murals of Southwestern Pueblo Indians grinding corn, weaving, and stalking deer.
[85] “Lovely,” said Pendergast. “A shame they’re down here. They look like early Fremont Ellis.”
“They used to hang in the Hall of the Southwest,” said Ippolito. “It closed in the twenties, I think.”
“Ah!” said Pendergast, scrutinizing one of the murals. “It isEllis. My heavens, these are lovely. Look at the light on that adobe facade.”
“So,” said Ippolito. “How do you know?”
“Why,” said Pendergast, “anyone who knows Ellis would recognize these.”
“I mean, how do you know the killer came through here?”
“I suppose I was guessing,” said Pendergast, examining the next painting. “You see, when someone says ‘it’s impossible,’ I have this very bad habit, I can’t help myself, I immediately contradict that person in the most positive terms possible. A very bad habit, but one that I find hard to break. But of course, now we doknow the killer came through here.”
“How?” Ippolito seemed confused.
“Look at this marvelous rendition of old Santa Fe. Have you ever been to Santa Fe?”
There was a momentary silence. “Er, no,” said Ippolito.
“There is a mountain range behind the town, called the Sierra de Sangre de Cristo. It means the ‘Blood of Christ Mountains’ in Spanish.”
“So?”
“Well the mountains dolook quite red in the setting sun, but not, I dare say, thatred. That’s real blood, and it’s fresh. A shame, really, it’s ruined the painting.”
“Holy shit,” said D’Agosta. “Look at that.”
