Still Life With Crows (37 page)

Boot looked at them, his mind blank with panic.

Pendergast smiled and waved dismissively at them. “Mr. Boot won’t be needing your help, gentlemen. He wishes to apologize for the inconvenience.”

They looked at Boot. After a pause the CEO nodded stiffly. “Right. Won’t be needing you.”

“If you would be so kind as to lock the door on your way out,” said Pendergast, “and please tell the secretary to hold all calls and visitors for the next ten minutes. We need a little privacy here.”

Again the guards looked toward Boot for confirmation.

“Yes,” said Boot. “We need a little privacy here.”

The men retreated, the lock turned, and the office fell silent. Pendergast turned to the chief executive officer of ABX and said cheerily, “And now, my dear Mr. Boot, shall we return to our discussion of the crown jewels?”

Pendergast strolled out to his Rolls-Royce, the long mailing tube under one arm. He unlocked the door, placed the tube on the passenger seat, and slid into the hot interior. Starting the engine, he let the compartment cool off while he slipped the survey out of the tube and gave it a quick overview, just to make sure it was what he needed.

It was all that and more. This tied everything together: the Mounds, the legend of the Ghost Warriors, the massacre of the Forty-Fives—and the inexplicable movements of the serial killer. It even explained Medicine Creek’s excellent water, which had proven to be the connection he had needed. As he’d hoped, it was all here on the oil exploration survey, printed in crisp blue and white.

First things first. He picked up the phone, pressed the scrambler option, punched in a number with the area code of Cleveland, Ohio. The ring was answered immediately, but it was several seconds before a voice of exceeding thinness spoke.

“And?”

“I thank you, Mime. The Cayman Islands number did the trick. I expect the target to experience more than a few sleepless nights.”

“Happy to be of assistance.” There was a click.

Pendergast replaced the receiver and examined the map again, looking more closely at the complex subterranean labyrinths it exposed.

“Excellent,” he murmured.

The memory crossing had
not
failed. Instead, as the map confirmed, it had succeeded beyond his highest expectations. He had merely failed to interpret it properly. He rolled up the survey and inserted it back into the tube, capping it with a deft tap.

Now he knew exactly where the Ghost Warriors had come from—and where they had gone.

Forty-Five

I
n New York City, it was a warm, brilliant late afternoon. But in the strangely perfumed vaults that lay deep underneath the mansion at Riverside Drive, it was always midnight.

The man named Wren walked through the basement chambers, thin and spectral as a wraith. The yellow light of his miner’s helmet pierced the velvety gloom, illuminating a wooden display case here, a tall metal filing cabinet there. From all corners came the faint sheen of copper and bronze, the dull winking of leaded glass.

For the first time in many days, he did not carry the clipboard beneath his arm. It sat beside his laptop, half a dozen vaults back, ready to be taken upstairs. Because Wren, after eight weeks of exhausting, fascinating work, had at last completed the cataloguing of the cabinet of curiosities that Pendergast had charged him with.

It had proved a remarkable collection indeed, even more remarkable than Pendergast had intimated it would be. It was full of wildly diverse objects, the finest of everything: gemstones, fossils, precious metals, butterflies, botanicals, poisons, extinct animals, coins, weapons, meteorites. Every room, every new drawer and shelf, had revealed fresh discoveries, some wondrous, others deeply unsettling. It was, without question, the greatest cabinet of curiosities ever assembled.

What a shame, then, that the chances of the public ever setting eyes upon it were vanishingly small. At least, not in this century. He felt a pang of jealousy that it should belong to Pendergast, all of it, and nothing for him.

Wren walked slowly through the dim chambers, one following upon the next, looking this way and that, making sure that all was in order, that he had overlooked nothing, left nothing behind.

Now, at last, he reached his final destination. He stopped, the beam of his light falling over a forest of glass: beakers, retorts, titration setups, and test tubes, all returning his light from long dark rectangles of a dozen laboratory tables. His beam stopped at last on a door set into the far wall of the lab. Beyond lay the final chambers, into which Pendergast had expressly forbidden him entrance.

Wren turned back, gazing down the dim, tapestried chambers through which he had just passed. The long journey reminded him, somehow, of Poe’s story “The Masque of the Red Death,” in which Prince Prospero had arranged for his masked ball a series of chambers, each one more fantastic, bizarre, and macabre than the one before it. The final chamber—the chamber of Death—had been black, with blood-colored windows.

Wren looked back into the laboratory, shining his light toward that little closed door in the far wall. He had often wondered, during his cataloguing, what lay beyond it. But perhaps, in retrospect, it was best that he not know. And he did so want to get back to the remarkable ledger book that awaited him at the library. Working on it was a way to put these strange and disturbing collections behind him, at least for a while.

. . . There it was again: the rustle of fabric, the echo of stealthy tread.

Wren had lived most of his working life in dim, silent vaults, and his sense of hearing was preternaturally acute. Time and again, as he had labored in these chambers, he’d heard that same rustle, heard that furtive step. Time and again he’d had the sense of being watched as he pored over open drawers or jotted notes. It had happened far too often to be mere imagination.

As he turned and began moving back through the shadowy rooms, Wren’s hand reached into his lab coat and closed over a narrow-bladed book knife. The blade was fresh and very sharp.

The faint tread paced his own.

Wren let his gaze move casually in the direction of the sound. It seemed to be coming from behind a large set of oaken display cases along the right wall.

The basement chambers were vast and complex, but Wren had come to know them well in his two months of work. And he knew that particular set of display cases ended against a transverse wall. It was a cul-de-sac.

He continued walking until he was almost at the end of the chamber. A rich brocaded tapestry lay ahead, covering the passage into the next vault. Then, with sudden, ferretlike speed, he darted to the right, placing himself between the set of display cases and the wall. Pulling the scalpel from his pocket and thrusting it forward, he shone his light into the blackness behind the cases.

Nothing. It was empty.

But as he slipped the book knife back into his pocket and moved away from the display case, Wren heard, with utter distinctness and clarity, a retreating patter of steps that were too light, and too swift, to belong to anybody but a child.

Forty-Six

C
orrie drove past the Kraus place slowly, giving the ugly old house a good once-over. A real Addams Family pile if ever there was one. That meddlesome old woman was nowhere to be seen, probably taken to bed sick again. Pendergast’s Rolls was still gone and the place looked abandoned, sitting all by its shabby self in the stifling heat, surrounded by yellowing corn. Overhead, the great anvil-shaped wedge of the storm was creeping farther across the sun. There were now tornado warnings on the radio from Dodge City to the Colorado border. When she looked to the west, the sky was so black and solid it seemed to be made of slate.

No matter. She’d be in and out of the cave in fifteen minutes. A quick check, that was all.

About a quarter mile beyond the Kraus place, she pulled onto a dirt track heading into the nearby fields. She parked her car in a turnaround where it couldn’t be seen from the road. Over the tops of the corn to the east, she could just make out the widow’s walk of the Kraus place; if she took a shortcut through the corn, nobody would see her.

She wondered briefly if it was such a good idea to be out in the corn like this. But then she remembered Pendergast being quite positive the killer worked only at night.

Pocketing her flashlight, she got out of the car and closed the door. Then she pushed into the corn and walked down the rows in the direction of the cave.

The heat of the corn pressed down on her almost to the point of suffocation. The ears were drying out—gasohol corn was harvested dry—and Corrie wondered mildly what would happen if the corn caught fire. She enjoyed that thought until she reached the broken-down picket fence that separated the Kraus place from the surrounding fields.

She followed the line of the fence until she was behind the house. She glanced back quickly, just in case the old lady had appeared in one of the windows, but they all remained dark and empty, like missing teeth. The house gave her the creeps, frankly: standing against the cruel-looking sky, rundown and alone, a couple of gnarled, dead trees at its back. The weak rays of the sun still illuminated its mansard roofs and ocular windows. But even as she watched, the shadow of the approaching front crept across the corn like a blanket and the house darkened against the background sky. She could smell ozone on the air, and the mugginess grew even more suffocating. The storm was worse than it had seemed from inside the trailer—far worse. She’d better hurry before all hell broke loose.

She turned and skirted the path to the cave, keeping low in case old lady Kraus glanced out an upper window. In a moment she was descending the cut in the earth and had arrived at the iron door.

She looked carefully at the ground before the door, but the dust was undisturbed. Nobody had been through here in at least a couple of days. She felt both relief and disappointment: the killer, if he’d been here at all, was obviously long gone, but the lack of prints made it all the more likely that her theory was just so much bullshit. Still, she’d come this far; might as well check the place out.

She glanced over her shoulder again, then leaned forward to inspect the padlock on the iron door. Perfect: an old pin tumbler lock, the kind they’d been making for over a hundred years, still basically unchanged. This was the same kind of lock as on the front door of her trailer, the lock she’d first practiced on; it was the same kind as in the padlocks on the school lockers. She smiled, remembering the gift-wrapped box of horseshit she had once deposited into Brad Hazen’s locker with a card and a single rose. He never had a clue.

First, she tugged on the padlock hard, to make sure it was actually locked. That was the first rule of lock-picking: don’t try any keyway tools until you’re sure you need them.

It was locked, all right.
Here we go,
she thought.

She pulled an envelope of green felt out of her pocket and unfolded it carefully. Inside was her small set of tension wrenches and the lifter picks she’d surreptitiously made in shop class. She selected the wrench that seemed the right size and inserted it in the keyway, applying tension in the unlocking direction. Lock picking, she knew, was basically a job of finding the mechanical defects of a particular lock: the individual pins were never machined to precisely the same size, there were always slight variations between them that could be exploited. Next, she inserted a pick and gingerly tested the wards, looking for the tightest fit, which would signify the thickest pin. Since the thickest pin of a lock binds first when a turning force is applied, it was important to pick the pins in order of fattest to thinnest. There it was: the pin that bound the most. Carefully, using the pick, she raised it until she felt it set at the shear line. Then she moved to the next thinnest pin and repeated the process, and then once again, careful always to maintain tension. At last, the driver pin set with an audible click; she gave a yank and the lock popped open.

Corrie stood back, unable to suppress a small smile of pride. She wasn’t particularly fast at picking locks—and there were lots of other techniques, like “scrubbing” and “raking,” that she hadn’t mastered—but she was competent. Too bad it was a skill Pendergast would disapprove of. Or would he?

Putting the lock-picking tools back in her pocket, she removed the padlock and placed it to one side. The door squeaked open on rusty hinges; she moved through the entrance, then hesitated. She stood in the darkness a moment, wondering if she should turn on the lights or use her flashlight. If Winifred Kraus showed up, the lights would be a dead giveaway. But then she recollected herself. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, past time for the last tour of the day according to the sign; and besides, Corrie was positive there hadn’t been any tours at all since Pendergast had been forced to take one. The old busybody wasn’t going to stir out of her house in a rising storm. Also, the watchful darkness was getting on her nerves. Better to save her batteries.

She felt along the damp stone wall, found the light switch, flicked it on.

It had been years since she’d been in the cave. Her father had taken her there once, when she was six or seven, not long before he’d run off. For another moment she remained still, looking down into the yawning tunnel. Then she began to descend the limestone steps, her waffle-stompers echoing against the stone.

After a long descent, the staircase gave onto a wooden boardwalk that disappeared between stalagmites and stalactites. Corrie had forgotten just how strange the place was. As a kid going there, she’d been surrounded by adults. Now she was alone in the silence. She walked forward hesitantly, wishing her shoes didn’t make such a hollow sound against the walkway. Bare bulbs, hanging from the uneven ceiling far overhead, threw spectral shadows against the walls. A forest of stalagmites, like jagged, giant spears, rose on both sides. There was no sound in the vast empty space but her footsteps and the distant drip of water.