Bloodless Page 17

  He turned and bent over the camera. Those in the crowd, with a burst of chatter, fumbled out their cell phones and began frantically poking and swiping. The atmosphere of anticipation had become almost unbearable. It was brilliant theater—more than theater, as Moller had found a way to make his audience active participants. Gannon, watching the feed from her two camera operators on her monitors, was happy to see them nailing it.

  “I am now sending,” said Moller as he turned back.

  Total silence for a moment. Then, as the photos began hitting people’s phones, a great aaahhh-ing and ooohhh-ing came up like a rising wind. Everybody, press photographers included, was staring at their phone. She could even make out a few choked-off gasps and garbled sounds of fear and horror.

  What was it? Gannon was dying to see, but she couldn’t break off directing to grab her own phone. She glanced at Betts. He, too, was staring into his phone, an expression of sheer delight mingled with horror on his face. She went back to covering the moment, her camera operators getting shots of people’s reactions.

  A moment later, she heard Betts speak loudly. “Hey, what are you doing?” She looked over to see him advance rapidly toward the woman, Daisy Fayette, who straightened up. She had been bending over Moller’s equipment case, and now she dropped something back into it with a guilty look.

  “What is this?” Moller yelled, spinning around. “Why are you touching those things?” He rushed over. “Alte Drache, how dare you touch my instruments?”

  Daisy went bright red, and then recovered, saying frostily: “I was curious to see your equipment. After all, I’m also a supernatural researcher.”

  “You can’t go rummaging around like that!” Betts said as Moller began rearranging his case, cheeks red with anger. “In fact, you weren’t even supposed to be on the set today at all. Johnny, see Mrs. Fayette out of here.”

  Gannon watched as the woman was led off by one of the crew, protesting ineffectually. Good riddance, she thought. Fayette, the opposite of photogenic, was obviously just a busybody, angling for more camera time. Gannon had herself lobbied for engaging the woman—a local point of view was an important consideration—but as happened so often, the people you thought were going to be a bonus turned out to have no camera presence. The woman should have remained primarily a voice-over, as Betts had initially said.

  Now Betts came over. “Have a look.” He pulled out his cell phone and swiped through.

  Gannon took up the phone with great interest. The first of Moller’s photographs was of the tomb with the angel with a raised arm. A CSI worker was standing to one side, blurred from the long exposure. On the opposite side of the tomb, a cloud of mist appeared to be rising out of the grass, inside of which stood a figure. Amid the blurry swirl of mist, she could just make out a staring eye, and a bony hand reaching out in a most sinister way toward the oblivious CSI worker.

  She swiped. The next photo showed another cloud of eddying mist, larger and more diffuse, in which she could just make out a giant face, four feet in diameter, indistinct and bloated, and of a tremendously evil aspect. The third photo was the best—or worst—of all, showing what appeared to be a demon climbing out of the very earth, its naked, emaciated arm emerging from the ground, along with the top of a skull covered with wispy hairs, with hollow eye sockets and grinning teeth.

  “Holy shit,” she murmured, “these are amazing.” She could feel her heart beating like a tom-tom. They were extremely creepy, and what’s more, they looked real. The photos had obviously been taken just moments before. Could Moller have somehow manipulated them inside the camera before sending them out? It didn’t seem possible, but as a photographer Gannon knew all too well that there was an almost infinite range of digital manipulation tricks. Anyway, it hardly mattered: this was stupendous stuff, and how Moller got the images was his business.

  She handed the phone back to Betts. “These will make fantastic stills for the documentary.”

  “Absolutely. And there’ll be many more.”

  “But…” she asked, half facetiously, “where’s the vampire?”

  Moller, coming over, answered instead of Betts. “The vampire is not here. It may be somewhere nearby. What you are seeing are demonic presences excited by the recent passage of the vampire, like buoys bobbing in the wake of a big boat.”

  “So you think you can get a picture of the vampire himself?” Betts asked.

  “If you put me in the right place at the right time, yes.”

  “Excellent!” Betts cried, slapping Moller on the back, much to his displeasure.

  37

  AND YOU CAN’T BE any more specific than that?” Commander Delaplane asked.

  The kid—Toby Manning—shook his head. He’d washed his face and hands since she’d first seen him in the cemetery, but his clothes were still a mess. His eyes were clearer, though, and he was relatively composed. Not all that surprising, she mused to herself—he’d been asked to go over the events leading up to his friend’s death probably half a dozen times in as many hours, and now it was becoming routine.

  She waited a minute or two, her gaze on Manning. Then she glanced at Benny Sheldrake and past him to where the two FBI agents were seated at a small conference table. Pendergast gave a slight nod.

  “Okay,” she said, snapping off her recorder. “Thanks for your help. You can go now. I’ll have a car take you home. Get some rest, all right? And stick around, because we’ll be calling on you again in the coming days.”

  Manning nodded, stood up, and—with a furtive glance at Pendergast—shuffled toward the door.

  Delaplane consulted a handwritten list of names, crossed off Manning’s. “That just leaves the Ingersolls. They’re waiting outside.”

  “Excellent.”

  Delaplane sighed inwardly. This was a necessary procedure, interviewing potential witnesses to last night’s mess. They had already spoken to a woman who lived across from the Ingersolls’ B and B, the bartender at the place where the two youths, Toby and Brock, had gotten hammered, the custodian of the cemetery, and a handful of others. The interviews had been short, and—unfortunately—they hadn’t contributed much in the way of hard evidence to what they’d already learned.

  She picked up the phone, asked a watch officer to get a ride for Manning.

  “And bring in the Ingersolls,” she said.

  A minute later, there was a knock on the door and the two came in, escorted by an officer. Their eyes darted around the room, taking in everyone present. Then they sat down in the chairs set before Delaplane’s desk. The woman, Agnes, had an expression of stone—still in shock, no doubt, from the rush of unpleasant events—but her husband, Bertram, looked aggrieved, almost angry, like Sisyphus after being assigned a larger hill.

  “Mr. Ingersoll,” she said, nodding, her voice clipped, uninflected, professional. “Mrs. Ingersoll. Thank you for coming.”

  “Of course,” the woman mumbled without thinking. Her husband said nothing.

  “I’ll be recording this conversation,” she said, snapping the machine on again. “Do I have your permission?”

  “No problem,” said Mr. Ingersoll.

  After going through the preliminaries of date, time, and those present, Delaplane launched into the questioning. “I know this must be difficult, but I’d like you to please go over again with me, one more time, the events leading up to your discovery of the body. Step by step, and please take your time and mention any new details you might have remembered since making your previous statements, no matter how minor.”

  The couple was silent for a moment. Finally, the woman began to speak in a low, halting voice. The story she recounted was, almost word for word, the same one Delaplane had heard already: the walk through the quiet streets; the sudden rush of sound combined with an inexplicable sense of movement; and then, her husband sprawling over a body and her frantic call to 911. The husband winced as she went over certain details but otherwise remained silent.

  Agnes Ingersoll’s story ta
iled off slowly, with a few final observations sputtering out as she recalled them. Then a silence fell over the room. Delaplane followed her usual strategy of letting a witness stew a little before speaking. More often than not, under the pressure of silence, they’d remember something else. But to her surprise, it was Pendergast who spoke.

  “Mrs. Ingersoll,” he said. “Can you tell me how quickly you dialed 911 after your husband fell to the pavement?”

  Through long practice, Delaplane managed to keep her expression neutral, despite the trivial nature of the question. She noticed, however, that Coldmoon shifted his eyes toward his partner.

  The woman paused, thinking. “Um…well…Bertram fell, and as I said he cried out when he hit the pavement, and I knelt over him to make sure he was all right. It all happened so quickly, you know, it seemed everything was over within a second.”

  “So,” Pendergast prodded, “how long would you estimate before the call? Ten seconds? Fifteen?”

  The husband seemed about to object, but his wife answered first. “I saw he was moving, but it was fairly dark and I couldn’t tell how badly hurt he was. I saw the—the other body. Bertram moaned—and that was when I reached into my purse.” She hesitated. “Fifteen seconds.”

  “Fifteen,” Pendergast repeated. “From the moment your husband fell over the body to when you called for assistance?”

  “Yes,” the woman said a little hesitantly. Then, more firmly: “yes.”

  “Very good. And—please forgive me if I dwell on these unpleasant events—the body your husband tripped over: did it seem to you it was already in place?”

  The woman looked from Pendergast to her husband and back again. “I don’t understand.”

  “Was the body in situ, on the ground? Or did you have any sense of motion immediately before the, ah, accident occurred? Such as a body that had fallen from above—jumped or pushed?”

  “No,” she blurted.

  “Mr. Ingersoll?” Pendergast asked.

  The man stared at the agent with red-rimmed eyes. Then he merely shook his head.

  “Thank you,” Pendergast said, glancing at Delaplane to signal, once again, that he had nothing more to ask.

  Sheldrake asked a few perfunctory questions, and then Delaplane dismissed the couple with the usual warnings. As the door closed behind them, she turned to Pendergast. “May I ask why the interest in the timing of the 911 call?”

  “Naturally. And I’d be happy to answer your question—once you’ve checked in with that cell phone specialist of yours.”

  This had been another of Pendergast’s bizarre questions. “I’m not sure he’ll have an answer for us yet.”

  “Please try him anyway, if you don’t mind.”

  “Okay.” Delaplane dialed an internal extension, then turned on the speaker of her desk phone.

  “Wrigley here,” came a voice over the speaker.

  “Wrigley? It’s Alanna.”

  “Oh. Hi, Commander.”

  “Any joy?”

  “As a matter of fact, I was just about to call you,” the disembodied voice replied. “It turns out I didn’t need to tinker with the microcode after all. Once I knew his location, the model of his phone, and its internal GPS ID, I tried the cell towers in that area, just in case. And I got lucky. The kid has a really old phone, and it pings the network a lot more frequently than today’s models when its flashlight is on or it’s being used as a compass. Some proposed IEEE standard that ultimately was never implemented. Anyway, sure enough, it was pinging the network: once every sixty seconds. Of course, newer phones go dormant much faster in order to save juice, but this—”

  “Fascinating, Wrigley, but can we get to the point?”

  “There were thirteen pings, each exactly sixty seconds apart. The first was at 3:02, and the last was at 3:14.”

  “Excuse me,” Pendergast said. “But what was the exact time of the last ping?”

  “Like I said,” the technician replied, “3:14.”

  “I asked for the exact time, if you please.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?” came the sarcastic response. “Three fourteen, forty seconds, and seventy-one centiseconds. That’s 3:14:40.71. I’d give you the milliseconds, but the ANI/ALI signal doesn’t—”

  “Okay, Wrigley,” Delaplane said, trying to keep from smiling. “Good work.” And she hung up. “Now,” she said, turning to Pendergast, “I’m not sure what you’re driving at here.”

  “Just one last favor, please,” Pendergast said in his most honeyed tone. “Would you please call your emergency dispatcher and find out when Mrs. Ingersoll dialed 911?”

  “Let me guess. Down to the second.”

  “If you’d be so kind.”

  It took two calls, and about five minutes of waiting as the records were accessed, before Delaplane hung up again. “Three eighteen,” she said. “And, no, they couldn’t tell me how many hundredths of a second.”

  “That’s quite all right, thank you,” said Pendergast, sliding the fingers of one hand over the nails of the other in a peculiar gesture. “We can assume both time sources are quite accurate—certainly accurate enough for our needs.”

  “What are those needs, exactly?” Delaplane asked. She caught Coldmoon’s eye, and he grinned.

  “To provide the variables for the following calculation: The Manning youth dropped his phone just as he started running away from whoever attacked his friend. That means the assault took place at 3:14 and about forty seconds. We also know that Mrs. Ingersoll dialed 911 at 3:18, less than four minutes later. Which means that was the time Brock Custis was dropped.”

  “What the hell?” Coldmoon said, stirring behind the conference table, suddenly seeing the craziness of the timeline.

  “Dropped?” Delaplane asked.

  “My dear colleagues, consider the facts! The injury to the body, and the accounts of the eyewitnesses, make it clear that Custis had just fallen to the sidewalk a moment before Ingersoll tripped over him. Everyone has assumed that Custis fell from a window or off the roof. But that clearly isn’t the case.”

  “How’s that?” Delaplane asked.

  “Because the Bonaventure Cemetery, where Custis was accosted, is almost four miles from the location on Taylor Street where our friend Ingersoll tripped over Custis’s body. Given the narrow streets, urban congestion, and geographical impediments between the two locations, it’s impossible to drive that distance in less than sixteen minutes—I’ve checked all possible routes. But Custis, or rather his corpse, made it in just four minutes. This is why I say, Commander, that he was dropped. Because the only possible conclusion is that he flew from one spot to the other—or rather, was flown.”

  “Flown?” Delaplane protested in a high, incredulous voice. After a moment, comprehension dawned on her face. “Oh. Oh, shit.”

  38

  ANOTHER BISCUIT?” FELICITY FROST asked, holding out the plate of chocolate digestives.

  “No, thank you,” replied Constance, dabbing her lips with a damask napkin.

  “Hell,” the elderly woman said with feigned annoyance. “That means I can’t have one, either.” And she put the plate back on a silver tray that sat on the tea table between them. The china, Constance noted, was from an antique set of Haviland Limoges, understated but exquisite. But then, she thought, that was characteristic of Frost herself: antique, discreet, and with far more depth than a superficial glimpse would suggest.

  Frost had sent Constance a note earlier that day, asking if she would like to have tea that evening at nine. And so Constance, accepting, had spent over an hour in the woman’s company. Miss Frost had proven to be an excellent conversationalist, knowledgeable about a number of topics—especially antiquarian. She had shown Constance three rooms of the penthouse: a library-cum-museum, a music room, and the drawing room in which they now sat. There were clearly others, but Frost had not invited her to tour them and Constance had not asked. In any case, these three were sufficient to provide her with a sense of Frost’s inter
ests and personality. The rooms contained many beautiful things: first editions of neglected nineteenth-century novelists; a Steinway Model O from 1923, the final year of original production; and an impressive collection of art that ran the gamut from John Marin watercolors to several of Piranesi’s Carceri etchings. True, the rugs were not the hand-knotted Kashan or Isfahan pieces of Pendergast’s Riverside Drive mansion, and the Duncan Phyfe furniture was not original—but the reproductions were tasteful. Everything spoke of a woman of discernment who—though her wealth was not unlimited—had accumulated and curated many beautiful things.

  In addition to the collections of firearms and pens, there was, curiously, a museum-in-miniature of cipher machines and pieces from the early history of computing. Several large display cases contained, Frost had explained, a Fialka M-125 Soviet cipher device, an Enigma machine, a set of gears of Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine, a relay and rotary switch from Harvard’s Mark I, and a pair of printed circuit boards from the landmark early supercomputer Cray-1. Frost’s knowledge of computers was remarkable, and it struck Constance this must be a significant link to her mysterious past—whatever that was.

  “It’s almost eleven,” Frost said, glancing at a grandfather clock on the far wall. She was sitting on a chaise longue across from Constance. A well-thumbed paperback, which Constance had noticed on her first visit, was at her side, a constant companion. “I think something stronger than tea is called for—don’t you?”

  Constance reminded herself that, because of the woman’s nocturnal habits, cocktails were apparently served half a dozen hours later than usual. “If you’d like.”

  “I would like indeed. At my age, self-medication is practically the only vice left to me.” She stood up with effort, then walked over to a sideboard arrayed with numerous bottles. “Would you care to, ah, smother a parrot with me?”

  “No, thank you,” said Constance, a little more sharply than she intended.