Two Graves Page 2

  “Yes.” Pendergast plucked the notebook and pen from D’Agosta’s hand, opened the notebook, and quickly scrawled something. “This is the license plate of the cab Helen was abducted in. I managed to get all but the final two numbers. Put all your resources into finding it. Here’s the hack number, too, but my guess is it’s meaningless.”

  D’Agosta took back the notebook. “You got it.”

  “Put out an APB on Helen. It might be complicated, as she’s officially dead, but do it anyway. I’ll get you a photograph—it will be fifteen years old, use forensic software to age it.”

  “Anything else?”

  Pendergast gave a single, brusque shake of his head. “Just find that car.” And he stepped out of the room without another word, limping down the hall, accelerating as he went.

  + Twenty-Two Hours

  AS D’AGOSTA DROVE WEST AWAY FROM NEWARK, HE FELT AS if he were stepping back in time to when he’d been a beat cop at the Forty-First Precinct of the old South Bronx. The dilapidated shops, the shuttered buildings, the ravaged streets—all were a reminder of less happy days. He drove on as the view outside the windshield grew steadily grimmer. Soon he reached the heart of the blight: here—in the midst of the densest megalopolis in America—entire blocks lay empty, their buildings burnt shells or piles of rubble. He pulled over at a corner and got out, service piece where he could get to it quickly. But then he saw, amid all the decay, a single building—standing like a lonely flower in a parking lot—with lace-curtained windows, geraniums, and brightly painted shutters: a spot of hope in the urban wasteland. D’Agosta fetched a deep breath. The South Bronx had come back; this neighborhood would, too.

  He crossed the sidewalk and started across a vacant lot, kicking aside bricks. Pendergast had beaten him here: he could see the agent at the far end of the lot, beside the burned-out remains of a taxi, speaking to a uniformed police officer and what looked like a small CSI team. Pendergast’s Rolls-Royce was parked at the corner, spectacularly out of place on these impoverished streets.

  Pendergast gave D’Agosta a curt nod as he approached. Other than the shocking paleness, the FBI agent now looked more like his old self. In the late-afternoon light, his trademark black suit was clean and pressed, his white shirt crisp. He had traded the ungainly aluminum cane for one of ebony, topped by a handle of carved silver.

  “… Found it forty-five minutes ago,” the beat cop was telling Pendergast. “I was chasing some twelve-year-olds who’d been boosting copper wire.” He shook his head. “And here was this New York taxi. The license matched the one on the APB, so I called it in.”

  D’Agosta turned his attention to the taxi. It was little more than a husk: the hood was gone, the engine cannibalized, the seats missing, dashboard scorched and partially melted, steering wheel broken in two.

  The head of the CSI team approached from the far side of the vehicle. “Even before the vandals got to it, this was almost useless as evidence,” he said, pulling off a pair of latex gloves. “No paperwork or documentation. It was vacuumed and wiped down, all fingerprints removed. They employed a particularly aggressive accelerant. Anything the perps didn’t take care of, the fire would have.”

  “The VIN?” D’Agosta asked.

  “We’ve got it. Stolen vehicle. Won’t be of much use.” The man paused. “We’ll haul it back to the warehouse for a more thorough examination, but this smells like a professional cleanup job. Organized crime.”

  Pendergast took this in without replying. Although the agent remained utterly still, D’Agosta could feel a sense of desperation, of ruthless drive, radiating from him. Then, abruptly, he drew a pair of latex gloves from a coat pocket, snapped them on, and approached the vehicle. Crouching over it, wincing briefly with pain, he circled once, then twice, spidery fingers running lightly over the scorched metal, glittering eyes taking in everything. As the others watched, he peered carefully into the engine space; the passenger compartment, front and back; the trunk. Then, as he began a third revolution, he pulled some small ziplock bags, a few sample tubes, and a scalpel from his pocket. Kneeling beside the front fender, his face creasing momentarily with the effort, he used the scalpel to scrape some shavings of dried mud into one of the bags, which he then sealed and returned to his pocket. Rising, he completed the third circuit, more slowly this time. Stopping at the right rear tire, he knelt again and—using a pair of forceps—plucked several small pebbles from the treads of the tire and placed them in a second bag. This, too, quickly disappeared into his pocket.

  “That’s, uh, evidence,” the cop began.

  Pendergast rose and turned toward the cop. He said nothing, but the cop took a step backward under the force of the FBI agent’s stare.

  “Right. Keep us in the loop on that,” the cop muttered.

  Still Pendergast skewered the man with his stare. He looked at the CSI team, each in turn, and then finally at D’Agosta. There was something accusatory in his gaze, as if they were guilty of some unnamed offense. Then he turned and began walking in the direction of the Rolls, limping slightly, using the cane for support.

  D’Agosta scrambled after him. “What’s next?”

  Pendergast did not stop walking. “I’m going to find Helen.”

  “Will you be… working officially?” D’Agosta asked.

  “Do not concern yourself with my status.”

  D’Agosta was taken aback by his cold tone.

  “Carry on with the official homicide and kidnapping investigation. If you uncover anything of interest, let me know. But remember also: this is my fight. Not yours.”

  When D’Agosta stopped, Pendergast turned, his voice softening as he laid a hand on his arm. “Your place is here, Vincent. What I have to do, I must do alone.”

  D’Agosta nodded. Pendergast turned away again and opened the car door, simultaneously raising his cell phone to one ear. As the door closed, D’Agosta could hear him speaking into the phone: “Mime? Anything? Anything at all?”

  + Twenty-Six Hours

  HORACE ALLERTON WAS PREPARING TO ENJOY HIS FAVORITE activity—a relaxing evening with a cup of coffee and a good scientific journal—when a knock sounded at the front door of his neat Lawrenceville bungalow.

  He put down his cup and glanced at the clock with a frown. Quarter past eight: too late for a friend to be calling. He picked up the magazine, Stratigraphy Today, and opened it with a quiet sigh of contentment.

  The knock came again, more insistent.

  Allerton’s eyes rose from the magazine to the door. Jehovah’s Witnesses, maybe, or one of those annoying kids who went door-to-door, selling magazine subscriptions. Ignore them and they’d go away.

  He had just started in on the magazine’s lead article—“Mechanical Stratigraphy Analysis of Depositional Structure,” a promising evening’s reading indeed—when he glanced up and had the shock of his life. A man in an elegant black suit, face as white as Dracula, stood in the center of his living room.

  “What on earth—?” Allerton cried, leaping up.

  “Special Agent Pendergast. FBI.” A shield and identification card appeared out of nowhere, shoved into his face.

  “How, how did you get in? What do you want?”

  “Dr. Horace Allerton, the geologist?” the agent asked. His voice was cool but with an underlying shimmer of threat.

  Allerton nodded, swallowed.

  Without a word, Pendergast stepped over to a chair, and now Allerton noticed the limp and the silver-headed cane. The geologist sat back guardedly in his own wing chair. “What’s this all about?”

  “Dr. Allerton,” the FBI agent began as he took a seat, “I’ve come to you for help. You are known for your expertise in analyzing soil composition. And I’ve taken particular note of your knowledge of glacial deposition.”

  “And?”

  The agent reached into his pocket, took out two sealed plastic bags. He laid them both on the coffee table, separating them.

  Allerton hesitated, then bent forward to examine th
em. One was filled with a sample of micaceous clay mingled with soil, the other with small broken pebbles of porphyritic granite.

  “I need two things. First, I would like a distribution map of the type of clay found in sample one.”

  Allerton nodded slowly.

  “The pebbles in sample two are the product of a gravel crusher, are they not?”

  The geologist opened the bag and slid the pebbles into his hand. They were rough, sharp, the edges unworn by time, weathering, or glacial abrasion. “They are.”

  “I want to know where they came from.”

  Allerton glanced from one bag to the other. “Why come to me at this time of night, sneaking in like this? You should make an appointment, see me at my Princeton office.”

  A faint tremor passed over the FBI agent’s sculpted face. “If this were merely an idle request, Doctor, I would not have troubled you at such a late hour. A woman’s life is at stake.”

  Allerton put the bags down beside his coffee cup. “What exactly is the, uh, time frame you had in mind?”

  “You are known to have a small but quite fine mineralogy laboratory in your basement.”

  “You mean… you mean you want these analyzed now?” Allerton asked.

  In response, Pendergast merely leaned back in his chair, as if making himself comfortable.

  “But that could take hours!” Allerton protested.

  Pendergast continued to fix him with a level gaze.

  Allerton glanced at the clock. It was now eight thirty. He thought of his magazine, and the article he’d been looking forward to. Then he glanced again at the FBI agent in the opposite chair. There were dark smudges beneath the man’s pale gray eyes, as if he had not slept in a long time. And the look in those eyes made him most uneasy.

  “Perhaps if you told me why you needed these particular analyses?”

  “I will. They were recovered from a car that had evidently spent some time driving over a crushed-gravel road and a muddy driveway. I need to find that location.”

  Allerton scooped up the samples and rose. “Wait here,” he said.

  As an afterthought, he took his cup of coffee with him to the basement.

  + Thirty Hours

  MIDNIGHT. PENDERGAST SAT IN HIS ROLLS-ROYCE OUTSIDE the house of Dr. Allerton, engine idling.

  He had been fortunate: the particular type of granite outcropped in only one area that also contained a gravel pit. This pit was owned by the Reliance Sand and Gravel Company, located just outside Ramapo, New York. They ran a large gravel-crushing operation that supplied an area covering a significant portion of Rockland County. Using his laptop to visit the Reliance website, Pendergast had been able to map the approximate geographic range of Reliance’s customer base, which he duly marked on an atlas of Rockland County.

  Next he turned to Allerton’s analysis of the mud. It was largely composed of an unusual type of clay, identified as a weathered micaceous halloysite, fortunately not common to the region, although—according to the geologist—somewhat more so in Quebec and northern Vermont. Allerton had given Pendergast a map of its geographic distribution, copied from an online journal.

  Pendergast compared this with the distribution region he had marked for the gravel. They intersected in only one area, somewhat less than a square mile in extent, north and east of Ramapo.

  Now Pendergast opened Google Earth on his laptop and located the coordinates of that square mile of overlap. Zooming in to the program’s maximum resolution, he examined the terrain. Much of it was heavily wooded, situated along the border of Harriman State Park. A suburban neighborhood took up another section, but it was a recent development and all the roads and driveways appeared neatly paved. There were some dirt roads and houses scattered elsewhere, as well as a few farms, but they showed no areas that looked graveled. Finally he spied a structure that looked promising: a large, isolated warehouse. The place had a long driveway; a small adjacent parking area that showed up in a mottled pale hue that looked very much like gravel spread over muddy ground.

  Shutting off the laptop, Pendergast stowed the computer and pulled away from the curb with a screech of rubber, heading for the New Jersey Turnpike.

  Ninety minutes later, he parked the Rolls off to the side of the road, half a mile past the Rockland County Solid Waste facility, on a wooded stretch just short of the warehouse. Through the denuded trees, pale in the moonlight, he could make out the building, a single light burning before its heavy corrugated-metal door. For half an hour, he kept the structure under surveillance. Nobody came or went; it appeared deserted.

  Taking a penlight from the backseat, but keeping it switched off, he slipped out of the car and approached the building through the trees, moving silently. He circled it cautiously. The lone window was painted black.

  Turning the flashlight on, Pendergast knelt, wincing with pain. He took the gravel sample from his pocket and, using the light, compared it with the gravel that lined the driveway. The match was perfect. He reached down and fingered a small sample of mud under the gravel, spreading it between his thumb and forefinger. Perfect as well.

  Flitting across the open area around the warehouse, Pendergast pressed himself against the corrugated wall, then made his way around to the front, keeping low. Externally it was decrepit, defunct, without signage of any kind. And yet, for such a shabby building, the padlock on the lone door was expensive and new.

  Pendergast hefted the padlock in one hand, let his other hand drift over it in an almost caressing gesture. It did not spring open at once, yielding only after manipulation with a tiny screwdriver and a bump key. He pulled it free of the hasp, then—weapon at the ready—opened the door just enough to peer through. Darkness and silence. He slid the door open a little farther, slipped inside, and closed it behind him.

  For perhaps five minutes, he made no movement except to pan his flashlight around, examining the floor, walls, and ceiling. The warehouse was almost completely bare, with a concrete pad floor, metal walls, empty shelves along the surrounding walls. It seemed to offer no more information than the burned-out taxi had.

  He made a slow circuit of the interior, pausing now and then to examine something that caught his attention; pluck a bit of something up here; take a photograph there; fill sample bags with almost invisible evidence. Despite the apparent emptiness of the warehouse, under his probing eye a story began to emerge, still little more than a ghostly palimpsest.

  An hour later, Pendergast returned to the closed door of the warehouse. Kneeling, he spread out a dozen small sealed plastic envelopes, each containing a fragment of evidence: metal filings; a piece of glass; oil from a stain on the concrete, a bit of dried paint, a broken chip of plastic. His eye roved over each in turn, allowing a mental picture to form.

  The warehouse had once been used as a vehicular pool. Judging by the age and condition of the oil spots on the floor, at one time it had seen fairly heavy use. More recently, however, only two vehicles had been stored. One—judging by the faint tread marks on the concrete floor, a Goodyear brand size 215/75-16—belonged to the Ford Escape that had been used as the getaway taxi. Spatters of yellow on one wall, as well as a reverse-image tracing of spray paint on a fragment of wood tossed into a far corner, indicated also that this was the spot where the Escape had been converted into a counterfeit New York City taxi—down to the paint job and fake medallion.

  The other recent vehicle was harder to identify. Its tire print was broader than that of the Escape, and most probably a Michelin. It might well belong to a powerful European luxury sedan, such as an Audi A8 or a BMW 750. The faintest of paint scrapings could be seen against the inside of the warehouse door where this vehicle had recently come in contact; Pendergast carefully transferred them to another evidence bag with a set of tweezers. It was automotive paint, metallic, and of an unusual color: deep maroon.

  And then, as he examined the paint, his eye noted—in the narrow channel of the sliding door—a tiny freshwater pearl.

  His heart al
most stopped.

  After a moment, recovering, he picked it up with tweezers and stared at it. In his mind’s eye, he could visualize—roughly twenty-four hours before—the taxi returning here. It would have contained four people: the driver, two men dressed in jogging suits, and an unwilling companion—Helen. Here she was transferred to the maroon foreign car. As they prepared to leave, there was a struggle; she tried to escape, forcing open the door of the car—that accounted for the scratch of paint—and in the process of subduing her, Helen’s abductors snapped her necklace, scattering small pearls all over the passenger compartment and, no doubt, the floor of the warehouse. There would have been oaths, perhaps a punishment, and a hurried scuffle to pick up the explosion of pearls lying across the concrete.

  Pendergast glanced at the tiny, lustrous bead held between the tips of the tweezers. This was the one they missed.

  With Helen safely secured in the second car, the vehicles would have gone their separate ways, the counterfeit taxi to its fiery end in New Jersey, the maroon vehicle to…?

  Pendergast remained, still kneeling, deep in thought, for another ten minutes. Then, rising stiffly, he exited the warehouse, padlocked it behind him, and walked noiselessly back to the waiting Rolls.

  + Thirty-Seven Hours

  THOMAS PURVIEW WAS ALWAYS FASTIDIOUS ABOUT GETTING to his law office promptly at seven o’clock, but this morning someone else had been even more punctual: he found a man waiting in his outer office. He had the look of someone who had just arrived. In fact, it almost appeared as if he were about to try the door to the inner office, but of course Purview realized this was unlikely. As he walked in, the man turned, then limped toward him, one hand holding a cane, the other extended.

  “Good morning,” Purview said, shaking the proffered hand.

  “That remains to be seen,” the stranger replied in a southern accent. He was thin, almost gaunt, and he did not respond to Purview’s professional smile. Purview prided himself on his ability to read the trouble in a new client’s face—but this one was unreadable.