City of Endless Night Page 6

  I can see you’re not your usual self.

  He frowned at the memory. He knew from his Chongg Ran training that the thoughts you most try to banish are the ones that most persistently push themselves back in. The best way to not think of something is to possess it fully, and then cultivate indifference.

  Moving from the more public spaces of the apartment to the private, he wandered into the kitchen, where he had a brief discussion in ASL with his deaf housekeeper, Miss Ishimura, about that evening’s dinner menu. After some back and forth they ultimately agreed on okonomiyaki pancakes with yam batter, octopus, and pork belly.

  It had been over three weeks since Pendergast’s ward, Constance, had—with an abrupt declaration—left their home at 891 Riverside Drive to go live with her young son in a remote monastery in India. In the aftermath of her departure, Pendergast had fallen into a most uncharacteristic emotional state. But as the days and weeks went on, and the voices that sounded in his head grew still one by one, a single voice remained—a voice, he knew, that was at the heart of his strange disquiet.

  Can you love me the way I wish you to? The way I need you to?

  He pushed this voice away with sudden violence. “I will master this,” he murmured to himself.

  Moving out of the kitchen, he made his way down the hall to a tiny, windowless, ascetic room not unlike a monk’s chamber. It contained only a plain wooden desk, unvarnished, and a straight-backed chair. Taking a seat, Pendergast opened the desk’s single drawer and, one at a time, carefully took out the three items it contained and placed them on the tabletop: a hardbound notebook; a cameo; and a comb. He sat a moment, looking at each in turn.

  And I—I love you. But you made it very clear that you don’t return my love.

  The notebook was of French make, with an orange cover of Italian leatherette, containing blank sheets of vellum Clairefontaine paper ideal for fountain pens. It was the kind Constance had used exclusively for the last dozen years, ever since the venerable English purveyor of leather-bound journals she always preferred had gone out of business. Pendergast had taken it from her private rooms in the sub-basement below the mansion: it was her most recent journal, left incomplete on her sudden departure for India.

  He had not yet opened it.

  Next he turned to the antique tortoiseshell comb and the old, elegant cameo in a frame of eighteen-karat yellow gold. The latter had been carved, he knew, from the prized sardonyx of Cassis madagascariensis.

  Both items had been among Constance’s most favored possessions.

  Knowing what I know, having said what we’ve said—continued living under this roof would be intolerable…

  Plucking all three from the tabletop, Pendergast exited the room, went down the hall, and opened the unprepossessing door that led into the third and most private of his apartments. Beyond the door was a small room that ended in a shoji, a sliding wood-and-rice-paper partition. And beyond the shoji was—hidden deep within the massive walls of the old and elegant apartment building—a tea garden, recreated by Pendergast to the most exacting specifications.

  He slowly closed the partition behind him, then paused, listening to the soft cooing of doves and inhaling the scent of eucalyptus and sandalwood. Everything—the path of flat stones meandering before him, the dwarf pines, the waterfall, the chashitsu or teahouse that lay half-hidden in the greenery ahead—was dappled in hazy, indirect light.

  Now he made his way down the path, past the stone lanterns, to the teahouse. Bending low, he entered the dim confines of the chashitsu. He closed its sadouguchi, carefully set the three items he’d been carrying down to one side, then glanced around, making sure that everything necessary for the tea ceremony—the mizusashi, whisks, scoops, brazier, kama iron kettle—was in readiness. He set the tea bowl and container of matcha powder in their proper places, then took a seat on the tatami mat. Over the next thirty minutes, he immersed himself completely in the ceremony: ritually cleaning the various utensils; heating the water; warming the chawan tea bowl and, after at last scooping hot water into it, whisking in the proper proportion of matcha. Only then, once every last preparation had been completed with almost reverential exactitude, did he taste the tea, taking it in with barely perceptible sips. And as he did so, he allowed himself—for the first time in almost a month—to let the weight of grief and guilt fully occupy his mind, and in so doing, slowly fall away.

  At long last, equanimity restored, he carefully and deliberately went through the final steps of the ceremony, re-cleaning the implements and returning them to their proper places. Now he again glanced at the three items he had brought with him. After a moment, he reached for the notebook and—for the first time—opened it at random and allowed himself to read a single paragraph. Instantly, Constance’s personality leapt out through her written words: her mordant tone, her cool intelligence, her slightly cynical, slightly macabre world view—all filtered through a nineteenth-century perspective.

  He found it a great relief he could now read the journal with a degree of detachment.

  He put the journal carefully back beside the comb and the cameo: the simple, spare walls and floor of this chashitsu seemed for the time their best home, and perhaps he would return to contemplate them, and their owner, again in the not-too-distant future. But now there were other matters to deal with.

  He left the teahouse, walked down the path, exited the garden, and made his way—with a brisk, firm step—down a long series of passages toward the front door of the apartment. As he did so, he slipped his cell phone out of his suit jacket and speed-dialed a number.

  “Vincent?” he said. “Meet me at the Cantucci town house, if you please. I’m ready for that walk-through you spoke of.”

  And then, replacing the phone, he shrugged into a vicuña overcoat and left the apartment.

  11

  D’AGOSTA WASN’T ALL that thrilled to be back at the Cantucci crime scene in what was practically the middle of the night, even if it was to meet Pendergast, who had finally agreed to examine the place. Sergeant Curry let him in the front door, and a moment later D’Agosta saw Pendergast’s huge vintage Rolls glide up to the curb, Proctor at the wheel. The special agent got out.

  Pendergast glided past Curry. “Good evening, my dear Vincent.”

  They started down the hall. “See all these cameras?” D’Agosta asked. “The perp hacked into the security system, bypassed all the alarms.”

  “I should like to see the report.”

  “I’ve got a complete set for you,” D’Agosta said. “Forensics, hair and fiber, latents, you name it. Sergeant Curry will give them to you on the way out.”

  “Excellent.”

  “Ingress was through the front door,” D’Agosta continued. “The hacked security system let him in. The perp moved extensively through the house. Here’s the way it played out, as best we understand it. It seems that while the killer was in the entryway, Cantucci wakes up. We think Cantucci goes to the CCTV and sees the guy downstairs. He puts on his bathrobe and gets his gun, a Beretta 9mm. He thinks the guy is coming up on the elevator, so he fires a bunch of rounds through the door when the elevator arrives—but the killer faked him out, sent the elevator up empty. So now Cantucci, probably checking the CCTV again, goes down to the third floor, where the guy is messing around with a safe holding his Stradivarius violin. And that’s where Cantucci is ambushed, killed by three arrows fired in quick succession, all three going through the heart. And then the perp decapitates him—practically as the heart stops beating, if the M.E. is to be believed.”

  “Must have been a rather sanguinary process.”

  D’Agosta wasn’t sure what Pendergast meant by that and let it go. “The perp then goes to the attic, where the safe holding the security system is located, opens it using the hacked code, takes out the hard drives, and leaves. Egress again out the front door. According to our expert, only an employee, or ex-employee, of the company that installed the security system could have pulled this off. It’s a
ll in the report.”

  “Very good. Let us proceed, then. One floor at a time, every room on each floor, please, even those in which nothing occurred.”

  D’Agosta led Pendergast through the kitchen, then the downstairs sitting room, opening all the closet doors at his request. They climbed the stairs to the second floor, toured that, and then the third. This was where most of the action had taken place. There were two rooms in the back of the narrow town house, and one large sitting room in front.

  “The killing occurred at the doorway to the music room,” said D’Agosta, indicating the wall where the arrows had struck. There was a broad, thick shower of blood descending from three splintered marks in the paneled wall, and a huge pool of dried blood in the carpet below. Here Pendergast paused, kneeling. Using a penlight, he probed about, once in a while slipping a small test tube out of his suit pocket, plucking something up with tweezers, putting it in, and stoppering the tube. He then examined the rug and the arrow marks with a loupe fixed to one eye. D’Agosta didn’t bother to remind him that the CSU team had already fine-combed everything; he had seen Pendergast turn up fresh clues in even the most thoroughly scrubbed crime scene.

  Once he had finished going over the immediate area of the murder, Pendergast continued on in silence, making a slow and painstaking exploration of the music room, the safe, and the two other rooms on that floor of the town house. Next, they proceeded to the upper floors, then climbed into the attic. Again, Pendergast got down on his hands and knees among the dust in front of and inside the security safe, plucking and storing evidence in test tubes.

  He half rose beneath the low ceiling. “Curious,” he murmured, “very curious indeed.”

  D’Agosta had no idea what he found curious but he knew if he asked, he wouldn’t get an answer. “As I said, it had to be someone who worked for Sharps and Gund. The perp knew exactly how the system worked. I mean exactly.”

  “An excellent line of inquiry to follow up. Ah—regarding the other murder, do you have any further revelations about the daughter?”

  “Yeah. We managed to get copies of some sealed files from the Beverly Hills PD. She killed a boy while driving under the influence about eighteen months back—hit and run. Ozmian got her off with some mighty fine lawyering. The boy’s family took it pretty hard—threats were made.”

  “Another obvious line for follow-up.”

  “Of course. The boy’s mother committed suicide, the father supposedly moved back east. We’re trying to figure out just where he is so we can talk to him.”

  “You consider him a suspect?”

  “He’s got a strong motive.”

  “When did he come east?”

  “About six months ago. We’re keeping it all under the radar, for obvious reasons, until we locate him.”

  They descended once again to the first floor, where Pendergast turned to Curry and the small group of police who stood with him. “I’ll have a look at those files now, if you please.”

  Curry pulled an accordion folder out of his briefcase and handed it to Pendergast. The agent promptly sat down in a chair, opened it, and began leafing through it, pulling out files, eyeballing them, putting them back in rapid succession.

  D’Agosta glanced covertly at his watch. Ten minutes after twelve. “Um,” he said, “that’s a pretty big file. Maybe you’d like to take it home with you? It’s all yours.”

  Pendergast looked up, his silvery eyes glittering with annoyance. “I wish to make sure I’ve overlooked nothing before I leave the premises.”

  “Right, right.”

  He fell into silence as Pendergast continued shuffling through the papers. Everyone waited with increasing impatience as the minutes ticked by.

  Suddenly Pendergast looked up: “Where’s Mr. Cantucci’s cell phone?”

  “It says right there in the report that they didn’t find it. Calls roll over to voice mail. The phone is turned off. We don’t know where the hell it is.”

  “It should have been on his bedside table, where the charger was.”

  “He probably left it somewhere.”

  “You searched his office?”

  “Yes.”

  “Our Mr. Cantucci has survived two grand jury hearings and he’s been subjected to over a dozen search warrants—not to mention countless death threats. He would not let his cell phone out of his sight. Ever.”

  “Okay. So what’re you getting at?”

  “The killer took his phone. Before he was murdered.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “The killer came upstairs, took his cell phone from his bedside table while Cantucci was sleeping, then went back downstairs to the first floor.”

  “That’s crazy. If he did that, why the hell didn’t he just kill Cantucci right there, in bed?”

  “A most excellent question.”

  “Maybe he took the cell phone off Cantucci after he killed him.”

  “Impossible. Mr. Cantucci would have called nine-one-one on the cell phone when he realized there was an intruder in the house. The conclusion is inescapable that he did not have his phone when he woke and pursued the intruder.”

  D’Agosta shook his head.

  “And there’s a second unaddressed mystery here, Vincent.”

  “Which is?”

  “Why did the killer go to great lengths to disable the alarm system, yet fail to shut down the CCTV system?”

  “That one’s easy,” said D’Agosta. “He used the system to locate his victim—to see where Cantucci was in the house.”

  “But having retrieved the phone, he already knew where his victim was: in bed, sleeping.”

  That assumed Pendergast was right in his crazy assertion that the killer took the cell phone and then went back downstairs without killing Cantucci immediately. “Sorry—don’t buy it.”

  “Consider what our Mr. Cantucci did when he woke up. He did not call nine-one-one—because he couldn’t find his phone. He realized the alarm system had been deactivated, but the CCTV was still operating. He immediately retrieved his gun and used the CCTV system to locate the intruder. He found him—and saw that he was armed with a hunting bow. Our Mr. Cantucci, on the other hand, had a handgun with a fifteen-round magazine, and he was an expert in its use. Your own files indicate he was a champion small-arms competitor. He assumed his gun and his skills far outmatched the intruder’s hunting bow. That encouraged him to stalk the intruder, and I would submit to you that this is exactly what the intruder wanted. It was a setup. The victim was then surprised and killed.”

  “How can you know all this?”

  “My dear Vincent, there’s no other way it could have occurred! This entire scenario was expertly choreographed by an individual who remained calm, methodical, and unrushed throughout. This was not a professional hit man. This was someone far more sophisticated.”

  D’Agosta shrugged. If Pendergast wanted to go off on a tangent, that was his prerogative—it wouldn’t be the first time. “So let me ask you again: if you’re right about the cell phone, then why not just kill the guy in bed?”

  “Because his goal wasn’t merely to kill.”

  “So what was it?”

  “That, my dear Vincent, is the very question we must answer.”

  12

  A​NTON OZMIAN TOOK his breakfast at 6 AM in his office—a pot of organic pu-erh tea, the scrambled egg whites from two free-range Indian Runner ducks, and a one-ounce piece of bitter 100 percent cacao chocolate. This breakfast had not varied in ten years. Ozmian had to make many difficult business decisions in the course of a day, and to compensate he organized the rest of his life to be as decision-free as possible—starting with breakfast.

  He ate alone, in his large office overlooking the watery expanse of the Hudson River, rolling along in the reddish predawn light like a sheet of liquid steel. A soft knock came at the door, and an assistant carried in a stack of the morning’s newspapers, which he laid down on the granite desk, and then soundlessly vanished. Ozmian sorted
through them, glancing over the headlines in the usual order: the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the New York Times, and the New York Post.

  The Post was the last on his list, and he read it not for its news value but as a matter of anthropological interest. As his eye fell on the cover page and its usual seventy-two-point headline, he froze.

  ROAD KILL

  Drunk Ozmian girl in past hit-and-run

  BY BRYCE HARRIMAN

  Grace Ozmian, the recently murdered and decapitated daughter of dot-com mogul Anton Ozmian, struck an eight-year-old boy with her BMW X6 Typhoon in Beverly Hills in June of last year. She fled the scene of the accident, leaving the boy dying in the street. A witness obtained the license plate number, and local police stopped and arrested her two miles from the scene. A blood test determined she had a blood-alcohol content of .16, twice the legal limit.

  Her father, billionaire CEO of DigiFlood, subsequently hired a team of lawyers from one of LA’s most expensive law firms, Crosbie, Whelan & Poole, to defend his daughter. She was sentenced to a mere 100 hours of community service, and the case records were sealed. Her community service consisted of buttering toast and serving pancakes at a homeless shelter in downtown Los Angeles two mornings a week…

  Ozmian’s hands began to shake as he read the story, first word to last. Soon the shaking was so violent he had to lay the paper down on the desk and let go of it to finish. When he was done, he rose and, with a scream of inchoate rage, picked up the glass mug of tea and hurled it across the room, directly at a Jasper Johns painting of an American flag. The glass shattered, cutting through the canvas and leaving a brown splash across it.

  An urgent knock came at the door. “Stay the fuck out!” he screamed, while at the same time casting about, snatching up a two-pound nickel-iron meteorite, and heaving it at the Johns, where it ripped through the image, splitting it in half and knocking the painting from the wall. Finally, he seized a small bronze Brancusi sculpture and gave the broken picture, now lying on the floor, a few shredding blows, thus completing its destruction.