The Obsidian Chamber

by Lincoln Child

  So it was all lies—all of it. His “best friend,” the “fortune hunter,” the million-dollar theft and ransom. Not one thing he’d told her was true. And here he was, with that woman, making love to her with a passion that, despite herself, tore Flavia’s breath from her lungs.

  She staggered away from the door, then sank back against the cool wall of the temple. She wanted to raise her arms, stuff her fingers in her ears, shut out the sounds…but it was as if all strength had been leached from her limbs. All except for her hands: they kept playing with the Zombie Killer, passing it back and forth between her palms, as the sounds of lovemaking went on, and on, and on.

  55

  THE MEDICAL EXAMINER’S office of Miami-Dade County was located in a drab-colored modern building of indifferent architecture. The interior was as cold as sun-soaked Tenth Avenue outside was hot. In the basement, among the capacious walls of corpse lockers, it was even colder. Susceptible to chill as always, Pendergast buttoned his suit jacket, pulled his tie up around his throat.

  The medical examiner who’d greeted them at the entrance to the morgue cooler, Dr. Vasilivich, was a cheerful, heavyset man with a tonsure like a medieval monk’s. “It’s a good thing you’ve got pull,” he told Longstreet after the introductions had been made. “And that you were able to get here so early. Both bodies were about to be released to their families.”

  “We won’t take up much of your time,” said Longstreet, with a significant glance at Pendergast. Pendergast knew his old CO was growing tired of humoring him.

  “What are you looking for, exactly?” Vasilivich asked.

  “We aren’t sure,” Pendergast said before Longstreet could speak.

  Vasilivich nodded and led the way down the room. To the left and right, the walls were lined from floor to waist height with stainless-steel doors. “Montoya first, then,” he said. “Age before beauty.” He chuckled.

  Stopping before a locker near ground level, he grabbed the handle, then slid it out slowly. A draped form lay on the cold steel. “If you have any specific questions, ask,” he said, pulling on a pair of latex gloves. “I’m afraid I’m the only one who can touch the bodies.”

  “Understood,” said Longstreet.

  “Prepare yourself,” Vasilivich said as he grasped the concealing drape. “This makes Hellraiser look like Captain Kangaroo.”

  He pulled the drape aside, revealing the naked figure of an elderly lady.

  “Christ,” Longstreet muttered.

  The head and chest were covered with dozens of deep, gaping wounds, the slashes strangely gray given the bloodless tissue. Lacerations seemed to cover every inch of the torso, and the face was so cut up as to be almost unrecognizable. The two agents looked on in silence.

  “No autopsy,” Pendergast said at last, referring to the lack of a Y-incision.

  “The county coroner deemed it unnecessary,” said Vasilivich. “Same thing for Dr. Graben.” He paused. “Funny thing, though.”

  “What is?” Pendergast asked.

  “According to the toxicology report, Ms. Montoya died of heart failure, most likely due to an overdose of morphine.”

  “These wounds weren’t the cause of death?” Pendergast asked.

  “The window of time between events is so brief that it’s hard to be sure. But at least some of the lacerations were postmortem. There was as much blood on the bedsheets, you see, as there was on the walls—insufficient vascular pressure.”

  “Couldn’t the death have been caused by the shock of the initial wounds?” Longstreet asked.

  “It’s possible. As I say, the overdose was only ruled the most likely causative factor. But given the violence of the attack, any number of elements could have brought on death—and probably did.”

  Leaving the body, Vasilivich moved down a few more rows, pulled open another cold locker, and rolled out another body. When the drape was removed, the corpse of a man was exposed. If anything, this body was even more lacerated than the elderly lady’s had been.

  “No question about cause of death here,” Vasilivich said as they surrounded the body. “Exsanguination, resulting from transverse laceration of the aorta. That was probably the killer’s initial blow. There are several others, however, that would have been sufficient to cause death—the severed femoral artery, for example, here.”

  There was a pause.

  “What would cause an overdose of morphine?” Longstreet asked. “Could the drip have malfunctioned?”

  “It’s extremely rare, especially these days. Those machines are foolproof.”

  “So it was most likely intentional,” Pendergast said. “But if an overdose was in fact the cause, it was still administered close enough to the time of the knife attacks to allow for a degree of arterial spattering.”

  “Why would somebody try to kill the old lady by overdosing her, then cut her to ribbons?” Vasilivich asked.

  “Because he—or she—was interrupted,” Longstreet answered.

  “Yes,” said Pendergast. “If the overdose theory is correct, perhaps the killer hadn’t initially intended to slash the body. The woman was on a death watch anyway—everyone would assume she died of natural causes. But Dr. Graben stumbled upon the murderer in flagrante. The murderer slashed him to death—then killed Montoya in the same way, to make it look like the work of a lunatic.”

  “It’s like no lunatic murder I’ve ever seen,” said Vasilivich. “And I’ve seen more than my share.”

  “Why not?” Pendergast asked.

  “Because of all the slashes to the backs as well as the torsos. Their backs are sliced to ribbons—they look as if they’d been whipped with a cat-o’-nine-tails. Okay, the wounds to the frontal sides aren’t all that unusual—Graben even has some defensive wounds on his forearms—but what murderer bothers to slice up their victims’ backs?”

  “A particularly twisted individual,” Longstreet murmured.

  “Turn him over, if you please,” Pendergast asked.

  Vasilivich gently turned over the doctor’s body. It was indeed a veritable checkerboard of deep slashes, particularly in the region of the lower back, over and across the buttocks.

  Pendergast examined the corpse for a minute. Then he froze. After a moment he bent over the lower back, his hand coming forward.

  “Agent Pendergast,” Vasilivich warned.

  Pendergast stopped. “Note this section of vertebrae here, from about L1 to S2.”

  “Yes?”

  “Please inspect it. Wouldn’t you say that the extensive shredding and tearing of the flesh along the spinal column is more than just the result of slashing with a knife?”

  Vasilivich placed his gloved hands on the corpse’s lower back and began gently pulling away the flesh, first at one spot, then another. “My God,” he murmured. “You’re right. There’s been an excision.”

  “Can you identify the missing material?” Pendergast asked.

  More prodding. “Yes,” said Vasilivich. “It would appear to be—”

  “The cauda equina,” Pendergast finished for him.

  The M.E. looked up at him, blinking in surprise. “How did you know?”

  “Examine the old woman’s body, if you please. See if it is missing its cauda equina, as well.”

  It was the work of two minutes to determine that this was, in fact, the case.

  “Aloysius?” Longstreet asked in a strange tone. “What exactly is going on here?”

  But Pendergast did not answer. The cauda equina. Very quickly, many things fitted themselves together in his mind. Enoch Leng and his elixir. Constance Greene and her sister, Mary. And now Diogenes.

  So the killer had intended to slash his victim from the very beginning. The morphine was simply to dispatch her, to make his job easier. But once one knew where to look, all the lacerations, cuts, and slashes in the world couldn’t hide the fact that a small excision had been made from both bodies.

  “Why are you doing this?” he asked his absent brother, in a voice below the thres
hold of hearing.

  At that moment, there was a loud knock on the cooler door. Vasilivich walked over and pulled it open. One of Longstreet’s field agents was waiting outside. He quickly stepped in.

  “Yes?” Longstreet asked.

  “There’s been a break in the Leyland case,” the agent said.

  “Go on.”

  “We already knew that, infrequently, he did work for the Hendry County medical examiner. But we’ve now learned that, even more infrequently, he assisted the M.E. in administering lethal injections to death row patients.”

  “And?” Longstreet urged.

  “Just seven days ago, he supervised an execution at Pahokee. Single-handedly.”

  Pendergast quickly drilled the man with his gaze. “And who was executed?”

  “Lucius Garey. He was buried the day before yesterday.”

  Just as quickly, Pendergast turned back to Longstreet. “You need to put through a request to have that prisoner’s body exhumed. This morning.”

  “Not until you explain what’s going on.”

  “I’ll explain on the way to the grave site. Now please, make the call. There’s no time to lose.”

  56

  THE ENTRANCE OF the aptly named Gates of Heaven Cemetery in Lady Lake, central Florida, was chained and locked. Inside the small cemetery, a procession of cars was parked beside a single grave, around which yellow privacy screens had been erected.

  Inside the enclosure were seven people: Special Agent Pendergast; Executive Associate Director Longstreet; a local public health official; a Lake County doctor named Barnes who had been court-appointed to supervise the exhumation; and two gravediggers, who were now hip-deep in an oblong hole of muddy earth. The seventh person—Lucius Garey—was for the time being belowground, somewhere under the feet of the diggers. He was anticipated to appear in the open air very shortly.

  Pendergast and Longstreet stood aside from the rest, speaking in low tones.

  “So let me get this straight,” Longstreet was saying. “Your great-grand-uncle, Enoch Leng, perfected an elixir that could extend a person’s life span by a prodigious degree.”

  Pendergast nodded.

  “And one ingredient he needed—at least, at first—was a freshly harvested cauda equina, the bundle of nerves at the base of a human being’s spinal column.”

  “Correct.”

  “He used this elixir on himself because he was working on a complex project that, he felt, would take more than a normal life span to complete. But before doing so, he tested it on his ward. Constance Greene.”

  Pendergast nodded.

  “What, exactly, was this complex project?”

  “It’s not germane. Suffice it to say it ultimately was rendered unnecessary.”

  Longstreet shrugged. “But later, in the 1940s, modern science had caught up sufficiently so that he was able to create his elixir from purely synthetic sources. He no longer needed to kill human beings to acquire their caudae equinae.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “And both he and Constance continued to take this new, synthetic version of the elixir until about five years ago, when the Riverside Drive mansion was broken into and Leng tortured and killed.”

  “Yes. He refused to divulge the secret of his elixir.”

  “What happened to the killer?” Longstreet asked.

  “Again, not germane. He joined my ancestor, Dr. Leng, among the dead not long after committing the killing.”

  “And Constance?”

  “I found the only remaining copy of the formula and burned it. After Leng’s death, without the benefit of the elixir, Constance began to age normally.”

  “So she really was born in the 1880s.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you burned the formula. My God, what a decision…” Longstreet threw a sidelong glance at Pendergast. “It is remarkable, Aloysius, how many things about yourself and your family you haven’t told me.”

  “What would have been the point? And as you can imagine, many of them are painful or mortifying—or both.”

  For a moment, the two fell silent, watching the gravediggers at work.

  Longstreet shifted, spoke again. “I’m assuming you believe that it was Diogenes who killed those two people in the hospital. Killed them for their caudae equinae.”

  “I believe it was Diogenes, yes. Although judging from the evidence, I would guess he planned to kill only the old woman. The doctor surprised him in the act; to escape detection, he killed the man and harvested his cauda equina as well, as a trophy of opportunity. And then he savagely slashed up the bodies in the hope of covering up his excisions.”

  “But why? You said you destroyed the last copy of the formula for Leng’s elixir. Is he taking it himself? Or has Miss Greene decided she wants to remain young, after all?”

  “I can’t say,” Pendergast murmured after a moment. “It is possible there was another copy of the formula, still in existence, that I did not know about. But recall: the formula Leng used for the last sixty-odd years of his life was artificial—it did not require using the cauda equina of a human being. Diogenes would appear to be using the original formula. Making his actions doubly confusing.”

  “Do you think it was somebody else—that this was just a freak coincidence?”

  Pendergast shook his head. “I don’t believe in coincidence.” Then he glanced at Longstreet. “And after what happened to us, underneath that bridge in Thailand, I thought you’d stopped believing, as well.”

  Longstreet nodded slowly. “You’re right. I did.”

  There was a hollow thud from the deepening hole, and a shout from one of the gravediggers. Pendergast and Longstreet came forward as the two men swept mud off the top of a flimsy coffin. Within minutes, ropes had been secured around the coffin and—with an effort—it was raised from its grave and deposited atop a plastic tarp on the nearby grass. The public health official stepped forward; examined a small plate screwed into the top of the coffin; examined the headstone; examined a piece of paper attached to a clipboard he held in one hand; then gave a nod. The gravediggers unsealed the coffin and placed the lid to one side.

  Within lay the large form of Lucius Garey, wearing a dark suit and white shirt open at the collar. He had proven too large for the coffin, it seemed, and the mortician had bent his knees to one side in order to fit him in. His eyes were wide and staring, and in death the prison tattoos on his neck had turned a ghastly color.

  The county-appointed doctor began pulling on gloves, but Pendergast beat him to it. Gloves already on his hands, he darted forward and—with a grunt of effort—flipped the body over indecorously within its coffin.

  There was a chorus of protest. “Aloysius,” Longstreet said, “what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Instead of replying, Pendergast merely pointed.

  As was the way with cheap, potter’s-grave-style burials, Lucius Garey’s “suit” did not extend over his whole body. Instead, it merely covered his torso and the tops of his legs, like a sheet. His naked backside was now exposed to the sky.

  At the lower end of his spinal column, a small incision was visible.

  “Doctor?” Pendergast asked, removing his own latex gloves and tossing them into the coffin. “Would you mind examining that incision?”

  After glaring briefly at the FBI agent, the doctor knelt at the graveside and scrutinized the corpse.

  When he said nothing, Pendergast went on. “Would you say that the cauda equina of the deceased appears to have been removed?”

  The doctor’s only answer was a curt nod.

  At this, Pendergast turned, ducked between the privacy curtains, and began walking briskly away from the grave site. Longstreet watched for a moment, then turned to the others. “Thank you,” he said. “We’re done here.”

  Back in the car, driving slowly toward the front gate, Longstreet cleared his throat. “So Dr. Walter Leyland—Diogenes Pendergast, that is—performed the state-ordered execution of Lucius
Garey. In his role as acting medical examiner, he also certified him dead. And in so doing, he was able to extract the man’s cauda equina without anybody being the wiser. Taken in a different sort of context, one might almost call the whole thing beautifully symmetrical.”

  “One might,” said Pendergast.

  They waited at the gate for the cemetery guard to unlock the chain and let them out.

  “There’s one thing that’s obvious,” Longstreet said. “Diogenes did not want anyone to know he was harvesting the cauda equina. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have needed to go to such elaborate lengths as performing an execution.” He glanced over. “Is there any chance Diogenes knows you’re alive?”

  Pendergast didn’t answer for a moment. “I don’t think so. I believe he’s been too busy with…other matters. On the other hand, in my haste to track him down, I haven’t made an effort to conceal my presence. That was an oversight on my part.” He stirred in the passenger seat. “One thing, though, is crystal clear.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Whether my brother knows I’m alive or not, he is a transcendentally careful individual. There’s only one reason I can think of why he’d go to such lengths to conceal his harvesting of these caudae equinae: the chance that I might still be alive. Because I’m the only person who would understand their real significance. And the only reason this would concern him would be if he was—and planned to remain—within a short distance.”

  “You mean—?”

  “Yes. Diogenes, and Constance, are here in Florida…somewhere close.”

  57

  THE ELECTRUM SUN rose into the late-morning sky, illuminating the myriad mangrove islands that dotted the shallow turquoise water, ending in the blue sea of the Gulf. Diogenes felt the warmth of the sun on the side of his face as he stood at the stove, cooking a breakfast of omelets with enokitake mushrooms, prosciutto, Gruyère and Brie, and fresh-chopped basil. He picked up the pan and slid an omelet onto a plate, which he whisked over to Constance, seated in the breakfast nook.

  This omelet was in addition to the thick slabs of buttered toast and marmalade, half a dozen rashers of bacon, and fried green tomatoes he had already served. She was famished—and no wonder, when he thought back to the long, and wakeful, night they had spent together. My God, she was strong—and so daring, self-assured, and fearless! She had exhausted him many times over. He was spent; utterly spent.