The Book of the Dead

by Richard Preston

  “Cuff him!”

  But Visconti had already sprung into action, slapping the cuffs on one wrist and then, with the help of O’Connor, wrestling the other flailing arm down and cuffing it as well.

  He screamed and bucked maniacally.

  “Do his ankles!” Hayward ordered.

  A minute later, the perp lay on his stomach, still pinned, writhing and shrieking in a voice so high it cut the air like a scalpel.

  “Get the EMTs in here,” Hayward said. “We need a sedative.”

  Most suspects, when cuffed hand and foot and pinned to the floor, settled down. Not this one. He continued to writhe and scream, twisting, rolling, thrashing about, and, small as he was, it was all that Hayward and the cops could do to hold him down.

  “Must be on angel dust,” said one of the cops.

  “I’ve never seen angel dust do this.”

  A minute later, an EMT arrived and plunged a needle into the shrieking man’s buttock. A few moments later, he began to quiet down. Hayward got up and dusted herself off.

  “Jesus,” said O’Connor. “Looks like he’s taken a shower in gore.”

  “Yeah, and it’s gone off in this heat. He stinks.”

  “Fucker’s naked, too.”

  Hayward stepped back. The perp was still lying on his stomach, face pressed to the floor by Visconti, whimpering and quivering in an unsuccessful attempt to fight off the sedative.

  She bent down. “Where’s Lipper?” she asked him. “What did you do to him?”

  More whimpering.

  “Turn him over, I want to see his face.”

  Visconti complied. The man’s face and hair were caked with dried blood and offal. He was grimacing strangely, his face seized by tics.

  “Clean him up.”

  The EMT broke out a pack of sterile gauze wipes and cleaned up his face.

  “Oh, Christ,” Visconti said involuntarily.

  Hayward merely stared. She could barely believe her eyes.

  The killer was Jay Lipper.

  27

  Spencer Coffey settled himself in a chair in Warden Imhof’s office, impatiently flicking his trouser crease. Imhof sat behind his desk, looking much as he had during the first meeting: cool and neat, with the same blow-dried helmet of light brown hair on his head. Nevertheless, Coffey could see the uneasy, perhaps even defensive look in his eye. Special Agent Rabiner remained standing, arms crossed, leaning against the wall.

  Coffey let a strained silence build in the office before speaking.

  “Mr. Imhof,” he began, “you promised you would take care of this personally.”

  “As I have,” said Imhof in a coldly neutral voice.

  Coffey leaned back. “S.A. Rabiner and I have just come from an interview with the prisoner. I’m sorry to say there’s been no progress—none—in teaching him the value of respect. Now, I told you earlier I wasn’t really interested in how you accomplished the task we set for you, that I was only interested in results. Whatever you’re doing, it isn’t working. The prisoner’s the same cocky, arrogant bastard who first walked in here. Refused to answer questions. Insolent as well. When I asked him how he was enjoying solitary confinement, he said, ‘I rather prefer it.’”

  “Prefer it to what?”

  “Being mixed in with ‘former clients’ is how he put it, the sarcastic bastard. Really emphasizing the point that he didn’t want to be mixed with the general prison population. He’s as unrepentant and combative as ever.”

  “Agent Coffey, sometimes these things take time.”

  “Which is exactly what we don’t have, Mr. Imhof. We’ve got a second bail hearing coming up, and Pendergast’s going to have a day in court. We can keep him from his lawyer only so long. I need him broken by then; I need a confession.” What he didn’t add were the growing problems they were having nailing down some of the evidence. That would make the bail hearing very tricky—whereas a confession would make it all so nice and clean.

  “As I said, it takes time.”

  Coffey took a breath, remembering Imhof’s particular buttons. A little carrot, a little stick.

  “Meanwhile, our man is down there bad-mouthing you and Herkmoor to all who will listen: guards, staff, everyone. And he’s an eloquent bastard, Imhof.”

  The warden remained silent, but Coffey noticed—with satisfaction—a slight twitching at one corner of his mouth. And yet the man made no move to suggest stronger measures. Maybe there weren’t any stronger measures . . .

  And that’s when the idea came to him—the masterstroke. It was the “former clients” phrase that did it. So Pendergast was afraid of being mixed up with “former clients”?

  “Mr. Imhof,” he said—but quietly, as if to disguise the freshness of his brainstorm—“is that computer on your desk linked to the Department of Justice database?”

  “Naturally.”

  “Well, then. Let’s check up on some of these ‘former clients.’”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Access Pendergast’s arrest records. Run them against your current prison population, see if you can find any matches.”

  “You mean, see if any of the perps Pendergast arrested are currently in Herkmoor?”

  “That’s the idea, yes.”

  Coffey glanced over his shoulder at Rabiner. The agent had a wolfish smirk on his face.

  “Boss, I like the way you think,” he said.

  Imhof pulled the keyboard toward him and began typing. Then he stared at the screen for a long moment while Coffey waited in growing impatience.

  “Strange,” Imhof said. “Pendergast’s collars seem to have suffered a rather high mortality rate. Most never made it to trial.”

  “Surely, there have to be some live ones who made it through the legal system and ended up in prison.”

  More typing. Then Imhof leaned back from the monitor. “There are two currently residing in Herkmoor.”

  Coffey looked at him sharply. “Tell me about them.”

  “One is named Albert Chichester.”

  “Go on.”

  “He’s a serial killer.”

  Coffey rubbed his hands together, glanced again at Rabiner.

  “Poisoned twelve people in the nursing home where he was employed,” Imhof went on. “Male nurse. Seventy-three years old.”

  As quickly as it had come, Coffey’s exhilaration fell away. “Oh,” he said.

  There was a brief silence.

  “What about the other one?” S.A. Rabiner asked.

  “A serious felon named Carlos Lacarra. They call him El Pocho.”

  “Lacarra,” Coffey repeated.

  Imhof nodded. “Former drug kingpin. Real hard case. Worked his way up through East L.A. street gangs and then came east. Took over much of the Hudson County and Newark enforcement action.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Tortured a whole family to death, including three kids. Revenge for a deal gone bad. Says here Pendergast was the S.A. in charge on that one—funny, I didn’t remember that.”

  “What’s Lacarra’s record here?”

  “Leads a gang in here known as the Broken Teeth. A major pain in the rear for our guards.”

  “The Broken Teeth,” Coffey murmured. The exhilaration was quickly returning. “Now, tell me, Mr. Imhof. Where does this Pocho Lacarra currently enjoy his exercise privileges?”

  “Yard 4.”

  “And what would happen if you transferred Agent Pendergast to, ah, yard 4 for his daily exercise period?”

  Imhof frowned. “If Lacarra recognized him, it would be ugly. Or even if he didn’t.”

  “How so?”

  “Lacarra . . . Well, there isn’t a delicate way of putting it: he likes a white boy for his bitch.”

  Coffey thought for a moment. “I see. Please give the order at once.”

  Imhof’s frown deepened. “Agent Coffey, that’s a rather extreme step—”

  “I’m afraid our man has left us with no choice. I’ve seen hard cases in my time,
I’ve seen sullen impudence before, but nothing like this. The way he disrespects the legal process, this prison—and you, in particular—is shocking. It really is.”

  Imhof drew in a breath. Coffey noticed, with satisfaction, that the man’s nostrils flared briefly.

  “Stick him in there, Imhof,” Coffey said quietly. “Stick him in there, but keep an eye on the situation. Extract him if things get out of hand. But don’t extract him too soon, if you get my meaning.”

  “If something does happen, there could be fallout. I’ll need you to back me up.”

  “You can count on me, Imhof. I’m behind you, in all the way.” And with that, Coffey turned, nodded to the still-grinning Rabiner, and left the office.

  28

  Captain of Homicide Laura Hayward sat at her desk, gazing at the storm of paperwork in front of her. She hated disorder; she hated mess; she hated unsquared papers and shabby piles. And yet it seemed no matter how much she sorted and squared and organized, it ended up this way: the desk a physical manifestation of the disorder and frustration within her own mind. By rights, she should be typing up a report on the murder of DeMeo. Yet she felt paralyzed. It was damned hard to work on open cases when you felt you’d royally screwed up on a previous one; that maybe an innocent—or mostly innocent—man was in prison, unjustly charged with a crime that carried a potential death sentence . . .

  She made another enormous effort to impose order on her mind. She had always organized her thoughts in lists: she was forever making lists nested within lists within lists. And she was finding it difficult to move forward with her other cases while the Pendergast case remained unresolved in her mind.

  She sighed, focused, and began again.

  One: a possibly innocent man was in prison, charged with a capital crime.

  Two: his brother, long thought dead, had resurfaced, kidnapped a woman with apparently no connection to anything, stolen the world’s most valuable diamond collection . . . and then destroyed it. Why?

  Three—

  A knock on the door interrupted her.

  Hayward had asked her secretary to make sure she was not disturbed, and she struggled with a momentary anger that shocked her with its intensity. She brought herself back under control and said coldly, “Come in.”

  The door opened slowly, tentatively—and there stood Vincent D’Agosta.

  There was a brief moment of frozen stasis.

  “Laura,” D’Agosta began. Then he fell silent.

  She maintained an utter coolness even as she felt the color mounting in her face. For a moment, she could think of nothing to say except “Please sit down.”

  She watched him enter the office and take a seat, crushing with ruthless efficiency the emotions that welled up inside her. He was surprisingly trim and reasonably well dressed in a suit and a twenty-dollar sidewalk tie, his thinning hair combed back.

  The moment of awkward silence lengthened.

  “So . . . How’s everything?” D’Agosta asked.

  “Fine. You?”

  “My disciplinary trial is scheduled for early April.”

  “Good.”

  “Good? If they find me guilty, there goes my career, pension, benefits—everything.”

  “I meant, it will be good to have it over with,” she said tersely. Is that what he’d come here to do—complain? She waited for him to get to the point.

  “Look, Laura: first, I just want to tell you something.”

  “Which is?”

  She could see him struggling. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m really sorry. I know I hurt you, I know you think I treated you like dirt . . . I wish I knew how to make it up.”

  Hayward waited.

  “At the time, I thought, I really thought, I was doing the right thing. Trying to protect you, keep you safe from Diogenes. I thought that by moving out I could keep the heat off you. I just didn’t figure on how it would look to you . . . I was winging it. Things were happening fast and I didn’t have time to work everything out. But I’ve had plenty of time to think about it since. I know that I looked like a cold bastard, walking out on you with no explanation. It must have seemed like I didn’t trust you. But that wasn’t it at all.”

  He hesitated, chewing his lip as if working up to something. “Listen,” he began again. “I really want us to get back together. I still care about you. I know we can work this out . . .”

  His voice trailed off miserably. Hayward waited him out.

  “Anyway, I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”

  “Consider it said.”

  Another excruciating silence.

  “Is there anything else?” Hayward asked.

  D’Agosta shifted uncomfortably. Slats of sunlight came in through the blinds, striping his suit.

  “Well, I heard . . .”

  “What did you hear?”

  “That you were still looking into the Pendergast case.”

  “Really?” she said coolly.

  “Yeah. From a guy I know, works for Singleton.” He shifted again. “When I heard that, it gave me hope. Hope that maybe I could still help you. There are things that I didn’t tell you before, things that I felt sure you wouldn’t believe. But if you’re really still on the case, after all that’s happened . . . well, I thought maybe you should hear some of these things. To, you know, give you as much ammunition as possible.”

  Hayward kept her face neutral, not willing to give him anything but a thunderous silence. He was looking older, a little drawn, but his clothes were new and his shirt was well ironed. She wondered, briefly and searingly, who was taking care of him. Finally she said, “The case is settled.”

  “Officially, yeah. But this friend said that you were—”

  “I don’t know what you heard, and I don’t give a damn. You should know better than to listen to departmental gossip from so-called friends.”

  “But, Laura—”

  “Refer to me as Captain Hayward, please.”

  Another silence.

  “Look, this whole thing—the killings, the diamond theft, the kidnapping—was all orchestrated by Diogenes. All of it. It was his master plan. He played everyone like a violin. He murdered those people, then framed Pendergast for it. He stole the diamonds, kidnapped Viola Maskelene—”

  “You’ve told me all this before.”

  “Yes, but here’s something you don’t know, something I never told you—”

  Hayward felt a rush of anger that almost overwhelmed her icy control. “Lieutenant D’Agosta, I don’t appreciate hearing that you’ve continued to withhold information from me.”

  “I didn’t mean it that—”

  “I know exactly what you meant.”

  “Listen, damn it. The reason Viola Maskelene was kidnapped is that she and Pendergast—well, they’re in love.”

  “Oh, please.”

  “I was there when they met on the island of Capraia last year. He interviewed her as part of the investigation into Bullard and the lost Stradivarius. When they met, I could see this connection between them. Diogenes somehow learned of it.”

  “They’ve been seeing each other?”

  “Not exactly. But Diogenes lured her here using Pendergast’s name.”

  “Funny she never mentioned that during her debriefing.”

  “She was trying to protect Pendergast and herself. If it got out that they had a thing for each other—”

  “From one brief meeting on an island.”

  D’Agosta nodded. “That’s right.”

  “Agent Pendergast and Lady Maskelene. In love.”

  “I can’t speak one hundred percent about the strength of Pendergast’s feelings. But as for Maskelene—yeah, I’m convinced.”

  “And how did Diogenes discover this touching bit of sentiment?”

  “There’s only one possibility: while Diogenes was nursing Pendergast back to health in Italy, after rescuing him from Count Fosco’s castle. Pendergast was delirious, he probably said something. So, you see? Diogenes kidnapped Vio
la to ensure that Pendergast was maximally distracted at precisely the moment he undertook the diamond heist.”