Cemetery Dance

by Douglas Preston

  “Is the stump still around?”

  “No. The tree was cut in 1933. But Wren found me an old map giving the location of the tree as eigthteen yards southwest of the monument. I’ve already entered the data into the GPS unit.”

  Pendergast walked southwest, keeping a careful eye on the device. “Here.” He turned south. “Twenty-two rods, at sixteen point five feet the rod, is three hundred sixty-three feet.” He punched some buttons on the GPS. “Follow me, please.”

  Pendergast set off again into the darkness, almost spectral in his black suit. D’Agosta followed, hoisting the heavy bag higher onto his shoulder. He could smell the marshes and mudflats along the Spuyten Duyvil and soon he could make out, filtering through the trees, the lights of the tall apartment buildings perched on the bluffs of Riverdale, just across the river. Abruptly, they came to the edge of the trees, which opened onto an expanse of matted grass, dropping down to a half-moon pebbled beach. Beyond, the river swirled and eddied, the lights of the Henry Hudson Parkway arching overhead and the apartment buildings across the water caught in the swirling tide, glittering and dimpling as the water flowed past. A low-lying mist drifted in patches across the water; the rumble of a boat could be heard.

  “Wait a moment,” Pendergast murmured, pausing at the verge of the trees.

  A police boat came slowly churning down the Spuyten Duyvil, its ghostly form sliding in and out of the mist, a spotlight mounted on the hardtop sweeping the shore. They crouched just as the light passed over them, lancing through the woods.

  “Christ,” muttered D’Agosta, “I’m hiding from my own damn men. This is crazy.”

  “This is the only solution. Have you any idea how long it would take to get the proper permissions to exhume a body buried, not in a cemetery, but on public land, without a death certificate, and with only a few newspaper articles as supporting evidence?”

  “We’ve been through that.”

  Rising, Pendergast walked out of the trees and down through the sea grass to the edge of the cobbled beach. To the east, halfway up the cliffs, D’Agosta could just make out the vast ramshackle structure of the Ville’s central church, rising like a fang above the trees, a faint yellow glow peeking from upper-story windows.

  Pendergast stopped. “Right here.”

  D’Agosta looked around the shingle beach. “No way. Who would bury a body here, in such an exposed location?”

  “Easier digging. And a hundred years ago, none of those buildings on the other side of the river had been built.”

  “Nice. How are we supposed to dig up a body with the whole world watching?”

  “As quickly as possible.”

  With a sigh, D’Agosta dropped the bag, unzipped it, and hauled out the shovel and pick. Pendergast screwed the rods of the metal detector together, donned a pair of earphones and plugged them into the device, then turned it on. He began sweeping the ground.

  “A lot of metal here,” he said.

  He swept the detector back and forth, back and forth, walking slowly forward. After proceeding about five feet he turned, came back. “I’m getting a consistent signal here, two feet down.”

  “Two feet? That seems awfully shallow.”

  “Wren tells me the general erosion of the ground level in this area would be about four feet since the time of the interment.” He laid the metal detector aside, removed his jacket and hung it on a nearby tree, grasped the pick, and with surprising vigor began to break up the ground. D’Agosta pulled on a pair of work gloves and began shoveling out the loose dirt and pebbles.

  Another rumble heralded the return of the police boat. D’Agosta hit the deck as the spotlight licked the shore, Pendergast quickly falling prone beside him. When the boat had passed, Pendergast rose. “How inconvenient,” he said, dusting himself off and grasping the pick once again.

  The rectangular hole deepened—twelve inches, eighteen. Pendergast tossed the pick aside, knelt, and began working with a trowel, scraping off layers of dirt that D’Agosta then shoveled out of the way. The pit exhaled the cloying smell of brackish seawater and rotting humus.

  When the grave had deepened to about twenty inches, Pendergast swept it again with the metal detector. “We’re almost there.”

  Five more minutes of work and the trowel scraped across something hollow. Pendergast quickly brushed the loose dirt away, revealing the back of a skull. More scraping revealed the posterior side of a scapula and the end of a wooden handle.

  “Our friend appears to have been buried facedown,” Pendergast said. He cleared around the wooden handle, exposing a guard and rusted blade. “With a knife in his back.”

  “I thought he was stabbed in the chest,” said D’Agosta. The moon broke through the mist, and he glanced from the corpse to Pendergast. The agent’s face had gone very grim and wan.

  They worked together, gradually exposing the back of the skeleton. Rotting clothing came to light: a pair of shriveled shoes peeling off the foot bones, a rotting belt, old cufflinks, and a buckle. They cut the earth down around the skeleton, exposing the sides, whisking dirt off the old, brown bones.

  D’Agosta rose—one eye toward the river and any sign of the police boat—and shined his light around. The skeleton lay face-down, arms and legs arranged neatly, toes bent inward. Pendergast reached in and lifted off a few rotting pieces of clothing that clung to the bones, first exposing the upper part of the skeleton, then pulling pieces of canvas off the legs, laying everything in the locker. The knife stuck out of the back, having been driven to the hilt through the left blade of the scapula, directly above the heart. Peering more closely, D’Agosta could see what looked like a severe depressed fracture on the back of the skull.

  Pendergast bent low over the makeshift grave, taking a series of photographs of the skeleton from various angles. Then he rose. “Let’s remove it,” he said.

  While D’Agosta held the flashlight, Pendergast pried up the bones one by one with the tip of his trowel, starting with the feet and working upward, handing them to D’Agosta for stowing in the evidence box. When he reached the chest, he slowly worked the knife out of the soil and handed it over.

  “Do you see that, Vincent?” he asked, pointing. D’Agosta shined his light over a piece of wrought iron, like a long spike or rod, with an end that curved over the bones of the victim’s upper arm. The long end of the spike was buried deep in the ground. “Pinned into the grave.”

  Pendergast pulled the spikes out and set them with the rest of the remains. “Curious. And do you see this?”

  Now D’Agosta shined the light on the victim’s neck. The remains of a thin, twisted hemp cord could still be seen, horribly constrictive around the neck bone.

  “Strangled so hard,” said D’Agosta, “it must have half decapitated him.”

  “Indeed. The hyoid bone is nearly crushed.” Pendergast continued with his grisly task.

  Soon all that was left to be exposed was the skull, which remained facedown in the dirt. Pendergast undermined it and the jaw with a small penknife, wiggling them loose, then freeing them as a single unit. He turned them over with the blade of his pen-knife.

  “Oh, shit.” D’Agosta took a step back. The skull’s mouth was closed, but the space behind the teeth, where the tongue had been, was packed with a chalky, greenish white substance. A curled-up thread lay in a tangle in front, one end clamped between the teeth.

  Pendergast picked out the thread and looked at it, then carefully placed it in a test tube. He then leaned in gingerly, sniffed the skull, pinched up a minuscule amount of the powder, and rubbed it between thumb and forefinger. “Arsenic. The mouth was filled with it and the lips sewn shut.”

  “Jesus. So what’s a suicide doing strangled, with a knife in his back and a mouth sewn full of arsenic? You’d think the people who buried him would have noticed.”

  “The body wasn’t originally buried like this. Nobody buries their kin facedown. After the relations buried the body, someone else—those who had presumably, ah, ‘re
animated’ it—came back, dug it up, and prepared it in this special manner.”

  “Why?”

  “A common enough Obeah ceremony. To kill him a second time.”

  “What the hell for?”

  “To make sure he was very, very dead.” Pendergast stood up. “As you’ve already noticed, Vincent, this was no suicide. Or victim. In fact, since he was killed twice, the second time with arsenic and a knife in the back, there can be no doubt at all. After his initial burial, this man was dug up—dug up for a purpose—and, when that purpose was accomplished, buried again, facedown. This is the perpetrator—the ‘reanimated corpse’ of the New YorkSun—of the Inwood Hill murders of 1901.”

  “You’re saying the Ville kidnapped or recruited him, turned him into a zombii, made him kill that landscape architect and parks commissioner—all to keep their church from being razed?”

  Pendergast waved at the corpse. “Ecce signum.”

  44

  D’Agosta took a swig of coffee and shuddered. It was his fifth cup of the day and it wasn’t even noon. The expense of drinking Starbucks was becoming ruinous, and so he’d switched back to the black tar produced by the ancient coffee machine in the break room down the hall. As he sipped, he gazed at Pendergast, sitting in the corner, lost in thought, his fingers tented—apparently no worse the wear for the previous night’s gravedigging antics.

  Suddenly, he heard a querulous voice raised in the hallway—someone demanding to see him. It sounded familiar, but D’Agosta couldn’t immediately place it. He rose and poked his head out the door. A man in a corduroy jacket was arguing with one of the secretaries.

  The secretary glanced up and saw him. “Lieutenant, I keep telling this man he needs to make his report to the sergeant.”

  The man turned. “There you are!”

  It was that movie-producer-with-a-cause, Esteban. With a fresh bandage on his forehead.

  “Sir,” the secretary said, “you must make an appointment to see the lieutenant—”

  D’Agosta waved him over. “Shelley, I’ll go ahead and see him. Thanks.”

  D’Agosta stepped back into his office, and Esteban followed. When he caught sight of Pendergast, sitting silently in the corner, he frowned; the two hadn’t exactly become best buddies during their first encounter, out at Esteban’s Long Island estate.

  D’Agosta sat down wearily behind his desk, and the man took a chair in front. There was something about Esteban that D’Agosta didn’t like. Basically, the man was a self-righteous prig.

  “What is it?” D’Agosta asked.

  “I was attacked,” said Esteban. “Look at me! Attacked with a knife!”

  “Did you report it to the police?”

  “What the hell do you think I’m doing now?”

  “Mr. Esteban, I’m a lieutenant in the homicide division. I’ll be happy to refer you to an investigating officer—”

  “It’s an attempted homicide, isn’t it? I was attacked by a zombii.”

  D’Agosta halted. Pendergast slowly raised his head.

  “Excuse me… a zombii?” D’Agosta said.

  “That’s what I said. Or someone acting like a zombii.”

  D’Agosta held up a hand and pressed down his intercom. “Shelley? I need an investigating officer in here right away, ready to take a statement.”

  “Sure thing, Lieutenant.”

  The man tried to speak again but D’Agosta held up his hand. In a minute an officer came in with a digital recorder, and D’Agosta nodded him toward the lone remaining empty chair.

  The officer snapped on the recorder and D’Agosta lowered his hand. “All right, Mr. Esteban. Let’s hear your story.”

  “I stayed late in my office working last night.”

  “Address?”

  “Five thirty-three West Thirty-fifth Street, near the Javits Convention Center. I left about one am. That area of town is pretty dead at night, and I was walking east on Thirty-fifth when I realized someone was behind me. I turned and he looked like some kind of bum, drunk or maybe high, dressed in rags, lurching along. He looked out of it, so I didn’t pay much attention. Just before I reached the corner of Tenth Avenue, I heard this rush behind me; I spun around and was struck in the head with a knife. It was just a glancing blow, thank God. The man—or man-thing—tried to stab me again with the knife. But I keep myself in good shape and I was a boxer in college, so I parried the strike and hit him back. Hard. He made another swipe at me but by that time I was ready and knocked him down. He got up, grabbed the knife, and went lurching away into the night.”

  “Can you describe the assailant?” Pendergast asked.

  “All too well. His face was all puffy and swollen. His clothes were ragged and covered with splotches, maybe blood. His hair was brown, all matted and sticking up from his head, and he made this sound, like…” Esteban paused, thinking. “Almost like water being sucked down a drain. Tall, angular, thin, gawky. Around thirty-five. His hands were spotted, streaked with what looked like old blood.”

  Colin Fearing, thought D’Agosta. Or Smithback. “Can you give a precise time?”

  “I checked my watch. It was one eleven AM.”

  “Any witnesses?”

  “No. Look, Lieutenant, I know who’s behind this.”

  D’Agosta waited.

  “The Ville has been out to get me ever since I raised the issue of animal sacrifice. I was interviewed by that reporter, Smithback—then he was murdered. By a zombii or someone dressed like one, according to the papers. Then I was interviewed by that other reporter, Caitlyn Kidd—and then she’s killed by a so-called zombii. Now they’re after me!”

  “The zombiis are after you,” D’Agosta repeated, in as neutral a tone as possible.

  “Look, I don’t know if they’re real or fake. The point is—they’re coming from the Ville. Something’s got to be done—right away. Those people are way out of control, cutting the throats of innocent animals, and now using unholy ceremonies to murder people who object to their practices. Meanwhile, New York does nothing while these killers squat on city-owned land!”

  Now Pendergast, who had been unusually quiet through this exchange, came forward. “I’m so sorry about your injury,” he said as he bent solicitously, examining Esteban’s bandage. “May I—?” He began detaching the tape.

  “I would rather you didn’t.”

  But the bandage was off. Underneath was a two-inch cut with half a dozen stitches. Pendergast nodded. “Lucky for you it was a sharp knife and a clean cut. Rub it with a little Neosporin and it won’t even leave a scar.”

  “Lucky? The thing nearly killed me!”

  Pendergast reattached the bandage and stepped back behind the desk.

  “There’s no mystery to why the attack came now, either,” Esteban said. “It’s well known I’ve been planning a march protesting animal cruelty at the Ville—I’ve got a parade permit for this afternoon, and it’s been reported in the papers.”

  “I’m aware of that,” said D’Agosta.

  “Obviously, they’re trying to silence me.”

  D’Agosta leaned forward. “Do you have any specific information connecting the Ville with this attack?”

  “Any idiot can see everything points to the Ville! First Smith-back, then Kidd, and now me.”

  “I’m afraid it’s not obvious at all,” said Pendergast.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m puzzled why they didn’t come for you first.”

  Esteban gave him a hostile stare. “How so?”

  “You’ve been the instigator from the beginning. If it were me, I’d have killed you right away.”

  “Are you trying to be a wise guy?”

  “By no means. Just pointing out the obvious.”

  “Then allow me to point out the obvious—that you’ve got a bunch of murderous squatters up there in Inwood, and that neither the city nor the cops are doing anything about it. Well, they’re going to be sorry they came after me. Come this afternoon, we’re going t
o raise such a stink that you’ll have no choice but to take action.” He rose.

  “You’ll need to read and sign the statement,” said D’Agosta.

  With an irritated exhalation of breath, Esteban waited while the statement was being printed, read through it fast, scribbled a signature. He stepped to the door, then turned and pointed a finger at them. It was trembling with outrage and anger. “Today, everything changes. I’m sick and tired of this inaction, and so are a lot of other New Yorkers.”

  Pendergast smiled, touching a finger to his forehead. “Neosporin, once a day. Works wonders.”

  45

  D’Agosta and Pendergast stood on the corner of 214th Street and Seaman Avenue, watching the progress of the march. D’Agosta was surprised at the minuscule turnout—he estimated a hundred people, maybe less. Harry Chislett, the deputy chief for this district, had shown up and then, when he saw the size of the crowd, had left. It was proving an orderly affair, sedate, placid, almost somnolent. No angry shouting, no pressing against the police barricades, no rocks or bottles flying out of nowhere.

  “Looks like an ad for the L. L. Bean catalog,” said D’Agosta, squinting through the sunlight of the crisp fall day.

  Pendergast was leaning against a lamppost, arms folded. “L. L. Bean? I’m not familiar with that brand.”

  The marchers flowed around the corner at West 214th Street, heading toward Inwood Hill Park, waving placards and chanting in unison. Leading the fray was Alexander Esteban, bandage still on his forehead, along with another man.

  “Who’s the guy holding hands with Esteban?” D’Agosta asked.

  “Richard Plock,” Pendergast replied. “Executive director of Humans for Other Animals.”