D’Agosta shifted in his chair. “Disemboweled? And fingers and toes cut off, you say?”
“The others, yes. But the groundskeeper was not disemboweled. He was found covered in blood, a knife in his chest. According to the papers, the wound might have been self–inflicted.”
“What was the upshot?” D’Agosta asked.
“It appears the police raided the Ville and arrested several people, who later had to be released for lack of evidence. Searches turned up nothing, and the cases were never solved. Nothing definitely connected the killings with the Ville, beyond the proximity of the village to the crime scenes. Stories of shambling, mindless creatures died away, and reports of animal sacrifices grew relatively spotty — the Ville seems to have lain low. Until now, of course. But here’s the most interesting thing of all, something I managed to turn up by cross–checking a variety of other old records. It seems that in 1901, the Straus family wanted to clear–cut a large northern section of Inwood Hill, affording them a better view of the Hudson River. They hired a landscape architect to design the new plantings in the finest of taste. Guess what his name was?”
There was a brief silence. “Not Phipps Gormly?” Pendergast said.
“The same. And would you care to guess the park commissioner involved in clearing the necessary variances?”
“Cornelius Sprague.” Pendergast sat in his chair, leaning forward, hands clasped. “If those plans to clear the park had gone through, would the Ville have been affected?”
Wren nodded. “It stood directly in the path. It would have undoubtedly been torn down.”
D’Agosta looked from Pendergast to Wren and back again. “Are you saying the Ville murdered those people to discourage the family from going ahead with their landscaping plans?”
“Murdered — or arranged for them to be murdered. The police were never able to establish a connection. However, the message clearly got through. Because the plan to re–landscape the park was obviously abandoned.”
“Anything else?”
Wren shuffled through his papers. “The articles talk about a ‘devilish cult’ at the Ville. The members are celibate, and they keep their numbers steady by recruitment or press–ganging street people and the less fortunate.”
“Curioser and curioser,” murmured Pendergast. He turned to D’Agosta. “ ‘Mindless apparition’… Not so very different from what attacked you, eh, Vincent?”
D’Agosta scowled.
The elegant white hands unclasped and reclasped as Pendergast sank into deep thought. Somewhere, in the bowels of the great mansion, came the old–fashioned ringing of a phone.
Pendergast roused himself. “It would be useful to get one’s hands on the remains of one of those victims.”
D’Agosta grunted. “Gormly and Sprague are probably buried in family plots. You’ll never get a warrant.”
“Ah. But the fourth victim, the Straus family groundskeeper — the supposed suicide — it’s just possible he’ll yield up his secrets more easily. And if so, we shall be in luck. Because of all the bodies, his is the one of greatest interest to us.”
“Why is that?”
Pendergast smiled faintly. “Why, my dear Vincent, why do you think?”
D’Agosta frowned in exasperation. “Damn it, Pendergast, my head hurts. I’m not in the mood to play Sherlock Holmes!”
A pained look briefly appeared on the agent’s face. “Very well,” he said after a moment. “Here are the salient points. Unlike the others, the body was not disemboweled. It was covered in blood, the clothes in rags. It was a possible suicide. And it was the last to be found. After its discovery, the killings ceased. And I might point out that he had disappeared several months before the murders began — where was he? Living at the Ville, perhaps.” He sat back in his chair.
D’Agosta felt gingerly at the bump on his skull. “What are you saying?”
“The groundskeeper wasn’t a victim — he was the perpetrator.”
Despite himself, D’Agosta felt a tingle of excitement. “Go on.”
“At great estates such as the one in question, it was common practice for the servants and workers to have their own family plot, where the deceased were interred. If such a plot exists at the old Straus summer house, we might find the groundskeeper’s remains there.”
“But you’re only going on an account in a newspaper. There’s no connection. Nobody’s going to issue an exhumation order on such flimsy evidence.”
“We can always freelance.”
“Please don’t tell me you intend to dig him up at night.”
A faint affirmative incline of the head.
“Don’t you ever do anything by the book?”
“Only infrequently, I’m afraid. A very bad habit, but one that I find hard to break.”
Proctor appeared in the doorway. “Sir?” he said, his deep voice studiously neutral. “I heard from one of our contacts downtown. There have been developments.”
“Share them with us, if you please.”
“There was a killing at the Gotham Press Club; a reporter named Caitlyn Kidd. The perpetrator vanished, but many witnesses are swearing the killer was William Smithback.”
“Smithback!” said Pendergast, rising suddenly.
Proctor nodded.
“When?”
“Ninety minutes ago. In addition, Smithback’s body is missing from the morgue. His wife went looking for it there, caused a scene when it was gone. Apparently, some, ah, voodoo ephemera was left in its place.” Proctor paused, his large hands folded in front of his suit coat.
D’Agosta was seized with horror and dread. All this had come down — and he was without beeper or cell phone.
“I see,” murmured Pendergast, his face suddenly as sallow as a corpse’s. “What a dreadful turn of events.” He added in almost a whisper, to nobody in particular: “Perhaps the time has come to call in the help of Monsieur Bertin.”
Chapter 36
* * *
D’Agosta could see a gray dawn creeping through the curtained windows of the Gotham Press Club. He was exhausted, and his head pounded with every beat of his heart. The scene–of–crime unit had finished up their work and gone; the hair and fiber guys had come and gone; the photographer had come and gone; the M.E. had collected the corpse; all the witnesses had been questioned or scheduled for questioning; and now D’Agosta found himself alone at the sealed crime scene.
He could hear the traffic on 53rd Street, the early delivery vans, the crack–of–dawn garbage pickups, the day–shift taxi drivers beginning their rounds with the usual wake–up ritual of horn blaring and cursing.
D’Agosta remained standing quietly in the corner of the room. It was very elegant and old New York; the walls covered with dark oak paneling, a fireplace with carved mantelpieces, a marble floor tiled in black and white, a crystal chandelier above and tall mullioned windows with gold–embroidered drapes. The room smelled of old smoke, stale hors d’oeuvres, and spilled wine. Quite a lot of food and broken glass was strewn about the floor from the panic at the time of the murder. But there was nothing more for D’Agosta to see, no lack of witnesses or evidence. The killer had committed murder in front of more than two hundred people — not one lily–livered journalist had tried to stop him — and then escaped out the back kitchen, through several sets of doors left unlocked by the catering group whose van was parked in a lane behind the building.
Had the killer known that? Yes. All the witnesses reported that the killer had moved surely — not swiftly, but deliberately — straight for one of the room’s rear service doors, down a hall, through the kitchen, and out. He knew the layout of the place, knew the doors were unlocked, knew the gates blocking the back lane would be open, knew that it led to 54th Street and the anonymity of the crowd. Or a waiting car. Because this had all the appearance of being a well–planned crime.
D’Agosta rubbed his nose, trying to breathe slowly, to reduce the pounding in his temples. He could hardly think. Those bastards
at the Ville were going to realize they had made a serious mistake in assaulting a police officer. They were involved in this, one way or another, he felt sure. Smithback had written about them and paid dearly for it; now the same fate had befallen Caitlyn Kidd.
Why was he still here? There was nothing new he could extract from the crime scene, nothing that hadn’t already been examined, recorded, photographed, picked over, tested, sniffed, eyeballed, and noted for the record. He was utterly exhausted. And yet he couldn’t bring himself to leave.
Smithback. That, he knew, was the reason he couldn’t leave.
The witnesses all swore it was Smithback. Even Nora, whom he had interviewed — sedated but lucid enough — at her apartment. Nora had seen the killer from across the room, so she was less reliable — but there were others who had seen the killer up close and swore it was him. The victim herself had shouted out his name as he approached her. And yet a few days earlier, D’Agosta had seen with his very own eyes Smithback’s dead body on a gurney, his chest opened, his organs removed and tagged, the top of his skull sawed open.
Smithback’s body gone… How could some jackass just walk into the morgue and steal a body? Maybe it wasn’t so surprising — Nora had charged right in and nobody stopped her. There was only one night receiver, and people in that position seemed to have a history of sleeping on the job. But Nora had been chased, and ultimately caught, by security. And charging into a morgue was a lot different than leaving with a body.
Unless the body left on its own…
What the hell was he thinking? A dozen theories were swimming in his head. He’d been certain the Ville was involved somehow. But of course he couldn’t dismiss that software developer, Kline, who had threatened Smithback so openly. As he’d told Rocker, certain pieces of his African sculpture had been identified by museum specialists as voodoo artifacts with particularly dark significance. Although that brought up the question of why Kline would want to kill Caitlyn Kidd. Had Kidd written about him, too? Or did something about her remind him of the journalist who had once destroyed his budding career? That was worth looking into.
And then, there was that other theory that Pendergast, despite all his dissembling, seemed to take seriously: that Smithback, like Fearing, had been raised from the dead.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered out loud, turning and walking out of the reception hall into the foyer. The cop guarding the front door signed him out, and he stepped into a chill, gray October dawn.
He glanced at his watch. Six forty–five. He was due to meet Pendergast downtown at nine. Leaving his squad car parked on Fifth, he walked down 53rd to Madison, stepped into a coffee shop, eased himself into a chair.
By the time the waitress arrived, he was already asleep.
Chapter 37
* * *
At ten after nine in the morning, D’Agosta gave up waiting for Pendergast and made his way from the lobby of City Hall to an anonymous office on a high floor of the building, which took him another ten minutes to find. At last he stood before the closed office door, reading its engraved plastic plaque:
MARTY WARTEK
DEPUTY ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR
NEW YORK CITY HOUSING AUTHORITY
BOROUGH OF MANHATTAN
He gave the door a double rap.
“Come in,” came a thin voice.
D’Agosta entered. The office was surprisingly spacious and comfortable, with a sofa and two easy chairs on one side, a desk on the other, and an alcove containing an old bag of a secretary. A single window looked into the forest of towers that constituted Wall Street.
“Lieutenant D’Agosta?” asked the office’s occupant, rising from behind his desk and indicating one of the easy chairs. D’Agosta took the sofa instead: it looked more comfortable.
The man came around the desk and settled himself in a chair. D’Agosta took him in quickly: small, slight, ill–fitting brown suit, razor–burned, tufts of thinning hair springing from the middle of a bald head, nervous shifty brown eyes, small trembly hands, tight mouth, self–righteous air.
D’Agosta started to remove his shield, but Wartek quickly shook his head. “Not necessary. Anyone can see you’re a detective.”
“That so?” D’Agosta was somehow offended. He realized he was hoping to be offended. Vinnie–boy, just take it easy.
A silence. “Coffee?”
“Thank you. Regular.”
“Susy, two regular coffees, please.”
D’Agosta tried to organize his thinking. His mind was shot. “Mr. Wartek—”
“Please call me Marty.” The guy was making an effort to be friendly, D’Agosta reminded himself. No need to be an asshole in return.
“Marty, I’m here to talk about the Ville. Up in Inwood. You know it?”
A cautious affirmative nod. “I’ve read the articles.”
“I want to know how the hell it is these people can occupy city land and block off a public access road — and get away with it.” D’Agosta hadn’t meant to be so blunt, but it just came out that way. He was too damn tired to care.
“Well, now.” Wartek leaned forward. “You see, Lieutenant, there’s a point of law called a ‘proscriptive easement’ or ‘right of adverse possession’ ” — he indicated the quotation marks with nervous darts of his fingers — “which states that if a piece of land has been occupied and used in an ‘open and notorious’ manner for a certain specific period of time without the permission of the owner, then the using party acquires certain legal rights to the property. In New York, that specific period of time is twenty years.”
D’Agosta stared. What the man had said was just so much noise in his ear. “Sorry. I didn’t follow you.”
A sigh. “It seems the residents of the Ville have occupied that land since at least the Civil War. It was an abandoned church with numerous outbuildings, I believe, and they simply squatted there. There were a lot of squatters in New York City at the time. Central Park was full of them: little kitchen farms, pigpens, shacks, and so forth.”
“They’re not in Central Park now.”
“True, true — the squatters were evicted from Central Park when it was designated a park. But the northern tip of Manhattan was always something of a no–man’s–land. It’s rocky and rugged, unsuited to farming or development. Inwood Hill Park wasn’t created until the thirties. By that time, the residents of the Ville had acquired a right of adverse possession.”
The man’s insistent, lecture–hall tone of voice was starting to grate. “Look, I’m no lawyer. All I know is, they don’t have title to the land and they’ve blocked a public way. I’m still waiting to hear how that’s possible.” D’Agosta folded his arms and sat back.
“Lieutenant, please. I am trying to explain this to you. They’ve been there for a hundred and fifty years. They have acquired rights.”
“Rights to block a city street?”
“Perhaps.”
“So you mean, if I decide to barricade Fifth Avenue, it’s okay? I have a right to do it?”
“You’d be arrested. The city would object. The law of adverse possession would never apply.”
“All right then, I break into your apartment while you’re away, live there rent free for twenty years, and then it’s mine?”
The coffees arrived, milky and lukewarm. D’Agosta drank half his down. Wartek sipped his with poked–out lips.
“In point of fact,” he continued, “it would be yours, if your occupation of the apartment were open and notorious and if I never gave you permission to be there. You would eventually acquire a right of adverse possession, because—”
“What the hell — are we Communist Russia, or what?”
“Lieutenant, I didn’t write the law but I have to say it’s a perfectly reasonable one. It’s to protect you if you, say, accidentally build a septic system that encroaches on a neighbor’s land and that neighbor doesn’t notice or complain for twenty years — do you think you should have to take it away if he notices it then?”
“An entire village in Manhattan is not a septic system.”
Wartek’s voice had climbed a notch as he became excited, a rashy splotch spreading over his neck. “Septic system or entire village, it’s the same principle! If the owner doesn’t object or notice, and you are using the property openly, then you do acquire certain rights. It’s as if you abandoned the property, not so different from the marine law of salvage.”
“So you’re telling me the city never objected to this Ville?”
A silence. “Well, I don’t know.”
“Yeah, well maybe the city did object. Maybe there are letters on file. I’ll bet—”
D’Agosta fell silent as a black–clad figure glided into the room.
“Who are you?” Wartek asked, his voice high with alarm. D’Agosta had to admit that Pendergast was a rather disturbing presence at first notice — all black and white, his skin so pale he almost looked dead, his silver eyes like newly minted dimes.
“Special Agent Pendergast, Federal Bureau of Investigation, at your service, sir.” Pendergast gave a little bow. He reached into his suit and produced a manila file, which he laid on the desk and opened. Inside were photocopies of old letters on New York City letterhead.
“What’s this?” Wartek asked.
“The letters.” He turned to D’Agosta. “Vincent, please forgive my tardiness.”
“Letters?” Wartek asked, frowning.
“The letters in which the city objected to the Ville. Going back to 1864.”
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