White Fire p-13

by Douglas Preston

  “Thank God.”

  “Two more victims were found by the back door — probably where the perp made his exit. There was the body of a dog there, too.”

  “Rex,” said the chief to himself, wiping his brow with a trembling hand.

  Chivers noted the same man in the black suit he’d seen before, floating in the background, eyes on them. He frowned. Why was the undertaker allowed inside the cordon?

  “Motive?” asked the chief.

  “Now I’m guessing,” Chivers continued, “but from thirty years of experience I’d say pretty definitely we’re looking at a home invasion and robbery, combined with possible sex crimes. The fact that the entire family was subdued and controlled suggests to me there might have been more than one perp.”

  “This was no robbery,” came a soft, drawling voice.

  Chivers jerked his head around to find that the man in the black suit had somehow managed to approach without being noticed and was now standing behind them.

  Chivers’s scowl deepened. “I’m talking to the chief. Do you mind?”

  “Not at all. But if I may, I would like to offer a few observations for the benefit of the investigation. A mere robber would not have gone to the trouble to tie up his victims and then burn them alive.”

  “Alive?” the chief said. “How do you know?”

  “The sadism and rage evident in the arc of this crime are palpable. A sadist wishes to see his victims suffer. That is how he derives his gratification. To tie someone to a bed, douse that person with gasoline, and light them on fire — where’s the gratification in that, if the person is already dead?”

  The chief’s face went as gray as putty. His mouth moved but no sound came out.

  “Bullshit,” said Chivers fiercely. “This was a home invasion and robbery. I’ve seen it before. The perps break in, find a couple of pretty girls, have their way with them, load up on jewelry, and then burn down the place thinking they’ll destroy the evidence — particularly the DNA inside the girls.”

  “Yet they didn’t take the jewelry, as you yourself noted in your taped observations a few minutes ago, regarding some lumps of gold you discovered.”

  “Hold on, here. You were listening to me? Who the hell are you?” Chivers turned to the chief. “Is this guy official?”

  The chief passed a sopping handkerchief across his brow. He looked indecisive and frightened. “Please. Enough.”

  The man in the black suit regarded him a moment with his silver eyes, and then shrugged nonchalantly. “I have no official role here. I am merely a bystander offering his impressions. I shall leave you gentlemen to your work.”

  With that he turned and began to leave. Then he paused to speak over his shoulder. “I should mention, however: there may well be…more.”

  And with that he walked off, slipping under the tape and disappearing into the crowd of rubberneckers.

  16

  Horace P. Fine III stopped, swiveled on his instep, and looked Corrie up and down, as if he had just thought of something.

  “Do you have any experience house-sitting?” he asked.

  “Yes, absolutely,” Corrie replied immediately. It was sort of true: she’d watched their trailer home overnight more than once when her mother went on an all-night bender. And then there was the time she’d stayed at her father’s apartment six months before, when he’d gone to that job fair in Pittsburgh.

  “Never anyplace this big, though,” she added, looking around.

  Fine looked at her suspiciously — but then again, maybe it was just the way his face was put together. It seemed that every syllable she’d uttered had been greeted by distrust.

  “Well, I don’t have time to check your references,” he replied. “The person I’d arranged to take the position backed out at the last minute, and I’m overdue in New York.” His eyes narrowed slightly. “But I’ll be keeping an eye on you. Come on, I’ll show you to your rooms.”

  Corrie, following the man down the long, echoing first-floor hallway, wondered just how Horace P. Fine planned to keep an eye on her from two thousand miles away.

  At first it had seemed almost like a miracle. She’d learned of the opening by coincidence: a conversation, overheard at a coffee shop, about a house that needed looking after. A few phone calls led her to the mansion’s owner. It would be an ideal situation — in Roaring Fork no less. No more driving eighteen miles each way to her fleabag motel room. She could even move in that very day. Now she’d be earning money instead of spending it — and doing so in style.

  But when she’d dropped by the mansion to meet with the owner, her enthusiasm dimmed. Although the house was technically in Roaring Fork, it was way up in the foothills, completely isolated, at the end of a narrow, winding, mile-long private road. It was huge, to be sure, but of a dreary postmodern design of glass, steel, and slate that was more reminiscent of an upscale dentist’s office than a home. Unlike most of the big houses she’d seen, which were perched on hillsides offering fantastic views, this house was built in a declivity, practically a bowl in the mountains, surrounded on three sides by tall fir trees that seemed to throw the place into perpetual gloom. On the fourth side was a deep, icy ravine that ended in a rockfall of snow-covered boulders. Ironically, most of the vast plate-glass windows of the house overlooked this “feature.” The decor was so aggressively contemporary as to be almost prison-like in austerity, all chrome and glass and marble — not a straight edge to be found anywhere save the doorways — and the walls were covered with grinning masks, hairy weavings, and other creepy-looking African art. And the place was cold, too — almost as cold as the ski warehouse where she did her work. Corrie had kept her coat on during the entire walk-through.

  “This leads down to the second basement,” Fine said, pausing to point at a closed door. “The older furnace is down there. It heats the eastern quarter of the house.”

  Heats. Yeah, right. “Second basement?” Corrie asked aloud.

  “It’s the only part of the original house that still exists. When they demolished the lodge, the developer retained the basement for retrofitting into the new house.”

  “There was a lodge here?”

  Fine scoffed. “It was called Ravens Ravine Lodge, but it was just an old log cabin. A photographer used it for a home base when he went out into the mountains to take pictures. Adams, the name was. They tell me he was famous.”

  Adams. Ansel Adams? Corrie could just picture it. There had probably been a cozy, rustic little cabin here once, nestled in among the pines — until it got razed for this monstrosity. She wasn’t surprised that Fine was not familiar with Adams — only a Philistine, or his soon-to-be ex-wife, could have bought all this freaky art.

  Horace Fine himself was almost as cold as the house. He ran a hedge fund back in Manhattan. Or maybe it was the U.S. branch of some foreign investment bank; Corrie hadn’t really been listening when he told her. Hedge, branch — it was all so much shrubbery to her. Luckily, he seemed not to have heard of her or her recent stay in the local jail. He’d made it quite clear that he detested Roaring Fork; he hated the house; and he loathed the woman who had forced him to buy it and who was now making its disposal as difficult as she possibly could. “The virago” was the way he had named her to Corrie over the last twenty minutes. All he wanted to do was get someone in the house and get the hell back to New York, the sooner the better.

  He led the way down the corridor. The house was as strangely laid out as it was ugly. It seemed to be made up of a single endless hallway, which veered at an angle now and then to conform with the topography. All the important rooms were on the left, facing the ravine. Everything else — the bathrooms, closets, utility rooms — was on the right, like carbuncles on a limb. From what she could tell, the second floor featured a similar layout.

  “What’s in here?” she asked, stopping before a partially open door on the right. There were no overhead lights on inside, but the room was nevertheless lit up with a ghostly gleam from dozens of poi
nts of green, red, and amber.

  Fine stopped again. “That’s the tech space. You might as well see it, too.”

  He opened the door wide and snapped on the light. Corrie looked around at a dizzying array of panels, screens, and instrumentation.

  “This is a ‘smart’ house, of course,” Fine said. “Everything’s automated, and you can monitor it all from here: the generator status, the power grid, the security layout, the surveillance system. Cost a fortune, but it ultimately saved me a lot in insurance charges. And it’s all networked and Internet-accessible, too. I can run the whole system from my computers in New York.”

  So that’s what he meant by keeping an eye on me, Corrie thought. “How does the surveillance system work?”

  Fine pointed to a large flat panel, with a small all-in-one computer to one side and a device below that looked like a DVD player on steroids. “There are a total of twenty-four cameras.” He pressed a button and the flat panel sprang to life, showing a picture of the living room. There was a number in the upper left-hand corner of the image, and time and date stamps running along the bottom. “These twenty-four buttons, here, are each dedicated to one of the cameras.” He pressed the button marked DRIVEWAY and the image changed, showing a picture of, what else, the driveway, with her Rent-a-Junker front and center.

  “Can you manipulate the cameras?” Corrie asked.

  “No. But any motion picked up by the sensors activates the camera and is recorded on a hard disk. There — take a look.” Fine pointed to the screen, where a deer was now passing across the driveway. As it moved, it became surrounded by a small cloud of black squares — almost like the framing windows of a digital camera — that followed the animal. At the same time, a large red M inside a circle appeared on the screen.

  “M for ‘movement,’” Fine said.

  The deer had moved off the screen, but the red letter remained. “Why is the M still showing?” Corrie asked.

  “Because when one of the cameras detects movement, a recording of that video feed is saved to the hard disk, starting a minute before movement begins and continuing one minute past when it stops. Then — if there’s no more movement — the M goes away.”

  Movement. “And you can monitor all this over the Internet?” Corrie asked. She didn’t like the idea of being the subject of a long-distance voyeur.

  “No. That part of the smart system was never connected to the Internet. We stopped the work on the security system when we decided to sell the house. Let the new owner pick up the cost. But it works just fine from in here.” Fine pointed to another button. “You can also split the screen by repeatedly pressing this button.” For the first time, Fine seemed engaged. He demonstrated, and the image split in two: the left half of the monitor showing the original image of the driveway, with the right showing a view looking over the ravine. Repeated pressings of the button split the screen into four, then nine, then sixteen increasingly smaller images, each from a different camera.

  Corrie’s curiosity was quickly waning. “And how do I operate the security alarm?” she asked.

  “That was never installed, either. That’s why I need someone to keep an eye on the place.”

  He snapped off the light and led the way out of the room, down the hallway, and through a door at its end. Suddenly the house became different. Gone was the expensive artwork, the ultramodern furniture, the gleaming professional-grade appliances. Ahead lay a short, narrow hall with two doors on each side, ending in another door leading into a small bathroom with cheap fixtures. The floor was of linoleum, and the pasteboard walls were devoid of pictures. All the surfaces were painted dead white.

  “The maid’s quarters,” Fine said proudly. “Where you’ll be staying.”

  Corrie stepped forward, peering into the open doors. The two on the left opened into bedrooms of almost monastic size and asceticism. One of the doors on the right led into a kitchen with a dorm-style refrigerator and a cheap stove; the other room appeared to be a minuscule den. It was barely a cut above her motel room in Basalt.

  “As I said, I’m leaving almost immediately,” Fine said. “Come back to the den and I’ll give you the key. Any questions?”

  “Where’s the thermostat?” Corrie asked, hugging herself to keep from shivering.

  “Down here.” Fine stepped out of the maid’s quarters and went back down the hall, turning in to the sitting room. There was a thermostat on the wall, all right — covered in a clear plastic box with a lock on it.

  “Fifty degrees,” Fine said.

  Corrie looked at him. “I’m sorry?”

  “Fifty degrees. That’s what I’ve set the house at and that’s where it’s going to stay. I’m not going to spend a penny more on this goddamn house than I have to. Let the virago pay the utilities if she wants to. And that’s another thing — keep electricity use to a minimum. Just a couple of lights, as absolutely necessary.” A thought seemed to strike the man. “And by the way, the thermostat settings and the kilowatt usage have been wired into the Internet. I’ll be able to monitor them from my iPhone.”

  Corrie looked at the locked thermostat with a sinking heart. Great. So now I’m going to be freezing my rear off by night as well as by day. She began to understand why the original applicant had decided against the job.

  Fine was glancing at her with a look that meant the interview was over. That left just one question.

  “How much does the house-sitting job pay?” she asked.

  Fine’s eyes widened in surprise. “Pay? You’re getting to stay, free, in a big, beautiful house, right here in Roaring Fork — and you expect a salary? You’re lucky I’m not charging you rent.”

  And he led the way back toward the den.

  17

  Arnaz Johnson, hairdresser to the stars, had seen a lot of unusual people in his day hanging out at the famous Big Pine Lodge on the very top of Roaring Fork Mountain — movie starlets decked out as if for the Oscars; billionaires squiring about their trophy girlfriends in minks and sables; wannabe Indians in ten-thousand-dollar designer buckskins; pseudo-cowboys in Stetson hats, boots, and spurs. Arnaz called it the Parade of the Narcissists. Very few of them could even ski. The Parade was the reason Arnaz bought a season pass and took the gondola to the lodge once or twice a week: that, and the atmosphere of this most famous ski lodge in the West, with its timbered walls hung with antique Navajo rugs, the massive wrought-iron chandeliers, the roaring fireplace so large you could barbecue a bull in it. Not to mention the walls of glass that looked out over a three-hundred-sixty-degree ocean of mountains, currently gray and brooding under a darkening sky.

  But Arnaz had never seen anyone quite like the gentleman who sat at a small table by himself before the vast window, a silver flask of some unknown beverage in front of him, gazing out in the direction of snowbound Smuggler’s Cirque, with its complex of ancient, long-abandoned mining structures huddled like acolytes around the vast rickety wooden building that housed the famous Ireland Pump Engine: a magnificent example of nineteenth-century engineering, once the largest pump in the world, now just a rusted hulk.

  Arnaz had been observing the ghostly man with fascination for upward of thirty minutes, during which time the man had not moved so much as a pinkie. Arnaz was a fashionista, and he knew his clothes. The man wore a black vicuña overcoat of the finest quality, cut, and style, but of a make that Arnaz did not recognize. The coat was unbuttoned, revealing a bespoke tailored black suit of an English cut, a Zegna tie, and a gorgeous cream-colored silk scarf, loosely draped. To top off the ensemble — literally — the man wore an incongruous, sable-colored trilby hat of 1960s vintage on his pale, skull-like head. Even though it was warm in the great room of the lodge, the man looked as cold as ice.

  He wasn’t an actor; Arnaz, a movie buff, knew he had never seen him on the silver screen, even in a bit part. He surely wasn’t a banker, hedge fund manager, CEO, lawyer, or other business or financial wizard; that getup would be entirely unacceptable in such a crowd. He wasn’
t a poseur, either; the man wore his clothes casually, nonchalantly, as if he’d been born in them. And he was far too elegant to be in the dot-com business. So what the heck was he?

  A gangster.

  Now, that made sense. He was a criminal. A very, very successful criminal. Russian, perhaps — he did have a slightly foreign look about him, in those pale eyes and high cheekbones. A Russian oligarch. But no…where were his women? The Russian billionaires that came to Roaring Fork — and there were quite a few — always went about with a passel of spangled, buxom whores.

  Arnaz was stumped.

  * * *

  Pendergast heard himself being addressed and turned, slowly, to see Chief Stanley Morris approaching him from across the vast room.

  “May I?”

  Pendergast opened his hand in a slow invitation to sit.

  “Thank you. I heard you were up here.”

  “And how did you hear that?”

  “Well…You’re not exactly inconspicuous, Agent Pendergast.”

  A silence. And then Pendergast removed a small silver cup from his overcoat, and placed it on the table. “Sherry? This is a rather indifferent Amontillado, but nevertheless palatable.”

  “Ah, no thanks.” The chief looked restless, shifting his soft body in the chair once, twice. “Look, I realize I messed up with your, um, protégée, Miss Swanson, and I’m sorry. I daresay I had it coming there at the town meeting. You don’t know what it’s like being chief of police in a town like this, where they’re always pulling you in five different directions at once.”

  “I am indeed sorry to say this, but I fear your microscopic problems do not interest me.” Pendergast poured himself a small tot of sherry and tossed it back in one feral motion.

  “Listen,” said the chief, shifting about again, “I came to ask your help. We’ve got this horrific quadruple murder, a one-acre crime scene of unbelievable complexity. All my forensic people are arguing with each other and that fire expert, they’re paralyzed, they’ve never seen anything like this before…” His voice cracked, then trailed off. “Look, the girl — Jenny, the older daughter — was my intern. She was a good kid…” He managed to pull himself together. “I need help. Informally. Advice, that’s all I’m asking. Nothing official. I looked into your background — very impressive.”