Delaplane turned to Sheldrake. “I’m going to look around a bit. Maybe you could circulate, make sure everyone’s doing what they should be.”
“Will do.”
He went off and, moments later, she heard him issuing a short string of quiet orders.
She circled the perimeter and found the M.E., George McDuffie, carrying a Yeti evidence cooler to his vehicle. It was hard to believe he actually had a medical degree—he looked more like a college freshman, thin as a rail, nervous and awkward. She hadn’t worked with him much and didn’t know yet if he was any good.
“Hey, George,” she said. “Got a minute?”
“Certainly, Commander,” He placed the cooler in the back of his vehicle and turned to her.
She nodded. “Have a look?”
“Um, sure.” He unhooked the Yeti and opened the lid. Delaplane peered in. In a large test tube nestled in ice was the finger. Next to it, in another tube, was a long, thin strip of bloody scalp, with the hair attached. She recognized right away that the finger must be from the first victim, found washed up on the riverbank, who was missing one. That body also had a scalp wound that was probably going to match this bloody strip. Several other test tubes contained swabs of blood, flesh, and bloody bits of clothing.
“Looks like Ellerby,” she said.
“Yes, I believe so. As soon as I get this finger and piece of scalp back to the lab I’ll match them to the cadaver.”
“You think this is where he was killed?”
“Possibly. There was quite a lot of blood in the bushes.”
“And the finger? Cut off or what?”
“Bitten, I think.”
Delaplane grunted. She turned and saw Sheldrake coming over.
He peered in. “The guy from the Chandler House?”
“Yup.”
Sheldrake straightened and looked around at the buildings facing the square. “Christ almighty, you’d think someone would have heard something.”
“Right,” said Delaplane. “Ellerby was alive at eleven, because folks at the hotel said that’s when he went out and didn’t come back. Pretty sure he went out for a smoke. Let’s get some DNA off those cigarette butts, see if this hedge was Ellerby’s habitual smoking spot.” She grinned. “Sheldrake, I’ve got a pain-in-the-ass assignment for your team. You need to interview everyone in those buildings within earshot—say, three hundred yards on either side—about what they heard between eleven and midnight that night.”
“Right. But I wonder: how the hell did Ellerby’s body get from here to the river?”
“Good question. Probably dragged to the street and loaded in a car. We need dogs here, and we need ’em along the riverbank, to see where he was dumped in.”
She heard a commotion at the other end of the crime scene and saw a film crew trying to push their way past the police barriers. She came striding over. It was a big crew, with two cameras—one of them a Steadicam—a sound man, and a couple of others, surrounding a little fat man holding a mic, with a tall, gloomy guy next to him carrying what looked like a big old-fashioned box camera. The videographers were obviously shooting. The tall man was taking weird gadgets out of a suitcase with foam cutouts and laying them on a piece of velvet.
“What’s going on?” Delaplane boomed out.
“I’ve told them, Commander, that this is a crime scene,” said a uniformed officer.
“Hello, I’m Barclay Betts,” said the short round man with the mic, as if she should know who he was. The cameras were still rolling. The name and face were sort of familiar, but Delaplane didn’t give a shit enough to try to remember.
“Well, Mr. Barclay Betts, we’ve got a police barricade here, in case you didn’t notice.”
“We just need to get a little closer,” the round man said. “We’re taking some photographs with this Percipience Camera here. It’s quite remarkable, Officer. You see, it can capture paranormal activity. It could be a great help to the police.”
Delaplane put her fists on her hips and grinned. “Paranormal activity? Like ghosts?”
“In this case, possibly a vampire.”
At this she exploded into laughter. “Oh, yeah? Well, I’ll tell you what. You take one step over that barrier, and I’ll confiscate your vampire camera. Could be a bomb, for all we know. We’ll have to take it apart to find out, and our technicians might, you know, oops!, kind of break it in the process. Or you can just stay where you are and tune in to your vampire vibes from afar.”
The tall man, frowning deeply, put the cover back on the camera and latched it up, while Betts yelled “Cut!” Delaplane could see a young lady behind a camera trying to stifle a laugh.
She walked off, shaking her head. “Vampires!”
12
IT WAS A DOZEN blocks from the Chandler House to the M.E.’s office, and Pendergast had insisted on walking. Humidity or not, Coldmoon didn’t mind. He’d spent a restless night with no more than four hours of sleep. His huge four-poster bed might have been impressive to look at, but it was soft as a marshmallow, and he was more accustomed to sleeping on the bare ground than on a mattress like a ’70s Eldorado. On top of that, he felt like those portraits and creepy black silhouettes hanging on the walls were watching him as he tried to sleep. The walk, and the heat, loosened his muscles and blew away last night’s cobwebs. Best of all, Montgomery Street was a broad commercial avenue, with a quiet cluster of sober-looking buildings ahead that had to be official. No ghoulish mansions, and not a wisp of Spanish moss in sight.
Pendergast strode along beside him, a silent figure in the trademark black suit, his only concession to the sun a pair of tortoiseshell Persol sunglasses with lenses dark as his clothes. If they’d been assigned a vehicle, Coldmoon hadn’t seen any sign of it. He wondered idly if Pickett would get them something, or if Pendergast would take it upon himself to go car shopping again.
Speaking of Pickett, Coldmoon hadn’t gotten so much as a glimpse of their boss since the previous day, when the ADC had dropped them at the Owens-Thomas House. Was it possible he’d really left town—that he’d gone back to New York? He’s signaling that he’s going to let us handle this investigation our way, Pendergast had said. It would be interesting to see if his partner was right.
As they approached the complex of county offices, Coldmoon noticed the scene wasn’t as quiet as it had seemed a moment earlier. Two unmarked vans and a large private bus with blacked-out windows were pulling up onto Montgomery Street. He glanced at his watch: 8:35. He wondered why Pendergast had been so insistent on leaving early.
“Appointment’s at nine,” he said. “Want to grab some coffee?”
“No,” said Pendergast, increasing his pace ever so slightly.
As they began cutting across the plaza in front of the office complex, doors in the vans and bus opened simultaneously and a motley assemblage began pouring out: young men and women with digital tablets and earpieces, one burly guy toting a portable light, and another unspooling what looked like an audio snake. From somewhere came the low growl of a generator starting up. And then a truly peculiar figure emerged from the bus: a man no taller than five feet, with round black glasses, a silk shirt of pale maroon, and an expensive-looking straw hat with an enormous brim. He took off the hat for a moment and looked around, and when he did Coldmoon saw a perfectly bald head that gleamed in the morning sun.
The man’s slow reconnaissance of the plaza stopped when he saw Pendergast and Coldmoon. Putting the hat back on his head, he started toward them, at an angle designed to cut them off before they reached the buildings. A tall, attractive woman stepped out of the bus after him, followed by three more men, one carrying a Steadicam, another a sound box and boom mic, and the third a big video camera. It was some kind of film crew, and they were closing in.
But instead of hurrying to get past, Pendergast corrected course and slowed, with the result being that the group caught up with him just as they reached the wide brick steps in front of a closed glass door that read COUNTY COR
ONER’S OFFICE.
“Excuse me!” the short man said, removing his hat once again. For his size, he had a remarkably deep voice. Something about him looked familiar.
Pendergast began to ascend the steps, stopping only when the man repeated: “Excuse me!” Then he turned.
“Yes?”
“Are you the coroner?” the man asked.
“I rather hope not.”
“Are you with the coroner’s office?” the man asked, unfazed.
“No.”
Coldmoon stepped forward to tell the man to go fuck himself, but a gentle, restraining hand from Pendergast stopped him. In the distance, he could see other cars and vans, some with network affiliations stenciled on their flanks, pulling up. The gaggle of people before them must have noticed this, too, because now they spread out, as if to form a protective cordon around their prey.
“Bring it in closer, darling,” the round person said to a cameraman behind him. Then he turned back. “My name is Barclay Betts.”
So that’s who he is! Coldmoon thought. He used to chair one of those weekly news-lite shows that ran on Sunday evenings, and Coldmoon had seen him from time to time hosting scandalous documentaries and celebrity takedowns.
The faintest look of irritation passed over Betts’s face when Pendergast had no reaction to his introduction. “I’m doing a docuseries on the city’s strange history. ‘Demon-Haunted Savannah.’ May I ask your role in the murder investigation?”
Expectation now hung in the air. Coldmoon wondered what amusing brush-off Pendergast would employ to rid himself of this pest. There were few things the man hated more, he knew, than interviews with the press.
“I’m Special Agent Pendergast of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and this is my partner, Special Agent Coldmoon.” In case anyone doubted his statement, Pendergast followed it by removing his ID and shield and displaying them to the camera.
Much to Coldmoon’s annoyance, Betts’s face turned into a mask of delight. His eyes sparkled behind the round glasses. “Is that so? An FBI agent? So the feds have taken an interest in the recent murders?”
Pendergast nodded with a combination of gravity and reserve. “Indeed we have.”
Coldmoon looked at his watch. What the hell was this? They’d arrived early, when the office was still locked, allowing themselves to be cornered, and now Pendergast was stopping to talk to this jackass. He began to step forward again, but once more he felt a restraining hand.
“Splendid!” Betts said, almost rubbing his hands together with glee. No doubt he’d come in hopes of catching the coroner—but in Pendergast, he’d found a prize at least as tasty. “May we ask you a few questions?”
“On the record?”
“Yes. Certainly. For the documentary.”
Coldmoon watched as Pendergast glanced in the direction of the camera, as if to see if it was on. It was. He cleared his throat and crossed his arms in front of his severe suit.
“I am at your disposal, Mr. Betts,” he said.
13
WENDY GANNON, DIRECTOR OF photography, stood back slightly from the rest of the crew, monitoring their camera feeds, watching the FBI agent talk. This was an unexpected find—they’d been planning to beard the M.E., George McSomebodyorother, in his den. If she’d expected a premature encounter like this, she would have been on the lead camera herself. But she knew Craig could be trusted to get good footage, without a lot of amateurish panning and zooming. She looked at the sky, looked back at Betts and the FBI agent, mentally framing the shot. That black suit might throw off the white balance, and she murmured a few directions into her headset. Craig gave her a thumbs-up and zeroed in on the agent.
“Can you tell us what your investigations have uncovered so far?” Betts asked in his most ingratiating tone—the one he reserved for movie stars and high-ranking officials.
“Certainly,” the agent said. What was his name? Prendergrast? Gannon glanced at Marty, the production assistant, asking him through the headset to get all available background on this person, ASAP—to make sure they weren’t being pranked into interviewing someone masquerading as someone else. This guy looked about as far from an FBI agent as possible, but then she didn’t really know much about the FBI. With the undertaker’s garb, he was a strange-looking fellow, and unusually cooperative for law enforcement. But his ID had looked real enough. The younger, athletic man standing next to him, on the other hand, could have been a statue stamped right out of the Quantico mill.
She glanced around, making sure her people kept the other media away until Betts got what he wanted. He was a shrewd interviewer and could be relied on to do that quickly. Pavel was shooting B-roll with the Steadicam—simultaneously, not afterward as per usual, since this interview was unscripted—and that would give her any necessary elbow room when it came to editing the footage. She checked with the sound assistant, satisfied herself with the audio levels, then looked skyward again. The light was a little hot, but that was all right. This particular interview wasn’t about mood, she knew—it was about content.
She turned her attention back to the interview already under way.
Strange—Betts, interrogator first class, didn’t seem to have made any progress. “So what then, exactly, have you uncovered?”
“Nothing.” The man spoke with a genteel southern lilt that, Gannon thought, would fit in perfectly with the Georgia locale.
Betts looked perplexed. “You haven’t uncovered anything?”
“No.”
“But there has been a murder, correct?”
“Certainly,” the agent said, in the most agreeable manner imaginable. “Two, in fact.”
“I’m sorry,” Betts said. “If you’re sure it was murder, then how can you not have uncovered anything?”
“The body was not covered—except by the clothes, of course, which were rather a mess. I don’t know where you got the impression it was covered.”
“But…that isn’t…” Betts paused, uncharacteristically flummoxed. He took a deep breath. “Let’s try this again.” He glanced at the lead camera, as if to slap an invisible clapperboard for a fresh take. “Why has the FBI been called in?”
“Called in for what?”
“The murders.”
“Which murders?”
“The ones that just took place.”
“Do you mean, took place here?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Here in Savannah?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll have to be more specific.”
A pause. “The murders in which the blood was sucked from the bodies, as if by a vampire. Those murders, sir!”
“I ask because more than one murder has taken place in Savannah recently. I’m delighted to help you, but I can’t answer a question that’s insufficiently articulated.”
This was said in a tone of mild reproach, like that of a disappointed elementary school teacher speaking to a favorite student. Gannon saw a hint of red appear on the back of Betts’s neck, just above his tailored silk shirt.
“Now that we’ve established which murders,” Betts said, his voice raised, “what can you tell me about them?”
“Which one?”
“Let’s start with the first murder,” Betts said, after a pause to compose himself.
“The first murder?” the FBI agent repeated, in a remarkable parroting of Betts’s own deep, nasal voice. “Oh, I’m afraid I can’t really be of much help there. I’m so sorry.”
“Why not?” Betts asked tersely.
“Because I haven’t seen the first body. That’s why I’m here. I don’t mean in Savannah, you understand. I mean this building.”
A slightly strangled noise escaped Betts’s lips. “Okay. What can you tell me about the second murder?”
“It was a man.”
“So we’ve been told.”
“He’s dead. I can verify that much for you, having examined that body. As I believe I implied already.”
“Can you be m
ore specific? How was the blood sucked out?”
“From the man?”
“Yes, yes. From the man!” Gannon could see Betts was losing his legendary temper.
“Well, the body was not covered. Going back to your earlier inquiry, that is.”
Betts waited impatiently for more.
“I confess, Mr.—Butts, was it?”
“Betts.”
“Ah. Forgive me. I confess, Mr. Butts, but I’m not sure precisely what additional information will satisfy you. The victim is a male. His body was found yesterday. The cause of death has yet to be determined. Surely that should be enough to satisfy a member of your…profession?” And here Pendergast glanced—not, Gannon noticed, in a friendly way—over the entourage.
“It’s not satisfactory,” Betts said. “Why is the FBI involved?”
Pendergast’s wandering eye returned to the director and he waved a hand at the cameras, mics, and other equipment. “The FBI often investigates homicides. Are you representing some local, or more likely hyperlocal, news channel?”
Betts’s exasperated sigh was loud enough to spike the needles on the sound equipment. “I’m making—directing—a documentary. ‘Demon-Haunted Savannah.’ Now, Mr. Pendergast, some are saying this is the work of the Savannah Vampire. Do you have any comment on that?”
“Why do you ask?”
“As an FBI agent—if in fact you are an agent—you should know that what we need are details. People are frightened; they need answers. They have the right to know the truth.”
Gannon felt this sanctimonious retort would anger the agent, and she braced herself. But if anything, it did just the opposite. The man’s face assumed a thoughtful, almost philosophical expression. And when he spoke again it was once more in the most cooperative of tones.
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