Fever Dream

by Douglas Preston

  A moment later the hawk tumbled from the sky, a few feathers drifting along after her, carried off on the wind.

  The shooter folded away the bipod, picked up and re-counted all the shells, put the gun back in its case, packed away his lunch and thermos, and hefted his pack. He gave the area one last look-over, but the only sign of his presence was a patch of matted grass.

  He turned back toward the Range Rover with a deep feeling of satisfaction. Now, at least for a while, he could give free vent to his feelings, allow them to flow through his body, spiking his adrenaline, preparing him for the killing to come.

  33

  Port Allen, Louisiana

  D’AGOSTA STOOD OUTSIDE THE VISITOR’S CENTER in brilliant afternoon sunlight, looking down Court Street toward the river. Besides the center itself—a fine old brick building, spotlessly renovated and updated—everything seemed brand new: the shops, the civic buildings, the scattering of homes along the riverbank. It was hard to believe that, somewhere in the immediate vicinity, John James Audubon’s doctor had lived and died nearly 150 years before.

  “Originally, this was known as St. Michel,” Pendergast said at his side. “Port Allen was first laid out in 1809, but within fifty years more than half of it had been eaten away by the Mississippi. Shall we walk down to the riverfront promenade?”

  He set off at a brisk pace, and D’Agosta followed in his wake, trying to keep up. He was exhausted and wondered how Pendergast maintained his energy after a week of nonstop traveling by car and plane, charging from one place to the next, rolling into bed at midnight and waking at dawn. Port Allen felt like one place too many.

  First they had gone to see Dr. Torgensson’s penultimate dwelling: an attractive old brick residence west of town, now a funeral home. They had rushed to the town hall where Pendergast had charmed a secretary, who allowed him to paw through some old plans and books. And now they were here, on the banks of the Mississippi itself, where Blast claimed Dr. Torgensson had spent his final unpleasant months in a shotgun shack, ruined, in a syphilitic and alcoholic stupor.

  The riverfront promenade was broad and grand, and the view from the levee was spectacular: Baton Rouge spread out across the far bank, barges and tugs working their way up the wide flow of chocolate-colored water.

  “That’s the Port Allen Lock,” Pendergast said, waving his hand toward a large break in the levee, ending in two huge yellow gates. “Largest free-floating structure of its kind. It connects the river to the Intracoastal Waterway.”

  They walked a few blocks along the promenade. D’Agosta felt himself reviving under the influence of the fresh breeze coming off the river. They stopped at an information booth, where Pendergast scanned the advertisements and notice boards. “How tragic—we’ve missed the Lagniappe Dulcimer Fête,” he said.

  D’Agosta shot a private glance toward Pendergast. Given how hard he’d taken the shock of his wife’s murder, the agent had taken the news about Constance Greene—which Hayward had given them yesterday—with remarkably little emotion. No matter how long D’Agosta knew Pendergast, it seemed he never really knew him. The man obviously cared for Constance—and yet he seemed almost indifferent to the fact that she was now in custody, charged with infanticide.

  Pendergast strolled back out of the booth and walked across the greensward toward the river itself, pausing at the remains of a ruined sluice gate, now half underwater. “In the early nineteenth century, the business district would have been two or three blocks out there,” he said, pointing into the roiling mass of water. “Now it belongs to the river.”

  He led the way back across the promenade and Commerce Avenue, made a left on Court Street and a right on Atchafalaya. “By the time Dr. Torgensson was forced to move into his final dwelling,” he said, “St. Michel had become West Baton Rouge. At the time, this neighborhood was a seedy, working-class community between the railroad depot and the ferry landing.”

  He turned down another street; consulted the map again; walked a little farther and halted. “I do believe,” he drawled, “that we have arrived.”

  They had arrived at a small commercial mini-mall. Three buildings sat side by side: a McDonald’s; a mobile phone store; and a squat, garishly colored structure named Pappy’s Donette Hole—a crusty local chain D’Agosta had seen elsewhere. Two cars were parked in front of Pappy’s, and the McDonald’s drive-through was doing a brisk business.

  “This is it?” he exclaimed.

  Pendergast nodded, pointing at the cell phone store. “That is the precise location of Torgensson’s shotgun shack.”

  D’Agosta looked at each of the buildings in turn. His spirits, which had begun to rise during the brief walk, fell again. “It’s like Blast said,” he muttered. “Totally hopeless.”

  Pendergast put his hands in his pockets and strolled up to the mini-mall. He ducked into each of the buildings in turn. D’Agosta, who could not summon the energy to follow, merely stood in the adjoining parking lot and watched. Within five minutes the agent had returned. Saying nothing, he did a slow scan of the horizon, turning almost imperceptibly, until he had carefully scrutinized everything within a three-hundred-sixty-degree radius. Then he did it again, this time stopping about halfway through his scan.

  “Take a look at that building, Vincent,” he said.

  D’Agosta followed the gesture with his eyes toward the visitor’s center they had passed at the beginning of their loop.

  “What about it?” D’Agosta asked.

  “That was clearly once a water-pumping station. The Gothic Revival style indicates it probably dates back to the original town of St. Michel.” He paused. “Yes,” he murmured after a moment. “I’m sure it does.”

  D’Agosta waited.

  Pendergast turned and pointed in the opposite direction. From this vantage point they had an unobstructed view down to the promenade, the ruined sluice gate, and the wide Mississippi beyond.

  “How curious,” Pendergast said. “This little mini-mall falls on a direct line between that old pumping station and the sluice gate at the river.”

  Pendergast broke into a swift walk toward the river again. D’Agosta swung in behind.

  Stopping almost at the water’s edge, Pendergast bent forward to examine the sluice gate. D’Agosta could see it led to a large stone pipe that was sealed with cement and partially backfilled.

  Pendergast straightened up. “Just as I thought. There was an old aqueduct here.”

  “Yeah? So what’s it mean?”

  “That aqueduct was no doubt abandoned and sealed up when the eastern half of St. Michel crumbled into the river. Remarkable!”

  D’Agosta did not share his friend’s enthusiasm for historical detail.

  “Surely you see it now, Vincent? Torgensson’s shack must have been built after this aqueduct was sealed up.”

  D’Agosta shrugged. For the life of him, he didn’t see where Pendergast was going.

  “In this part of the world it was common—for buildings constructed over the line of an old water pipe or aqueduct, anyway—to cut into an old aqueduct and use it as a basement. It saved a great deal of labor when basements were dug by hand.”

  “You think the pipe is still down there—?”

  “Exactly. When the shack was built in 1855, they probably used a section of the capped and abandoned tunnel—now quite dry, of course—as the basement. Those old aqueducts were square, not round, and made of mortared stone. The builders merely had to shore up the foundations, construct two brick walls on the sides perpendicular to the existing aqueduct walls, and—voilà! Instant basement.”

  “And you think that’s where we’ll find the Black Frame?” D’Agosta asked a little breathlessly. “In Torgensson’s basement?”

  “No. Not in the basement. Remember the creditor’s note Blast showed us? ‘We’ve searched the shack from basement to eaves. It has proven empty, nothing left of value, certainly no painting.’ ”

  “If it’s not in the basement, then what’s all the exc
itement about?” Pendergast’s coyness could be so maddening sometimes.

  “Think: a series of row houses, situated in a line above a preexisting tunnel, each with a basement fashioned from a segment of that tunnel. But, Vincent—think also of the spaces between the houses. Remember, the basements would be roughly the size of the houses above them.”

  “So… so you’re saying there would be old spaces between the basements.”

  “Precisely. Sections of the old aqueduct between each basement, bricked off and unused. And that’s where Torgensson might have hidden the Black Frame.”

  “Why hide it so well?”

  “We can assume that if the painting was so precious to the doctor that he could not part with it even in the greatest penury, then it would be precious enough that he would not want to ever be far from it. And yet he had to hide it well from his creditors.”

  “But the house was struck by lightning. It burned to the ground.”

  “True. But if our logic is correct, the painting would likely have been safe in its niche, secure in the aqueduct tunnel between his basement and the next.”

  “So all we have to do is get into the basement of the wireless store.”

  Pendergast put a restraining hand on his arm. “Alas, that wireless store has no basement. I checked when I went inside. The basement of the structure that predated it must have been filled in after the fire.”

  Once again, D’Agosta felt a huge deflation. “Then what the hell are we going to do? We can’t just get a bulldozer, raze the store, and dig a new basement.”

  “No. But we just might be able to make our way into the tunnel space from one of the adjacent basements, which I confirmed still exist. The question is: which one to try first?” Once again, that gleam that had been so often absent in recent days returned to Pendergast’s eyes: the gleam of the hunt. “I’m in the mood for doughnuts,” he said. “How about you?”

  34

  St. Francisville, Louisiana

  PAINSTAKINGLY, MORRIS BLACKLETTER, PHD, FITTED the servo mechanism to the rear wheel assembly. He checked it, checked it again, then plugged the USB cable from the guidance control unit into his laptop and ran a diagnostic. It checked out. He wrote a simple four-line program, downloaded it into the control unit, and gave the execute command. The little robot—a rather ugly confabulation of processors, motors, and sensory inputs, set atop fat rubber wheels—engaged its forward motor, rolled across the floor for exactly five seconds, then stopped abruptly.

  Blackletter felt a flush of triumph all out of proportion with the achievement. Throughout his vacation—staring at English cathedrals, sitting in dimly lit pubs—he’d been anticipating this moment.

  Years ago, Blackletter had read a study explaining how retired people frequently acquired interests diametrically different from the work that had occupied their professional lives. That, he thought ruefully, was certainly the case with him. All those years in the health profession—first at Doctors With Wings, later at a succession of pharmaceutical and medical research labs—he had been obsessed with the human body: how it worked, what made it fail, how to keep it healthy or cure its ills. And now here he was, toying with robots—the antithesis of flesh and blood. When they burned out, you just threw them away and ordered another. No grief, no death.

  How different it was from those years he’d spent in Third World countries, parched and mosquito-bitten, threatened by guerrilla fighters and harassed by corruption, sometimes sick himself—working to contain epidemics. He had saved hundreds, maybe thousands of lives, but so many, many others had died. It hadn’t been his fault, of course. But then there was the other thing, the thing he tried never to think about. That, more than anything, was what caused him to flee flesh and blood for the contentment of plastic and silicon…

  Here he was, thinking about it again. He shook his head as if to rid himself of the terrible guilt of it and glanced back at the robot. Slowly, the guilt drained away—what was done was done, and his motives had always been pure. A smile settled over his features. He raised his hand and snapped his fingers.

  The robot’s audio sensor took note, and it swiveled toward the sound. “Robo want a cracker,” it croaked in a metallic disembodied voice.

  Feeling absurdly pleased, Blackletter rose to his feet and walked from his den to the kitchen for one last cup of tea before calling it a night. He suddenly paused, hand on the teapot, listening.

  There it came again: the creak of a board.

  Slowly, Blackletter set the pot back on the counter. Was it the wind? But no: it was a quiet, windless night.

  Somebody in the street, perhaps? The sound was too close, too clear for that.

  Perhaps it was all in his mind. Minds had a tendency to do that, he knew: the absence of real auditory stimuli frequently encouraged the brain to supply its own. He’d been puttering about in his den for hours, and…

  Another creak. This time Blackletter knew for certain: the sound had come from inside the house.

  “Who’s that?” he called out. The creaking stopped.

  Was it a burglar? Unlikely. There were far larger, grander houses on the street than his.

  Who, then?

  The creaking resumed, regular, deliberate. And now he could tell where it was coming from: the living room at the front of the house.

  He glanced toward the phone, saw the empty cradle. Damn these cordless phones. Where had he left the handset? Of course—it was in the den, on the table by the laptop.

  He walked quickly back into the room, plucked the telephone from the wooden surface. Then he froze. Somebody was in the hall just beyond. A tall man in a long trench coat stepped forward from the darkness.

  “What are you doing in my house?” he demanded. “What do you want?”

  The intruder did not speak. Instead, he pulled back his coat, revealing the twin barrels of a sawed-off shotgun. The butt-stock was of a heavy black wood, carved in paisley rosettes, and the bluing of the barrels gleamed faintly in the light of the den.

  Blackletter found that he was unable to take his eyes from the weapon. He took a step back. “Wait,” he began. “Don’t. You’re making a mistake… we can talk…”

  The weapon swiveled upward. There was a tremendous boom-boom as both barrels fired almost simultaneously. Blackletter was flung backward, impacting the far wall with a shattering crash, then slumping to the ground. Framed pictures and knickknacks rained down around him from little wooden shelves.

  The front door was already closing.

  The robot, its audio sensors alerted, swiveled toward the motionless form of its builder. “Robo want a cracker,” it said, the tinny voice muffled by the blood now coating its miniature speaker. “Robo want a cracker.”

  35

  Port Allen, Louisiana

  THE FOLLOWING DAY WAS AS DARK AND RAINY as the previous day had been pleasant. That was just fine with D’Agosta—there would be fewer customers to deal with at the doughnut shop. He had deep misgivings about this whole scheme of Pendergast’s.

  Pendergast, behind the wheel of the Rolls, took the Port Allen exit from I-10, the wheels hissing on the wet asphalt. D’Agosta sat beside him, turning the pages of the New Orleans Star-Picayune. “I don’t see why we couldn’t do this at night,” he said.

  “The establishment has a burglar alarm. And the noise would be more apparent.”

  “You better do the talking. I have a feeling my Queens accent wouldn’t go down well in these parts.”

  “An excellent point, Vincent.”

  D’Agosta noticed Pendergast glancing once again in the rearview mirror. “We got company?” he asked.

  Pendergast merely smiled in return. Rather than his habitual black suit, he was wearing a plaid work shirt and denims. Instead of resembling an undertaker, he now looked like a gravedigger.

  D’Agosta turned another page, paused at an article headlined Retired Scientist Murdered in Home. “Hey, Pendergast,” he said after scanning the opening paragraphs. “Look at this: t
hat guy you wanted to talk to, Morris Blackletter, Helen’s old boss, was just found murdered in his house.”

  “Murdered? How?”

  “Shotgunned.”

  “Do the police suspect a robbery gone wrong?”

  “The article doesn’t say.”

  “He must have just returned from his vacation. A great pity we didn’t get to him earlier—he could have been rather useful.”

  “Somebody else got to him first. And I can guess who that somebody was.” D’Agosta shook his head. “Maybe we should go back to Florida and sweat Blast.”

  Pendergast turned onto Court Street, heading for downtown and the river. “Perhaps. But I find Blast’s motive to be obscure.”

  “Not at all. Helen might have told Blackletter about Blast threatening her.” D’Agosta folded the paper, shoved it between the seat and the center pedestal. “We talk to Blast, and the following night Blackletter is killed. You’re the one who doesn’t buy coincidences.”

  Pendergast looked thoughtful. But instead of replying, he turned off Court Street and nosed the Rolls into a parking lot a block short of their destination. They stepped out into the drizzle, and Pendergast opened the trunk. He passed D’Agosta a yellow construction helmet and a large canvas workbag. He took out another helmet, which he fitted onto his head. Lastly, he pulled out a heavy tool belt—from which dangled an assortment of flashlights, measuring tapes, wire cutters, and other equipment—and buckled it around his waist.

  “Shall we?” he said.

  Pappy’s Donette Hole was quiet: two plump girls stood behind the counter while a lone customer ordered a dozen double-chocolate FatOnes. Pendergast waited until the customer paid and left, then stepped forward, construction belt jangling.