Two Graves p-12

by Douglas Preston

  When she saw the closet full of letters and packages, Corrie had guessed—in fact, hoped—that this would be the explanation. But the last thing had never occurred to her: that, all the time she was waiting to hear from her dad, he’d been waiting to hear from her. “She said that you refused to pay child support, that you shacked up with another woman, couldn’t keep a job, spent your time drinking in bars.”

  “None of that’s true, Corrie, or at least…” He colored. “I did spend way too much time in bars. And there were… women. But I’ve been clean and sober for nine years. And I tried to pay child support when I could, I really did. Sometimes I went without eating to send her a check.”

  Corrie shook her head. Of course what her mother had told her all these years wasn’t true. How could she have been so dense as to believe it—believe her lying, embittered, alcoholic mother? She suddenly felt horribly thickheaded and stupid. And guilty—for fifteen years of thinking bad thoughts about her father.

  And yet her overwhelming feeling was one of relief.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “For what?”

  “For not realizing all that. For… being so passive.”

  “You were just a kid. You didn’t know.”

  “I’m twenty-two years old. I should’ve figured this out a long time ago.”

  He waved his hand. “Water under the dam.”

  She couldn’t help smiling. “Over the dam.”

  “I never was any good at sayings and speeches. But I do live by a philosophy, and it’s a good one.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Forgive everyone everything.”

  Corrie wasn’t sure that was going to be her philosophy—at all.

  He finished his cup, rose, picked up the pot. “More coffee?”

  “Please.”

  He poured them each another mug, sat down. “Corrie, I do want to tell you about this so-called bank robbery. I was framed by someone at work, I don’t know who. I’m pretty sure it had something to do with their scamming the customers, overcharging them on the financing. That’s how they make their money, you know—on the financing. Problem is, they all do it. Except for one—Charlie, the only decent guy there.”

  “But you ran,” she said again.

  “I know. I’ve always done stupid, impulsive things. I figured I could hide up here while figuring out the truth. But obviously I don’t even have a phone here, and I had to toss my cell phone, because they’ll use it to track me. So now I’ve no way to investigate—and by running I’ve made myself look guilty as hell. I’m stuck here.”

  Corrie looked at him. She wanted to believe him.

  “I’m not stuck here,” she said. “I could investigate.”

  “Come on,” he said, laughing. “You? You don’t know the first thing about being a detective.”

  “Yeah? For your information, I’m studying law enforcement at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, I’m getting straight A’s, and back in Medicine Creek I worked as the assistant to one of the country’s top FBI agents on a famous serial killer case.”

  His eyes widened. “Oh, no. My daughter, a cop?”

  26

  THE MAN APPEARED SO SUDDENLY IN THE DOORWAY OF Madeleine Teal’s office cubicle that she literally jumped. He was a very strange-looking man, dressed in black, with a pale face and gray eyes, and he radiated a restlessness bordering on agitation.

  “My, you gave me a start!” she said, pressing a hand to her ample bosom. “Can I help you?”

  “I’ve come for Dr. Heffler.”

  Now, that was a strange way of phrasing it—he did look more than a little like the grim reaper—but the man did have a mellifluous voice with a charming southern accent. She herself came from the Midwest, and the various New York accents still grated on her nerves.

  “Do you have an appointment?” she asked.

  “Dr. Heffler and I are old buddies.”

  Old buddies. Somehow the way he said it didn’t sound right. Nobody would use the word buddy to describe Dr. Wayne Heffler, who was a pretentious, pseudo-upper-class, condescending twit, as far as Teal was concerned. She had known plenty of Hefflers in her long career, but he was truly the worst: one of those types whose highest pleasure was found in reviewing the work of subordinates, with the sole purpose of finding fault and pointing it out in front of as many people as possible. Meanwhile, he neglected his own work and left others to scramble to cover for him, knowing they would be blamed if something went wrong or fell through the cracks.

  “And your name, sir?”

  “Special Agent Pendergast.”

  “Oh. As in FBI?”

  A singularly disturbing smile spread over the face of the special agent as a marble hand slipped inside his suit coat and withdrew a wallet, opened it to display a shield and ID, then gently closed it and reinserted it into the folds of black wool. With a not-displeasing sense of anticipation, Madeleine Teal pressed the intercom button and picked up the phone.

  “Dr. Heffler, there’s an FBI agent named Pendergast here to see you, no appointment, says he knows you.”

  A short pause. “Pendergast, did you say?”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  “Send him in.”

  She hung up. “You may go in.”

  But the agent didn’t move. “Dr. Heffler may come out.”

  Now, this was different. She got back on the phone. “He wants you to come out.”

  “You tell that son of a bitch that if he wants to see me, I’m here, in my office—otherwise send him away.”

  She felt a gentle tug. Pendergast’s arm had snaked up and was gently grasping the phone. “May I?”

  She released the phone. No one could fault her for not opposing an FBI agent.

  “Dr. Heffler? Agent Pendergast.”

  She couldn’t hear the reply, but the cricket-like chittering that drifted from the earpiece indicated a raised voice. Heffler was arguing.

  This, thought Madeleine Teal, is going to be good.

  The FBI agent listened patiently, then responded. “I have come for the mtDNA results on the Hotel Killer.”

  More irritated chittering out of the mouthpiece.

  “What a shame.” He turned and smiled at her, an apparently genuine smile this time, as he handed her back the telephone. “Thank you. Now—which way is the laboratory where the mtDNA work is performed?”

  “It’s down the hall to the right, but… no one’s allowed in there unescorted,” she said, lowering her voice.

  “Ah, but I won’t be unescorted. Dr. Heffler will be escorting me. Or at least, he will be shortly.”

  “But—”

  Pendergast, however, had his cell phone out and was making a call even as he walked out the door, turned right, and headed down the hall. Almost as soon as he’d vanished, Madeleine Teal’s phone rang and she picked it up.

  “Dr. Heffler, please,” came the voice. “Mayor Starke.”

  “Mayor Starke?” Unbelievable. It really was him, calling personally. “Yes, sir, just a moment.” She put the call through. It lasted less than thirty seconds. Then Heffler came bursting out of his office, face red. “Where’d he go?”

  “Down the hall to the lab. I told him—”

  But Heffler had already taken off down the hall at an undignified jog. She had never seen the man so put out, so frightened, and—she had to be honest with herself—she enjoyed it immensely.

  The Rolls pulled up at the porte cochere of the mansion at 891 Riverside Drive. Agent Pendergast instantly alighted, a slender manila folder under his arm. It was late in the day and a chill wind was coming off the Hudson, tugging at his suit and stirring his pale blond hair. Dry leaves skittered along the pavement and blew around the house as the heavy oaken door opened to swallow his dark figure.

  Winding his way swiftly through the dim corridors, Pendergast reached the library. It remained untidy, the refectory table stacked with papers, spilling to the floor. The section of bookcases revealing the flat-panel r
emained open. He moved briskly to the rear of the library, where a swift flick of his wrist at some invisible mechanism caused another section of shelves to swing open, revealing a small work space with computer and monitor. Without bothering to sit down, Pendergast began typing on the keyboard, the screen leaping to life. He pulled a compact disk out of the manila folder, scattering papers in his haste. He fed the CD into the computer and rapped out additional commands, reaching a log-in screen. When he filled out the password, a stark black-and-white welcome page came into view:

  DOCTOR’S TRIAL GROUP

  mtDNA DATABASE

  Homo sapiens haplogroup mitochondrion

  Polymorphisms and mutations

  THIS IS A CONFIDENTIAL DATABASE.

  UNAUTHORIZED USE STRICTLY FORBIDDEN.

  More machine-gun typing followed, and then the screen displayed a rotating wheel. A moment later a single, small result popped into view. Pendergast, still standing, stared at the result for a full five seconds—and then he staggered. Stepping backward, he wobbled for a moment, then dropped unceremoniously to his knees.

  27

  SPECIAL AGENT PENDERGAST ENTERED HIS DAKOTA apartment and walked into the reception room. There he paused, irresolutely, listening to the whisper of water over stone. After a moment, he stepped over to a small Monet painting and straightened it, back and forth, although it was already perfectly aligned against the rose-colored wall. Next, he moved to a twisted bonsai tree, picked up a tiny pair of hand-forged clippers that lay on the table beside it, and carefully snipped off a few new shoots of growth. His hand trembled slightly as he did so.

  That done, he paced the room restlessly, pausing to rearrange the lotus petals that floated in the base of the fountain.

  He had something he must do, but the prospect of doing it was almost unbearable.

  Finally, he stepped over to the flush door that led into the apartment proper. Opening it, he walked down the length of hallway, passing a number of doors. He nodded to Miss Ishimura, who was resting in her sitting room, reading a book in Japanese, and soon reached the end of the corridor, where the hallway made a ninety-degree turn to the right. Pendergast opened the first door to the left after the turn and stepped into the room beyond.

  The walls on either side were lined floor-to-ceiling with recessed mahogany bookshelves, each filled with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century leather-bound books. The wall before him was taken up by a deep window embrasure of polished mahogany, with two banquette seats facing each other, fitted with plush cushions. Between these lay a large picture window overlooking the intersection of Central Park West and Seventy-Second Street. Beyond lay the broad vastness of Central Park, its trees bare and stark in the winter sun.

  He closed his eyes, let his body relax, and carefully regulated his breathing. Slowly, outside existence began to fall away; first the room, then the apartment, the building, the island, then the world itself, in an ever-widening circle of orchestrated oblivion. The process took fifteen minutes to complete. When it was done, he held himself suspended in the close darkness, waiting for absolute emptiness, absolute calm. When he had achieved it, he slowly opened his eyes—not physically, but mentally—slowly, slowly.

  The small room was revealed in all its detailed perfection. But it remained empty.

  Pendergast did not allow himself the luxury of surprise. He was highly skilled in the art of Chongg Ran, an ancient Himalayan mental discipline that he had taken years to master. It was rare for him to fail to achieve stong pa nyid—the State of Pure Emptiness. Clearly, there was resistance lurking somewhere in his mind.

  He would need to take more time—much more time.

  Once again, he regulated his breathing, allowing his heart rate to slow to forty beats a minute. He let his mind go blank, to still the inner voice, to let go of his hopes and desires, to forget even his purpose in coming to this room. For a long moment, he lingered again, weightless, in empty space. Then—infinitely more slowly this time—he began building a perfect model of Manhattan Island in his mind, starting with his apartment and moving outward. He went first room by room, then building by building, and then—with loving attention—block by block. Pendergast knew the topography of Manhattan as well as any living person, and he allowed himself to linger on every structure, every intersection, every obscure point of architectural interest, in a harmonious mental braid of memory and reconstruction, assembling every detail into a whole and holding it, in its entirety, in his mind. Step by step the great mental construction was made, expanding until it was bordered by the Hudson River to the west and the Harlem River to the east, Battery Park in the south and Spuyten Duyvil in the north. For a long, long moment he held the entire island in his head, its every feature existing simultaneously with every other in his mental reconstruction. And then—after assuring himself of its perfection—he vaporized it in a one-second flick of the mind. Vanished. Extinguished. Nothing remained but darkness.

  Now, in his mind, he opened his eyes again. Five hours had passed. And Helen Esterhazy Pendergast was sitting in the window seat across from him. Of all the rooms in the Dakota apartment, this had been Helen’s favorite. She had not been especially fond of New York, and this tiny den—cozy with books and the smell of polished wood, the view of Central Park spread out before it—had been her particular retreat.

  Of course, Helen was not there in the literal sense; but in every other way she existed: everything in Pendergast’s mind that touched on her, every memory, every tiny detail, was part of that mental construct, so much so that she could be said to have assumed a quasi-autonomous existence.

  Such was the beauty and power of Chongg Ran.

  Helen’s hands were folded in her lap, and she was wearing a dress he well remembered—black satin, with pale coral-colored stitching traced along the low neckline. She was younger—about the age she had been at the time of the hunting accident.

  Accident. The irony of it was that it had been an accident—only not in the way he’d believed these many years.

  “Helen,” he said.

  Her eyes rose to meet his briefly. She smiled and then looked down again. The smile caused him to flinch in pain and grief; and the scene wavered and almost flew apart. He waited until it stabilized, until his heart slowed back down.

  “There is a serial killer loose in the city,” he said. He could hear the quaver in his own voice, along with a formal tone uncharacteristic of his usual exchanges with his wife. “He has killed three times. Each time, he left a message. The second message was Happy Birthday.”

  There was a silence.

  “This second killing took place on my birthday. Because of that—and certain other elements of the murders—I began to suspect they were the work of my brother, Diogenes. This seemed to be confirmed when I compared my DNA with that of the killer and learned that we were, in fact, closely related. Close enough to be brother-to-brother.”

  He stopped, checking to see the impact these words were having on his wife. But she continued to look down at the hands clasped in her lap.

  “But now I’ve had a look at the mtDNA results as well. And they’ve shown me something else. The killer isn’t related to me alone. He’s also related to you.”

  Helen looked up. She either could not, or would not, speak.

  “Do you remember that trip you made to Brazil? It was about a year before we were married, and you were away a long time—almost five months. At the time, you told me you were on a mission for Doctors With Wings. But that was a lie—wasn’t it? The truth was that… that you went to Brazil in order to secretly bear a child. Our child.”

  The words hung in the air. Helen returned his gaze, a stricken look on her face.

  “I think I even know when the child was conceived. It was on that first moonrise we shared—two weeks after we met. Wasn’t it? And now… now you’ve left me to come to terms with the fact that I have not only a son I do not know, a son I’ve never met—but a son who is also a serial killer.”

  He
len dropped her eyes once again.

  “I’ve also seen documents that indicate your family—and, in fact, yourself and your brother, Judson—were involved in eugenics experiments that date back to the Nazi regime. Brazil; John James Audubon; Mengele and Wolfgang Faust; Longitude Pharmaceuticals; the Covenant, Der Bund—it’s a long, ugly story that I’m only beginning to piece together. Judson explained a piece of it to me once, not long before he died. He said: What I’ve become was what I was born to be. It’s what I was born into—and it’s something beyond my control. If you only knew the horror that Helen and I have been subjected to, you’d understand.”

  He paused, swallowed.

  “But the truth is that I don’t understand. Why did you hide so much from me, Helen? Your pregnancy, our child, your family’s past, the horrors Judson spoke of—why didn’t you let me help you? Why did you keep our child apart from me all these years—and in so doing perhaps allow him to become… what he has now become? As you surely knew, those tendencies are a dark strain in my family going back generations. The truth is, you never, ever mentioned him until your own dying words to me: He’s coming.”

  Helen refused to look at him. She was clenching and unclenching the hands that lay in her lap.

  “I’d like to believe you weren’t complicit—or, at least, merely tangentially complicit—in your sister’s death. I’d also like to believe Emma Grolier, as she was known, was already dead, mercifully euthanized, when you learned of the plan. I certainly hope that was the case. It would certainly have made the whole arrangement easier to swallow for you.

  “But why did she have to die for you in the first place? I have been thinking about that for a long time now, and I believe I understand what happened. After learning about the Doane family tragedy, and the cruel way they were used, you must have threatened Charles Slade and Longitude—and by extension Der Bund—with exposure over the Audubon drug. So the decision was made, in turn, to kill you in order to keep you silent. Correct?”