Verses for the Dead

by Douglas Preston

  But it was a good question: why ask for a hair dryer to use the next morning and then go hang yourself? Spontaneous suicides, Fauchet knew from medical school, almost always involved drugs or alcohol. But her toxicology report was clean.

  There was a file of the maid’s interview, just half a sheet. She read through it and found it a hysterical, babbling mess.

  Fauchet sat back, lips pursed. If only the police officer had thought to copy the motel register listing the car makes and license plates, she would know whether the same Mercury Tracer with the Florida plates had been at that motel. She wondered if the motel still existed; a quick Google check indicated it was gone.

  She went back through the folders for the other three murders, which still sat on a corner of her desk: Baxter, Flayley, Adler. In no case was there a police officer as thorough as in Bethesda; there were no lists of car models or license plates. Then again, why should there be? All three murders were thought to be suicides.

  But she still had the Florida plate number from the motel where Winters was killed. Okay, now it was time to call Pendergast. He could run that plate in ten seconds.

  She dialed his number and was immediately directed to voice mail. She tried Coldmoon and the same thing happened. She then dialed the Miami FBI number and, after a lot of being bounced around, learned that the precise location of Agents Pendergast and Coldmoon was unknown, but it was believed they were out in the field.

  She set down her phone. She had a brother, Morris, with the Florida Highway Patrol out of Jacksonville. Maybe he could see whom the plate belonged to. She picked up the phone and dialed his number.

  “Hello, Sis,” came the deep voice.

  Fauchet exhaled with relief. She explained what she wanted and why. There was a long silence, and then Morris said: “Sis? Let those FBI guys deal with it.”

  “Listen, Morris—”

  “I know you were really into Harriet the Spy as a kid. But you’re an M.E., not a detective.”

  She felt crestfallen. “I can’t get hold of the ‘FBI guys.’”

  “Call Miami Homicide, then.”

  She didn’t want them to have the collar; Pendergast was the one who’d put the critical pieces together. “Can’t you just give me a name? There’s a serial killer out there, and he might kill again at any moment.”

  “All the more reason you should leave this to the professionals.” A long sigh. “I love you, Sis, but sorry. They flag those kinds of checks these days—you wouldn’t want me to get fired, right?”

  She didn’t answer, waiting him out.

  “You know,” he said finally, almost reluctantly, “under the Florida open government act, everyone now has access to a section of the MVD database. You can’t run a plate, but you can check on citations, accidents, DUI, fraud, criminal stuff.”

  Fauchet thanked him and said goodbye. Then she put down the phone and ruminated.

  The killings ceased after Ithaca. Pendergast had speculated that the murders might have stopped because the killer, or killers, died. And Coldmoon had taken the speculation further, wondering if maybe the apprentice had killed the master. That was possible, of course. It was also just as possible something else happened: some sort of accident—like a car accident—ended the killing spree.

  Okay. It was a long shot, but worth a try—to see if the license plate from the Bethesda motel had been involved in an accident in the weeks following the Ithaca murder.

  She logged into the morgue’s computer system and moused her way through the labyrinth of governmental menus until she reached the MVD. A minute of poking around brought her to a database search page, where she typed in the license plate number and the date parameters of her query.

  Bingo.

  A 1997 Mercury Tracer wagon, Florida license plate JW24-99X, was involved in a fatal accident on I-81 south of Scranton, Pennsylvania, in March 2007…just one week after the Ithaca killing.

  Fauchet quickly searched the internet and brought up a local newspaper article about the accident. It was brief: the vehicle had gone off the highway, hit a guardrail, and rolled. The car’s registered owner, a man named John Bluth Vance, had been killed in the resulting crush of metal. His fourteen-year-old son, Ronald, had been taken to the hospital with serious injuries. The cause of the accident was “under investigation.”

  And that was it. There were no subsequent articles about Vance’s death, the accident, or his son’s movements. It was as if Ronald Vance simply vanished—that is, if the accident hadn’t ultimately killed him.

  Fauchet felt her heart pounding. This could be it. Admittedly, the evidence was thin—she’d only matched the car to the site of one killing—but the date and place of the accident matched with the sudden cessation of homicides…as outlined by Pendergast.

  The killings stopped after Ithaca because of the fatal accident—which ended the brutal road trip. That wasn’t all. They—a father-and-son team—had been traveling under assumed names. They drove a car with Florida plates. And they had stayed at the same motel as Laurie Winters on the night she was killed.

  The son, Ronald Vance—alias Travis Lehigh—would now be twenty-four, maybe twenty-five. If she was right, this fourteen-year-old boy had been forced to participate in a series of horrific murders that—as Pendergast hypothesized—culminated in his committing the final murder at Ithaca himself, shortly before his father was killed in a car accident.

  On a hunch, she did a meta-search of the medical databases at her disposal. Nothing showed up on a sweep of the Miami area, or for the state of Florida, either. But when she did a nationwide search, she learned that a Ronald Vance, aged twenty-four, had been released from the King of Prussia Subacute Care Center in September of last year. Digging deeper, she found Vance had been transferred to the center from Powder Valley State Hospital outside of Allentown, nine months before.

  Powder Valley Hospital, she quickly discovered, specialized in long-term rehabilitation of neurologic trauma. And like King of Prussia, it wasn’t far from Scranton. If Ronald Vance had been admitted to Powder Valley as a minor, the records would be sealed. That’s why she could only see the recent transfer and release dates.

  No wonder the guy was so utterly messed up: he’d been dragged on a monstrous road trip by his father, then gravely injured in a car accident. And that accident resulted in some kind of head injury that took him a decade to recover from. Assuming he recovered…what if he’d developed a psychosis that, to those caring for him, appeared to present itself as trauma instead?

  It all made sense. Ronald Vance was Brokenhearts. He’d been released from the subacute care center less than seven months ago—half a year before the new murders started up. Now he was trying to atone for those previous murders—by killing more people! There was a motive here, even if it was insane.

  She took a deep breath. Admittedly, there was more due diligence to be done. But this felt right.

  This felt huge.

  Fauchet turned to a people-search app on her phone and typed in “Ronald Vance, Miami.” It took her less than ten seconds to get a hit.

  Name:

  Ronald C. Vance

  Age:

  24

  Address:

  203 Tarpon Court

  Golden Glades, FL 33169

  Holy shit: there it was. So he had come home!

  Golden Glades—where was that again? She pulled up her keyboard and typed in the address, and a map of the endless Miami sprawl appeared on her screen. There: abutting North Miami Beach, only a few miles from Pendergast’s safe house. And not too far from the site where the first heart was left.

  A half-hour drive. Maybe less, if the traffic cooperated.

  Once again she tried to call Pendergast and Coldmoon, but the calls still went straight to voice mail.

  She went over the train of logic again, slowly. Was it actually possible she was right? Could Ronald Vance be Mister Brokenhearts—and could he really be living just a short drive away?

  She stared at the s
creen and the map it displayed, with the little red arrow blinking just above the street named Tarpon Court.

  42

  UP CLOSE, THE airboat was even smaller than it had looked from a distance. The bow swept upward, like a World War II landing craft. There were two seats, one behind the other, both on stilts. The big prop at the rear was attached to a ninety-horsepower Lycoming engine and enclosed in a wire cage. Coldmoon rapped on the gas tank: full.

  Pendergast turned to him. “Have you ever driven one of these?”

  “No,” said Coldmoon.

  “In that case, no time like the present. Care to take the helm?”

  “I’d rather not. I, um, don’t like water.”

  He felt Pendergast’s amused gaze on him. “I’m not overfond of the substance myself, at least in large, stagnant, miasmic bodies. But if you don’t mind, I’d prefer to function as guide and lookout.”

  “Let me guess. If I object again, you’ll remind me whose idea it was to interview John B. Vance.” Coldmoon got into the boat and, muttering to himself in Lakota, stepped up to the wheel, then cast an eye over the helm. Everything looked pretty simple: a key, a choke, and a combined throttle and gearshift with neutral, forward, and reverse. And there was a little stopcock on what was obviously the fuel line. He sat down in the front seat, opened the stopcock, set the throttle to neutral, pulled out the choke, and turned the key. The engine fired up almost immediately.

  “Ready to cast off?” asked Pendergast.

  “Do I have a choice?”

  Pendergast untied the boat, climbed aboard, and gave them a push away from the dock with a wing-tip shoe.

  When Coldmoon eased the throttle forward, the propeller engaged with a whir of wind, and the flat-bottomed boat surged forward. Coldmoon cautiously steered it into the main channel. Pendergast, meanwhile, had reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a map, folded into a remarkably small size. No wonder he wanted to be guide, Coldmoon thought, wondering whether Pendergast had purchased his seemingly bottomless suit jacket from a magician’s supply store.

  “Canepatch is almost exactly three miles to the southwest of us,” he said.

  Coldmoon pulled out his phone to check the GPS. “Zero bars. Figures.”

  “That is why we have this.” Pendergast opened the map with a whip-like motion, and it extended to an alarming size. “Set a course for two hundred ten degrees.”

  “How the hell do I do that? I’ve never driven a boat before. My preferred mode of travel is a horse, and they aren’t usually equipped with GPS.”

  Pendergast pointed at a small compass, set into a bulb on the helm. “Turn the boat until it is pointing toward two ten. Then go straight.”

  “I knew that.” He steered the boat around until it was pointing in the right direction. There were many channels among the cypresses, and the direction they headed was fairly open.

  “What is our speed?” Pendergast asked.

  “Um, eight miles per hour.”

  “Barring any obstructions or delays, we should reach Canepatch in twenty minutes.”

  The water was smooth, and the movement of the boat produced a refreshing breeze. It was loud as hell, though—even louder than the Shelby. Weaving among the big trees, Coldmoon tried to keep the boat headed in the direction indicated by the compass. Once in a while they passed a hummock of mud, where there was invariably an alligator or two. Another time, he was sure he saw a snake winding through the water.

  They continued on through the mangroves, the noise of the engine making conversation all but impossible. Strange trees came together overhead in an exotic canopy that threw the bayou into semi-darkness. Coldmoon found it impossible to imagine anyone would live out here. In fact, the farther they went, the more certain he felt that nobody did. The rented airboat must be for fishermen or the like. The old guy had either died or returned to civilization—who could live out here for a decade without going crazy?

  “And here we are,” said Pendergast. Ahead, in the gloomy shade, Coldmoon could see a dock sticking into the water. Beyond, solid land rose up, and the cypress trees gave way to a forest of oaks above a thick carpet of ferns.

  As Coldmoon slowed alongside the dock, he could see, looming through the trees, a large old wooden house on a rise, with a wraparound veranda. It was remarkably shabby, and yet hinted at current habitation. Coldmoon wasn’t sure why he believed this: there was no hum of a generator, no curl of smoke from a chimney, no satellite mini-dish on the roof of the structure. From the look of things, it might be squatters.

  He clumsily brought the boat in, bumping hard against the dock. Pendergast jumped out and tied it to a post as Coldmoon killed the engine.

  “So much for the element of surprise,” Coldmoon said, jerking a thumb toward the huge propellers slowing in the cage behind them.

  Pendergast glanced at Coldmoon. “I would not care to surprise the kind of person who chose to live out here.”

  Coldmoon patted his jacket where his sidearm was. “As in, some crazy old geezer who’d shoot first and ask questions afterward?”

  “Precisely.”

  “I suppose that’s why you’ll ask me to go first.”

  They stood on the dock, peering at the house. A narrow, sandy trail led from the small clearing, through ferns, across a wooden bridge, and up the hill. There was a makeshift sign on the bridge he couldn’t read.

  Pendergast cupped his hands. “Halloo!”

  Silence.

  “There’s no boat at the dock,” said Coldmoon. “Maybe no one’s home.”

  “Halloo!” Pendergast called again. “John Vance?”

  A faint, unintelligible voice filtered back down. Coldmoon squinted up at the house again, but nobody was visible.

  “Let’s go.” They advanced along the trail and approached the bridge, where the crudely lettered sign read:

  DANGER!!

  DO NOT PROCEED!

  Pendergast paused to call out again. “FBI!” he said. “We’d like to come up and ask a few questions!”

  The voice responded: high-pitched and urgent, still unintelligible.

  Coldmoon took another look at the sign. The trail forked here, one path leading over the bridge—which indeed looked rotting and dangerous—and the other winding its way around through the ferns.

  Another call from above.

  “Was that a cry for help?” Coldmoon asked.

  “It sounded like it.”

  “Mr. Vance?” Coldmoon shouted. “Do you need help?” He turned away from the bridge and walked down the sandy path.

  “Thank God,” came a weak voice. “Help me—cut myself with a chain saw!”

  The voice seemed to be coming from the house, but it was hard to pinpoint with all the trees. Coldmoon squinted into the dim tangle of vegetation. “Shit, I see him! A white-haired guy, lying on the veranda!”

  “Please help!” came the voice, already growing weaker. “Help!”

  “Jesus.” Coldmoon began walking faster down the path.

  “Hold on,” said Pendergast, reaching for him.

  “Hurry, I’m bleeding to death!”

  Coldmoon shrugged off Pendergast’s hand and broke into a jog.

  “Wait!” Pendergast cried. “We don’t know—”

  But he never finished his sentence, and for Coldmoon it was almost surreal: the way the ferns underfoot simply opened up, the ground fell away, and then they both dropped with surprising speed into a dark chasm.

  43

  THE NEIGHBORHOOD OF Golden Glades was laid out in a grid of ranch houses, surrounded by unkempt lawns and patches of sand. Bedraggled fan palms broke up the monotonous march of homes. The streets were lined with bins, green for garbage and blue for recycling—evidently, it was trash day.

  Fauchet had decided to drive by the house—that was all—to see if someone was home. There was no harm in that—certainly no danger. Drive by, check it out, then report what she found to Pendergast. Assuming, that is, she could ever reach his cell phone.
<
br />   She turned into Tarpon Court, a curving asphalt road that seemed less prosperous than its neighbors. A few of the houses were boarded up, and some others had colorful graffiti sprayed on the façades. The numbers to her left reeled off: 119, 127, 165, 201. Finally, there it was: 203.

  She slowed the car. The house, of faded yellow stucco with white trim, was set back from the street, and it looked even shabbier than the rest. A half-dead oak blocked the picture window in front, and a rusting lawn mower sat beside it, sprouting weeds. The patchy St. Augustine grass of the front yard was at least a foot tall, matted down by recent rains. The driveway was webbed with cracks, and an old newspaper sat in the baking sun, in front of a garage door with peeling panels of fake wood.

  She cruised by as slowly as she dared, then continued to the end of the block, preparing to circle around. Out of sight of the house, she pulled over briefly to try Pendergast again. Nothing.

  Continuing on around the block, she started working up a story in her head in case she was stopped by a nosy neighbor. I’m looking for my aunt’s house. Reba Jones. She figured the likelihood of anyone questioning her was slim, especially considering she was driving a late-model Lexus. Or perhaps that would look even more suspicious in a neighborhood like this. But whatever the case, the more she thought about it, “looking for my aunt’s house” sounded lame. She needed something better.

  Rounding the last corner, she reentered Tarpon Court. What if Brokenhearts was out stalking another victim? Or what if he’d already fled, leaving a house full of evidence? It was true he had suddenly gone quiet. Her brother’s cautionary words echoed in her mind: Leave this to the professionals. Well, she was a professional. She was a forensic pathologist with a medical degree, and a detective to boot—at least, with human bodies. She’d even figured out Brokenhearts’s identity and address. Anyway, she thought she had.