Beyond the stage, in the dim crimson light, was a small audience of similar age. As the chanting grew in intensity, the audience members, too, began to shed their clothes, then gather in groups of two and three, fondling and caressing each other as they watched the ritual.
Pendergast retreated from the door and Coldmoon followed.
“Are those Satanic rites?” Coldmoon asked. He felt sick.
“Something of the sort,” said Pendergast in a disgusted voice. In the reflected reddish glow, he looked disappointed, if not downright crestfallen.
“Isn’t that what you were expecting?” Coldmoon asked. “Looks like the orgy’s starting up any minute.”
“I fear I may have miscalculated.” Pendergast paused. “These people are... amateurs.”
“Amateurs? Looks pretty damn serious to me.”
At this point, the chanting abruptly slackened. Pendergast hurried to the door, glanced through the crack, then turned to Coldmoon. “Quick, over here. She’s coming.”
Pendergast and Coldmoon slipped into a dark closet, then half closed the door. A moment later, the woman with the pot came in, fiddled briefly with the spigot — having some difficulty in the dark — then left the way she had come. Obviously, she had refilled the pot with blood.
A sudden loud pounding sounded on the front door of the church, followed by a voice amplified through a megaphone: “FBI, executing a search warrant! Open up! This is the FBI!”
“Right on time,” said Pendergast grimly.
A second later came the boom of a ram, then another, mingled with the screams and surprised cries of the participants and their audience. The main doors flew open, splintering on their hinges, and agents poured in.
“FBI!” yelled the man with the megaphone, whose voice Coldmoon recognized as Agent Carracci’s. “Everyone on the ground! On the fucking ground! Do it now! Show your hands!”
At this, Pendergast opened the door wide and strode out through the sacristy, Coldmoon following. The naked group was hastily obeying, getting down on the floor amid slicks of blood. Coldmoon watched as the agents fanned out, weapons drawn, making sure everyone was unarmed and cooperating.
“Clear!” somebody yelled.
It did not take long for the agents to complete their search. Pendergast directed them into the kitchen, where they hefted the jug of blood and confiscated it, along with other things — masks, costumes, hoods, chalices, dildos, statuettes, and additional flotsam ridiculous or uncouth. Pendergast watched, lips pursed with dissatisfaction.
No one was arrested. When the search was concluded, the FBI allowed everyone back on their feet, and — as the would-be Dionysians stood in a line, shamed, their fleshy bodies illuminated by numerous flashlights — took down names one at a time. For a bunch of Satanists, Coldmoon thought, the audience was surprisingly docile, some blubbering with fear, others pleading with the agents not to make their names public. Among the group was Dr. Cobb, who, alone among the rest, took it upon himself to argue that this was a bona fide religious service, that their religious freedom had been trampled upon, and that he would be calling his lawyer first thing in the morning. His complaints were studiously ignored. Coldmoon reflected that he’d preferred the first meeting with Cobb, when the museum director had been fully clothed.
And then Carracci said tersely: “All right. Get the fuck out of here.” In a mad rush of swaying breasts and bobbing privates, the group broke apart, ran to various corners of the church, grabbed their clothes, then headed for their cars and exited the parking lot, tires screeching. After briefly conferring with Carracci, Pendergast went out the back with Coldmoon.
“Too bad we can’t hold them,” said Coldmoon.
“It would be a waste of time.”
“What are you talking about? You don’t think the case is solved?”
“I think anything but,” said Pendergast. His face looked drawn. “I fear I have made a serious miscalculation.”
“Miscalculation? You saw the tattoos; you made the connection; you found the church. It looks to me like pretty fast footwork, not miscalculation.”
“All too fast. I did not follow my own advice; I started thinking too early.”
Coldmoon thought this was ridiculous. “Come on. You saw all that blood.”
“I’d wager a great deal that it’s animal blood. But more to the point: when I saw that lot full of expensive cars, and those ridiculous rites, I understood the psychological dynamic was wrong. These are dilletantes, playing at Satanism. They are guilty of animal cruelty, perhaps, but not murder. The killer or killers we are seeking are far more insidious than these... these pathetic dabblers in the occult.”
Coldmoon shook his head. The case had gone from being open, to closed, to open again, so fast he felt almost dizzy.
“Let this be a lesson to you, my friend, on the dangers of drawing conclusions too early,” Pendergast told him. “As H. L. Mencken once said, ‘There is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.’ This was that neat, plausible, and wrong solution.”
“If you say so. What now?”
“We must look elsewhere for answers. Specifically, Ellerby.”
19
Pendergast descended the worn steps, pausing at the bottom to look around. He felt deeply chagrined at the previous evening’s raid and his central role in it, but for the time being he put such thoughts aside.
The basement of the Chandler House had a distinctive smell — the smell of time, for want of a better word — that he found most interesting: wet stone, dust, and the distant odor of saltpeter, no doubt from the days when the building had functioned as a munitions factory, with a whiff of burnt rubber. Here they had processed gunpowder, lead, and brass into .54-caliber ringtail bullets for the Sharps rifles favored by Confederate cavalry. How stimulating, he thought, to have the past and the present mingling here in one’s senses, like a fugue.
He also noted an additional odor: the crushed-walnut scent unique to the toxin prestrycurarine. He paused. It would seem the hotel was troubled with rat infestations. It would also seem they used a backward exterminator, because that particular rodenticide had been deemed ineffective years ago; rats, lacking the physical capacity to vomit, were by nature highly suspicious of unfamiliar odors. No matter; rats in a basement were not his concern.
The entire space exuded a feeling of desuetude and abandonment. He could see bare lightbulbs hanging from cords, stretching out into the distance, leaving gloom on either side. Even from his position at the foot of the steps, he noticed that the basement was formed out of a layering of building cycles, the stone floor rising or falling to match the periods of additional excavation. In the darker corners, away from the lights, rooms were faintly visible: pantries, a disused kitchen, what looked like a scullery. One section far to the rear was roped off with yellow tape and an official-looking sign that read STRUCTURALLY UNSOUND.
The antiquarian in him would have enjoyed exploring this underground fastness further, but he was here for a specific purpose: to investigate the room hard by the basement stairs that had been Ellerby’s special office.
The room was marked by a scuffed wooden door with a pane of frosted glass set into it. Pendergast tried it, found it locked. He took out his set of lock-picking tools and, with a quick movement of his nimble fingers, the door opened noiselessly.
The room was small and boxy. One of the fluorescent lights affixed to the ceiling had a malfunctioning baffle. Three computer monitors arrayed along one wall were dark, but he could see the computers connected to them were still running, albeit asleep. They were placed upon a long table, a printer at one end. A shorter table was pushed against the opposite wall, its stacks of paper, arranged into folders of various colors. This was where the late Patrick Ellerby had moonlighted as a stock trader.