As he closed the door and walked into the room, Pendergast reminded himself that moonlighting was misleading: from what the staff had said, Ellerby would drift down here at random times of the day or night. Which was odd, because most traders worked by the clock. .5
Pendergast had already examined Ellerby’s rooms, located on the third floor of the hotel. There had been nothing unusual, incriminating, or particularly interesting; the books, magazines, clothing, and electronics were typical of the life of a middle-aged bachelor. Based on what Constance had told him, Pendergast had hoped to uncover something that might shed light on the nature of Ellerby’s relationship with the hotel’s ancient and reclusive proprietress — who had refused to speak to anyone, including the police — but he had found nothing.
As he scanned the desk, two items caught his eye. One was a set of purchase papers for an F-250 truck, loaded, that had cost just over $70,000, and the other was the receipt for a self-winding Vacheron Constantin watch from a Miami boutique, with a price tag of $30,000.
While Pendergast did not much care for Ellerby’s choice of vehicle, he certainly approved of his taste in timepieces.
Both purchases had been made within the last month. Pendergast briefly conjured up the image of somebody wearing that peerless example of haute horlogerie... while driving a pickup. It was ridiculous — but then, his mother had always told him people in Savannah had their own peculiar ways. He had witnessed a few of those ways himself, firsthand, the night before. He riffled through the colored folders, then placed them back on the worktable.
Constance had taken a peculiar interest in the proprietress, Miss Frost, and had gathered a store of gossip about her. Two days before Ellerby’s death, she had come down here, seeming not at all a frail old recluse... not to mention later that evening when they’d had a ferocious argument in her rooms. Odd indeed.
He turned toward the computers. Pendergast surveyed the long table for a moment, and then he pulled a penlight out of his jacket pocket, knelt, and examined the closest CPU, feeling its flank with the backs of his knuckles. The whining noise of the fan and the heavy accumulation of dust in its rear grill indicated these machines were turned off rarely, if at all.
He rose and walked past each computer in turn, wriggling their mice to wake them up. A password field popped up on one of the screens — not surprising, given the financial transactions it presumably controlled. The password provided access to all three machines.
These computers would be dealt with by the FBI’s digital forensics lab. He glanced at them for a few seconds before his attention turned to a thick, well-scuffed ledger book covered in green cloth, sitting on the desk before the three monitors. He picked it up and began paging through it. It appeared to be a list of transactions, all handwritten in a fanatically neat hand, with each entry containing a date, a cash amount, and a variety of abbreviations and symbols. It went back several years, and had obviously been meticulously kept. With any luck, it would prove to be Ellerby’s magnum opus: the logbook that chronicled all his doings in the market. It seemed odd he didn’t have a safe to put all these papers in, but then again, no one had any interest in his doings until after he was murdered. But it did strike Pendergast as significant that there was no air of secrecy, illicit trading, or deception here. Even the lock on the door was of the most ordinary nature.
Pendergast flipped through the ledger until he reached the final entries. The most recent had been made eight days before.
Eight days. Two days before Ellerby died.
Pendergast ran through the dozen-odd pages leading up to these final entries. A cursory scan indicated that the hotel manager had been actively trading every day of the week, including weekends. There appeared to be no missed days, gaps, or lacunae of any sort... until the trades abruptly ended. He looked at the final entries once again, but there was nothing about them that indicated anything was amiss. The lines of text simply stopped — and forty-eight hours later, Ellerby was dead.
Putting down the ledger and taking out his penlight, Pendergast got on his hands and knees and did a painstaking search of the entire floor of the room. This was followed by the undersides of the desks, the chairs, the walls, the single filing cabinet. He took the occasional sample, but he could see nothing of special interest: no traces of blood, no signs of violence or a struggle. It looked as if Ellerby had last come down here on one of his breaks, done some work, then walked out, closing the door behind him... and gone to meet his death.
Pendergast walked toward the door, opened it, snapped off the light, and stepped into the basement hallway. As he closed the door, his gaze once more turned toward the array of bare bulbs, leading off tantalizingly into the darkness. Then he turned away and began ascending the stairs, pulling out his phone as he did so to arrange for the FBI’s Evidence Response Team to come and take away all traces of Patrick Ellerby’s lucrative hobby.
20
As they were finishing breakfast the morning after the raid, Pendergast’s cell phone rang. While he answered it, Coldmoon stirred his coffee moodily and took a sip. It was terrible, of course. He noticed that Pendergast was listening for a long time to someone on the other end of the line, without saying a word, and wondered idly who it was. Constance — whose breakfast had consisted only of tea — was reading the latest issue of The Lancet. This seemed like odd breakfast reading material, but nothing Constance did would surprise Coldmoon anymore.
Pendergast finally said, simply, “Yes,” and hung up.
“Who was that?” Coldmoon asked.
“Our old friend, Squire Pickett. The senator has asked him to ask us to participate in a press conference.”
“Press conference? Good God, why?”
Pendergast smiled wanly. “To discuss the Savannah Vampire, of course.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“The senator is a canny fellow,” Pendergast said. “He doesn’t want this blowing up in his face, and so he’s getting in front of the situation by leveraging his relationship with Pickett. Rumors are running rampant about a vampire, and he wants to put some solid information in front of the public to squelch speculation. Commander Delaplane will be running the conference. The mayor will be there, and we’ll be backing them up.”
“But we don’t have solid information to give them,” said Coldmoon. “Except for the raid on the church of crazy naked blood-drinking Satanists, who have all lawyered up by now.”
“True. But we have enough to fashion a small bone from, which we can toss them.”
Coldmoon grunted. “And when is this conference taking place?”
“Two hours.”
Coldmoon nearly choked on his coffee. “Two hours?”
“As I said, the senator wants to get in front of this.”
Constance peeped over the top of her journal as the two men rose. “In which case, a small bone might not be enough,” she said. “You should perhaps consider a tibia. Or even better, a femur.”
Coldmoon shot her a glance, but her face was already hidden once again behind the periodical.
The press conference took place in the parking lot behind the police station, where a temporary stage had been set up and the television news vans with their satellite dishes had room to park. It was obviously a hasty improvisation, but Coldmoon was impressed that Delaplane had been able to put even this together so quickly. A uniformed officer moved some cones aside to let them pass and waved them on to a restricted parking area. Pendergast took out his cell phone once again and dialed.