They stood looking at each other for a moment, and then D’Agosta pulled off a glove and stuck out his hand. Pendergast slipped off his own black leather gloves and they shook, D’Agosta gripping his arm. The man’s hand was as cool as a piece of marble, but he pulled back his hood and exposed his pale face, white-blond hair slicked back, silver eyes unnaturally bright in the dim light.
“You say you have to be here?” D’Agosta asked. “You on assignment?”
“For my sins, yes. I’m afraid my stock in the Bureau has declined rather sharply for the moment. I am — what is that colorful term of yours? — temporarily in shit’s creek.”
“Up shit creek? Or do you mean you’re in deep shit?”
“That’s it. Deep shit. Without the paddle.”
D’Agosta shook his head. “Why are the feds involved in this?”
“A superior of mine, Executive Associate Director Longstreet, hypothesizes the body may have been brought here from New Jersey. Crossing state lines. He thinks organized crime could be involved.”
“Organized crime? We haven’t even collected the evidence. New Jersey? What’s this bullshit?”
“Yes, Vincent, I’m afraid it’s all fantasy. And for one purpose: I am being taught a lesson. But now I feel rather like Br’er Rabbit being thrown into the briar patch, because I have found you here, in charge. Just like when we first met, back at the Natural History Museum.”
D’Agosta grunted. While he was glad to see Pendergast, he was not at all glad the FBI was involved. And despite the uncharacteristically light banter — which felt forced — Pendergast didn’t look good…not at all. He was thin, almost skeletal, and his face was hollow, dark circles under his eyes.
“I realize this is not a welcome development,” Pendergast said. “I shall do my utmost to keep out of your way.”
“No problem, you know how it is with the NYPD and the FBI. Let me bring you over to the crime scene and introduce you around. You want to examine it yourself?”
“When the EGT is finished, I’d be delighted.”
Delighted. He didn’t sound delighted. He’d be even less so when he saw the three-day-old body without a head.
“Ingress and egress?” Pendergast asked as they walked back.
“Seems pretty evident. The guy had a key to the back gate, drove in, dumped the body, left.”
They arrived back at the area before the open garage and entered the glare of the light. The EGT was almost finished, packing up their stuff.
“Where did all the leaves come from?” Pendergast asked, without much interest.
“We think the body was hidden in the bed of a pickup truck under a big pile of leaves, tied down beneath a tarp. The tarp was left in a corner, leaves and body dumped against the back wall. We’re working on interviewing the neighbors, trying to determine if anyone saw a truck or car in here. No luck so far. There’s a lot of traffic in this area, day and night.”
D’Agosta introduced Special Agent Pendergast to his detectives and Caruso, none of whom made much effort to hide their displeasure at the arrival of the FBI. Pendergast’s appearance didn’t help any, looking like he’d just returned from an Antarctic expedition.
“Okay, clear,” said Caruso, not even looking at Pendergast.
D’Agosta followed Pendergast into the garage as he strolled over to the body. The leaves had been swept away and the body lay on its back, a very prominent exit wound between the collarbones, caused no doubt by an expanding, high-powered round. The heart was obliterated; death instantaneous. Even after years of investigating murders, D’Agosta was not so hardened as to find this comforting — little comfort of any kind could be found in the death of so young a person.
He stepped back to let Pendergast do his thing, but he was surprised to see the agent not going through his usual rigmarole, with the test tubes and tweezers and loupes appearing out of nowhere and interminable fussing around. Instead, Pendergast merely walked around the body, almost listlessly, examining it from different angles, cocking his long pale head. Two times around the body, then three. By the fourth round, he didn’t even try to conceal a look of boredom.
He came back up to D’Agosta.
“Anything?” D’Agosta asked.
“Vincent, this is truly punishment. Save for the beheading itself, I don’t see anything that would mark this homicide as in the slightest degree interesting.”
They stood side by side, gazing at the corpse. And then D’Agosta heard a slight intake of breath. Pendergast suddenly knelt; the loupe finally made an appearance; and he bent over to examine the concrete floor about two feet from the corpse.
“What is it?”
The special agent didn’t answer, scrutinizing the dirty patch of cement as studiously as if it were the Mona Lisa’s smile. Now he moved to the corpse itself and took out a pair of tweezers. Bending over the severed neck, his face less than an inch from the wound, he maneuvered his tweezers under the loupe, dug them into the neck — D’Agosta almost had to turn away — and stretched out what looked like a rubber band but was obviously a large vein. He snipped off a short piece and dropped it in a test tube, dug around some more, pulled out another vein, snipped and stored it, as well. And then he spent another several minutes examining the massive wound, the tweezers and test tubes in almost constant employment.
Finally he straightened up. The bored, distant look had faded somewhat.
“What?”
“Vincent, it appears we have an authentic problem on our hands.”
“Which is?”
“The head was severed from the body right here.” He pointed downward. “You see that tiny nick in the floor?”
“There are a lot of nicks in the floor.”
“Yes, but that one has a small fragment of tissue in it. Our killer took great pains in severing the head without leaving any sign, but it is difficult work and he slipped at one point and made that tiny nick.”
“So where’s the blood? I mean, if the head was cut off here, there’d be at least some blood.”
“Ah! There was no blood because the head was cut off many, many hours or perhaps even days after the victim was shot. She had already bled out elsewhere. Look at that wound!”
“After? How long after?”
“Judging from the retraction of those veins in the neck, I should say at least twenty-four hours.”
“You mean the killer came back and cut off the head twenty-four hours later?”
“Possibly. Or else we are dealing with two individuals — who may or may not be connected.”
“Two perps? What do you mean?”
“The first individual, who killed and dumped her; and the second…who found her and took her head.”
3
Lieutenant D’Agosta paused at the front door of the mansion at 891 Riverside Drive. Unlike the buildings surrounding it, which were gaily hung with Christmas lights, the Pendergast mansion, although in fine shape given its age, was dark and seemingly abandoned. A weak winter sun struggled through a thin cloud cover, casting a watery morning light over the Hudson River, beyond the screen of trees along the West Side Highway. It was a cold, depressing winter’s day.
With a deep breath he walked under the porte cochere, stepped up to the front door, and knocked. The door was opened with surprising speed by Proctor, Pendergast’s mysterious chauffeur and general factotum. D’Agosta was a bit taken aback by how thin Proctor seemed to have grown since the last time he’d seen him: normally he was a robust, even massive, presence. But his face was as expressionless as usual, and his dress — a Lacoste shirt and dark slacks — characteristically casual for a man supposedly in service.