As he looked, he noted a small edge of rust creeping around the muzzle rim.
He strode to the door of the parlor and called down the stairs. "Maurice? Would you kindly bring me the key to the gun cabinet?"
After a long moment, Maurice appeared in the hall. "Yes, sir." He turned, disappearing once again. Moments later, he slowly mounted the groaning stairs, an iron key gripped in his veined hand. He creaked past Pendergast and stopped before the gun case, inserted the key, and turned it.
"There you are, sir." His face remained impassive, but Pendergast was glad to sense in Maurice a feeling of pride: for having the key at his fingertips, for simply being of service.
"Thank you, Maurice."
A nod and the manservant was gone.
Pendergast reached inside the case and--slowly, slowly--grasped the cold metal of the double barrel. His fingers tingled at the mere touch of her weapon. For some reason his heart was accelerating--the lingering effects of the nightmare, no doubt. He brought it out and placed it on the refectory table in the middle of the room. From a drawer below the cabinet he removed the gun-cleaning paraphernalia, arranging it beside the rifle. He wiped his hands, picked up the gun, and broke open the action, peering down both barrels.
He was faintly surprised: the right barrel was badly fouled; the left one clean. He laid the gun down, thinking. Again he walked to the top of the stairs.
"Maurice?"
The servant appeared once more. "Yes, sir?"
"Do you know if anyone has fired the Krieghoff since... my wife's death?"
"It was your explicit request, sir, that no one be allowed to handle it. I've kept the key myself. No one has even been near the case."
"Thank you, Maurice."
"You're quite welcome, sir."
Pendergast went back into the parlor, this time shutting the doors. From a writing desk he extracted an old sheet of stationery, which he flipped over and laid on the table. Then he inserted a brush into the right barrel, pushed out some of the fouling onto the paper, and examined it: bits and flakes of some burned, papery substance. Reaching into his suit pocket, he pulled out the loupe he always carried, fixed it to his eye, and examined the bits more intently. There was no doubt: they were the scorched, carbonized fragments of wadding.
But the .500/.416 NE cartridge had no wadding: just the bullet, the casing, and the propellant. Such a cartridge, even a defective one, would never leave this kind of fouling behind.
He examined the left barrel, finding it clean and well oiled. With the cleaning brush he pushed a rag through. There was no fouling at all.
Pendergast straightened up, his mind suddenly in furious thought. The last time the gun had been fired had been on that terrible day. He forced himself to think back. This was something he had avoided--while awake--at all costs. But once he began to remember, it wasn't hard to recall the details: every moment of that hunt was seared forever into his memory.
She had fired the gun only once. The Krieghoff had two triggers, one behind the other. The front trigger fired the right barrel, and that was the trigger normally pulled first. It was the one she pulled. And that shot had fouled the right barrel.
With that single shot, she missed the Red Lion. He'd always chalked it up to bush deflection, or perhaps extreme agitation.
But Helen wasn't one to display agitation, even under the most extreme of circumstances. She rarely missed. And she hadn't missed that last time, either... or wouldn't have missed, if the right barrel had been loaded with a bullet.
Except that it wasn'tloaded with a bullet: it was loaded with a blank.
For a blank to generate a similar sound and recoil, it would have to have a large, tightly wadded plug, which would foul the barrel exactly as he'd observed.
Had Pendergast been a man of lesser control, the hinges of his sanity might have weakened under the emotional intensity of his thoughts. She had loaded the gun with .500/.416 NE soft-points at the camp that morning, just before heading into the bush after the lion. He knew that for a fact: he had watched her. And he knew they were live rounds, not blanks--nobody, especially not Helen, would mistake a wadded blank for a two-ounce round. He himself clearly recalled the blunt heads of the soft-points as she dunked them into the barrels.
Between the time she loaded the Krieghoff with soft-points and the time she fired, someone had removed her unfired cartridges and replaced them with blanks. And then, after the hunt, someone had removed the two blanks--one fired, one not--to cover up what they had done. Only they made a small mistake: they did not clean the fired barrel, leaving the incriminating fouling.
Pendergast sat back in the chair. One hand--trembling ever so slightly--rose to his mouth.
Helen Pendergast's death had not been a tragic accident. It had been murder.
6
New York City
FOUR AM, SATURDAY. LIEUTENANT VINCENT D'Agosta pushed through the crowd, ducked under the crime-scene tape, and walked over to where the body lay sprawled across the sidewalk outside one of the countless identical Indian restaurants on East 6th Street. A large pool of blood had collected beneath it, reflecting the red and purple neon light in the restaurant's grimy window with surreal splendor.
The perp had been shot at least half a dozen times and he was dead. Very dead. He lay crumpled on his side, one arm thrown wide, his gun twenty feet away. A crime-scene investigator was laying a tape measure, measuring the distance from the open hand to the gun.
The corpse was a scrawny Caucasian, thirtysomething, with thinning hair. He looked like a broken stick, his legs crooked, one knee hitched up to his chest, the other extended out and back, the arms flung wide. The two cops who had done the shooting, a beefy black guy and a wiry Hispanic, were off to one side, talking with Internal Affairs.
D'Agosta went over, nodded to the Internal Affairs officer, and clasped the hands of the cops. They felt sweaty, nervous.
It's damn hard, D'Agosta thought, to have killed someone. You never really get over it.
"Lieutenant," said one of the cops in a rush, anxious to explain yet again to a fresh ear, "the guy had just robbed the restaurant at gunpoint and was running down the street. We identified ourselves, showed our badges, and that's when he opened on us, motherfucker just emptied his gun, firing while he ran, there were civilians on the street and we had no choice, we hadto take him down. No choice, man, no choice--"
D'Agosta grasped the man's shoulder, gave it a friendly squeeze as he glanced at his nameplate. "Ocampo, don't sweat it. You did what you had to do. The investigation will show that."
"I mean, he just opened up like there was no tomorrow--"
"For him there won't be." D'Agosta walked aside with the Internal Affairs investigator. "Any problems?"
"I doubt it, sir. These days, of course, there's always a hearing. But this is about as clear-cut as they come." He slapped his notebook shut.