Now Coldmoon had his hands full. He took another sip from his thermos lid.
“Try the other,” urged Pendergast, kindly.
He tasted — gingerly — the drink Pendergast had given him. He’d never had a Starbucks coffee before — it was too damn expensive. He quickly took another gulp of camp coffee, rinsing the taste from his mouth. Then he poured the espresso into a nearby snow pile and dropped the empty cup into a waste can.
“Too civilized,” he said.
The flagman waved them past and they continued down the hill. Now, directly ahead, lay the bridge. It was not especially impressive — just a pair of green steel arches rising gently toward the sky, the two-lane road between them passing over Fall Creek Gorge and disappearing into the snowy landscape beyond. Coldmoon could hear a faint rushing sound, almost like wind.
“There she is,” Solomon, the security officer, said, waving toward the bridge as proudly as if he’d built it himself.
They paused again and Coldmoon glanced at the man. He found it interesting that Pendergast had requested this Cornell security officer instead of a local cop to act as guide. Perhaps he’d been unimpressed by their reception in Katahdin. Or perhaps it was the fact that Solomon had been with the university two dozen years and had seen three bridge suicides firsthand. In any case, they’d already retrieved the case files from the Ithaca PD. They were now crammed into his satchel with the thermos, ready for examination on the flight home.
He glanced at his watch. Twelve thirty. If they wanted to catch the plane home that evening, they’d better scramble. Even with the earliest Miami-to-Syracuse flight, it had still taken them almost four hours to get here. In addition, Coldmoon had requested they make an hour’s detour on the way back to the airport so he could take care of some personal business, and that further limited their time.
“Let’s take a look,” he said.
They crossed the street, Solomon leading, and went another hundred yards to the pedestrian walkway that spanned the eastern flank of the bridge. The Fall Creek Gorge fell steeply away beneath their feet, its prominences and stratifications fanged by long, menacing icicles. The base of the gorge lay far below, covered with flat boulders punctuated here and there by menhirs sculpted by water. Upstream, the falls were half-frozen, but gray-black cataracts of water, spurting defiantly from its middle passage, turned the rushing sound he’d noticed earlier into a roar. From this distance, it was clear the bridge supports were flanked by decorative iron fencing in the same green and, beyond that, sturdy netting, elaborately rigged, to catch any falling bodies.
“Happened right there,” Solomon said, hitching up his pants and pointing just ahead. “I was doing perimeter tours that night and happened to be very near when the call came in. Got here within two minutes, before even the cops. Didn’t touch anything, of course. It was too late. I knew there was nothing I could do to save her.”
Pendergast pulled a thin folder, which he’d appropriated from the stack of Ithaca PD case files, out of his parka. “Two students found her, I understand. Were they still there when you arrived?”
Solomon nodded. “Yep. Both sitting down. Stunned. Guess I can’t blame them.” He paused. “It was a warm evening for March. Real pleasant. Coming on a new moon, too.”
“You’ve got a good memory,” said Coldmoon.
“I’m not likely to forget that night. Not the way she died.” And Solomon cast them a significant look. “This bridge is pretty famous for the so-called Cornell gorge suicides. Before they put up that netting, more than two dozen people — many of them students — jumped into the gorge. Flayley’s the only person that I know of who hanged herself instead of jumping.”
“What else do you remember?” Pendergast asked.
“She used yellow polypropylene rope. You know, the kind they rig boats and things with. Real strong for its weight. Tied one end around the railing, here—” He pointed. “Of course, the netting wasn’t in place at the time. They put that in a few years later.”
Pendergast opened the folder and paged through it for a moment. “A very common brand of rope, I see. Available in most states.” He glanced up at Solomon. “Was she dead by the time you arrived?”
The man hesitated. “Well, that’s hard to say.”
“What do you mean?”
“She was... well, I saw her limbs twitch for a couple of seconds. Legs, mostly. Don’t think she was still alive, it was just... ” He fell silent again for a moment. “The ones that called it in, they said she was struggling when they first got there. They were too freaked out to do anything. Hadn’t made the rope long enough to break her own neck, I guess.” He licked his lips. “Poor woman. What a way to go.”
“Nobody saw her approach the bridge or jump off?”
“No, sir. Like I said, it was a dark night. Quiet. Little traffic that late.”
“How late?”
“Ten past midnight.”
Pendergast went back to the folder. Coldmoon wondered why he was asking these questions; most, if not all, of the answers would be in the case files. It was almost as if the man had to absorb something from eyewitnesses, or the scene itself — as if he were waiting for the very landscape to murmur its secrets to him.
“And it was determined that Ms. Flayley knew none of the university students or any Ithaca residents,” Pendergast said without looking up.
“She knew nobody. Was just in town for one night. Had an interview at Cornell in the afternoon.”
A so-so interview, too, Coldmoon knew; an expression of interest, but not a definite job offer. That’s what Pickett had said, and the HR department at Cornell backed him up. Agatha Flayley, thirty-one at the time of her suicide. Parents long deceased, no siblings or significant others. Place of residence: Miami. Place of employment: Outpatient Consulting, Mercy Miami Hospital. Interested in a position as patient advocate at Cornell Health. Who the hell moves voluntarily from Miami to upstate New York? Felice Montera, the first woman to have her heart rudely chopped out, had been in the health field, too, he remembered — a nurse at Mount Sinai. Connection?
As Coldmoon mused, Pendergast had walked down the bridge alone, hands in his pockets. At the far end, he abruptly stopped and looked around. Again, Coldmoon was struck with the odd notion that the man was waiting for something. He mentally shrugged it off: whatever it was, it wasn’t any more peculiar than lying motionless on a hotel bed in Maine for a couple of hours. The agent’s eccentric behavior, the “Pendergast mystique” Pickett had warned him of, was something Coldmoon felt impervious to.
Solomon, the security officer, was saying something. Coldmoon tuned in; realized he was talking about snow in the forecast; tuned it out again. Now Pendergast was coming back. Just before he reached them, he faced the bridge once more. For a split second, he seemed to freeze, and Coldmoon was certain he heard the agent draw in a sharp breath. But then he turned back, his expression as inscrutable as ever, and the moment — whatever it was — had passed.
Pendergast nodded to the security officer. “Thank you, Mr. Solomon,” he said, slipping the file back into his parka. “I don’t think we need to take up any more of your time.”
On the way back to the Syracuse airport, Coldmoon — as he’d requested — made a detour for personal reasons. His destination was the federal penitentiary at Jamesville, New York. He kept the visit brief — about half an hour — and the deviation from their planned route took no more than an hour. They made their flight to Miami with time to spare. After the cramped and noisy flight up that morning, Pendergast insisted on upgrading them both to first class for the flight back, at his own expense. Coldmoon was too tired to object.