Dance of Death (45 page)

The man's chair legs clunked down on the floor as he hastily righted himself. "FBI? Sure, yeah, right. What can I do for you?"

"When do you go on shift?" Pendergast asked.

"At midnight."

"I want you to look at these." He removed the prints he had collected at Kennedy, held one in front of the attendant. "Have you seen this man? He would have come in last night, sometime between one and three."

The attendant took the photo, screwing up his face. D'Agosta watched carefully, relaxing slightly. Clearly, the guy knew nothing of the APB. He glanced out toward the dark highway. It was almost four in the morning. It was only a matter of time. They weren't ever going to get a lead, this was needle-and-haystack stuff. The police would find them, and...

"Yeah," the guy said. "I saw him."

The air in the tiny store went electric.

"Look at this photo as well, please." Pendergast passed the man a second image. "I want you to be sure." He spoke quietly, but his body was tense as a coiled spring.

"That's him again," the man murmured. "I remember those funny eyes, kind of freaked me out."

"Did you see this car?" Pendergast murmured, showing him a third image.

"Well, I can't say I remember that. He did the self-serve, you know?"

Pendergast took back the photographs. "And your name is-?"

"Art Malek."

"Mr. Malek, can you tell us if anyone was with him?"

"He came into the store alone. And like I said, I didn't go out, so I really can't say if there was anybody in the car. Sorry."

"That's all right." Pendergast returned the photos to his jacket and drew still closer. "Now, tell me exactly what you remember from the time this man arrived to the time he left."

"Well... it was last night, like you said, must have been close to three in the morning. There wasn't anything unusual about it-he pulled up, filled the car himself, came in to pay."

"Cash."

"Right."

"Did you notice anything else about him?"

"Not really. Had a funny accent, kind of like yours. No offense," Malek added hastily. "In fact, he looked kind of like you."

"What was he wearing?"

A labored effort to remember. "All I can remember is a dark overcoat. Long."

"Did he do anything else but pay?"

"Seems to me he wandered about the aisles a bit. Didn't buy anything, though."

At this, Pendergast stiffened. "I assume you have security cameras in the back aisles?"

"Sure do."

"I'd like to see the tapes from last night."

The man hesitated. "The system recycles them on a thirty-hour loop, and it gets erased as-"

"Then please stop the security system
now.
I must see the tape."

The man almost jumped to comply, hastening into a back office.

"Looks like we've finally got a lead," said D'Agosta.

The pair of eyes Pendergast turned on him seemed almost dead. "On the contrary. Diogenes hoped we would find this place."

"How do you know?"

Pendergast didn't answer.

The man came huffing out of the back room with a videotape. Pendergast ejected the movie from the VCR and shoved in the security tape. A ceiling-level shot of the tiny store came into view, a time and date stamp in the bottom left corner. Pendergast punched the rewind button, stopped, rewound again. Within a minute, he'd located the 3 a.m. time stamp for January 28. Next, he cued it back another half hour to allow for a margin of error. Then they began watching the tape at accelerated speed.

The black-and-white picture quality was poor. The aisles of the convenience store glowed and flickered on the screen. Now and then a huddled shape raced through on fast-forward, like a pinball, bounced around grabbing things off shelves, then disappeared again.

Suddenly, Pendergast jabbed the play button, slowing it to a normal pace as yet another dark figure entered the screen. The figure strolled down the aisle, its eyes-differing shades of gray-seeking out and fixing on the security camera.

It was Diogenes. A smile spread over his face as he casually reached into his pocket and withdrew a piece of paper. He unfolded it and nonchalantly held it up to the camera.

BRAVO, FRATER!

TOMORROW, CALL AT 466 AND

ASK FOR VIOLA.

THIS WILL BE OUR

LAST COMMUNICATION.

MAY OUR NEW LIVES BEGIN!

VALEAS.

"Four six six?" said D'Agosta. "That's not a legit emergency number..."

Then he stopped. It was not a telephone number, he realized, but an address. Four sixty-six First Avenue was the underground entrance at Bellevue that led to the New York City Morgue.

Pendergast rose, ejected the tape, and put it in his pocket.

"You can keep that," said the attendant helpfully as they left.

Pendergast slipped behind the wheel, started the Camry, but did not move. His face was gray, his eyes half lidded.

There was a terrible silence. D'Agosta could think of nothing to say. He felt almost physically ill. This was even worse than at the Dakota-worse because, for the last twelve hours, they'd had hope. Slender, but hope nevertheless.

"I'll check the police band," he said stiffly. It was a pointless gesture, just something to keep himself busy. And even police chatter about the APB was preferable to the dreadful silence.

Pendergast didn't respond as D'Agosta turned on the radio.

A burst of frantic, overlapping voices poured from the speaker.

Instinctively, D'Agosta glanced out the window. Had they been spotted? But the roads around the service area were deserted.

He leaned forward and changed the frequency. More frantic voices.

"What the hell?" D'Agosta punched the button, changed the frequency again and again. Almost half the available channels were taken up, and the talk wasn't about them. Something big, it seemed, was going down in the city. As he listened, trying to figure out what it was, he became aware that Pendergast was listening, too, suddenly totally alert.

The talk on the current channel was about the Museum of Natural History, a theft of some kind. It seemed the Astor Hall of Diamonds had been hit.

"Go to the command-and-control channel," Pendergast said.

D'Agosta dialed it in.

"Rocker wants you to sweat the techies,"
a voice was saying.
"This was an inside job, that much is clear."

D'Agosta listened in disbelief. Rocker at four in the morning? This must be gigantic.

"They got 'em all? Including Lucifer's Heart?"

"Yup. And see who knew the specs on the security system, get a list, move through it fast. Museum security, too."

"Got that. Who's the insurer?"

"Affiliated Transglobal."

"Jeez, they're going to shit bricks when they learn about this."

D'Agosta, glancing at Pendergast, was shocked at the rapt expression on his face. Strange how, at this moment of ultimate crisis, he could become so fixated on something that had no bearing or the problem at hand.

"The museum's president is on his way. And they've gotten the mayor out of bed. You know how he'll crucify anybody who lets him get behind the curve on a major
-"

"Someone knocked off the diamond hall," said D'Agosta. "I guess that's why we've been temporarily upstaged."

Pendergast said nothing. D'Agosta was taken aback by the look on his face.

"Hey, Pendergast," he said. "You okay?"

Pendergast turned his pale eyes toward him. "No," he whispered.

"I don't get it. What's this got to do with anything? It's a diamond heist-"

"Everything."
And then the FBI agent looked away, out into the winter darkness. "All these brutal killings, all these mocking notes and messages ... nothing more than a smoke screen. A cruel, coldblooded, sadistic smoke screen."

He tore away from the curb and headed back into the neighborhood they had just passed through.

"Where are we going?"

Instead of answering, Pendergast jammed on the brakes, pulling up in front of a split-level house. He pointed to an F150 pickup parked in the driveway.
For Sale
was written on the windshield in soap.

"We need a new vehicle," he said. "Get ready to move the radio and laptop into that truck."

"Buy a car at four a.m.?"

"A stolen car is reported too quickly. We need more time."

Pendergast got out of the car and strode up the short concrete walk. He rang the bell, rang it again. After a minute, the lights on the second floor came on. A window scraped open, and a voice shouted down: "What do you want?"

"The pickup-it's operational?"

"Hell, pal, it's four in the morning!"

"Will hard cash help get you out of bed?"

With a muttered curse, the window shut. A moment later, the porch light came on and a corpulent man in a bathrobe appeared at the door. "It's three thousand. And it works good. Got a full tank of gas, too."

Pendergast reached into his suit, removed a book of cash, peeled off thirty hundreds.

"What's going on?" the man asked a little blearily.

Pendergast pulled out his badge. "I'm with the FBI." He nodded at D'Agosta. "He's NYPD."

Balancing the radio and laptop under one arm, D'Agosta removed his shield.

"We're working an undercover narcotics job. Be a good citizen and keep this to yourself, all right?"

"Sure thing." The man accepted the cash.

"The keys?"

The man disappeared, came back a moment later with an envelope. "The title's in there, too."

Pendergast took the envelope. "An officer will be by shortly to take care of our previous vehicle. But don't say anything about the car or about us, not even to another police officer. You know how it is with undercover cases."

The man nodded vigorously. "Sure do. Hell, the only books I read are true crime."

Pendergast thanked the man and turned away. A minute later, they were inside the truck, accelerating from the curb.

"That should buy us a few hours," Pendergast said as he raced back in the direction of the Montauk Highway.

FIFTY-FIVE

Diogenes Pendergast drove slowly, without hurry, through the bleak winter townscapes along the Old Stone Highway: Barnes Hole, Eastside, Springs. Ahead, a traffic light turned red, and he coasted to a stop at the intersection.

He eased his large head to the left, to the right. A wintry potato field stretched to one side, frozen and dusted with snow. At its edge stood a dark wood of bare trees, branches etched in white. The world was black and white and it had no depth: it was flat, like a nightmare confection of Edwin A. Abbott.
Fie, fie how franticly I square my talk...

The light moved down, indicating it had turned green, and Diogenes slowly depressed the accelerator. The car nosed forward and swung right onto Springs Road as he turned the wheel, letting it slide through his hands as the car straightened out. He increased the pressure on the accelerator, easing off as the vehicle approached the speed limit. More gray potato fields passed on his right, beyond which stood several rows of gray houses, and beyond that, the Acabonack Marshes.

All gray, exquisite gray.

Diogenes reached to the dash and turned the heater vent several clicks to the right, increasing the flow of warmth into the glass, steel, and plastic compartment that enclosed his body. He felt neither triumph nor vindication, only a curious kind of emptiness: the sort that came with the achievement of a great thing, the completion of a long-planned work.

Diogenes lived in a world of gray. Color did not enter his world, except fleetingly, when he least expected it, coming in from the corner of his eye like a Zen koan. Koan. Ko. Koan ko.
Ko ko rico, ko ko rico...

Long ago, his world had attenuated to shades of gray, a monochromatic universe of shape and shadow, where true color had vanished even from his waking dreams. No, not quite. Such a statement would be dissembling, melodrama. There
was
a final repository of color in his world, and it was there, in the leather satchel beside him.

The car moved down the empty road. No one was out.

He could tell, from a shifting of the monochromatic landscape around him, that night was relinquishing its hold on the world. Dawn was not far away. But Diogenes had little use for sunlight, just as he had little use for warmth or love or friendship or any of the countless things that nourished the rest of humanity.

As he drove, he played back, in meticulous detail, the events of the night before. He went over every last action, motion, statement, taking pleasure in satisfying himself that he had made no errors. At the same time, he thought of the days ahead, mentally ticking off the preparations he would have to make, the tasks he'd need to perform, the great journey he would make-and,
aber natürlich,
the journey's end. He thought of Viola, of his brother, of his childhood, multithreaded multiplexing waking daydreams that seemed more real than the present. Unlike the other bags of meat and blood that made up his species, Diogenes mused, he could process several disparate trains of thought simultaneously in his head.