City of Endless Night (Pendergast #17)(33)

A silence. Paine looked at D’Agosta, then back at Pendergast. “Who’s going to pay for my door?”

Pendergast smiled. “Consider which will cost more: a new door, or the four-hundred-dollar-an-hour attorney you will need to hire if the lieutenant serves you with a subpoena and takes you downtown for what will be at least a twelve-hour interview, possibly stretching over several days—unless of course you want to take your chances with one of the pro bono hacks supplied by the state.”

A long silence. “Okay,” said Paine, actually breaking into a sort of cynical smile. “This is going to be interesting.”

“Excellent,” said Pendergast rising. “We shall be back. In, say, an hour?”





19

AFTER THE BIG hullabaloo in Maplewood—all the neighbors, D’Agosta had noticed with a certain gratification, had been plastered to their windows—they had taken Paine down to 1PP and he was now comfortably ensconced in a small conference room, where he had become a most cooperative and friendly witness. The official setting seemed to loosen his tongue, and he had gone into great technical detail about the Cantucci system. They were now moving on to Sharps & Gund itself.

“I was the senior man on the Cantucci install,” Paine was saying. “A lot of the people I have to deal with are difficult, but Cantucci was a royal pain in the ass. There was a lot of stuff he didn’t like—cosmetic stuff, mostly, such as the placement of cameras or the color of the CCTV monitors—and he just about nitpicked us to death. He was the kind of guy who didn’t want to sully himself by dealing with the low-level people like myself. He always took his complaints right to Mr. Ingmar, every little thing. It drove Ingmar crazy that Cantucci would only talk to him, calling him up at all hours of the day and night and treating him like his lapdog. Ingmar really came to hate him, and even talked about firing him as a client, except that the man owed us a lot of money. They had a shouting match once, on the phone.”

“What about?” D’Agosta asked.

“Money. Cantucci wasn’t paying the bills. Said he wouldn’t pay a dime until the install was completed to his satisfaction.”

“And did he pay in the end?”

“Not totally. He chiseled Ingmar over the final bill, finding fault with every little thing and deducting for it. I think we got about eighty cents on the dollar. I’m pretty sure Ingmar took a loss on the job.”

“What was the total?”

Paine thought for a moment. “I’d guess around two hundred. Plus a monthly fee of two grand.”

D’Agosta shifted position, consulted his notes. He was now getting to the heart of his questions. “Would Ingmar have been capable—did he personally have the knowledge—to bypass the security system the way the killer did?”

“Yes. Absolutely.”

“Who else at Sharps and Gund would have sufficient skills to do what the killer did, in circumventing the system?”

“My install partner, Lasher. Possibly the guy who heads the IT department, maybe the chief of programming and design. But I really don’t think either of them knew how the Cantucci system itself was laid out or had access to the technical lockbox.” He paused, considering. “Really, Ingmar and Lasher are probably the only two, other than me of course.”

This is good, D’Agosta thought. Really good. “You and Lasher were the techs who responded to and performed the repair that had apparently been rigged, staged for by the killer?”

“I was the guy, but Lasher had been fired by that time, so I went with another techie.”

“Which is?”

“Hallie Iyer. She still works for the company.”

“Would this Ms. Iyer have enough knowledge to circumvent the system?”

“No. No way. She’s pretty junior in the firm, hasn’t been with it more than a couple of months.”

“Tell us about your ex-partner, Lasher,” said D’Agosta. “The one who helped you with the original install. What kind of guy was he?”

“He was a strange one. Man, he gave me the creeps—not from day one, though. It came on kind of gradually. At first he was really closemouthed, didn’t say a word, but as we worked together more he sort of let down his guard. Oh, I can see why Ingmar hired him—he knew his stuff, no doubt about that—but he talked some strange shit.”

“Such as?”

“That the Apollo moon landings were faked, that the jet contrails you see in the sky are actually chemical trails the government is spraying on people to brainwash them, that global warming is a Chinese hoax. Unbelievable crap.”

Pendergast, who had been silent, broke in. “How did a fellow with these views pass Sharps and Gund’s allegedly CIA-level vetting system?”

Paine laughed. “CIA-level? Is that what Ingmar told you?” He shook his head. “Ingmar hires on the cheap, no benefits, long hours, no overtime, a ton of travel. The only vetting he does is to make sure you don’t have a criminal record, and even then he’d probably hire you because you’d come cheaper. Lasher seemed normal at first, but then he got weirder and weirder.”

“Anything in particular?” D’Agosta asked.

“It was mostly about women. A total creep. No social skills, asked them out on dates right in front of the whole office. Always angry, too, making disparaging comments, telling stupid jokes, bragging. Lot of talk about big tits—you know the kind.”