City of Endless Night (Pendergast #17)(39)

Now he moved toward the workbench. This was his focus of interest. He inspected it from left to right, examining every last thing with the flashlight and occasionally a loupe, now and then picking up something with a pair of jeweler’s tweezers and slipping it into a test tube. His pale visage, illuminated by the reflected flashlight, floated like a disembodied face, silvery eyes glittering in the darkness.

For fifteen minutes he performed his examinations until suddenly he froze. In the corner where the rough deal table had been pushed up against the wall, his light had illuminated what appeared to be two grains of yellowish salt. The first one he picked up in his fingers; he rubbed it, examined the resulting whitish dust on his fingertips, sniffed at it, and finally tasted it with the tip of his tongue. The second grain he picked up with the tweezers and dropped into a tiny ziplock bag, sealing it and slipping it back into his jacket pocket.

He turned and left the apartment. The policeman on duty, waiting with rigid attention, rose. Pendergast took his hand warmly. “I thank you, Officer, for your help and attention to duty. I shall certainly mention it to the lieutenant when I see him next.”

And then he slipped down the stairs as silently and smoothly as a cat.





25

ALMOST EXACTLY TWELVE hours after Pendergast left Lasher’s apartment, Bryce Harriman was pacing restlessly through his one-bedroom apartment on Seventy-Second and Madison. The apartment was in a converted prewar building, and the conversion had given the apartment a bizarre layout that allowed for a true circuit: from the living room, through the kitchen, into one door of the bathroom, out the other door into the bedroom, and then from the bedroom through a short, closet-lined hallway that led back to the living room.

The building had high ceilings, a posh lobby, and twenty-four-hour doormen, but the apartment was rent-stabilized and held under the name of Harriman’s aunt. When she passed away, which would probably be fairly soon, he’d have to leave and find someplace more in keeping with his salary. Just one more example of the fading fortunes of the Harriman family.

It was furnished in an eclectic style of cast-off pieces left to him by elderly relations, now departed. Many of them were valuable, and all were old. The only new thing in the entire apartment, outside of the kitchen appliances, was the laptop that sat on a Queen Anne table of figured Brazilian maple with cabriole legs—once in the possession of Great-Uncle Davidson, now these ten years under the earth.

Harriman paused in his pacing to approach the table. Besides the laptop with its glowing screen, there were three piles of paper, one for each murder, the sheets covered with notes, scrawls, doodles, rough diagrams, and the occasional question mark. He shuffled through them restlessly for a moment, then resumed his pacing.

That nagging frisson of professional anxiety, which had subsided somewhat after his coup with the Izolda Ozmian interview, had surfaced once again. He knew, he knew, what great stories these murders could be—but he was having his share of problems covering them. One difficulty was that his police sources weren’t that good, and they were not eager to help him out. His old archrival Smithback had been a master at cozying up to cops, buying them drinks, buttering them up, and cadging stories out of them. But, although he hated to admit it, Harriman just didn’t have the knack. Maybe it was his WASPy upbringing, the years at Choate and Dartmouth, growing up with the yacht-club-and-cocktail set—but whatever the reason, he just couldn’t relax with cops, couldn’t talk their talk. And they knew it. His stories suffered as a result.

But there was an even bigger problem here. Even if he was buddy-buddy with all the cops on the force, Harriman wasn’t sure it would help him this time around. Because they seemed as confused by these killings as he was. A dozen different theories were circulating: one killer, two killers, three killers, a copycat killer, a lone killer pretending to be a copycat. The theory du jour was that the Ozmian girl had been killed by one murderer, then decapitated later by somebody who had gone on to do more copycat killings. The cops wouldn’t say exactly why they thought the second and third killings were connected, but from what Harriman had been able to dig up it looked pretty clear the modus operandi was similar in both cases.

So in the wake of the Izolda Ozmian interview, he’d dutifully banged on all the doors, shown up at all the scenes, and coughed up the best stories he could. He’d made himself as visible during the press conference two days before as he possibly could without holding up a neon sign. But he wasn’t fooling himself: visibility alone didn’t sell papers, and these new stories of his were long on innuendo but short on facts and evidence.

He made two more perambulations of the apartment and stopped once again in the living room. The laptop sat there, word processor open, cursor blinking at him like a taunting middle finger. He looked around. Three walls of the room were covered with half-decent oils, watercolors, and sketches he’d inherited; the fourth wall was devoted to pictures of his deceased girlfriend, Shannon, as well as to a few plaques and awards he’d received for his work on spotlighting cancer research. The most prominent plaque was for the Shannon Croix Foundation, a fund he had set up in her name to gather money for medical research into uterine cancer. He had accomplished this with the help of the Post, which from time to time did charity drives in coordination with a series of articles. The foundation had become modestly successful, having brought in several million dollars. Harriman was on the board. There was nothing he could do to bring Shannon back—but at least he could do his best to ensure her death had not been entirely in vain.