Bloodless (Aloysius Pendergast #20)(19)
Pendergast nodded with a combination of gravity and reserve. “Indeed we have.”
Coldmoon looked at his watch. What the hell was this? They’d arrived early, when the office was still locked, allowing themselves to be cornered, and now Pendergast was stopping to talk to this jackass. He began to step forward again, but once more he felt a restraining hand.
“Splendid!” Betts said, almost rubbing his hands together with glee. No doubt he’d come in hopes of catching the coroner—but in Pendergast, he’d found a prize at least as tasty. “May we ask you a few questions?”
“On the record?”
“Yes. Certainly. For the documentary.”
Coldmoon watched as Pendergast glanced in the direction of the camera, as if to see if it was on. It was. He cleared his throat and crossed his arms in front of his severe suit.
“I am at your disposal, Mr. Betts,” he said.
13
WENDY GANNON, DIRECTOR OF photography, stood back slightly from the rest of the crew, monitoring their camera feeds, watching the FBI agent talk. This was an unexpected find—they’d been planning to beard the M.E., George McSomebodyorother, in his den. If she’d expected a premature encounter like this, she would have been on the lead camera herself. But she knew Craig could be trusted to get good footage, without a lot of amateurish panning and zooming. She looked at the sky, looked back at Betts and the FBI agent, mentally framing the shot. That black suit might throw off the white balance, and she murmured a few directions into her headset. Craig gave her a thumbs-up and zeroed in on the agent.
“Can you tell us what your investigations have uncovered so far?” Betts asked in his most ingratiating tone—the one he reserved for movie stars and high-ranking officials.
“Certainly,” the agent said. What was his name? Prendergrast? Gannon glanced at Marty, the production assistant, asking him through the headset to get all available background on this person, ASAP—to make sure they weren’t being pranked into interviewing someone masquerading as someone else. This guy looked about as far from an FBI agent as possible, but then she didn’t really know much about the FBI. With the undertaker’s garb, he was a strange-looking fellow, and unusually cooperative for law enforcement. But his ID had looked real enough. The younger, athletic man standing next to him, on the other hand, could have been a statue stamped right out of the Quantico mill.
She glanced around, making sure her people kept the other media away until Betts got what he wanted. He was a shrewd interviewer and could be relied on to do that quickly. Pavel was shooting B-roll with the Steadicam—simultaneously, not afterward as per usual, since this interview was unscripted—and that would give her any necessary elbow room when it came to editing the footage. She checked with the sound assistant, satisfied herself with the audio levels, then looked skyward again. The light was a little hot, but that was all right. This particular interview wasn’t about mood, she knew—it was about content.
She turned her attention back to the interview already under way.
Strange—Betts, interrogator first class, didn’t seem to have made any progress. “So what then, exactly, have you uncovered?”
“Nothing.” The man spoke with a genteel southern lilt that, Gannon thought, would fit in perfectly with the Georgia locale.
Betts looked perplexed. “You haven’t uncovered anything?”
“No.”
“But there has been a murder, correct?”
“Certainly,” the agent said, in the most agreeable manner imaginable. “Two, in fact.”
“I’m sorry,” Betts said. “If you’re sure it was murder, then how can you not have uncovered anything?”
“The body was not covered—except by the clothes, of course, which were rather a mess. I don’t know where you got the impression it was covered.”
“But…that isn’t…” Betts paused, uncharacteristically flummoxed. He took a deep breath. “Let’s try this again.” He glanced at the lead camera, as if to slap an invisible clapperboard for a fresh take. “Why has the FBI been called in?”
“Called in for what?”
“The murders.”
“Which murders?”
“The ones that just took place.”
“Do you mean, took place here?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Here in Savannah?”
“Yes.”
“You’ll have to be more specific.”
A pause. “The murders in which the blood was sucked from the bodies, as if by a vampire. Those murders, sir!”
“I ask because more than one murder has taken place in Savannah recently. I’m delighted to help you, but I can’t answer a question that’s insufficiently articulated.”
This was said in a tone of mild reproach, like that of a disappointed elementary school teacher speaking to a favorite student. Gannon saw a hint of red appear on the back of Betts’s neck, just above his tailored silk shirt.
“Now that we’ve established which murders,” Betts said, his voice raised, “what can you tell me about them?”
“Which one?”
“Let’s start with the first murder,” Betts said, after a pause to compose himself.