Bloodless (Aloysius Pendergast #20)(55)

She picked up the phone, asked a watch officer to get a ride for Manning.

“And bring in the Ingersolls,” she said.

A minute later, there was a knock on the door and the two came in, escorted by an officer. Their eyes darted around the room, taking in everyone present. Then they sat down in the chairs set before Delaplane’s desk. The woman, Agnes, had an expression of stone—still in shock, no doubt, from the rush of unpleasant events—but her husband, Bertram, looked aggrieved, almost angry, like Sisyphus after being assigned a larger hill.

“Mr. Ingersoll,” she said, nodding, her voice clipped, uninflected, professional. “Mrs. Ingersoll. Thank you for coming.”

“Of course,” the woman mumbled without thinking. Her husband said nothing.

“I’ll be recording this conversation,” she said, snapping the machine on again. “Do I have your permission?”

“No problem,” said Mr. Ingersoll.

After going through the preliminaries of date, time, and those present, Delaplane launched into the questioning. “I know this must be difficult, but I’d like you to please go over again with me, one more time, the events leading up to your discovery of the body. Step by step, and please take your time and mention any new details you might have remembered since making your previous statements, no matter how minor.”

The couple was silent for a moment. Finally, the woman began to speak in a low, halting voice. The story she recounted was, almost word for word, the same one Delaplane had heard already: the walk through the quiet streets; the sudden rush of sound combined with an inexplicable sense of movement; and then, her husband sprawling over a body and her frantic call to 911. The husband winced as she went over certain details but otherwise remained silent.

Agnes Ingersoll’s story tailed off slowly, with a few final observations sputtering out as she recalled them. Then a silence fell over the room. Delaplane followed her usual strategy of letting a witness stew a little before speaking. More often than not, under the pressure of silence, they’d remember something else. But to her surprise, it was Pendergast who spoke.

“Mrs. Ingersoll,” he said. “Can you tell me how quickly you dialed 911 after your husband fell to the pavement?”

Through long practice, Delaplane managed to keep her expression neutral, despite the trivial nature of the question. She noticed, however, that Coldmoon shifted his eyes toward his partner.

The woman paused, thinking. “Um…well…Bertram fell, and as I said he cried out when he hit the pavement, and I knelt over him to make sure he was all right. It all happened so quickly, you know, it seemed everything was over within a second.”

“So,” Pendergast prodded, “how long would you estimate before the call? Ten seconds? Fifteen?”

The husband seemed about to object, but his wife answered first. “I saw he was moving, but it was fairly dark and I couldn’t tell how badly hurt he was. I saw the—the other body. Bertram moaned—and that was when I reached into my purse.” She hesitated. “Fifteen seconds.”

“Fifteen,” Pendergast repeated. “From the moment your husband fell over the body to when you called for assistance?”

“Yes,” the woman said a little hesitantly. Then, more firmly: “yes.”

“Very good. And—please forgive me if I dwell on these unpleasant events—the body your husband tripped over: did it seem to you it was already in place?”

The woman looked from Pendergast to her husband and back again. “I don’t understand.”

“Was the body in situ, on the ground? Or did you have any sense of motion immediately before the, ah, accident occurred? Such as a body that had fallen from above—jumped or pushed?”

“No,” she blurted.

“Mr. Ingersoll?” Pendergast asked.

The man stared at the agent with red-rimmed eyes. Then he merely shook his head.

“Thank you,” Pendergast said, glancing at Delaplane to signal, once again, that he had nothing more to ask.

Sheldrake asked a few perfunctory questions, and then Delaplane dismissed the couple with the usual warnings. As the door closed behind them, she turned to Pendergast. “May I ask why the interest in the timing of the 911 call?”

“Naturally. And I’d be happy to answer your question—once you’ve checked in with that cell phone specialist of yours.”

This had been another of Pendergast’s bizarre questions. “I’m not sure he’ll have an answer for us yet.”

“Please try him anyway, if you don’t mind.”

“Okay.” Delaplane dialed an internal extension, then turned on the speaker of her desk phone.

“Wrigley here,” came a voice over the speaker.

“Wrigley? It’s Alanna.”

“Oh. Hi, Commander.”

“Any joy?”

“As a matter of fact, I was just about to call you,” the disembodied voice replied. “It turns out I didn’t need to tinker with the microcode after all. Once I knew his location, the model of his phone, and its internal GPS ID, I tried the cell towers in that area, just in case. And I got lucky. The kid has a really old phone, and it pings the network a lot more frequently than today’s models when its flashlight is on or it’s being used as a compass. Some proposed IEEE standard that ultimately was never implemented. Anyway, sure enough, it was pinging the network: once every sixty seconds. Of course, newer phones go dormant much faster in order to save juice, but this—”