Bloodless (Aloysius Pendergast #20)(69)

44



GANNON HEARD A VOICE raised in complaint, as she’d known she would eventually, from the end of the hall where Betts was reviewing the daily rushes. She already had a good idea of what he was going to say, but she’d learned it was better to let him mansplain “his” ideas to her rather than come up with them independently and try to sell them to him.

“Gannon?” she heard. “Gannon! You around?”

She headed down the hall and into the editing room. Moller was in the chair next to Betts, a dour presence.

“Come in,” Betts said, gesturing. “Take a look.”

She came in and stood behind them. On the computer screen was the last of the footage from the previous day.

“This is great,” Betts said. “Love your angles. You really nailed it.”

Gannon couldn’t help but blush. Normally, Betts was stingy with his compliments.

“Moller, you look good, too. Right? I hope you’re happy.”

Moller bowed his head in grave affirmation. He never looked happy, but that, Gannon realized, was part of his shtick.

“But here’s the thing,” Betts went on. “We’ve got all this footage of Moller, the crazy mob scene, the press—all great stuff. But you know what we don’t have?”

She knew perfectly well, but she said, “No.”

“We don’t have creepy footage in a lonely cemetery. We need atmospherics. And we need to see Moller all alone, checking out some haunted place. We can’t get that in broad daylight with a big crowd around. You know what I mean?”

“I agree.”

“Good. Now look at this, here.” He pressed a button and some of Pavel’s Steadicam footage started rolling on the screen, showing the cops working the crime scene among unkempt tombs.

He paused the video. “There. You see, behind them, back through all that overgrowth? I was there. You can just barely see it, but there’s more graves. And a mausoleum, with a door partway open. Hard to tell, but it looks like it’s coming off its hinges. Maybe we can get in, film inside.”

“I see that.”

“Good. That’s where we need to shoot. We’ll bring some lights with filters, a fog machine, do it up good. See if we can’t register some more evil, I mean real evil, like the vampire himself—if you get my drift.”

Moller’s dour look deepened. “But that area of overgrown tombs is not where the young man was abducted. It is not where I registered a strong supernatural presence.”

“That doesn’t matter. I mean, it does matter—but this is a cemetery, for Chrissakes. There’re ghosts all around, right? And we need to get some good B-roll in the abandoned cemetery, after dark. That’s the perfect spot to do it. Gannon here will get the fogger going, generate some mist. With low, raking lighting, it’s going to look super. Right, Gannon?”

“Absolutely.”

“What do you say, Gerhard?”

“I am willing to try. When do you plan to make this excursion?”

“When? As soon as the sun sets, of course.”





45



AS THEY DROVE AWAY from the farm and into the inky maze of mountains, Coldmoon turned to Pendergast. “That was interesting.”

“What I found most curious was the injury,” said Pendergast.

“Broken leg? Why is that?”

“Think about it. What was she doing way out there, in the middle of nowhere, all alone, with a broken leg?”

“Maybe she fell off a mountain.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not…” Pendergast slowed the car at a fork—again, unmarked—and after a moment chose the left-hand route. “What was your opinion of the fellow?”

“A lost soul. Eighty-plus years old and the poor guy’s still pining for that woman, never gotten over her. She must’ve been quite the firecracker in her day.”

They drove on in silence before turning onto Route 141—another backwoods road, but at least one that seemed more traveled. Half an hour later, they merged onto I-84 in the direction of Portland. Coldmoon felt himself relax at the wide expanse of highway ahead, and the dark forbidding mountains beginning to recede in the rearview mirror.

“So,” Coldmoon said. “I’m still not clear how you found that guy, to be honest, or what it has to do with the murders.”

“I explained as little as possible back in Savannah, because I wanted you to be a check on any assumptions or hasty conclusions I might have made. I knew that Frost had found her new identity in this region of Washington State—in the cemetery in Puyallup. Given that the book Constance examined appeared to be a parting gift from her lover, it seemed a safe assumption that she’d lived in the area—and that was when I realized Berry Patch was not just some private trysting spot, but a town. Or, given its minuscule population, what is known in Washington State as a ‘populated place.’”

“I didn’t see any town at all.”

“A scattering of houses and a post office. Population eighty-five.”

“Sounds like something out of Li’l Abner,” Coldmoon said.

“The small population was, for me at least, a blessing: there proved to be only one resident with the initials Z.Q.”