Two Graves

BE _ _ _ EST

He examined the rubbing with a loupe, examined the table itself, and was finally able to add another letter.

BE _ A _ EST

He stared at the piece of paper for a long time. And then, with one swift motion of the pencil, he completed the word:

BETATEST

34

DR. JOHN FELDER SAT, A LITTLE DEJECTEDLY, IN THE MAIN room of the Wintour gatehouse. He had spent hours and hours restoring it to a modicum of livability—washing down the walls and floor with bleach, sweeping away the cobwebs, dusting all the surfaces, and dragging the clutter up into a tiny crawl space under the roof—and now he was able to sleep at night without imagining things crawling over his face and hands. He’d brought in just a few items: an air mattress and sleeping bag, a few sticks of furniture, a laptop, a space heater, books and groceries and a hot pot—the kitchen was too terrible to contemplate—and it hardly felt like home.

Again and again, as he toiled, he’d asked himself: Why am I doing this? But the fact was, he already knew the answer.

He got up from the lone chair and walked over to the window. It had been cleaned of grime and, through the last dying light of evening, afforded a good prospect of the Wintour mansion—cloaked in gloom, the brick walls straining under the too-large roof, the i

It was past eight: dark enough now so that he could not be seen if he toured the grounds. He bundled himself warmly in his jacket, opened the door, stepped out, and shut the door quietly behind him. As he walked through the tangle of wintry, frozen undergrowth, the house seemed to follow his progress, glaring at him.

He had decided the old woman was not in any way demented—just highly eccentric. And she was as sharp and prickly as a thistle—the one time he had brought up the subject of her library, in as tactful and offhand a way as possible, she’d practically jumped on him, demanding to know the reason for his interest. It was all he could do to steer the conversation in another direction, smooth down her suspicion. But he had learned its location: beyond a set of pocket doors that were always kept closed and locked. He knew, because he’d seen the room through the mansion’s windows by day: row after row of bookshelves, stuffed full of treasures both known and unknown.

He approached it now, very quietly, through the tall grass. Despite the light of the moon, the library windows were rectangles of unrelieved black. The house had no security system—he’d noticed that right away. But then, it didn’t need one.

It had Dukchuk.

Dukchuk was the towering, always-silent manservant who opened the front door; who brought the tepid, watery tea; who stood behind Miss Wintour’s chair while she spoke, his unreadable gaze on Felder. The man’s tattoos gave him nightmares.

He returned his attention to the library window. It might well be unlocked—he’d noticed that the windows of the front parlor were. It would be just like Miss Wintour to have four extra locks on the front door but none on the windows. Still, there was Dukchuk. The fellow looked as if he might have his own, extralegal way of dealing with encroachers. Felder knew he would have to be supremely careful if…

If what? Was he really thinking what he was thinking?

Yes, he was. He realized now there was no way on earth old Miss Wintour would ever willingly show him the library. If he was going to get in, if he was going to find that portfolio, he would have to find another way.

He licked his lips. Tomorrow night was forecast to be overcast, moonless. Then—he would do it then.

35

PENDERGAST STOOD IN THE WORKROOM OF HIS SPRAWLING apartments in the Dakota. The room was devoid of any decor or ornamentation, anything that would distract or hinder the most intense concentration. Even the color of the walls and the stain of the wooden floor were a cool gunmetal gray, as neutral as possible. The windows overlooking Seventy-Second Street were closed and tightly shuttered. In one corner sat a tall pile of yellowing documents: the papers that Corrie had brought him from the Nazi safe house. The only furniture was a long, oaken table that ran the length of the room. There were no chairs. The table was covered by police reports, SOC data, photographs, FBI profiles, forensic analyses, and other paperwork, all devoted to a single subject: the Hotel Killer murders. Committed by his son, Alban.

His son. Pendergast was finding this fact to be a most disruptive influence on his deductive processes.

He paced quickly back and forth along the length of the table, glancing at first one document, then another. Finally, with an exasperated shake of his head, he strode over to an audio player, set flush into one wall, and pressed the PLAY button. Immediately the low, sonorous strains of the Ricercar a 6 from Bach’s Musical Offering began to emerge from hidden speakers.

This was the only piece that was ever heard in this room. Pendergast did not play it for its beauty—but for the way the complex, intensely mathematical composition settled and sharpened his mind.

As the music continued, his pacing grew slower, his study of the documents strewn across the tabletop more ordered and nuanced.

His son, Alban, had committed these murders. Tristram said that Alban loved killing. But why journey all the way to New York from Brazil to commit them? Why leave the body parts of his own brother at the murder sites? Why scrawl bloody messages on the corpses—messages that could only be meant for Pendergast himself?

BETATEST. Beta test. There was clearly a method, a governing purpose, behind these killings. And Pendergast himself was meant to discover it. Or, perhaps, to try to discover it. Nothing else made sense.

With Bach’s delicate, fantastically intricate counterpoint weaving softly in the background, Pendergast looked at the data afresh, forming a logical counterpoint of his own, mentally comparing times, dates, addresses, room numbers, external temperatures, ages of victims—anything that might point to a method, or a sequence, or a pattern. This process continued for ten, then twenty minutes. And then—abruptly—Pendergast stiffened.

Bending over the table, he rearranged several pieces of paper, examined them again. Then, plucking a pen from his pocket, he wrote a series of numbers across the bottom of one of the sheets, double-checking it against the documentation.

There was no mistake.

He glanced at his watch. Moving like lightning, he darted down the hall to his study, plucked a tablet computer from the desk, and typed in a query. He examined the response—cursed softly but eloquently in Latin under his breath—and then picked up a telephone and dialed.