Brimstone

"You know I'm doing the best I can. No one's stopping you from moving back here, you know."

"Vi

D'Agosta said nothing. It was just the kind of declaration he hadn't wanted to provoke. Jesus, he had really blown it with this phone call. And all he wanted to do was talk to his son.

"Lydia, nothing's engraved in stone. We can work something out."

"Work something out ? It's time we faced-"

"Don't say it, Lydia."

"I am going to say it. It's time we faced the facts. It's time-"

"Don't."

"-time we got divorced."

D'Agosta slowly hung up the phone. Twenty-five years, just like that. He felt short of breath; almost sick. He wouldn't think about it. He had work to do.

The Southampton police headquarters was located in a charming, if dilapidated, old wooden building that had once been the clubhouse of the Slate Rock Country Club. The police force must have labored hard, D'Agosta reflected bleakly, to turn its insides into a typical charmless linoleum, cinder-block, and puke-colored police station. It even had that universal headquarters smell: that combination of sweat, overheated photocopy machines, dirty metal, and chlorine cleaning agents.

D'Agosta felt a knot in his gut. He'd been out of the place for three days now, ru

He walked through the outer offices, nodding this way and that. Nobody looked particularly glad to see him; he wasn't popular with the regular guys. He hadn't joined the bowling club or hung out with them at Tiny's, tossing darts. He'd always figured he was just passing through on his way back to NYC, hadn't thought it worth the time to make friends. Perhaps that had been a mistake.

Shaking such thoughts away, he rapped on the frosted-glass door that led to the lieutenant's small office. Faded gold letters, edged in black, spelled out BRASKIE .

"Yeah?" came the voice.

Inside, Braskie sat behind an old metal desk. To one side was a stack of newspapers, from the Post and the Times to the East Hampton Record, all with front-page stories about the case. The lieutenant looked terrible: dark circles under the eyes, face lined. D'Agosta almost felt sorry for him.

Braskie nodded him into a seat. "News?"

D'Agosta ran through everything while Braskie listened. When he was done, Braskie wiped his hand over his prematurely thi

He sounded almost hopeful, he was that desperate.

"Half an hour. He wanted me to make sure it was all ready."

"It's ready." The lieutenant rose with a sigh. "Follow me."

The evidence room was housed in a series of portable, container-type structures, fitted end-to-end behind the police station, at the edge of one of Southampton's last remaining potato fields. The lieutenant swiped his card through the door sca

D'Agosta eyed the table. Sergeant Lillian had done a nice job. Papers, glassine envelopes, sample tubes-everything was tagged and laid out neat as a pin.

"Think this'll meet with your special agent's approval?" Braskie asked.

D'Agosta wasn't sure if it was sarcasm or desperation he detected in Braskie's voice. But before he could contemplate a reply, he heard a familiar honeyed voice behind them.

"Indeed it does, Lieutenant Braskie; indeed it does."

Braskie fairly jumped. Pendergast stood inside the doorway, hands behind his back; he must've somehow slipped in behind them.

Pendergast strolled up to the table, hands still clasped behind his back, lips pursed, examining the evidence as keenly as a co

"Help yourself to anything," said Braskie. "I've no doubt your forensics lab is better than ours."

"And I doubt the killer left any forensic evidence beyond that which he wanted to leave. No, for the moment I'm merely browsing. But what's this? The melted cross. May I?"

Sergeant Lillian picked up the envelope holding the cross and handed it to Pendergast. The agent held it gingerly, turning it slowly this way and that. "I'd like to send this to a lab in New York."

"No problem." Lillian took it back and laid it in a plastic evidence container.

"And this charred material." Pendergast next picked up a test tube with some burned chunks of sulfur. He unstoppered it, waved it under his nose, restoppered it.

"Done."

Pendergast glanced at D'Agosta. "Anything that interests you, Sergeant?"

D'Agosta stepped forward. "Maybe." He swept an eye over the table, nodded toward a packet of letters.

"Everything's been gone over by forensics," said Lillian. "Go ahead and handle it."

D'Agosta picked up the letters and slipped one out. It was from the boy, Jason Prince, to Grove. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a smirk growing on Lillian's face. What the hell did he think was so fu

Jesus. Oh, Jesus. Reddening, D'Agosta put the letters down.

"Learn something new every day, huh, D'Agosta?" Lillian asked, gri

D'Agosta turned back to the table. There was a small stack of books: Dr. Faustus by Christopher Marlowe; The New Book of Christian Prayers ;Malleus Maleficarum.

"The Witches Hammer," Pendergast said, nodding at the last title. "The professional witch-hunting manual of the Inquisition. A font of information on the black arts."

Beside the books was a stack of Web printouts. D'Agosta picked up the top sheet. The site was called Maledicat Dominus; this particular page appeared to be devoted to charms or prayers for warding off the devil.

"He visited a bunch of sites like that in the last twenty-four hours of his life," said Braskie. "Those were the pages he printed out."

Pendergast was now examining a wine cork with a magnifying glass. "What was the menu?" he asked.

Braskie turned to a notebook, flipped open some pages, and passed it to Pendergast.

Pendergast read aloud. "Dover sole, grilled medallions of beef in a burgundy and mushroom reduction, julie

Handing back the notebook, Pendergast continued his prowl. He bent forward, picked up a wrinkled piece of paper.

"We found that balled up in the wastebasket. Appears to be a proof sheet of some kind."

"It's an advance print of an article for the next issue of Art Review . Due on the newsstands tomorrow, if I'm not mistaken." Pendergast smoothed the paper, once again began to read out loud. "'Art history, like any other great discipline, has its own sacred temples: places and moments any self-respecting critic would give his eyeteeth to have attended. The first impressionist exhibition on the Boulevard des Capucines in 1874 was one; the day Braque first saw Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is another. I am here now to tell you that the Golgotha series of Maurice Vilnius-now on display in his East Village studio-will be another such watershed moment in the history of art.'"