Cemetery Dance

His life might be in danger, he'd said. And Pendergast was not prone to exaggeration.

Her face darkened. This wasn't the first time Vi

She shook away her anger. There would be time to confront Pendergast later. Right now, she had to act.

She approached the Ville, seeking to bypass the confrontation taking place in the church. The main doorway gaped wide, lam — bent light flickering from it. As she approached she could see riot police entering, ugly — sticks and tasers in their hands. Her own weapon at the ready, she followed quickly behind them. Beyond the shattered doors lay an ancient, narrow alley, lined on both sides with sagging wooden structures. She followed the uniformed officers past darkened doorways and shuttered windows. From ahead came the din of a thousand voices.

They rounded a bend and entered a stone plaza, beyond which lay the hulking fabric of the church itself. Here she was presented with a sight so bizarre it stopped her dead in her tracks. The plaza was a scene of desperate pandemonium, a Fellini — esque nightmare: men in brown robes were fleeing the church, some bleeding, others wailing or crying. Protesters, meanwhile, were trashing the place, racing about, breaking windows and smashing everything in sight. An indescribable din sounded from within the church walls. A profusion of animals — sheep, goats, chickens — raced about the square, tripping up the ru

This was no good. She had to find access to the cellars below, where Vi

Turning away from the scene of bedlam, she left the plaza and ran down another dark cobbled alley, trying doors as she went. Many were locked, but one opened into a workshop of some kind, a ta

This building, too, was deserted. It appeared to be a butcher shop. Walking past a row of glass cases into a back room, she spied a set of stairs leading down into a basement. Pulling a small flash — light from her jacket pocket and snapping it on, she descended. At the bottom was a chilly room lined with ancient panels of zinc: a larder. Hams, ribs, fat sausages, and half carcasses hung from the ceiling, curing. She moved carefully among them, sending one or two swinging gently, letting the beam of her light lick over the floor and the walls. At the back of the larder was a door leading to another staircase, lined with stone and apparently far older, descending into darkness. An unpleasant smell yawned up from the depths. Hayward hesitated, remembering the other thing Pendergast had said: a creature that was once a man, now transformed into something extremely dangerous. I repeat: Vincent needs help. His life might be in danger.

His life might be in danger…

Without further hesitation, Hayward probed the stairwell with her light and — gun in hand — began to descend farther into blackness.

Chapter 74

Alexander Esteban turned from Pond Road, through the automatic gates, and onto the immaculate gravel driveway that wound among the thick — trunked oaks forming the approach to his estate. He drove slowly, savoring the feeling of returning home. Next to him, on the seat, lay a simple, two — page vellum document, signed, sealed, attested, and legally bulletproof.

A document that would, after a bit of a struggle no doubt, make him one of the richest men in the world.

It was late, almost nine o'clock, but there was no more rush. No more pla

As the car eased to a stop before the barn, Esteban felt his Black — Berry begin to vibrate. With a hiss of irritation he checked it: the rear kitchen door was registering an alarm. His spine stiffened. Surely it was a false alarm — they were a frequent occurrence on his large estate, one of the drawbacks of having such an extensive security system. Still, he had to be sure. He reached into the glove compartment and pulled out his favored handgun, a Browning Hi — Power 9mm parabellum with tangent sights. He checked the magazine and found it with its full complement of thirteen ball — point rounds. Slipping it into his pocket, he rose from the car and stepped out into the fragrant night. He checked the freshly raked gravel of the driveway — no sign of a car. Strolling across the broad expanse of lawn, he glanced down at the deserted pier, at the twinkling lights across the Sound, and found all in order. Gun in hand, he passed the greenhouse, entered a walled garden, and approached the back door of the kitchen, the one that had registered the alarm, moving noiselessly. He came to the door, tried the handle. It was closed and locked. The old brass keyhole showed no signs of being forced, no scratches in the old verdigris, no broken panes, nothing to indicate a disturbance.

False alarm.

He straightened up, checked his watch. He was almost looking forward to what was to come. A perverse pleasure, to be sure, but an ancient one. A pleasure encoded in the very genes: the pleasure of killing. He had done it before and found it a curiously cathartic experience. Perhaps, if he hadn't been a movie director, he might have made an excellent serial killer.

Chuckling to himself at this private little sally, he took out his key, opened the kitchen door, and punched in his code, turning off the alarm system in the house. But as he walked through the kitchen toward the door leading to the basement, he found himself hesitating. Why a false alarm now? They usually happened during thunderstorms or high winds. It was a calm, clear night, without the breath of wind. Was it a short circuit, a random static discharge? He felt uneasy, and that was a feeling he had learned never to ignore.

Instead of heading down to the basement, he turned and walked quietly through the darkened halls until he came to his study. He woke up his Mac, entered the password, and logged onto the Web site that handled his security cams. If someone had come in through the kitchen door, he would have had to cross the lawn behind the old greenhouse, where a cam would have picked him up. There was virtually no way to get into the house without being seen — coverage was more than one hundred percent — but if you were going to try, the kitchen side of the house, with its walled garden and ruined greenhouse, was perhaps the weakest point of the entire system. He tapped in the second password, and the live — cam image popped onto the screen. Checking his BlackBerry, he saw the alarm had registered at eight forty — one pm. He punched "8:36" into the digital timestamp field, selected the camera to monitor, and began to watch.

It was well past sundown, and the image was dark — the night vision hadn't kicked in. He fiddled with the controls, enhancing the view as much as possible. He wondered at his own paranoia; he was, as usual, micromanaging. He thought, with a smile of irony, that it was both his worst, and his best, quality. And yet the uneasy feeling remained…