Fever Dream

Pendergast closed the diary and slipped it into his jacket pocket. As he did so, a flash of lightning illuminated the black trees beyond the window and a rumble of thunder shook the house.

"Unbelievable," said D'Agosta. "Helen stole the parrot. Just like she stole those stuffed parrots of Audubon's. What in the world was she thinking?"

Pendergast said nothing.

"Did you ever see the parrot? Did she bring it back to Penumbra?"

Pendergast shook his head wordlessly.

"What about this scientific lab she talked about?"

"She had no lab, Vincent. She was employed by Doctors With Wings."

"Do you have any idea what the hell she was doing?"

"For the first time in my life I am completely and utterly at a loss."

The lightning flickered again, illuminating an expression on Pendergast's face of pure shock and incomprehension.

26

New York City

CAPTAIN LAURA HAYWARD, NYPD HOMICIDE, liked to keep the door of her office open to signal she hadn't forgotten her roots as a lowly TA cop patrolling the subways. She had risen far and fast in the department, and while she knew she was good and deserved the promotions, she was also uncomfortably aware that being a woman hadn't hurt at all, especially after the sex discrimination scandals of the previous decade.

But on this particular morning, when she arrived at six, she reluctantly shut the door even though no one else was in. The investigation into a string of Russian mafia drug killings on Coney Island had been dragging its ass around the department, generating huge amounts of paperwork and meetings. It had finally reached the point where someone--her--needed to sit down with the files and go through them all so at least one person could get on top of the case and move it forward.

Toward noon, her brain almost fried from the senseless brutality of it all, she rose from her desk and decided to get some air by taking a stroll in the small park next to One Police Plaza. She opened her door and exited the outer office, ru

They greeted her with a little more effusion than usual, with several sidelong, embarrassed glances.

Hayward returned the greetings and then paused. "All right, what is it?"

A telling silence.

"I've never seen a worse bunch of fakers," she said lightly. "Honestly, if you sat down to a game of Texas Hold 'Em, you'd all lose."

The joke fell flat, and after a moment's hesitation, a sergeant spoke up. "Captain, it's sort of about that, ah, FBI agent. Pendergast."

Hayward froze. Her disdain for Pendergast was well known in the department, as was her relationship with his sometime partner D'Agosta. Pendergast always managed to drag Vincent into deep shit, and she had a growing premonition that the present excursion to Louisiana would end as disastrously as the earlier ones. In fact, maybe it just had... As these thoughts flashed through her mind, Hayward tried to control her features, keep them neutral. "What about Special Agent Pendergast?" she asked coolly.

"It isn't Pendergast exactly," said the sergeant. "It's a relative of his. Woman named Constance Greene. She's down in central booking, gave Pendergast as her next-of-kin. Apparently she's his niece or something."

Another awkward silence.

"And?" Hayward prompted.

"She's been abroad. She booked passage on the Queen Mary Two from Southampton to New York, boarded with her baby."

"Baby?"

"Right. A couple months old at most. Born abroad. Anyway, after the ship docked she was held at passport control because the baby was missing. INS radioed NYPD and we've taken her into custody. They're booking her for homicide."

"Homicide?"

"That's right. Seems she threw her baby off the ship somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean."

27

Gulf of Mexico

THE DELTA 767 SEEMED ALMOST TO HOVER AT thirty-four thousand feet, the sky serene and cloudless, the sea an unbroken expanse of blue far below, sparkling in the afternoon light.

"May I get you another beer, sir?" the stewardess asked, bending over D'Agosta solicitously.

"Sure," he replied.

The stewardess turned to D'Agosta's seatmate. "And you, sir? Is everything all right?"

"No," Pendergast said. He gestured dismissively toward the small dish of smoked salmon that sat on his seat-back tray. "I find this to be room temperature. Would you mind bringing me a chilled serving, please?"

"Not at all." The woman whisked the plate away with a professional gesture.

D'Agosta waited until she returned, then settled back in the wide, comfortable seat, stretching out his legs. The only times he'd flown first-class were traveling with Pendergast, but it was something he could get used to.

A chime sounded over the PA system, and the captain a

D'Agosta took a sip of his beer. Sunflower, Louisiana, was already eighteen hours and hundreds of miles behind them, but the strange Doane house--with that single, jewel-like room of wonders surrounded by a storm of decay and furious ruin--had never been far from his mind. Pendergast, however, had seemed disinclined to discuss it, remaining thoughtful and silent.

D'Agosta tried once again. "I got a theory."

The agent glanced toward him.

"I think the Doane family is a red herring."

"Indeed?" Pendergast took a tentative bite of the salmon.

"Think about it. They went nuts many months after Helen's visit. How could the visit have anything to do with what happened later? Or a parrot?"

"Perhaps you're right," said Pendergast, vaguely. "What puzzles me is this sudden flowering of creative brilliance before... the end. For all of them."

"It's a well-known fact that madness runs in families--" D'Agosta thought better of concluding this observation. "Anyway, it's always the gifted ones that go crazy."

" 'We poets in our youth begin in gladness; But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.' " Pendergast turned toward D'Agosta. "So you think their creativity led to madness?"

"It sure as hell happened to the Doane daughter."

"I see. And Helen's theft of the parrot had nothing to do with what happened to the family later, is that your hypothesis?"

"More or less. What do you think?" D'Agosta hoped to smoke out Pendergast's opinion.

"I think that coincidences do not please me, Vincent."

D'Agosta hesitated. "Look, another thing I've been wondering... was, or I mean did, Helen--sometimes act weird, or... odd?"

Pendergast's expression seemed to tighten. "I'm not sure I know what you mean."

"It's just these..." D'Agosta hesitated again. "These sudden trips to strange destinations. The secrets. This stealing of birds, first two dead ones from a museum, then a live one from a family. Is it possible Helen was under some kind of strain, maybe--or was, you know, suffering from some nervous condition? Because back in Rockland I heard rumors that her family was not exactly normal..."