Fever Dream

He was faintly surprised: the right barrel was badly fouled; the left one clean. He laid the gun down, thinking. Again he walked to the top of the stairs.

"Maurice?"

The servant appeared once more. "Yes, sir?"

"Do you know if anyone has fired the Krieghoff since... my wife's death?"

"It was your explicit request, sir, that no one be allowed to handle it. I've kept the key myself. No one has even been near the case."

"Thank you, Maurice."

"You're quite welcome, sir."

Pendergast went back into the parlor, this time shutting the doors. From a writing desk he extracted an old sheet of stationery, which he flipped over and laid on the table. Then he inserted a brush into the right barrel, pushed out some of the fouling onto the paper, and examined it: bits and flakes of some burned, papery substance. Reaching into his suit pocket, he pulled out the loupe he always carried, fixed it to his eye, and examined the bits more intently. There was no doubt: they were the scorched, carbonized fragments of wadding.

But the .500/.416 NE cartridge had no wadding: just the bullet, the casing, and the propellant. Such a cartridge, even a defective one, would never leave this kind of fouling behind.

He examined the left barrel, finding it clean and well oiled. With the cleaning brush he pushed a rag through. There was no fouling at all.

Pendergast straightened up, his mind suddenly in furious thought. The last time the gun had been fired had been on that terrible day. He forced himself to think back. This was something he had avoided--while awake--at all costs. But once he began to remember, it wasn't hard to recall the details: every moment of that hunt was seared forever into his memory.

She had fired the gun only once. The Krieghoff had two triggers, one behind the other. The front trigger fired the right barrel, and that was the trigger normally pulled first. It was the one she pulled. And that shot had fouled the right barrel.

With that single shot, she missed the Red Lion. He'd always chalked it up to bush deflection, or perhaps extreme agitation.

But Helen wasn't one to display agitation, even under the most extreme of circumstances. She rarely missed. And she hadn't missed that last time, either... or wouldn't have missed, if the right barrel had been loaded with a bullet.

Except that it wasn't loaded with a bullet: it was loaded with a blank.

For a blank to generate a similar sound and recoil, it would have to have a large, tightly wadded plug, which would foul the barrel exactly as he'd observed.

Had Pendergast been a man of lesser control, the hinges of his sanity might have weakened under the emotional intensity of his thoughts. She had loaded the gun with .500/.416 NE soft-points at the camp that morning, just before heading into the bush after the lion. He knew that for a fact: he had watched her. And he knew they were live rounds, not blanks--nobody, especially not Helen, would mistake a wadded blank for a two-ounce round. He himself clearly recalled the blunt heads of the soft-points as she dunked them into the barrels.

Between the time she loaded the Krieghoff with soft-points and the time she fired, someone had removed her unfired cartridges and replaced them with blanks. And then, after the hunt, someone had removed the two blanks--one fired, one not--to cover up what they had done. Only they made a small mistake: they did not clean the fired barrel, leaving the incriminating fouling.

Pendergast sat back in the chair. One hand--trembling ever so slightly--rose to his mouth.

Helen Pendergast's death had not been a tragic accident. It had been murder.

6

New York City

FOUR AM, SATURDAY. LIEUTENANT VINCENT D'Agosta pushed through the crowd, ducked under the crime-scene tape, and walked over to where the body lay sprawled across the sidewalk outside one of the countless identical Indian restaurants on East 6th Street. A large pool of blood had collected beneath it, reflecting the red and purple neon light in the restaurant's grimy window with surreal splendor.

The perp had been shot at least half a dozen times and he was dead. Very dead. He lay crumpled on his side, one arm thrown wide, his gun twenty feet away. A crime-scene investigator was laying a tape measure, measuring the distance from the open hand to the gun.

The corpse was a scrawny Caucasian, thirtysomething, with thi

D'Agosta went over, nodded to the Internal Affairs officer, and clasped the hands of the cops. They felt sweaty, nervous.

It's damn hard, D'Agosta thought, to have killed someone. You never really get over it.

"Lieutenant," said one of the cops in a rush, anxious to explain yet again to a fresh ear, "the guy had just robbed the restaurant at gunpoint and was ru

D'Agosta grasped the man's shoulder, gave it a friendly squeeze as he glanced at his nameplate. "Ocampo, don't sweat it. You did what you had to do. The investigation will show that."

"I mean, he just opened up like there was no tomorrow--"

"For him there won't be." D'Agosta walked aside with the Internal Affairs investigator. "Any problems?"

"I doubt it, sir. These days, of course, there's always a hearing. But this is about as clear-cut as they come." He slapped his notebook shut.

D'Agosta lowered his voice. "See those guys get some psychological counseling. And make sure they meet with the union lawyers before they do any more talking."

"Will do."

D'Agosta looked thoughtfully at the corpse. "How much did he get?"

"Two hundred and twenty, give or take. Fucking addict, look at him, all eaten up by horse."

"Sad. Any ID?"

"Warren Zabriskie, address in Far Rockaway."

D'Agosta shook his head as he glanced over the scene. It was about as straightforward as you could ask for: two cops, both minorities; the dead perp white; witnesses up the wazoo; everything caught on security cams. Open and shut. There would be no protest marches or accusations of police brutality. The shooter got what he deserved--everyone would reluctantly agree on that.

D'Agosta glanced around. Despite the cold, a pretty big crowd had developed beyond the tape, East Village rockers and yupsters and metrosexuals and whatever the hell else you called them these days. The forensic unit was still working the body, the EMTs waiting to one side, the owner of the victimized restaurant being interviewed by detectives. Everyone doing their job. Everything under control. A senseless, stupid, piece-of-shit case that would generate a blizzard of paperwork, interviews, reports, analyses, boxes of evidence, hearings, press conferences. All because of two hundred lousy bucks for a fix.

He was wondering how long it would be before he could gracefully escape when he heard a shout and saw a disturbance at the far edge of the cordoned area. Someone had ducked under the tape and trespassed onto the scene. He turned angrily--only to come face-to-face with Special Agent A. X. L. Pendergast, pursued by two uniformed officers.