Blue Labyrinth

“He’s being held in lieu of bail at the Indio jail,” he said. “There was no identification on his person, and his fingerprints aren’t in any database.”

“Did he say why he attacked you?” came the voice of Constance Greene.

“He’s been as silent as a Trappist monk.”

“You were both knocked out by some anesthetizing agent?”

“So it would seem.”

“To what purpose?”

“That is still a mystery. I’ve been to the doctor, I’m in perfect health — save for the injuries inflicted during the struggle. There’s no trace of any poison or ill effects. No needle marks or anything to indicate I was interfered with while unconscious.”

“The person who attacked you must have been in league with whoever administered the sedative. It seems strange he would have anesthetized his own associate.”

“The entire sequence of events is strange. I believe the man was duped as well. Until he talks, his motive remains obscure. There is one thing, however, that is quite clear. And it is much to my discredit.”

He paused.

“Yes?”

“All of this — the turquoise, the Golden Spider Mine, the Salton Fontainebleau, the ineffectually erased tire tracks, the map of the mine itself, and possibly the old man I spoke to — was a setup. It was carefully orchestrated to lure me into that particular animal handling room where that gas could be administered. That room was built years ago for the very purpose of administering anesthetic gas to dangerous animals.”

“So what’s to your discredit?”

“I thought I was one step ahead of them, when in reality they were always several steps ahead of me.”

“You say they. Do you really believe that Alban could have been involved, somehow?”

Pendergast did not answer at once, and then repeated, in a low voice, “You have Alban to thank for this. A rather unambiguous statement, don’t you think?”

“Yes.”

“This complex arrangement at the Salton Fontainebleau, over-engineered as if to compensate for any possible failure, has all the tricky hallmarks of something Alban would delight in setting up. And yet — it was his murder that set the trap in motion.”

“A strange kind of suicide?” asked Constance.

“I doubt it. Suicide is not Alban’s style.”

The line lapsed into silence before Constance spoke again. “Have you told D’Agosta?”

“I haven’t informed anybody, especially Lieutenant D’Agosta. He already knows more about Alban than is good for him. As for the NYPD in general, I have no faith that they can be of any assistance to me in this matter. If anything, I fear they would trod about, doing damage. I’ll go back to the Indio jail this afternoon to see if I can get anything out of this fellow.” A pause. “Constance, I’m terribly chagrined I fell into this trap to begin with.”

“He was your son. You weren’t thinking clearly.”

“That’s neither comfort nor excuse.” And with that, Pendergast ended the call, slipped the cell phone into a pocket of his suit jacket, and remained unmoving, a vague, thoughtful figure in a darkened room.

23

Terry Bonomo was the NYPD’s crack Identi-CAD expert. He was also a wiseass in the true Jersey-Italian tradition and, consequently, one of D’Agosta’s favorite people on the force. Just sitting in forensics, among the computers and displays and charts and lab equipment, D’Agosta felt his spirits rise. It felt good to be away from the musty, dim confines of the Museum. It also felt good to actually be doing something. Of course he had been doing things, trying to identify the visiting “professor”—while his forensic team scoured the bones and tray for latents, DNA, hair, and fiber. But creating a composite sketch of the phony Dr. Waldron’s face was different. It would be a major step forward. And nobody was better at facial composites than Terry Bonomo.

D’Agosta leaned over Bonomo’s shoulder and watched as he worked with the complex software. Across the table sat Sandoval, the Osteology tech. The job could have been done in the Museum, but D’Agosta always preferred to bring witnesses down to headquarters for this kind of work. Being in a police station was intimidating and helped a witness focus. And Sandoval — who looked a little paler than usual — was clearly concentrating.

“Hey, Vi

“That was legendary,” D’Agosta said with a chuckle.

“Jesus H. Christopher. The guy thought he was being cute, pretending to be a witness to a murder rather than the killer. His idea was to put together a bullshit portrait, throw us off. But I began to smell a rat almost as soon as we started.” Bonomo worked while he talked, tapping away at the keys and moving around the mouse. “Lots of witnesses have bad memories. But this clown — he was giving us the exact opposite of what he looked like. He had a big nose — so he said the bad guy’s was small. His lips? Thin. So the perp had thick lips. His jaw? Narrow. Perp had a big jaw. He was bald — so the perp had long full hair.”

“Yeah, I’ll never forget when you caught on and started putting in the opposite of what he said. When you were done, there was our perp, staring up at us from the screen. By trying to be clever, he’d fed us his own ugly mug.”

Bonomo brayed a laugh.

D’Agosta watched him working on a facial rough, based on Sandoval’s answers, as a new window popped up here, an additional layer was created there. “That’s quite a program,” he said. “Improved since the last time I was in here.”

“They’re always upgrading it. It’s like Photoshop with a single purpose. Took me three months to master it, and then they redid it. Now I’ve got the sucker nailed. You remember the old days, with all those little cards and the blank face templates?”

D’Agosta shuddered.

Bonomo hit a final key with a flourish, then swiveled the laptop around so Sandoval could see it. A large central window held a digital sketch of a man’s face, with other smaller windows surrounding it. “How close is that?” he asked Sandoval.

The tech stared at it for a long time. “It looks sort of like him.”

“We’re just getting started. Let’s go feature by feature. We’ll start with the eyebrows.”

Bonomo clicked on a window containing a catalog of facial features and selected BROWS. A horizontal scroll of small boxes containing representations of eyebrows appeared. Sandoval picked the best match, and then a bunch more appeared, all variations on that, and Sandoval picked the best match again. D’Agosta watched as Bonomo went through the exhaustive process of wi

“So what’s this perp supposed to have done?” Bonomo asked D’Agosta.

“He’s a person of interest in the murder of a lab technician at the Natural History Museum.”

“Yeah? Of interest how?”

D’Agosta recalled Bonomo’s incurable curiosity about the details behind the faces he had to create. “He used a phony identity to access the Museum’s collections, and perhaps kill a technician. The identity actually belonged to this college professor in Bryn Mawr, Pe

Bonomo let out another loud bray. “I can just see it.”

D’Agosta hovered as Bonomo went through the interminable process of sharpening the nose, lips, jaw, chin, cheekbones, ears, hair, skin color and pigment, and a dozen other features. But he had a good witness in Sandoval, who had seen the fake scientist on more than one occasion. Finally, Bonomo clicked a button and the Identi-CAD program brought up a series of computer-generated variations of the final face from which Sandoval could choose. Some shading and blending, a few additional tweaks, and then Bonomo sat back with an air of satisfaction like that of an artist completing a portrait.