Blue Labyrinth

“Probably — and it’s creeping the heck out of me.”

27

Lieutenant Peter Angler sat at a scuffed desk, heaped with paper, in the rambling offices of the Transportation Security Administration. Outside the room’s lone window, a steady stream of jets screamed by on JFK’s runway 4L-22R. It was almost as noisy inside: the TSA offices were awash in ringing phones, clacking keyboards, slamming doors, and — not infrequently — voices raised in anger or protest. Directly across the hall, a heavyset man from Cartagena was being subjected — visible past a door that was more than ajar — to a body cavity search.

What was that line of Sophocles from Oedipus Rex? “How awful a knowledge of the truth can be.” Angler looked quickly back at the paperwork strewn across the desk.

With little else to go on, several of his men were checking into the many ways Alban could have entered the country. He had one hard fact: before showing up dead on a doorstep in New York City, Alban’s last reported location had been Brazil. And so Angler had dispatched teams to the local airports, Pe

Angler reached for a stack of paper. Passenger manifests: lists of people who had entered the country from Brazil over the last several months, via flights into JFK. It was one of many such manifests, and it was an inch thick. Searching for any evidence? They were wallowing in “evidence”—all of it apparently useless, a distraction. His men were examining these same manifests, looking for known criminals that Alban might have associated with, checking for anything remotely out of place or suspicious.

He himself was simply checking — paging through the lists, hour after hour, waiting for something, anything, to catch his attention.

Angler knew he didn’t think like the average cop. He was right-brained: always searching for that intuitive leap, that strange co

Howard Miller

Diego Cavalcanti

Beatriz Cavalcanti

Roger Taylor

Fritz Zimmerma

Gabriel Azevedo

Pedro Almeida

As he did so, he had the fleeting sense — not for the first time in this case — that somebody had made this journey before him. It was just little things: the slight disorder among papers that had no reason to be disordered, file drawers that looked like they’d recently been pawed through, and a few people who had vague recollections of someone else asking similar questions six months or a year ago.

But who could it have been? Pendergast?

At the thought of Pendergast, Angler felt a familiar irritation. He’d never before met such a character. If the man had been the slightest bit cooperative, maybe all this pawing through paper wouldn’t be necessary.

Angler shook this line of reflection away and returned to the manifests. He was experiencing a touch of indigestion, and he wasn’t going to let thoughts of Pendergast make it worse.

Dener Goulart

Matthias Kahn

Elizabeth Kemper

Robert Kemper

Nathalia Rocha

Tapanes Landberg

Marta Berlitz

Yuri Pais

Suddenly he stopped. One of the names — Tapanes Landberg — stood out.

Why? Other odd names had jumped out at him before… and proven to be nothing. What was it about this one that stirred something in his right brain?

He paused to consider. What had Pendergast said about his son? He’d said so little that all of it had stayed in Angler’s mind. He was eminently capable of managing even the worst trouble. There was something else, too; something that had stood out: He took delight in malicious games; he was an expert at taunting and mortification.

Games. Taunting and mortification. Interesting. What meaning, exactly, was hiding behind the veil of those words? Had Alban been a trickster? Did he like his little jokes?

Taking a pencil, Angler — slowly, lips pursed — began doodling with the name Tapanes Landberg in the top margin of the manifest.

Tapanes Landberg

Tapanes Bergland

Sada Plantenberg

Abrades Plangent

Abrades Plangent. On a whim, Angler removed the letters that made up Alban from this name. He found himself left with:

rdesPagent

Shifting to the bottom margin, he rearranged these letters.

dergaPenst

Pendergast

Angler glanced at the manifest details. The flight had been Air Brazil, Rio de Janeiro to New York.

The person who entered Ke

For the first time in several days, Peter Angler smiled.

28

The Microforms Reading Room on the first floor of the New York Public Library’s main building was brightly lit, packed with machines for reading microfilm and microfiche, and too warm for comfort. As he took a seat beside Margo, D’Agosta loosened his tie and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt. He watched as she loaded a reel of microfilm onto their machine and threaded it through the mechanism and onto the takeup spindle.

“Christ,” D’Agosta said. “You’d think they would have digitized all this by now. So what are we looking at?”

“The New-York Evening Independent. It was quite comprehensive for its time, but verged toward more sensationalist stories than the Times.” She glanced at the microfilm box. “This spool covers the years 1888 to 1892. Where do you suggest we start?”

“The skeleton entered the collection in ’89. Let’s start there.” D’Agosta tugged his tie down a little farther. Damn, it was hot in here. “If this guy got rid of his wife, he wouldn’t wait around to dispose of her body.”

“Right.” Margo nudged the big dial on the front of the microfilm machine into forward. Old newspaper pages scrolled up the screen, first slowly, then more quickly. The machine made a whirring noise. D’Agosta glanced over at Margo. She seemed a different person when outside the Museum — more at ease.

He couldn’t shake the feeling that, while this might be an interesting exercise, in the end it wouldn’t move his own case forward — even if Padgett had killed his wife and stuffed her bones in the collection. He found himself freshly a

Margo slowed the machine again as they reached 1889. Page after page passed: stories about New York politics, colorful or lurid foreign events, gossip and crime and all the attendant hustle and bustle of a city still growing at flank speed. And then, in late summer, something of interest appeared:

GENERAL LOCAL NEWS

~~~~~

Elevated Railway Stock Released — Man Arraigned on Suspicion of Wife’s Disappearance — New Opening at the Garrick Theatre — Sugar Ring Collapses — Stinson in jail following libel suit

~~~~~

Special to the New-York Evening Independent.

NEW YORK, AUG. 15.—Consolidated Steel has just a