Blue Labyrinth (12 page)

T
he third-floor suite of the Palm Springs Hilton was dimly lit, the curtains drawn across the picture windows overlooking the swimming pool and cocktail cabana, shimmering in the late-morning sun. In a far corner of the suite, Agent Pendergast was reclining in an armchair, a pot of tea on a table beside him. His legs were crossed at the ankles on a leather ottoman, and he was speaking into his cell phone.

“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.

T
erry 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, Vinnie,” Bonomo said in his booming New Jersey accent. “You recall the time I was putting together a portrait of a suspected murderer—using the testimony of the murderer himself?”

“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 winnowing down the look of the suspect’s eyebrows: shape, thickness, taper, distance between, on and on. Finally, when both Bonomo and Sandoval appeared satisfied, they moved on to the eyes themselves.

“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, Pennsylvania. Doddering old fart with trifocals. He almost soiled his underwear when he learned someone had stolen his identity and was now wanted for questioning in a murder.”

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.

The computer seemed to have frozen. “What’s it doing now?” D’Agosta asked.

“Rendering the composite.”

A few minutes passed. Then the computer gave a chirrup and a small window appeared on the screen that read
RENDERING PROCESS COMPLETE
. Bonomo clicked a button and a nearby printer stirred
into life, spooling out a sheet containing a grayscale image. Bonomo plucked it from the tray, glanced over it, then showed it to Sandoval.

“That him?” he asked.

Sandoval looked at the picture in amazement. “My God. That’s the guy! Unbelievable. How’d you do that?”

“You did it,” said Bonomo, clapping him on the shoulder.

D’Agosta peered over Bonomo’s picture at the sheet. The facial portrait it contained was almost photographic in its clarity.

“Terry, you’re the man,” he murmured.

Bonomo beamed, then printed half a dozen more copies and passed them over.

D’Agosta squared up the sheets on the edge of the table and put them in his case. “Email me the image, okay?”

“Will do, Vinnie.”

As D’Agosta left with Sandoval in tow, he thought that now it was just a question of trying to match this sketch to the twelve thousand people who came and went from the Museum on the day of the murder. That was going to be fun.

I
nterrogation Room B of the California State Holding Facility at Indio was a spacious room with beige cinder-block walls and a single table with four chairs: three on one side, one on the other. A boom mike descended from the ceiling, and video cameras sprouted from two corners. Along the far wall ran a dark rectangle of one-way glass.

Special Agent Pendergast sat in the center of the three chairs. His hands rested on the table, fingers interlocked. The room was perfectly silent. His pale eyes were fixed at some faraway point in space, and he remained as still as a marble statue.

Now sounds of footsteps echoed in the corridor outside. There was a rolling noise as a security bolt was drawn back, then the door opened inward. Pendergast glanced over to see John Spandau, senior corrections officer, enter the room.

Pendergast rose, a little stiff from the previous day’s struggle, and extended his hand. “Mr. Spandau,” he said.

Spandau smiled faintly, nodded. “He’s ready if you are.”

“Has he said anything?”

“Not a word.”

“I see. Bring him in, by all means.”

Spandau stepped back out into the corridor. There was a brief murmur of conversation. Then Pendergast’s attacker from the Salton Fontainebleau entered, wearing an orange jumpsuit, escorted by two
prison guards. The man had a cast on one wrist and a brace on one knee, and he walked slowly, with a limp. He was in cuffs and leg-chains. The guards directed him to the lone chair on the far side of the table, sat him down.

“Do you want us to be present?” Spandau asked.

“No, thank you.”

“They’ll be right outside if you need anything.” Spandau nodded to the guards, then all three men left the interrogation room. There was the sound of the security bolt sliding home, then a key being turned in a lock.

Pendergast’s gaze rested on the closed door for a moment. Then he sat down and turned to regard the man opposite the table. The man returned the look. His face was absolutely impassive. He was tall and muscular, with a broad face, high forehead, and heavy brows.

For a long time, the two men just stared at each other without speaking. Finally, Pendergast broke the silence. “I’m in a position to help you,” he said. “If you’ll let me.”

The man did not reply.

“You’re a victim, just as much as I am. You were as surprised as I was when the sedative agent was injected into that room.” His tone was gentle, understanding, almost deferential. “You’ve been made into—in the parlance of the day—a ‘fall guy’ or ‘stooge.’ Not very agreeable. Now, I don’t know why you undertook this job, why you agreed to attack me, or how you were to be compensated. I only know that it must have
been
a job, not any personal grievance, because I’ve never seen you before in my life. You were set up, played, used—and then thrown to the wolves.” He paused. “I told you that I could help. And I will—if you tell me who you are and who you’re working for. That’s all I want from you: two names. I shall do the rest.”

The man merely looked back at him with the same impassive expression.

“If you are maintaining your silence out of some misguided sense of loyalty, let me clarify:
you have already been sacrificed
. Do you understand? Whoever your puppeteer is—whoever has been guiding your
actions—clearly meant from the very beginning for you to be incapacitated as well as myself. So why remain silent?”

Still, silence.

“Let me tell you a story. One of my fellow agents put a mobster in jail seven years ago for extortion and blackmail. The mobster was given many opportunities to provide the names of his bosses in exchange for leniency. But he remained a loyal soldier. He did the whole stretch, all seven years of his sentence. This man was released just two weeks ago. The first thing he did was go home to his family, who greeted him with tears of joy. Less than an hour later, he was shot to death by the very mobsters he’d gone to prison to protect. They acted to make sure his mouth stayed closed…
despite
his seven years of loyal silence.”

As Pendergast spoke, the man blinked infrequently, but made no other movement.

“Are you keeping silent out of the hope you will be rewarded? That will never happen.”

Nothing. Now Pendergast fell silent for a time, staring appraisingly at the man across the table. At last, he spoke again.

“Perhaps you are protecting your family. Perhaps you fear that, if you speak, they will be killed.”

The man did not respond to this, either.

Pendergast rose. “If this is the case, then the only hope for your family and for you is to speak. We can protect them. Otherwise, both you and they will be lost—utterly. Trust me: I’ve seen it happen many times.”

Something flashed in the man’s eyes—perhaps.

“Good day.”

With this, he called for the guards. The door was unlocked, the bolt thrust back, and the guards entered, along with Spandau. Pendergast remained standing while the two guards led the prisoner away.

Pendergast hesitated. “I’ll be heading back to New York. Will you arrange for me to obtain his mug shots, fingerprints, DNA, and the medical report from the admitting doctor?”

“Of course.”

“You’ve been most cooperative.” He paused. “Tell me, Mr. Spandau—you are something of a wine connoisseur, are you not?”

The man looked back at him with veiled surprise. “What makes you say that?”

“A pamphlet detailing Bordeaux futures on your desk, which I noticed yesterday.”

Spandau hesitated. “I am a bit of an enthusiast, I admit.”

“You’re familiar, then, with Château Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande.”

“Sure.”

“Do you like it?”

“I’ve never tasted it.” Spandau shook his head. “Nor will I, on a correction officer’s salary.”

“Pity. It just so happens that this morning I was able to procure a case of the 2000 vintage. An excellent year, quite drinkable already. I’ve arranged for it to be delivered to your home.”

Spandau frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“I would take it as a great personal favor if you could call me right away should our friend start to talk. All for a good cause—solving this case.”

Spandau considered this in silence.

“And if you could arrange for a transcript to be made of what he says—officially, of course—that would be simply icing on the cake. It’s possible I might be of assistance. Here’s my card.”

Spandau remained still another moment. And then a smile spread across his normally unemotional features. “Agent Pendergast,” he said, “I believe it would be my pleasure.”