Chapter 14
WELCOME TO PENUMbrA PLANTATION,” Pendergast said. “And thank you for coming.”
Chambers tried to tamp down his mingled confusion and astonishment. So his hunch had been true: the guy was old-money rich. Unusual for an FBI agent, but no big deal—beyond the inevitable black suit and other personal eccentricities.
“I wasn’t sure I had a choice,” Chambers said, mustering a grin. “Besides, how could I resist taking a ride in that?” And he jerked a thumb toward the Rolls.
“Pardon my asking,” Chambers said as Pendergast ushered him into a reception area redolent of furniture polish and cedarwood, “but are we really going to take on that case? I thought we went there on a lark, more or less.”
“Indeed we did. But the body we examined yesterday—and the circumstances surrounding it—piqued my curiosity.”
“Okay.”
Pendergast paused. “Do you feel my interest to be misplaced?”
“No.”
“Were you at all intrigued?”
“Yes. Sort of.” The fact was, Chambers felt grateful for anything that got him out of the house. And he reminded himself he was supposed to be mentoring a new agent, and this was a fine opportunity to do that.
“Nice place you got here,” he added, trying hard not to sound sarcastic.
“It’s been in the family a long time.”
“So if we do take on the case, where’s our base going to be? We can’t go back to the office, and we don’t have access to the central archives.”
“Right here.” Pendergast pointed to the thick cabling at their feet. “Follow me.”
Chambers followed the agent through a dazzling drawing room and into a large den, where he was astonished to see three technicians—IBM identification cards dangling from lanyards around their necks—laboring over several personal computers set up at temporary workstations.
“My old colleague Mike Decker happened to call last night, and we got to chatting about that body in the storage unit. I won’t bore you with the details, but the upshot was he considered it worth pursuing—for a week, at least—and said that, if I paid for the necessary T-1 line and computing equipment, he would arrange access to the FBI databases from my private saloon here.
I hope you agree, Agent Chambers, that we will be comfortable? ”
“No doubt.”
This was an eye-opener, and no mistake. Chambers remembered what Pendergast had said yesterday: I reviewed your record with Agent Decker when we were selecting the most agreeable posting for me.
At the time, the sentence construction had struck him as odd, as if Pendergast was doing the picking instead of the other way around.
He again wondered about Pendergast’s background and just what kind of pull he had with the Bureau.
During Chambers’s long fog of mourning, Pendergast had done nothing to demonstrate he was a favored son.
He went about his work with initiative, it was true, even in the absence of direction.
And Estevez had been uncharacteristically evasive when he’d briefed Chambers on his new partner…
The voice of a technician roused him. “We’re all finished here, Mr. Pendergast, sir.”
“Excellent, most excellent. Let us just make sure.” Pendergast made a tour around the table, examining the screens of the three computers whose hulking CPU towers were sitting beside them on the table, humming loudly.
Chambers noticed all three screens currently displayed the sign-on screen used by the FBI’s investigative staff.
Finishing his circuit, Pendergast nodded to the men. “Thank you. Will I be able to reach you if there’s any problem?”
“These Server 85s are top-flight, and your T-1 data stream is holding steady at one megabit per second, plus,” said the person who seemed the lead tech.
“I take it that is a good thing.”
The tech dipped a hand into his jacket and pulled out a card. “I’ll stop by in the afternoon to see if any troubleshooting needs to be done. Meanwhile, if you experience any difficulty, call the number on that card—they’ll be able to get in touch with me immediately.”
“Thank you kindly.”
As if summoned by magic, a figure dressed in an old-fashioned but natty suit—apparently a butler or other manservant—appeared to usher the three out. A minute later, the man returned. He was thin and elegant and ageless. “Anything to drink, gentlemen?” he asked.
“Lemonade, if you please, Maurice,” said Pendergast.
“I’ll have the same,” said Chambers.
As Maurice left, Pendergast beckoned Chambers to a seat. “Shall we try this out? Those technicians told me the computers are running OS/2 Warp—which puts me in mind of a certain vulgarism in ancient Greek—but as you heard, they assured me we should encounter no problems.”
Chambers sat down at the proffered seat, then entered his credentials and password at the log-in screen. It came up with the menu he was intimately familiar with. He entered a few commands.
“Seems responsive enough.”
Pendergast took a seat beside him. “The murder we examined yesterday was, as I said, not the killer’s first. I hoped that combing our databases of unsolved homicides might turn up some leads to confirm this speculation.”
Chambers nodded slowly. In all honesty, he hadn’t given the case much thought since the night before.
But now his brain began to churn. “If this is a serial killer, we don’t have enough information to understand his MO.
Is garroting people his bag? Or is it hacking off limbs?
Leaving bodies in storage units? We’ll need to cast a wide net here. ”
Pendergast nodded—after waiting just long enough to make Chambers curious. “How shall we proceed?”
“You tell me, Agent Pendergast,” Chambers said as Maurice returned with their lemonades. “I’m mentoring you. Tell me what you think the next steps are.”
“Very well, then.” Pendergast, it seemed, already had an idea in mind.
“Such predators usually strike in territory they know, where they feel comfortable—usually a radius of five to thirty miles. I’d suggest we cast our net over such a range, with its center at the place the two girls witnessed the victim.
Where Chef Menteur Highway crosses the Old Pearl River.
Or perhaps the storage unit should be the center point? ”
Chambers smiled. “You choose.”
“Let’s do both.”
“And what filters will you be using?” Chambers asked. He was starting to enjoy this.
“Any unsolved homicides involving cutting, mutilation, or amputation.”
“Going back how far?”
“On that point, Agent Chambers, I really must defer to you.”
“Let’s try five years. If this is a wild goose chase, no point in beating ourselves up.”
“An inspired suggestion.”
Chambers sat down at one computer and Pendergast took another.
The room fell into silence as they accessed the FBI databases and began searching.
Chambers was familiar with this process and had grown to dislike it intensely.
Part of him longed for the old days of index cards and giant binders filled with paper.
But this was 1994, and that ship had sailed.
The problem was, the Bureau was still finalizing its changeover to digital recordkeeping, and the search tools remained crude and uneven.
With index cards you could get a feel for things, but looking at endless computer screens seemed to dull his sixth sense.
Maybe in twenty or thirty years he could type in a command—compile a list of all unsolved killings involving amputation or mutilation within such-and-such radius over the last five years—and it would be delivered to him on a silver platter.
As it was, he couldn’t shake the feeling these screens and their fixed categories might cause him to miss an important clue—if only because that clue had not been scanned or had been indexed improperly.
He applied various filters to his search—age, location, type of injury, manner of death—and ran each of these against the numerous sub-databases at his disposal.
Once, Maurice came in and silently refilled their lemonades.
Chambers had the sense that Pendergast—unfamiliar as he must be with the system—was having his own difficulties: there would be long stretches of silence from his keyboard, punctuated by staccato bursts of typing before another protracted silence.
An hour passed, then two. Chambers came across several promising items, only to have them fail to pan out on further examination. Nevertheless, he made a note of each.
Silent as a ghost, Maurice appeared to announce that lunch was ready. Pendergast raised his hands from the keyboard and—to Chambers’s surprise—dug into his jacket, fished out a gold pocket watch on a chain, flipped open the cover, and consulted it.
“Half past twelve,” he said. “Shall we take some refreshment, Agent Chambers?”
They adjourned to a rear veranda overlooking cypress groves, where Maurice served them an excellent lunch of cold chicken breast, hush puppies, and fried green tomatoes with rémoulade sauce. They ate quietly, preoccupied with what they had or had not found.
“Food to your liking?” Pendergast asked, dabbing a linen napkin at the corners of his mouth in what seemed a very proper fashion before allowing Maurice to take their dishes away.
Maurice, Chambers thought, would make an excellent chef. “Slap-your-momma-down good.”
There was a puzzled silence.
“It was first-rate,” Chambers said. For a guy supposedly from New Orleans, Pendergast seemed to have lived a remarkably sheltered existence. He prepared to stand up—until he noticed that his host showed no inclination to move.
“It’s interesting,” he said instead.
“What is?”
“That those two girls saw Mr. Drakos running across the road.”
Chambers didn’t know Pendergast well, but he could nevertheless sense there was something behind what seemed a blindingly clear observation.
“If I’d seen something like that, I would have found it interesting, too.” That seemed like the proper answer to draw out his host.