Chapter 20
“Yes,” Pendergast murmured. After a moment, he added: “So it would seem.” Then he straightened up and glanced at Chambers. “Don’t you find it rather stuffy in here?”
Chambers didn’t find it stuffy; it was more like a steam bath.
The interior of the Pendergast mansion had never seen a whiff of air conditioning.
Even with Maurice throwing open the French doors and windows in the mornings to aid a flow of air, when it was a hundred degrees outside it was a hundred degrees inside—no two ways about it.
His friends at the agency called this month in Louisiana “the depths of hell”—and for good reason.
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s hot.”
“Shall we take a stroll around the grounds to refresh our mental faculties before resuming our search?”
“Hell, yes.”
Chambers was relieved when they stepped out on the veranda—but not by much: it was still damn hot.
Even so, Pendergast had not even bothered to remove his black suit jacket of worsted wool.
In fact, Chambers couldn’t recall Pendergast ever taking his jacket off—even when he’d lain down on that butcher’s gurney for that weird meditation, or whatever it was.
Yet no matter how hot, he always looked cool and immaculate. How did the guy do it?
After descending from the veranda, Pendergast set off at an unexpectedly fast pace down a walkway and across the lawn, toward a parallel line of ancient oaks draped in Spanish moss.
Chambers hustled to keep up with the man’s long strides, wondering where they were going now.
They entered the oak grove, following the path paved in brick and overspread with moss.
It ended at a hedge with a gate, which Pendergast threw open, leading into an arboretum of ancient specimen trees, unkempt and overgrown.
Here Pendergast paused and cast him a mischievous glance. “It’s only fair to warn you, my dear Chambers, that we may encounter a ghost.”
“What sort of ghost?”
“One of my felonious ancestors who managed to get himself hanged. Poor fellow—his grave is just beyond.”
Glancing in that direction, Chambers could see a wrought iron fence enclosing a small burial plot.
“Shall we enter?”
Do I have a choice? Chambers thought as he followed Pendergast in. A scattering of slate and marble headstones, crooked and leaning, could be seen peeking up from the tangle of grass.
“This is the family plot?” Chambers asked as he looked around. The giant trees enveloped the graveyard in welcome shade, and he could feel a cooling mist drifting in from somewhere.
“Indeed it is. For me it is a place of meditation: a reminder of our common fate. More than that—I am required by my grandfather’s last will and testament to visit his grave at least once every three years, such visit to be recorded by a notary public.
And here it is.” Pendergast moved aside the grass with his shoe to expose a gravestone.
“Louis de Frontenac Diogenes Pendergast. We called him Pépère.”
“Tempus edax rerum,” Chambers read from the inscription. “What does that mean?”
“Time, devourer of all things,” said Pendergast.
Somehow, this reminded Chambers of his wife—and how brief, in retrospect, their time together had seemed. The pang caused him to fall silent.
“Time is our deadliest enemy,” Pendergast said in a quieter tone.
Chambers bowed his head. “True.”
“But also our fast friend.”
“How’s that?”
“The past is immutable and the future unknown. This moment—now—is the only reality. It is our challenge to accept the rule of time—which is to say that we accept the past for what it is, and cease worrying about the future and what it might bring.”
“You mean, enjoy the present.”
“Not ‘enjoy.’ Live. There lies the difference.”
This philosophical side of Pendergast was something new, especially delivered as it was in a honeyed accent that seemed to have become more pronounced than ever now that he was in his native element.
As the minutes passed, the pang of Chambers’s loss ebbed, and somehow the peaceful stillness of the graveyard gave him a sensation of acceptance he hadn’t experienced since his wife died.
He wondered if, perhaps, that was why Pendergast had brought him here.
“But now,” said Pendergast, his voice more brisk but still quiet, “let us return to the case—because I believe I’ve come to an unexpected realization. You may recall from the behavioral science curriculum at the Academy that serial killers fall into categories or, as they say, types.”
Chambers nodded.
“In this case, however, I believe we are dealing with a serial killer who is sui generis.”
“Sui—what?” For a moment, a scene from the movie Deliverance came to Chambers’s mind.
“He is unique. Reluctantly, I’m coming to the conclusion that there has never been another killer like him.
He does not fall into those neat categories that behavioral science—which, in my opinion, is a science still in its infancy—has laid out.
Which means the parameters of our search to date have been little more than useless.
In other words, he may be living within the radius ascribed to serial killers; he may live without.
He may cut off the arms of his victims; he may merely slash them, if that.
His motives are personal and idiosyncratic to himself, and we cannot hope to understand them by studying his type—since he belongs to none. ”
“So what do we do?”
“We discard—or at least revise—the parameters of our search. We drop the majority of our assumptions and stick with only what we know to be true. And what are those things we know?”
“We know he seeks out strong, healthy men. Until we get contrary evidence, you think his interest is focused for whatever reason on their right arms. He seems to have had some surgical experience.”
“Correct on all counts. And I would add, given the incident on the highway where he was chasing Drakos, it’s reasonable to believe one of his numerous safe houses is fairly near that location: probably within a ten-mile radius.
However, at this moment he may be operating far from that location—we can no longer count on the usual serial-killer radius rule. ”
“I’d go along with that,” said Chambers. “But I have one question.”
Pendergast arched his eyebrows in response.
“Those serial-killer categories you just disrespected—they aren’t exactly useless. They’ve been carefully curated based on all serial killers, and their motives, that we know of to date. Why—how—can this person be different?”
“An excellent question. All I can say is that we’ll have our answer—but only when we find the killer.”
Pendergast then turned and headed out of the graveyard, holding open the gate for Chambers and walking with that same fast stride back to the mansion. Chambers considered that their roles had slowly, almost unnoticeably, been reversing; now he was more the mentee, and Pendergast the mentor.
Oddly enough, it didn’t bother him.
An hour later, back in the stifling room, sitting in front of a computer, Chambers found himself—having widened his net across three states—now paging through dozens of open homicide files.
He began to wonder if this wasn’t just turning into a wild goose chase of a different sort.
He’d had no idea so many killings remained unsolved.
They were mostly banal killings of people involved in petty crimes, to which investigators had given only cursory attention before moving on.
But there was one case that gave him pause, though he wasn’t sure why.
On the surface, it seemed like yet another mob or gang killing—a guy hog-tied to a chair, face beaten to a pulp, stabbed in the heart.
Unlike the others, he was not missing an arm.
But the body showed signs of torture—cuts, bruises, cigarette burns.
His left arm had been broken and the fingernails pulled.
The right arm, the coroner had noted in passing, was unblemished except for some needle marks on the right shoulder, indicative of drug use.
Right shoulder? That didn’t sound to Chambers like drug use—who injected themselves in the shoulder instead of the arm? And why was one arm brutalized while the other was relatively undisturbed?
“Hey, Pendergast? Check this case out.”
Pendergast came over and peered over at the screen as Chambers paged through the slim covering file.
“Nicholas Mabley, Husser, Louisiana. Murdered two years ago. Death investigated by the Tangipahoa Sheriff’s Office.
Rather briefly, it seems.” Pendergast straightened up.
“If we take the Rolls, we can be there in about an hour,” he said, more to himself than to Chambers.
“Of course, the Spyder would be faster. And more entertaining, as well.”
“Spyder?”
A twitch of the lips came and went on Pendergast’s face. “To the garage, mortal—where you shall look upon my works, and despair.”