Douglas Preston: Brimstone

Count Fosco smiled. "What genius! What foresight!"

Pendergast inclined his head slightly.

"I speak not of you, my friend, but of the artist. You see, that must have been quite a feat, since Ghirlandaio painted this little panel three years before the Portinari Triptych arrived in Florence from Flanders." He beamed, looking around at his audience.

Pendergast coolly returned the gaze. "Ghirlandaio saw the studies for the painting which were sent to the Portinari family five years before the altarpiece arrived. I'm surprised, Count, to find you not in possession of that fact."

The count lost his smile for only a moment. Then he clapped with genuine admiration. "Well done, well done! It seems you have bested me on my home turf. I really must get to know you better, Mr. Pendergast: for a member of the carabinieri, you are exceptionally cultivated."

{ 9 }

D'Agosta listened to the distant ringing from the earpiece, so faint the other phone could have been ringing on the moon. If only his son, Vincent, would answer. He really didn't want to talk to his wife.

There was a click and that familiar voice came on. "Yes?" She never said hello , she always said yes , as if his call was already an imposition.

"It's me."

"Yes?" she repeated.

Jesus Christ. "Me, Vinnie."

"I know who it is."

"I'd like to talk to my son, please."

There was a pause. "You can't."

D'Agosta felt a flare of anger. "Why not?"

"Here in Canada we have something called school ."

D'Agosta felt stupefied. Of course. It was Friday, close to noon. "I forgot."

"I know you forgot. Just like you forgot to call on his birthday."

"You left the phone off the hook."

"The dog must've knocked it off the hook. But you could have sent a card, a present."

"I did send a card and a present."

"It arrived the day after."

"I sent it ten days before his birthday, for chrissakes. You can't blame me for slow mail." This was insane. Once again he was letting himself get dragged into a senseless argument. Why did they feel this desperate need to fight? The best thing to do was just not respond.

"Look, Lydia, I'll call later tonight, okay?"

"Vincent's going out with friends."

"I'll call tomorrow morning."

"You'll probably miss him. He's got baseball practice all day-"

"Have him call me , then."

"You think we can afford to make long-distance calls on what you're paying?"

"You know I'm doing the best I can. No one's stopping you from moving back here, you know."

"Vinnie, you dragged us kicking and screaming up here. We didn't want to go. It was tough at first. But then something amazing happened. I made a life here. I like it here. And so does Vincent. We have friends , Vinnie. We've got a life . And now, just when we're on our feet again, you want us to go back to Queens. Let me tell you, I’m never going back to Queens."

D'Agosta said nothing. It was just the kind of declaration he hadn't wanted to provoke. Jesus, he had really blown it with this phone call. And all he wanted to do was talk to his son.

"Lydia, nothing's engraved in stone. We can work something out."

"Work something out ? It's time we faced-"

"Don't say it, Lydia."

"I am going to say it. It's time we faced the facts. It's time-"

"Don't."

"-time we got divorced."

D'Agosta slowly hung up the phone. Twenty-five years, just like that. He felt short of breath; almost sick. He wouldn't think about it. He had work to do.

The Southampton police headquarters was located in a charming, if dilapidated, old wooden building that had once been the clubhouse of the Slate Rock Country Club. The police force must have labored hard, D'Agosta reflected bleakly, to turn its insides into a typical charmless linoleum, cinder-block, and puke-colored police station. It even had that universal headquarters smell: that combination of sweat, overheated photocopy machines, dirty metal, and chlorine cleaning agents.

D'Agosta felt a knot in his gut. He'd been out of the place for three days now, running around with Pendergast, reporting to the lieutenant by phone. Now he had to face the lieutenant in person. The phone call to his wife had left him a wreck. He really should have waited and called her later.

He walked through the outer offices, nodding this way and that. Nobody looked particularly glad to see him; he wasn't popular with the regular guys. He hadn't joined the bowling club or hung out with them at Tiny's, tossing darts. He'd always figured he was just passing through on his way back to NYC, hadn't thought it worth the time to make friends. Perhaps that had been a mistake.

Shaking such thoughts away, he rapped on the frosted-glass door that led to the lieutenant's small office. Faded gold letters, edged in black, spelled out BRASKIE .

"Yeah?" came the voice.

Inside, Braskie sat behind an old metal desk. To one side was a stack of newspapers, from the Post and the Times to the East Hampton Record, all with front-page stories about the case. The lieutenant looked terrible: dark circles under the eyes, face lined. D'Agosta almost felt sorry for him.

Braskie nodded him into a seat. "News?"

D'Agosta ran through everything while Braskie listened. When he was done, Braskie wiped his hand over his prematurely thinning scalp and sighed. "The chief gets back tomorrow, and basically all we've got so far is jack. No entry or egress, no latents, no hair or fiber, no eyewitnesses, no nothing. When's Pendergast coming?"

He sounded almost hopeful, he was that desperate.

"Half an hour. He wanted me to make sure it was all ready."

"It's ready." The lieutenant rose with a sigh. "Follow me."

The evidence room was housed in a series of portable, container-type structures, fitted end-to-end behind the police station, at the edge of one of Southampton's last remaining potato fields. The lieutenant swiped his card through the door scanner and entered. Within, D'Agosta saw that Joe Lillian, a fellow sergeant, was laying out the last of the evidence on a table in the middle of the long, narrow space. On both sides, shelves and lockers stretched back into the gloom, crammed with evidence going back God knew how many years.

D'Agosta eyed the table. Sergeant Lillian had done a nice job. Papers, glassine envelopes, sample tubes-everything was tagged and laid out neat as a pin.

"Think this'll meet with your special agent's approval?" Braskie asked.

D'Agosta wasn't sure if it was sarcasm or desperation he detected in Braskie's voice. But before he could contemplate a reply, he heard a familiar honeyed voice behind them.

"Indeed it does, Lieutenant Braskie; indeed it does."

Braskie fairly jumped. Pendergast stood inside the doorway, hands behind his back; he must've somehow slipped in behind them.

Pendergast strolled up to the table, hands still clasped behind his back, lips pursed, examining the evidence as keenly as a connoisseur admiring a table laden with precious art.

"Help yourself to anything," said Braskie. "I've no doubt your forensics lab is better than ours."

"And I doubt the killer left any forensic evidence beyond that which he wanted to leave. No, for the moment I'm merely browsing. But what's this? The melted cross. May I?"

Sergeant Lillian picked up the envelope holding the cross and handed it to Pendergast. The agent held it gingerly, turning it slowly this way and that. "I'd like to send this to a lab in New York."

"No problem." Lillian took it back and laid it in a plastic evidence container.

"And this charred material." Pendergast next picked up a test tube with some burned chunks of sulfur. He unstoppered it, waved it under his nose, restoppered it.

"Done."

Pendergast glanced at D'Agosta. "Anything that interests you, Sergeant?"