Douglas Preston: Brimstone

"I see you've already heard about the call."

"No, it was just a guess."

"Father Cappi arrived at eight this morning. He came straight after getting the message. But, of course, by then it was too late, and all he could do was give the body the last rites."

"Have the guests been questioned?"

"Preliminary statements. That's how we know when the party broke up. It seems Grove was not in good form last night. He was excited, garrulous, some say frightened."

"Could anyone have stayed behind, or perhaps slipped back inside after the guests had left?"

"That's a theory we're working on. Mr. Grove had, ah, perverse sexual tastes."

Pendergast raised his eyebrows. "How so?"

"He liked men and women."

"And the perverse sexual tastes?"

"Just what I said. Men and women."

"You mean he was bisexual? As I understand it, thirty percent of all men have such tendencies."

"Not in Southampton they don't."

D'Agosta stifled a laugh with a burst of coughing.

"Excellent work so far, Lieutenant. Shall we move on to the scene of the crime?"

Braskie turned, and they followed him through the house. The peculiar smell that D'Agosta had caught a whiff of out on the lawn was much stronger here. Matches, fireworks, gunpowder-what exactly was that? It mingled with a smell of burned wood and a gamy roast of some kind. It reminded D'Agosta of the bear meat he had once tried roasting at his house outside Invermere, British Columbia, brought to him by a friend. His wife had walked out in disgust. They'd ended up ordering pizza.

They mounted one set of stairs, threaded a winding hallway, came to a second staircase.

"This door was locked," said Braskie. "The housekeeper opened it."

They climbed the narrow, creaking staircase to the attic floor. At the top was a long hall with doors left and right. At the far end, one door was open and a bright light shone out. D'Agosta breathed through his mouth.

"The door to that far room and its window were also locked," Braskie continued. "The deceased, it appears, piled furniture up against it from the inside." He stepped across the threshold, Pendergast and D'Agosta following. The stench was now overpowering.

It was a small bedroom tucked beneath the eaves of the house, with a single dormer window looking out toward Dune Road. Jeremy Grove lay on the bed at the far side of the room. He was fully dressed, although the clothes had been slit in places to accommodate the M.E.'s investigations. The M.E. was standing beside the bed, back turned, writing on a clipboard.

D'Agosta dabbed his brow. Maybe it was the sun on the roof, maybe the bright lights in the room, but it was stifling. The smell of badly baked meat clung to him like greasy perspiration. He waited near the door while Pendergast circled the corpse, his body tensed like an eagle, examining it from every angle, the look on his face so eager it was unsettling.

The dead man lay on the bed, eyes goggled with blood, his hands clenched. The flesh was a strange tallow color, and its texture seemed off somehow. But it was the expression on the man's face, the rictus of horror and pain, that forced D'Agosta to look away. In his long years as a New York cop, D'Agosta had accumulated a small, unwelcome library of images stored in his mind that he'd never forget as long as he lived. This added one more.

The M.E. was putting away his tools, and two newly arrived assistants were getting ready to bag the body and load it onto a stretcher. Another cop was kneeling on the floor, cutting out a piece of floorboard that had a mark burned into it.

"Doctor?" Pendergast said. The M.E. turned and D'Agosta was surprised to see it was a woman, hair hidden under her cap, a young and very attractive blonde. "Yes?"

Pendergast swept open his shield. "FBI. May I trouble you with a few questions?"

The woman nodded.

"Have you established the time of death?"

"No, and I can tell you that's going to be a problem."

Pendergast raised his eyebrows. "How so?"

"We knew we were in trouble when the anal probe came back at one hundred eight degrees."

"That's what I was going to tell you," said Braskie. "The body's been heated somehow."

"Correct," said the doctor. "The heating took place most strongly on the inside."

"The inside?" Pendergast asked.

D'Agosta could have sworn he'd heard a note of disbelief in the voice.

"Yes. It was as if-as if the body was cooked from the inside out."

Pendergast looked closely at the doctor. "Was there any evidence of burning, surface lesions, on the skin?"

"No. Externally, the body is virtually unmarked. Fully dressed. Aside from a single, rather unusual burn on the chest, the skin appears unbroken and unbruised."

Pendergast paused a moment. "How could that be? A fever spike?"

"No. The body had already cooled from a temperature greater than one hundred twenty degrees-far too high to be biological. At that temperature, the flesh partially cooks. All the usual things you use to establish time of death were completely disrupted by this heating process. The blood's cooked solid in the veins. Solid. At those temperatures, the muscle proteins begin to denature, so there's no rigor-and the temperature killed most bacteria, so there's been no decomposition to speak of. And without the usual spontaneous enzymatic digestion, there's no autolysis, either. All I can say now is he died between 3:10A.M. , when he apparently made a telephone call, and 7:30, when he was discovered dead. But, of course, that's a nonmedical judgment."

"That, I assume, is the burn you referred to earlier?" Pendergast pointed at the man's chest. There, burned and charred into the sallow skin like a brand, was the unmistakable imprint of a cross.

"He was found wearing a cross around his neck, very expensive by all appearances. But the metal had partially melted and the wood burned away. It seemed to have been set with diamonds and rubies; they were found among the ashes."

Pendergast nodded slowly. After a moment, he thanked the doctor and turned his attention to the man working on the floor. "May I?"

The officer stepped back and Pendergast knelt beside him.

"Sergeant?"

D'Agosta came over and Braskie hastened to follow.

"What do you make of that?"

D'Agosta looked at the image burned into the floor. The finish around it was blistered and cracked, but there was no mistaking the mark of a huge cloven hoof, deeply branded into the wood.

"Looks like the murderer had a sense of humor," D'Agosta muttered.

"My dear Vincent, do you really think it's a joke?"

"You don’t?"

"No."

D'Agosta found Braskie staring at him. The "my dear Vincent" hadn't gone down well at all. Meanwhile, Pendergast had gotten down on his hands and knees and was sniffing around the floor almost like a dog. Suddenly a test tube and tweezers appeared out of his baggy shorts. The FBI agent picked up a brownish particle, held it to his nose a moment; then, sniffing, stretched it out toward the lieutenant.

Braskie frowned. "What's that?"

"Brimstone, Lieutenant," said Pendergast. "Good Old Testament brimstone."

{ 5 }

The Chaunticleer was a tiny six-table restaurant, tucked into an Amagansett side street between Bluff Road and Main. From his narrow wooden seat, D'Agosta looked around, blinking. Everything seemed to be yellow: the yellow daffodils in the window boxes; the yellow taffeta curtains on the yellow-painted windows; the yellow linen tablecloths. And what wasn't yellow was an accent of green or red. The whole place looked like one of those octagonal French dinner plates everybody paid so much money for. D'Agosta closed his eyes for a moment. After the musty dark of Jeremy Grove's attic, this place seemed almost unbearably cheerful.