Douglas Preston - Still Life With Crows

“ Up, like that. Up and in, as deep as it’ll go.” He shoved the hose in and out of the carcass a few times to demonstrate, then handed it back to Jimmy. “You following me?” Then he turned to Pendergast with a smile. “I started right here, Mr. Pendergast, in the Evisceration Area. Worked my way to the top. I like to see things done right.” There was a note of pride in his voice that Corrie found creepy.

“Sure thing, Mr. Ridder,” Jimmy said.

“As you were saying?” Pendergast kept his eyes on Breen.

“Right. Only last month Willie’s car broke down and I had to drive him to and from work. I’ll bet it broke down again and he tried to hoof it to Swede’s. And got nailed. Jesus. I requested a transfer the very morning he was found, didn’t I, Mr. Ridder?”

“You did.”

“I’d rather be sucking gibs out of a turkey than ending up gibs in a field myself.” Jimmy’s lips spread in a wet grin.

“No doubt,” said Pendergast. “Tell me about your previous job.”

“I was the night watchman. I was in the plant from midnight to sevenA .M., when the pre-shift arrives.”

“What does the pre-shift do?”

“Makes sure all the equipment is working so’s when the first truck arrives the birds can be processed right away. Can’t leave birds in a hot truck that ain’t moving while you fix something, otherwise you got a fine old truckload of dead turkeys.”

“Does that happen very often?”

Corrie noticed Jimmy Breen shoot a nervous glance at Ridder.

“Almost never,” said Ridder quickly.

“When you were driving to the plant that night,” Pendergast asked, “did you see anything or anyone on the road?”

“Why d’you think I asked for the day shift? At the time, I thought it was a cow loose in the corn. Something big and bent over—”

“Where exactly was this?”

“Midway. About two miles from the plant, two miles from town. On the left-hand side of the road. Waiting, like. It seemed to dart into the corn as my headlights came around the bend. Almost scuttling, like on all fours. I wasn’t sure, really. It might’ve been a shadow. But if so, it was a big shadow.”

Pendergast nodded. He turned to Corrie. “Do you have any questions?”

Corrie was seized with panic. Questions? She found Ridder looking at her, his eyes red and narrow.

“Sure. Yeah. I do.”

There was a pause.

“If that was the killer, what was he doing, waiting there? I mean, he couldn’t have expected Stott’s car to break down, could he? Might he have been interested in the plant, perhaps?”

There was a silence and she realized Pendergast was smiling, ever so faintly.

“Well, hell, I don’t know,” said Jimmy, pausing. “That’s a good one.”

“Jimmy, damn it,” Ridder suddenly broke in. “You’ve let that turkey get past you.” He shoved forward and grabbed a turkey as it was trundling away. With one great sweep, he reached inside and ripped out the guts by hand, flinging them into the vacuum container, where they were immediately swallowed with a horrible gurgling. Ridder turned back, shaking gore from his fingers with a savage snap of his wrist. He smiled broadly.

“In my day they didn’t have vacuum hoses,” he said. “You can’t be afraid to get your hands a little dirty on this job, Jimmy.”

“Yes, Mr. Ridder.”

He clapped Jimmy on the back, leaving a heavy brown handprint. “Carry on.”

“We’ve concluded here, I believe,” said Pendergast.

Ridder seemed relieved. He stuck out his hand. “Glad to be of assistance.”

Pendergast gave a formal bow, then turned to leave.

Twenty-Five

C orrie Swanson stood by the side of the road and watched, hands on her hips, as Pendergast pulled pieces of an odd-looking machine out of the trunk of her car and began screwing them together. When she’d picked him up at the old Kraus place, he’d been standing there by the road, waiting, the box of metal parts lying at his feet. He hadn’t explained what his plan was then, and he seemed disinclined to do so now.

“You really like to keep people in the dark, don’t you?” she said.

Pendergast screwed the last piece into place, examined the machine, and turned it on. There was a faint, rising hum. “I beg your pardon?”

“You know exactly what I’m talking about. You never tell anybody anything. Like what you’re going to do with that thing.”

Pendergast switched the machine off again. “I find nothing more tiresome in life than explanations.”

Corrie had to laugh at this. How true it was; from her mother to the school principal to that dickwad of a sheriff, You’ve got some explaining to do, that’s what they all said.

The sun was rising over the corn, already burning the parched ground. Pendergast looked at her. “Does this curiosity mean you’re warming to the role of my assistant?”

“It means I’m warming to all the money you’re paying me. And when somebody makes me get up at the crack of dawn, I want to know why.”

“Very well. Today we’re going to investigate the so-called Ghost Warrior Massacre up at the Mounds.”

“That looks more like a metal detector than some kind of ghost-busting machine to me.”

Pendergast shouldered the machine and began to walk up the dirt track that led through the low scrub toward the creek. He spoke over his shoulder. “Speaking of ghosts, do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Believe in them.”

She snorted. “You don’t really think there’s some scalped, mutilated corpse wandering around up there, looking for his boots or whatever?”

She waited for an answer, but none came.

Within minutes, they entered the shade of the trees. Here, a faint, cool breath of night still lingered, mingling with the scent of the cottonwoods. Another few minutes brought them to the Mounds themselves, swelling gently out of the surrounding earth, rocky at the base, sparsely covered with grass and brush along the top. Pendergast paused to turn on the machine once again. The whine went up, then down as he fiddled with the dials. At last, it fell silent. Corrie watched as he slipped a wire out of his pocket, a little orange flag attached to one end, and stuck it in the ground at his feet. From another pocket, he took a thing that looked like a cell phone and started fiddling with it.

“What’s that?”

“A GPS unit.”

Pendergast jotted something down in his ever-present leather notebook and then, with the circular magnetic coil of the metal detector inches from the ground, began to slowly walk north, sweeping the coil back and forth. Corrie followed him, feeling a rising sense of curiosity.

The metal detector squawked sharply. Pendergast quickly dropped to his knees. He began scraping the soil with a palette knife, and within moments he had uncovered a copper arrow point.

“Wow,” said Corrie. Without even thinking, she knelt by his side. “Is that Indian?”

“Yes.”

“I thought they made their arrowheads out of flint.”

“By 1865, the Cheyennes were just beginning to switch to metal. By 1870, they would have guns. This one metal point dates the site quite accurately.”

She reached down to pull it up but Pendergast stayed her hand. “It stays in the ground,” he said. Then he added, voice low, “Note the direction it is pointing in.”

The notebook and GPS reappeared; Pendergast jotted some more notes; they disappeared once again into the jacket of his suit. He placed another little flag at the spot and then continued on.

They walked for perhaps two hundred yards, Pendergast sweeping as they went, marking every point and every bullet they found. It amazed Corrie how much junk there was under the ground. Then they returned to their point of origin and headed in another cardinal direction. Pendergast swept on. There was yet another squawk. He knelt, scraped, this time uncovering a 1970s-era pop-top.