Линкольн Чайлд - Verses for the Dead

“No, sir, it didn’t,” said Coldmoon.

“Is it completed?”

“Just about.”

“I see. Agent Pendergast, I told you on more than one occasion that this would be a waste of time, and you still disobeyed my orders. Your insubordination has done nothing but generate a lawsuit and a public relations problem.”

“I’m sorry to hear it,” Pendergast replied.

“I am, too. Because you must certainly understand that such behavior by a federal officer is unacceptable. You’re aware that the FBI views insubordination in the strongest negative light. I’m taking you off the case. I’ve already set the wheels in motion. Coldmoon’s going to be the new lead agent, with three junior agents, two from Miami and another from New York. And as it turns out, Agent Pendergast, we have an opening in the Salt Lake City Field Office.”

Silence.

“Let me emphasize this is not a demotion or a punishment. It’s not even a matter for OPR. The Salt Lake Field Office covers all of Utah, Idaho, and Montana. It will be a major responsibility, equal to what you’re doing here.”

Pickett paused. The silence continued.

“The bottom line, Agent Pendergast, is that your sense of ethics conflicts with mine. I simply can’t manage an office with a freelancer such as yourself doing whatever the hell you please, with no regard for the chain of command. Do you understand?”

“I do.”

“Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

“No.”

“Agent Coldmoon, if you have any thoughts on what I’ve just said, let’s hear them.”

Coldmoon was surprised at Pendergast’s mild acquiescence. If it was, in fact, mild: what was that crack a minute before about the thirty pieces of silver? But as he’d been listening to this triumphant tirade of Pickett’s, Coldmoon was even more surprised to find that something was happening to him . He was beginning to grow angry: at himself, for getting maneuvered into this situation; at Pendergast, for his secretive and unorthodox methods; but most of all at Pickett — for encouraging him to violate one of the FBI’s most sacred codes... that of loyalty to your partner. It was not right. Pressure or no pressure, he should never have agreed to Pickett’s agenda, and he could only blame himself for that. But Pickett should never have put him in the position in the first place.

“I do have a thought,” Coldmoon said.

“I’m listening.”

“My thought is that I’m 100 percent behind my partner. You take him off the case, you take me off.”

“What? Have you lost your mind?”

“I think what I just said was both clear and logical.”

“Well, I’ll be... ” There was a moment of silence before Pickett’s voice came rasping out again through the cell phone speaker. “You’ve disagreed with Pendergast’s entire investigative approach. You said he was wasting your time on irrelevant tangents. You got burned going to Maine, Ithaca was a bust, and now you’re burned a third time with this useless autopsy. And yet here you are, sticking up for him with a misplaced sense of loyalty. Well, if that’s how you want it, I’ll transfer the both of you to Salt Lake City. This is a high-profile case and I’ll have no trouble finding top-notch agents to take it over. Is that really how you want it?”

“Yes, sir, that’s really how I want it.”

“So be it. I’m flying down to make things official.” The phone went dead.

Coldmoon turned and found Pendergast’s eyes on him. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“Yes, I did. I deserved it. I agreed to spy on my partner — I guess you probably figured out that’s what’s been going on.”

“I suspected it from the start.”

Coldmoon gave a mirthless laugh. “Of course you did.”

“You’re a good man, Agent Coldmoon.”

“Hell, Salt Lake City won’t be so bad. I’ve always liked the West. Florida is too flat. And too green.”

After a silent moment, Pendergast indicated the autopsy room door. “We might as well hear Dr. Fauchet’s conclusions before we pack our proverbial bags.”

They filed into the room just as Fauchet turned and put down her instruments. “Gentlemen, I’d like to show you something. Please come this way.”

Coldmoon and Pendergast stood on either side of the gurney as Fauchet adjusted the overhead light to illuminate the frontal portion of the neck.

“I’ll try to describe this in layman’s terms,” she said. “But first, let me point out that — as with the corpse of Ms. Flayley — the initial autopsy this body received was perfunctory, at best. Now, bearing that in mind: do you see these marks here, here, and here?”

She pointed to several very faint bruises.

“These were caused by ligature strangulation — according to the coroner’s report, a knotted bedsheet, which she allegedly used to hang herself from a curtain rod. In a hanging like this, these bruises would be expected. Do you follow me so far?”

Coldmoon nodded.

“Now, here—” she indicated a horseshoe-shaped bone she had exposed in the upper neck — “is the hyoid. This bone was fractured in the Flayley corpse, as you know. In that case it was fractured in the middle, what we call the body of the bone — as it is here. Again, typical of a self-hanging.” She paused. “In addition , there are fractures in the two greater horns, here and here, which form the wings of the hyoid.”

She rolled a portable magnifying glass on a stand into place. “You can see better with this.”

Coldmoon looked, then Pendergast did the same.

“Both horns are fractured in a fairly symmetrical fashion.” She pushed the stand away. “This type of double fracture cannot be caused by ligature strangulation. It’s typically caused by what we call a push-choke. That is, two hands are wrapped around the upper larynx and great pressure is brought to bear with the thumbs, a squeeze combined with a push or shake. It takes a person with powerful hands to do this — almost invariably a man. Right-handed in this case, judging by the differing degree of trauma to the two wings. Such choking cannot be self-administered.”

“So you’re saying—” Coldmoon began, then fell silent.

“I’m saying the victim did not die of a ligature strangulation. She died of a choke hold. The ligature strangulation was done immediately after death, when bruising was still possible, as a way of covering up the push-choke and making the death appear a suicide.” She paused. “But this was not a suicide. This person was most definitely the victim of a homicide.”

Roger Smithback paused to blow his nose on a real estate gazetteer, crumple it into a ball of newsprint, and then toss it in the trash before entering Bronner Psychiatric Group PA, a low white-brick building on Northwest Fifteenth Avenue. The pollen season — actually, not a season but a year-round threat in Florida — was in full swing and his allergies were acting up as usual.

He took a moment to breathe deeply and practice mindfulness, centering himself for what was to come. He wasn’t an investigative reporter, but the last few days he’d started wondering if maybe he should switch his focus: he seemed to have the nose of a good one. The nose — presently runny — had brought him here, for example.

With a pair of binoculars it had been easy to get the names and dates of the decedents off the two roped-off graves where Mister Brokenhearts had left his grisly offerings — Baxter and Flayley. Other journalists, of course, had done the same thing and now the names were publicly known. Same with yesterday’s recipient, Mary Adler, the one whose ashes were kept in a columbarium.

But he’d taken it further than the rest of his half-assed journalistic brethren. He’d retrieved Baxter’s and Flayley’s obituaries from his paper’s digital morgue — he hadn’t been able to find Adler’s — and learned they were both suicides. And then he’d dug up their former addresses from old phone books and figured out that — though they’d died out of state — they’d lived in Miami, just a few miles from each other. From there he was able to fit together bits and pieces of their personal histories.