Линкольн Чайлд - Verses for the Dead

While it’s my job to stop you, I’m not your enemy.

He let the emotion drain from him, breathing now without hurry, letting his humbleness renew itself, bit by bit, in the darkness of the room. He ran through his senses, one by one, ending with sound. All was quiet, save for the background hum that never fully went away.

The weakness he had just demonstrated was as expected. Despite that weakness, he knew his duty and he still had the power to make things right.

Now he had something new to prepare for.

It’s my job to stop you.

It’s my job to stop you.

Slowly, slowly, he rose from the floor. He felt the ground firm beneath his feet, and his resolve did not waver. He glanced around the shadowy room, lit only by the muted television.

That man, clad in black like a judge, reaching out to him like that: Who was he? Was he really just an FBI agent? Or an avenging angel — or the Grand Inquisitor?

He did not know. What he did know was that there was still crucial work to be done — and so much depended on him.

Now he strode with purpose toward the only furniture in the room: a scuffed card table and a single folding chair. He sat down, pulling the seat up to the table. On the black vinyl tabletop lay three bundles of soft felt cloth.

He stared at the bundles as his heart returned to its normal rhythm. Reaching for the left-hand bundle, he opened it, revealing an old carborundum — silicon carbide — whetstone; a tin of theatrical makeup in matte black; and a battered can of light-grade mineral oil. The stone, which was of a quality no longer available, had two different sides: four thousand grit and eight thousand grit. Since he never let his friends get dull, there was no need for a rougher stone.

Now he moved to the other two bundles, which he opened far more carefully. Archy slept in the first; Mehitabel in the second. He did not want to wake them too rudely.

Just seeing them in the warm, flickering glow of the television helped remind him of his tragic obligations. So much depends...

Taking hold of the sharpening stone, he placed it before him, finer-side down, then lubricated the four-thousand-grit side with a few drops of oil. He knew water was now more commonly used, but old ways — like old friends — were what he preferred. With two fingers, he rubbed the oil into the stone until it gave off a dull shine. He wiped his fingers carefully on the leg of his black jeans for sixty seconds. Only then did he pick up Mehitabel; place her blade at a precise fifteen-degree angle against the stone; and then — almost reluctantly, without joy — begin to hone her in long, deliberate strokes.

The letters arriving for Smithback had now swelled to three crates, stacked up in his cubicle. This epistolary flood had proved an unexpected boon. Of course, virtually all of them so far — aside from the genuine one from Brokenhearts himself — were from cranks, psychics, crazies, poisonous neighbors, clairvoyants, estranged husbands and wives, and other messed-up people... but they were nevertheless a gold mine of stories. Smithback had been writing nonstop on the case since the story he’d broken roughly a week before.

There was, for example, the piece about the psychic who broke into the Flayley mausoleum with a spirit pendulum and Ouija board, claiming to be in communication with the dead. And there was the Iron John Men’s poetry group meeting that was “swatted” by a radical feminist. And the luckless heart surgeon who, subjected to a conspiracy theory that went viral, had arrived at his hospital the previous morning to find a mob awaiting him.

On top of that, Pendergast’s surprise appearance on television the night before, instead of calming things down, had electrified the city. Half of Miami was furious at the apparently sympathetic tone the agent had expressed in his impromptu appeal, while the other half was enraged at the authorities for not having caught Mister Brokenhearts. It was all anyone could talk about.

Amid this cacophony, the only one who had suddenly gone quiet was Brokenhearts himself. There had been no more killings, no more letters — nothing.

Smithback was riding high. Except for the damn Bronner lead. What seemed so promising had gone nowhere. Baxter and Flayley had been his patients — but not Adler, the other suicide victim. After his article, the police had launched an investigation, but Smithback learned from his cop informant that Bronner had ironclad alibis for the nights in question. It appeared to be coincidence: Bronner was simply a wife-beating alcoholic asshole with anger management problems, not a serial killer.

But despite that setback, the rest was gravy. Smithback still had hundreds of letters to open, and God alone knew what juicy stuff and bizarre confessions might surface. He was delivering the goods and Kraski was leaving him alone. It was indeed a gold mine of entertaining stories — and Smithback was going to mine it for all it was worth.

Coldmoon looked morosely out the louvered window of what he’d started calling Pendergast’s safe house on the outskirts of Little Havana. Traffic was moving sluggishly through the soupy air, and as he watched, Axel’s taxi pulled away from the curb and joined the flow, headed off on yet another mysterious errand. It was not quite eleven in the morning, and already the sun was flaring off the car windows and bare metal shopfronts, filling the air with a blinding heat and light.

Growing up in South Dakota, Coldmoon had loved the hot, dry summers. But Miami was a different beast entirely. Here it was, just turning April, and already every day seemed hotter than the last. It was so damn humid that your body, in a futile effort to cool down, would get drenched with sweat that wouldn’t evaporate. And the sun didn’t come at you gently, like it did in the northern latitudes, but hammered straight down on you mercilessly, like a white-hot frying pan over the head.

He turned from the window. Pendergast was sitting at the table, holding a gold chain of some sort, to which was affixed a medallion of what appeared to be a saint. Coldmoon had noticed it in the agent’s hands when he’d been lying on Elise Baxter’s bed in that Maine lodge. Pendergast never said where he got it, or why he carried it, but he seemed to bring it out and contemplate it at the strangest times — like now.

He heard the closing of the front door, and a moment later, Dr. Fauchet appeared in the doorway with another armload of files. She was dressed in a crisp yellow dress, and she nodded a greeting to Coldmoon and then bestowed a radiant smile on Pendergast. How the hell did these Floridians manage to get through a morning, let alone an entire day, without wilting?

Grove came into view in the doorway behind her and the two stepped into the shadowy room. “Morning,” Grove said to Coldmoon and slapped his briefcase on the table, taking a seat.

Coldmoon noticed the commander’s tone was a trifle formal, not quite his usual avuncular self. Perhaps he was still stewing about the way Pendergast had hijacked last night’s television interview — even though afterward Pendergast had explained his rationale to Grove, with Pickett listening in on speakerphone. To Coldmoon, his partner’s arguments made sense. Given Brokenhearts’s psychological profile and his outreach to Smithback, Pendergast believed he could be influenced by a direct appeal. And maybe it had actually worked: there hadn’t been any killings since Carpenter — at least, not yet. Coldmoon’s gut feeling was that what Grove really minded was being kept in the dark. After all, he was the ranking local officer and he’d been unfailingly helpful in putting the resources of the Miami PD to work on their behalf. It had been a little unsporting of Pendergast to spring that sudden public appeal on him without warning.