Douglas Preston - The Obsidian Chamber

“It’s extremely rare, especially these days. Those machines are foolproof.”

“So it was most likely intentional,” Pendergast said. “But if an overdose was in fact the cause, it was still administered close enough to the time of the knife attacks to allow for a degree of arterial spattering.”

“Why would somebody try to kill the old lady by overdosing her, then cut her to ribbons?” Vasilivich asked.

“Because he — or she — was interrupted,” Longstreet answered.

“Yes,” said Pendergast. “If the overdose theory is correct, perhaps the killer hadn’t initially intended to slash the body. The woman was on a death watch anyway — everyone would assume she died of natural causes. But Dr. Graben stumbled upon the murderer in flagrante. The murderer slashed him to death — then killed Montoya in the same way, to make it look like the work of a lunatic.”

“It’s like no lunatic murder I’ve ever seen,” said Vasilivich. “And I’ve seen more than my share.”

“Why not?” Pendergast asked.

“Because of all the slashes to the backs as well as the torsos. Their backs are sliced to ribbons — they look as if they’d been whipped with a cat-o’-nine-tails. Okay, the wounds to the frontal sides aren’t all that unusual — Graben even has some defensive wounds on his forearms — but what murderer bothers to slice up their victims’ backs ?”

“A particularly twisted individual,” Longstreet murmured.

“Turn him over, if you please,” Pendergast asked.

Vasilivich gently turned over the doctor’s body. It was indeed a veritable checkerboard of deep slashes, particularly in the region of the lower back, over and across the buttocks.

Pendergast examined the corpse for a minute. Then he froze. After a moment he bent over the lower back, his hand coming forward.

“Agent Pendergast,” Vasilivich warned.

Pendergast stopped. “Note this section of vertebrae here, from about L1 to S2.”

“Yes?”

“Please inspect it. Wouldn’t you say that the extensive shredding and tearing of the flesh along the spinal column is more than just the result of slashing with a knife?”

Vasilivich placed his gloved hands on the corpse’s lower back and began gently pulling away the flesh, first at one spot, then another. “My God,” he murmured. “You’re right. There’s been an excision.”

“Can you identify the missing material?” Pendergast asked.

More prodding. “Yes,” said Vasilivich. “It would appear to be—”

“The cauda equina,” Pendergast finished for him.

The M.E. looked up at him, blinking in surprise. “How did you know?”

“Examine the old woman’s body, if you please. See if it is missing its cauda equina, as well.”

It was the work of two minutes to determine that this was, in fact, the case.

“Aloysius?” Longstreet asked in a strange tone. “What exactly is going on here?”

But Pendergast did not answer. The cauda equina. Very quickly, many things fitted themselves together in his mind. Enoch Leng and his elixir. Constance Greene and her sister, Mary. And now Diogenes.

So the killer had intended to slash his victim from the very beginning. The morphine was simply to dispatch her, to make his job easier. But once one knew where to look, all the lacerations, cuts, and slashes in the world couldn’t hide the fact that a small excision had been made from both bodies.

“Why are you doing this?” he asked his absent brother, in a voice below the threshold of hearing.

At that moment, there was a loud knock on the cooler door. Vasilivich walked over and pulled it open. One of Longstreet’s field agents was waiting outside. He quickly stepped in.

“Yes?” Longstreet asked.

“There’s been a break in the Leyland case,” the agent said.

“Go on.”

“We already knew that, infrequently, he did work for the Hendry County medical examiner. But we’ve now learned that, even more infrequently, he assisted the M.E. in administering lethal injections to death row patients.”

“And?” Longstreet urged.

“Just seven days ago, he supervised an execution at Pahokee. Single-handedly.”

Pendergast quickly drilled the man with his gaze. “And who was executed?”

“Lucius Garey. He was buried the day before yesterday.”

Just as quickly, Pendergast turned back to Longstreet. “You need to put through a request to have that prisoner’s body exhumed. This morning.”

“Not until you explain what’s going on.”

“I’ll explain on the way to the grave site. Now please, make the call. There’s no time to lose.”

The entrance of the aptly named Gates of Heaven Cemetery in Lady Lake, central Florida, was chained and locked. Inside the small cemetery, a procession of cars was parked beside a single grave, around which yellow privacy screens had been erected.

Inside the enclosure were seven people: Special Agent Pendergast; Executive Associate Director Longstreet; a local public health official; a Lake County doctor named Barnes who had been court-appointed to supervise the exhumation; and two gravediggers, who were now hip-deep in an oblong hole of muddy earth. The seventh person — Lucius Garey — was for the time being belowground, somewhere under the feet of the diggers. He was anticipated to appear in the open air very shortly.

Pendergast and Longstreet stood aside from the rest, speaking in low tones.

“So let me get this straight,” Longstreet was saying. “Your great-grand-uncle, Enoch Leng, perfected an elixir that could extend a person’s life span by a prodigious degree.”

Pendergast nodded.

“And one ingredient he needed — at least, at first — was a freshly harvested cauda equina, the bundle of nerves at the base of a human being’s spinal column.”

“Correct.”

“He used this elixir on himself because he was working on a complex project that, he felt, would take more than a normal life span to complete. But before doing so, he tested it on his ward. Constance Greene.”

Pendergast nodded.

“What, exactly, was this complex project?”

“It’s not germane. Suffice it to say it ultimately was rendered unnecessary.”

Longstreet shrugged. “But later, in the 1940s, modern science had caught up sufficiently so that he was able to create his elixir from purely synthetic sources. He no longer needed to kill human beings to acquire their caudae equinae.”

“That’s correct.”

“And both he and Constance continued to take this new, synthetic version of the elixir until about five years ago, when the Riverside Drive mansion was broken into and Leng tortured and killed.”

“Yes. He refused to divulge the secret of his elixir.”

“What happened to the killer?” Longstreet asked.

“Again, not germane. He joined my ancestor, Dr. Leng, among the dead not long after committing the killing.”

“And Constance?”

“I found the only remaining copy of the formula and burned it. After Leng’s death, without the benefit of the elixir, Constance began to age normally.”

“So she really was born in the 1880s.”

“Yes.”

“And you burned the formula. My God, what a decision…” Longstreet threw a sidelong glance at Pendergast. “It is remarkable, Aloysius, how many things about yourself and your family you haven’t told me.”

“What would have been the point? And as you can imagine, many of them are painful or mortifying — or both.”

For a moment, the two fell silent, watching the gravediggers at work.

Longstreet shifted, spoke again. “I’m assuming you believe that it was Diogenes who killed those two people in the hospital. Killed them for their caudae equinae.”