Douglas Preston - Two Graves

But there was nothing save the loud groan of rusty iron, and when he shone the light around the interior of the hop kiln, nobody was there.

The walls were blackened with soot and the floor was strewn with food trash. A bucket sat in the corner. Shackles had been driven into the walls, and on the scorched brick floor underneath were some small stains of blood. A filthy blanket with no mattress lay rucked up in the corner. Some old bloody bandages had been tossed in another corner. Clearly, this had been Tristram’s temporary prison.

Pendergast sorted through the trash with meticulous care, once in a while retaining something in a test tube or ziplock bag. But he found nothing of interest.

Back in the large space, he began to explore the area thoroughly. In an alcove he found the spot where Alban had presumably been living: a cot, an empty steamer trunk, a clean bucket. He searched the area, but it had been carefully cleaned out.

They’d known he was coming—and had abandoned the hideout.

In another alcove was a raw plywood table, on which sat a hot plate, a ten-dollar coffeemaker, and a mug. Shining the light low to the ground, Pendergast traced the web of footprints in the dust and dirt, hither and yon, and followed them as best he could, looking for other areas that might have been used. When that yielded nothing, he mounted the rickety metal stairs to the catwalk and traversed it, looking for hidden spaces. Nothing.

Once again, Pendergast searched Alban’s alcove. He next inspected the table. The raw, unsealed top was splattered with coffee stains and rings. He held his flashlight at one edge of the table and began shining it at various raking angles across the surface. On the fourth try, the beam illuminated some faint writing marks in the soft plywood top. There was one mark in particular that had been written with pressure and underlined twice. Laying the light on the table, Pendergast removed a piece of paper and pencil from his suit and placed the paper over the marks, rubbing it ever so lightly with the side of the pencil. Slowly, bits and pieces of a scattering of letters materialized. On a separate piece of paper, Pendergast jotted them down, leaving blank the letters that were too faint to make out. He tried rubbing in several directions, each time getting a slightly different take on the letters, until he had five of the eight.

BE _ _ _ EST

He examined the rubbing with a loupe, examined the table itself, and was finally able to add another letter.

BE _ A _ EST

He stared at the piece of paper for a long time. And then, with one swift motion of the pencil, he completed the word:

BETATEST

34

DR. JOHN FELDER SAT, A LITTLE DEJECTEDLY, IN THE MAIN room of the Wintour gatehouse. He had spent hours and hours restoring it to a modicum of livability—washing down the walls and floor with bleach, sweeping away the cobwebs, dusting all the surfaces, and dragging the clutter up into a tiny crawl space under the roof—and now he was able to sleep at night without imagining things crawling over his face and hands. He’d brought in just a few items: an air mattress and sleeping bag, a few sticks of furniture, a laptop, a space heater, books and groceries and a hot pot—the kitchen was too terrible to contemplate—and it hardly felt like home.

Again and again, as he toiled, he’d asked himself: Why am I doing this? But the fact was, he already knew the answer.

He got up from the lone chair and walked over to the window. It had been cleaned of grime and, through the last dying light of evening, afforded a good prospect of the Wintour mansion—cloaked in gloom, the brick walls straining under the too-large roof, the innumerable black windows like missing teeth. The day before, he’d been invited in for afternoon tea, and he’d found that the inside was just as creepy as the outside. Everything looked like a time capsule from the 1890s: the straight-backed, uncomfortable chairs with their lace antimacassars; the tiny wooden tables set with doilies, little glass figurines, ancient tchotchkes. The carpeting was dark, the wallpaper was dark, the walls were of dark wood, and it seemed as though no light could ever brighten the echoing spaces. Everything smelled faintly of mothballs. It wasn’t dusty, exactly—and yet Felder was aware of a constant desire to scratch his nose. The old, evil house seemed to be watching and listening as they sat in the dreary front parlor, Miss Wintour alternately heaping invective on the town fathers or lamenting how much better the world had been when she was a girl.

It was past eight: dark enough now so that he could not be seen if he toured the grounds. He bundled himself warmly in his jacket, opened the door, stepped out, and shut the door quietly behind him. As he walked through the tangle of wintry, frozen undergrowth, the house seemed to follow his progress, glaring at him.

He had decided the old woman was not in any way demented—just highly eccentric. And she was as sharp and prickly as a thistle—the one time he had brought up the subject of her library, in as tactful and offhand a way as possible, she’d practically jumped on him, demanding to know the reason for his interest. It was all he could do to steer the conversation in another direction, smooth down her suspicion. But he had learned its location: beyond a set of pocket doors that were always kept closed and locked. He knew, because he’d seen the room through the mansion’s windows by day: row after row of bookshelves, stuffed full of treasures both known and unknown.

He approached it now, very quietly, through the tall grass. Despite the light of the moon, the library windows were rectangles of unrelieved black. The house had no security system—he’d noticed that right away. But then, it didn’t need one.

It had Dukchuk.

Dukchuk was the towering, always-silent manservant who opened the front door; who brought the tepid, watery tea; who stood behind Miss Wintour’s chair while she spoke, his unreadable gaze on Felder. The man’s tattoos gave him nightmares.

He returned his attention to the library window. It might well be unlocked—he’d noticed that the windows of the front parlor were. It would be just like Miss Wintour to have four extra locks on the front door but none on the windows. Still, there was Dukchuk. The fellow looked as if he might have his own, extralegal way of dealing with encroachers. Felder knew he would have to be supremely careful if…

If what? Was he really thinking what he was thinking?

Yes, he was. He realized now there was no way on earth old Miss Wintour would ever willingly show him the library. If he was going to get in, if he was going to find that portfolio, he would have to find another way.

He licked his lips. Tomorrow night was forecast to be overcast, moonless. Then—he would do it then.

35

PENDERGAST STOOD IN THE WORKROOM OF HIS SPRAWLING apartments in the Dakota. The room was devoid of any decor or ornamentation, anything that would distract or hinder the most intense concentration. Even the color of the walls and the stain of the wooden floor were a cool gunmetal gray, as neutral as possible. The windows overlooking Seventy-Second Street were closed and tightly shuttered. In one corner sat a tall pile of yellowing documents: the papers that Corrie had brought him from the Nazi safe house. The only furniture was a long, oaken table that ran the length of the room. There were no chairs. The table was covered by police reports, SOC data, photographs, FBI profiles, forensic analyses, and other paperwork, all devoted to a single subject: the Hotel Killer murders. Committed by his son, Alban.