Cold Vengeance - Lincoln Child [62]
“My pleasure, Aloysius. How good to see you again after all these years—but I’m sorry it had to be under these particular circumstances.”
“Yet if it hadn’t been for death, we should never have known each other—would we?”
Those penetrating silver eyes turned on him and Beaufort, as he parsed the thought, felt a small shiver travel down his spine. He had never before known Aloysius Pendergast to be tense or agitated. Nevertheless, despite a veneer of calm, the man seemed so today.
The privacy screens were pulled into place around the plot, and Beaufort turned his attention to the goings-on. Jennings had been glancing at his watch and plucking at his collar. “Let us begin,” he said in a high, nervous voice. “May I have the exhumation license, please?”
Pendergast pulled it from inside his coat and handed it over. The health official glanced at it, nodded, handed it back. “Recall that at all times, our primary responsibility is to protect the public health and to ensure the dignity and respect of the deceased.”
He glanced down at the gravestone, which read, simply:
HELEN ESTERHAZY PENDERGAST
“Are we all in agreement on the correctness of the grave?”
There was a general nodding of heads.
Jennings stepped back. “Very well. The exhumation may proceed.”
Two gravediggers, wearing gloves and respiratory face masks in addition to their protective clothing, began by cutting a rectangle in the thick green sod and, with expert finesse, neatly detaching and rolling it up in strips, setting them carefully aside. An operator stood by with a tiny cemetery backhoe.
The sod up, the two gravediggers set to work with square-bladed shovels, aiming sharp alternating blows into the black earth, piling it neatly on a plastic sheet laid to one side. The hole took shape, the diggers blading the walls to crisp angles and planes. And then they stepped back while the backhoe inched forward, its miniature bucket plunging into the dark ground.
The backhoe and the two diggers alternated work, the diggers trimming the hole while the bucket took out the dirt. The assembled group watched in almost liturgical silence. As the hole deepened, the air became charged with its scent; loamy and oddly fragrant, like the smell of the deep woods. The open grave smoked faintly in the early-morning air. Jennings, the health officer, dipped a hand into his coat, pulled out a face mask, and put it on.
Beaufort shot a private glance at the FBI agent. He was staring at the deepening hole as if transfixed, an intense expression on his face that was, at least to Beaufort, unreadable. Pendergast had been evasive about why he wanted his wife’s body dug up—only that he wanted the mobile forensic van to be prepared for any and all tests of identity. Even for a family as notably eccentric as the Pendergasts, it seemed disturbing and inexplicable.
The digging continued for fifteen minutes, then thirty. The two men in masks and protective clothing stopped for a brief rest, then returned to work. A few minutes later, one of the shovels hit a heavy object with a loud, hollow thunk.
The men surrounding the open grave glanced at one another. All except Pendergast, whose eyes remained riveted on the yawning hole at his feet.
More carefully now, the diggers evened out the walls of the grave, then continued down, slowly exposing the standard cement container in which the coffin rested. The backhoe, fitted with straps, lifted the concrete lid, exposing the coffin inside. It was made of mahogany, even blacker than the surrounding soil, trimmed with brass handles, corners, and rails. A new scent was introduced to the already charged atmosphere: a faint odor of decomposition.
Four more men now appeared at the graveside, carrying the “shell”—a new casket to hold both the old casket and its exhumed remains. Placing it on the ground, they stepped forward to help the diggers. As the group watched silently, new webbing was lowered into the grave and slid beneath the coffin. Together—slowly, carefully, by hand—the six men strained to lift the coffin from its resting place.
Beaufort