Fever Dream - Douglas Preston [63]
Toward noon, her brain almost fried from the senseless brutality of it all, she rose from her desk and decided to get some air by taking a stroll in the small park next to One Police Plaza. She opened her door and exited the outer office, running into a gaggle of cops hanging out in the hall.
They greeted her with a little more effusion than usual, with several sidelong, embarrassed glances.
Hayward returned the greetings and then paused. “All right, what is it?”
A telling silence.
“I’ve never seen a worse bunch of fakers,” she said lightly. “Honestly, if you sat down to a game of Texas Hold ’Em, you’d all lose.”
The joke fell flat, and after a moment’s hesitation, a sergeant spoke up. “Captain, it’s sort of about that, ah, FBI agent. Pendergast.”
Hayward froze. Her disdain for Pendergast was well known in the department, as was her relationship with his sometime partner D’Agosta. Pendergast always managed to drag Vincent into deep shit, and she had a growing premonition that the present excursion to Louisiana would end as disastrously as the earlier ones. In fact, maybe it just had… As these thoughts flashed through her mind, Hayward tried to control her features, keep them neutral. “What about Special Agent Pendergast?” she asked coolly.
“It isn’t Pendergast exactly,” said the sergeant. “It’s a relative of his. Woman named Constance Greene. She’s down in central booking, gave Pendergast as her next-of-kin. Apparently she’s his niece or something.”
Another awkward silence.
“And?” Hayward prompted.
“She’s been abroad. She booked passage on the Queen Mary Two from Southampton to New York, boarded with her baby.”
“Baby?”
“Right. A couple months old at most. Born abroad. Anyway, after the ship docked she was held at passport control because the baby was missing. INS radioed NYPD and we’ve taken her into custody. They’re booking her for homicide.”
“Homicide?”
“That’s right. Seems she threw her baby off the ship somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.”
27
Gulf of Mexico
THE DELTA 767 SEEMED ALMOST TO HOVER AT thirty-four thousand feet, the sky serene and cloudless, the sea an unbroken expanse of blue far below, sparkling in the afternoon light.
“May I get you another beer, sir?” the stewardess asked, bending over D’Agosta solicitously.
“Sure,” he replied.
The stewardess turned to D’Agosta’s seatmate. “And you, sir? Is everything all right?”
“No,” Pendergast said. He gestured dismissively toward the small dish of smoked salmon that sat on his seat-back tray. “I find this to be room temperature. Would you mind bringing me a chilled serving, please?”
“Not at all.” The woman whisked the plate away with a professional gesture.
D’Agosta waited until she returned, then settled back in the wide, comfortable seat, stretching out his legs. The only times he’d flown first-class were traveling with Pendergast, but it was something he could get used to.
A chime sounded over the PA system, and the captain announced that the plane would be landing at Sarasota Bradenton International Airport in twenty minutes.
D’Agosta took a sip of his beer. Sunflower, Louisiana, was already eighteen hours and hundreds of miles behind them, but the strange Doane house—with that single, jewel-like room of wonders surrounded by a storm of decay and furious ruin—had never been far from his mind. Pendergast, however, had seemed disinclined to discuss it, remaining thoughtful and silent.
D’Agosta tried once again. “I got a theory.”
The agent glanced toward him.
“I think the Doane family is a red herring.”
“Indeed?” Pendergast took a tentative bite of the salmon.
“Think about it. They went nuts many months after Helen’s visit. How could the visit have anything to do with what happened later? Or a parrot?”
“Perhaps you’re right,” said