City of Endless Night

4

The vintage Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith with Proctor at the wheel — so incongruous in the cramped, pedestrian-clogged labyrinth of Lower Manhattan — squeezed through a traffic jam on West Street and approached the headquarters of DigiFlood, in the heart of Silicon Alley. The DigiFlood campus comprised two large buildings occupying an entire city block among West, North Moore, and Greenwich. One was a massive former printing plant dating back to the nineteenth century, and the other a brand-new skyscraper rising fifty stories. Both, D’Agosta mused, must have killer views of the Hudson River and, in the other direction, the skyline of Lower Manhattan.

D’Agosta had called ahead to say they were coming to see Anton Ozmian, and that they had information about his daughter. Now, as they entered the underground parking garage below the DigiFlood tower, the parking attendant who spoke to Proctor indicated a space directly next to the booth, marked OZMIAN 1. Even before they were out of the car, a man in a dark-gray suit appeared.

“Gentlemen?” He came forward, not shaking hands, all business. “May I please see your credentials?”

Pendergast removed his shield and flipped it open, and D’Agosta did the same. The man scrutinized each one without touching them.

“My driver will stay with the car,” said Pendergast.

“Very well. This way, gentlemen.”

D’Agosta mused that, if the man was surprised to see a cop and an FBI agent arrive in a Rolls, he gave no sign of it.

They followed him into a private elevator adjacent to the parking space, which their escort operated with a key. With a whoosh of cushioned air the elevator rose precipitously, and within a minute it had reached the top floor. The doors whispered open, and they stepped into what was obviously the executive suite. The decorating scheme, D’Agosta saw, was frosted glass, honed black granite, and brushed titanium. The space was Zen-like in its emptiness. The man walked briskly and they followed him across a large waiting area, curved like the bridge of a spaceship, that led to a central pair of birchwood doors that slipped open noiselessly as they approached. Beyond lay a set of outer offices, staffed by men and women dressed in what D’Agosta took to be Silicon Valley casual chic — the black T-shirts and linen jackets with skinny jeans and those Spanish shoes that were all the rage — what were they called? Pikolinos.

Finally they arrived at what D’Agosta guessed was the entrepreneur’s lair itself: another pair of soaring birchwood doors, these so large that a smaller door had been set into one of them for normal comings and goings.

“Gentlemen, please wait here a moment.” The man slipped through the smaller door and closed it behind him.

D’Agosta glanced at Pendergast. They could hear, beyond the door, a muffled voice raised in controlled anger. D’Agosta couldn’t catch the words but the meaning was pretty clear — some poor bastard was getting his ass reamed out. The voice rose and fell, as if cataloging a list of grievances. Then there was a sudden silence.

A moment later the door opened. A man emerged — silver-haired, tall, handsome, impeccably dressed — blubbering like a baby, his face wet with tears.

“Remember, I’m holding you responsible!” a voice called after him from the office beyond. “We’re bleeding proprietary code all over the Internet, thanks to this goddamned insider leak. You find the bastard responsible, or it’s your ass!”

The man stumbled blindly past and disappeared into the waiting area.

D’Agosta gave another glance at Pendergast to see his reaction, but there was none; his face was as blank as usual. He was glad to see the agent back in form, at least superficially, his finely chiseled face so pale that it might have been crafted from marble, his eyes especially bright in the cool wash of natural light that filled the space. He was, however, as thin as a damn scarecrow.

The sight of a man reduced to such misery made D’Agosta a little nervous, and he gave himself a quick mental once-over. Since his marriage, his wife, Laura Hayward, had made sure he bought double-breasted suits from only the better Italian clothiers — Brioni, Ravazzolo, Zegna — along with shirts of cotton lawn from Brooks Brothers. The only nod to a uniform was a single lieutenant’s bar pinned to his lapel. Laura, it had to be said, had really straightened up his act regarding clothing, throwing out all his brown polyester suits. He found that dressing like a million bucks made him feel secure, even if his colleagues joked with him that the double-breasted look gave him the air of a Mafioso. That sort of pleased him, actually. He just had to be careful not to show up his boss, Captain Glen Singleton, who was known throughout the NYPD as a natty dresser.

Their escort reappeared. “Mr. Ozmian will see you now.”

They followed him through the door into a large — yet not cavernous — corner office, looking south and west. The cool, elegant flanks of the Freedom Tower filled one of the windows, seemingly so close D’Agosta could almost touch it. A man came around from behind a black granite desk, which looked like slabs of stone stacked as if for a tomb. He was thin, tall, and ascetic, very handsome, with black hair graying at the temples, a close-cropped salt-and-pepper beard, and steel-rimmed glasses. He wore a white cable-knit turtleneck of thick cashmere, black jeans, and black shoes. The monochromatic effect was dramatic. He didn’t look like a man who had just handed someone his ass on a platter. But he didn’t look all that friendly, either.

“About time,” he said, pointing to a sitting area to one side of the desk, not as a gesture of offering but as an order. “My daughter has been gone for four days. And finally I’m graced with a visit from the authorities. Sit down and tell me what’s going on.”

D’Agosta glanced at Pendergast and saw he was not going to sit down.

“Mr. Ozmian,” Pendergast said. “When did you last see your daughter?”

“I’m not going over all this yet again. I’ve told the story over the phone half a dozen—”

“Just two questions, please. When did you last see your daughter?”

“At dinner. Four nights ago. She went out afterward with friends. Never came home.”

“And you called the police when, exactly?”

Ozmian sighed. “The following morning, around ten.”

“Weren’t you accustomed to her coming in late?”

“Not that late. What exactly…”

The man’s expression changed. He must, D’Agosta thought, have seen something in their faces. This guy was sharp as a tack. “What is it? You’ve found her?”

D’Agosta took a deep breath and was about to speak when Pendergast, to his great surprise, beat him to it.

“Mr. Ozmian,” said Pendergast, in his quietest, smoothest voice, “we have bad news: your daughter is dead.”

The man looked as if he’d just been shot. He actually staggered and had to grip the side of a chair in order to keep himself upright. His face instantly drained of all color; his lips moved, but only an unintelligible whisper came out. He was like a dead man standing.

He swayed again and D’Agosta took a step over to him, grasping his arm and shoulder. “Sir, let’s sit down.”

The man nodded mutely and allowed himself to be steered into a chair. He felt as light as a feather in D’Agosta’s grasp.

Ozmian’s lips formed the word how, but with only a rush of air coming out.

“She was murdered,” said Pendergast, his voice still very quiet. “Her body was found last night in an abandoned garage in Queens. We were able to make an identification this morning. We are here now because we wanted you to hear officially before the newspapers break the story — as they will at any moment.” Despite the baldness of his words, Pendergast’s voice managed to convey a depth of compassion and sorrow.

Again, the man’s lips moved. “Murdered?” came the single strangled word.

“Yes.”

“How?”

“She was shot through the heart. Death was instantaneous.”

“Shot? Shot?” The color was starting to come back into his face.

“We will know more in a few days. I’m afraid you have the task of identifying the body. We will of course be glad to escort you there.”

The man’s face was full of confusion and horror. “But…murdered? Why?”

“The investigation is only a few hours old. It appears she was killed four days ago and her body left in the garage.”

Now Ozmian grasped the sides of his chair and rose again to his feet. His face had gone from white to pink and was now turning a fiery red. He stood there for a moment, looking from Pendergast to D’Agosta and back again. D’Agosta could see he was recovering his wits; he sensed the guy was about to explode.

“You,” he began. “You bastards.”

Silence.

“Where was the FBI these past four days? This was your fault—your fault!” His voice, starting out in a whisper, crescendoed by the end into a roar, spittle flecking his lips.

Pendergast interrupted him very quietly. “Mr. Ozmian, she was probably already dead when you reported her missing. But I can assure you that everything was done to find her. Everything.”

“Oh, you bungling dickheads always say that, you lying sons of—” His voice choked up, and it was almost as if he’d swallowed too large a piece of food; he coughed and spluttered, face turning purple. With a roar of fury he took a step forward, seized a heavy sculpture from a nearby glass table, raised it, and slammed it onto the floor. Swaying, he shambled to a whiteboard and knocked it aside, kicked over a lamp, and grabbed some kind of award made of ceramic from his own desk and heaved it down on the glass table; both shattered with a terrific crash, sending up a spray of glass splinters and clay chips that fell back like rain onto the granite floor.

At this, their escort in the dark-gray suit came running in. “What’s going on?” he asked wildly, stunned to see the ruin strewn across the office and his boss so unmanned. He looked frantically at Ozmian, then at Pendergast and D’Agosta.

His entrance seemed to trigger something in Ozmian and he halted his rampage, standing in the middle of the room, breathing hard. His forehead had been nicked by a piece of flying glass, and a dot of blood oozed from the wound.

“Mr. Ozmian—?”

Ozmian turned to the man and spoke, his voice hoarse but calm. “Get out. Lock the door. Find Isabel. Nobody comes in but her.”

“Yes, sir.” He almost ran out.

Ozmian suddenly burst into tears, racked by hysterical sobs. D’Agosta, after hesitating, finally stepped forward and grasped his arm, again helping him to sit down in the chair, where he crumpled up, hugging himself and rocking back and forth, sobbing and gasping.

A minute or two later, he began to pull out of it. He jerked a handkerchief from his pocket, carefully wiped his face, and collected himself for a long moment, sitting in silence.

In a flat voice, he spoke. “Tell me everything.”

D’Agosta cleared his throat and took over. He explained how two kids had found the body in the garage, hidden in leaves, and how the homicide division jumped on it. He had put on a full CSU team, headed by the best in the business, and he described how more than forty detectives were now working the case. The entire homicide division was giving this its highest priority, with the full cooperation of the FBI. He laid it on as thick as he dared as the man listened, face bowed.

“Do you have any theories about who did it?” he asked when D’Agosta was done.

“Not yet, but we will. We’re going to find the person who did this; you have my word.” He faltered, wondering how he was going to tell him about the decapitation. He couldn’t quite seem to work in that detail, but before this meeting was over he knew that he had to; the newspapers would be full of it. And, most awful of all, the man would be asked to identify a headless body — the body of his daughter. They knew it was her from the fingerprints, but the physical ID process was still the law, even if, in this case, it seemed unnecessary and cruel.

“After you identify the body,” D’Agosta went on, “if you feel able, we would like to interview you — the sooner the better. We’ll need to learn about her acquaintances that you know of, names and contact info; we’ll want to hear about any difficulties in her life, or in your business or personal life — anything that might possibly connect to the killing. As unpleasant as all these questions will be, I’m sure you understand why we have to ask them. The more we know, the sooner we’ll catch the person or persons responsible. Naturally you may have an attorney present if you wish, but it’s not necessary.”

Ozmian hesitated. “Now?”

“We’d prefer to interview you up at Police Plaza, if you don’t mind. After you’ve…made the identification. Perhaps later this afternoon, if you feel capable?”

“Look, I…I’m ready to help. Murdered…Oh, God help me…”

“There’s one other thing,” said Pendergast in a low voice that instantly caused Ozmian to pause. The tycoon raised his face from his hands and looked at Pendergast, fear in his eyes.

“What?” he asked.

“You should be prepared to identify your daughter by bodily markings — dermatological peculiarities, tattoos, surgical scars. Or by means other than her body. Her clothing and possessions, for example.”

Ozmian blinked. “I don’t understand.”

“Your daughter was found decapitated. We…have not yet recovered the head.”

Ozmian stared at Pendergast for a long moment. Then his eyes swiveled over, seeking out D’Agosta.

“Why?” he whispered.

“That is a question we would like very much to answer,” said Pendergast.

Ozmian remained sunken in the chair. Finally he said: “Give the address of the morgue to my assistant on the way out and the location where you wish to question me. I’ll be there at two PM.”

“Very well,” said Pendergast.

“Now leave me.”