Bloodless

33

Coldmoon saw the early-morning glow of a café spilling onto the sidewalk and swerved toward it, not even bothering to ask his partner’s opinion. It was 6 AM and the café had apparently just opened.

“My dear Coldmoon—” began Pendergast.

“If I don’t get some coffee,” said Coldmoon loudly, “I’m going to die.”

“Very well,” said Pendergast. “I wouldn’t want another corpse on my hands.”

Inside, the little diner was air-conditioned, shiny and cheerful, smelling of coffee and bacon. It was a relief from the muggy night air. Coldmoon took a seat in one of the banquettes and Pendergast sat opposite him, gingerly, after inspecting the interior — and the banquette seat in particular — with a barely concealed expression of disdain. A waitress appeared immediately with plastic menus and a big pot of coffee.

“Fill ’er up, please,” said Coldmoon.

“I don’t suppose you have, ah, espresso...?” Pendergast asked.

“Sorry, sugar. Just this.” She held up the pot with a grin.

“Tea?”

“Black or green?”

“English breakfast, if you please. Milk and sugar.”

“Sure thing. Anything to eat, boys?”

“Bacon and eggs for me,” Coldmoon said, “over easy, toast, hash browns.”

“Hash browns?” the waitress said. “We’re known for our grits here. Buttered, salted, and sugared.”

“No,” Coldmoon said. “Hash browns. The greasier the better.”

“We don’t serve greasy food,” she said, offended.

“Okay, fine, whatever. But make it hash browns.”

She glared at him for a moment. Then she turned toward Pendergast — having picked up on his drawl — with a considerably softer expression. “And you, sugar?” she asked. “A nice plate of chicken and waffles?”

Pendergast closed his eyes and opened them. “Nothing for me, thank you very much.”

She went off and Coldmoon took a gulp of his coffee. It was, of course, not as richly burnt as he liked, but the bitter brew went down well and he quickly felt its revivifying effects.

“Sorry, Pendergast, but I can’t think straight if I haven’t had my coffee and breakfast.” He paused. “Chicken and waffles?”

“Keep your voice down — you’ve made a bad enough impression as it is.” Pendergast paused. “It’s a southern thing. If you have to ask, you won’t understand the explanation.”

Coldmoon shook his head. “Sounds toxic.”

“Then perhaps I shouldn’t tell you the waffles are slathered in butter, the fried chicken is doused with hot sauce, and then the entire concoction is drowned in maple syrup.”

Coldmoon shuddered.

Pendergast paused while the waitress brought his tea. “In any case, this interregnum will give us a chance to review the forensic examination of Mr. Ellerby’s day-trading hobby.”

“Already?”

“I spoke to the gentleman who analyzed the computer hard drives. The results are curious, to say the least.”

Coldmoon’s plate of food arrived in record time, and he tucked into the hash browns.

“In the three weeks before his death,” Pendergast said in the same casual voice, “Mr. Ellerby made two hundred million dollars.”

Coldmoon had just forked a mess of hash browns into his mouth and now he nearly choked. He chewed and chewed, finally getting the bolus of food down. “You timed that bombshell, I know you did,” he said, wiping his mouth.

“What could you mean?” said Pendergast.

“Two hundred million?” Coldmoon asked. “How?”

“Simple day trading. Exclusively limited to the thirty companies on the Dow Jones Industrial Index. All of it quite straightforward, apparently, with no sign of insider trading, manipulation, fraud, or any other illegality.”

“How’s that possible?”

“The forensic accountant, in whose competence I have faith, says in all his years of analyzing cooked books and unscrupulous trading, he’s never seen anything like it. The hotel manager’s trades, every single one, appeared to be totally legitimate and aboveboard. He never made a killing, just steady gains, one after the other, across thousands of trades of stocks and options.”

“Crazy.”

“And,” Pendergast added, “he never, even once, lost money on a trade.”

“Impossible.”

“One would think so.”

“Do you believe this, um, impossibility is connected with his murder?”

It was the kind of question Pendergast often didn’t answer, and as Coldmoon expected, no answer was forthcoming. So Coldmoon went ahead. “Did the second victim trade in the market?”

“Never.”

“And the third victim — that college kid on the sidewalk — chances are he’s not an investor, either.”

“I should be most surprised to learn the contrary.”

Coldmoon continued eating his hash browns at a much slower pace than before. Why the hell did Pendergast need to make a ten-word statement in which nine of the words were superfluous? A simple Right would have sufficed.

He went on. “So the fact this hotel manager made two hundred million right before his death, and the others didn’t even play the market — well, if the trading is connected with his murder, what is the connection?”

Pendergast said nothing.

Coldmoon plucked a miniature tray of grape jelly from the little metal rack on the table, peeled off the top, and began spreading it on his buttered toast. “Who was Ellerby’s heir? Do we know who’s going to get the dough?”

“His eighty-year-old widowed mother. He was an only child.”

Coldmoon shook his head. “Kind of rules that out as a motive.”

“I would say so.”

“About this morning’s killing. What happened, exactly? Was that guy tossed off the roof? Was he sideswiped by a car and thrown onto the sidewalk? Or was he just beaten to a pulp? He sure looked like a mess.”

“He was lying too far from the house to have fallen,” Pendergast said. “Or to have been thrown. At least by a human being.”

What the hell was that supposed to mean? “But he was sucked dry of blood. Like the other two.”

Pendergast simply nodded.

“You think it’s a vampire,” Coldmoon said after a moment, shoving a piece of bacon into his mouth. “You, along with everyone else.”

Pendergast took a long, contemplative sip of tea. He placed the cup down. “Do you?”

“What? No. I mean, are you kidding? Of course not. Vampires don’t exist.”

“Do the Lakota have any legends about vampires?”

Coldmoon was surprised by the question. Pendergast rarely seemed to acknowledge, let alone take an interest in, his Native American heritage.

“The Lakota do have a sort of legend about a vampire. He was white, of course.”

“Naturally.”

“A settler moved into the Black Hills to look for gold, and he built a cabin in a sacred valley, defiling it. A year later, some Lakotas found him dead in his cabin, stone cold, with a silver knife in his heart. When they pulled out the knife, the corpse began to warm up, and they grew frightened and ran away. He later began attacking people, killing them and drinking their blood. The only way he could be stopped was to put that same knife back into his heart. And then he would get cold and still again. But he wouldn’t die — not really. They say his body is up there, in that cabin, waiting for someone to pull the knife out—”

Just then, Coldmoon was interrupted by an unintelligible cry from outside. He looked out the café window to see a young man staggering up the street: filthy, covered in mud and dirt, his clothes torn almost into rags. He was jabbering in distress, evidently drunk or high.

In a flash, Pendergast was up.

“What are you doing?” Coldmoon asked as he readied his fork for a frontal attack on the fried eggs. “He’s just some drunken kid.”

But Pendergast ignored him and went outside. Reluctantly, Coldmoon followed a few moments later. The kid had paused just down the street and was clinging to a lamppost, steadying himself. The few pedestrians about at that early hour ignored him completely. Evidently inebriated people at dawn were not an uncommon sight in Savannah.

Pendergast approached the young man, speaking in a soothing voice, holding out his hand. The kid lurched, turned, and as he did so Pendergast grasped his muddy hand in support. “I’m here to help,” Coldmoon heard him say.

The kid let go of the lamppost, letting Pendergast bear his weight. “I’m here to help,” the agent repeated.

The kid turned his mud-smeared face toward Pendergast, his lips moving, the words indistinct but repeated over and over like a mantra, his eyes widening. And then, as his cracked voice grew louder, Coldmoon understood what he was trying to say:

No help, no help, no help, no help no help no help...