Bloodless

37

“And you can’t be any more specific than that?” Commander Delaplane asked.

The kid — Toby Manning — shook his head. He’d washed his face and hands since she’d first seen him in the cemetery, but his clothes were still a mess. His eyes were clearer, though, and he was relatively composed. Not all that surprising, she mused to herself — he’d been asked to go over the events leading up to his friend’s death probably half a dozen times in as many hours, and now it was becoming routine.

She waited a minute or two, her gaze on Manning. Then she glanced at Benny Sheldrake and past him to where the two FBI agents were seated at a small conference table. Pendergast gave a slight nod.

“Okay,” she said, snapping off her recorder. “Thanks for your help. You can go now. I’ll have a car take you home. Get some rest, all right? And stick around, because we’ll be calling on you again in the coming days.”

Manning nodded, stood up, and — with a furtive glance at Pendergast — shuffled toward the door.

Delaplane consulted a handwritten list of names, crossed off Manning’s. “That just leaves the Ingersolls. They’re waiting outside.”

“Excellent.”

Delaplane sighed inwardly. This was a necessary procedure, interviewing potential witnesses to last night’s mess. They had already spoken to a woman who lived across from the Ingersolls’ B and B, the bartender at the place where the two youths, Toby and Brock, had gotten hammered, the custodian of the cemetery, and a handful of others. The interviews had been short, and — unfortunately — they hadn’t contributed much in the way of hard evidence to what they’d already learned.

She picked up the phone, asked a watch officer to get a ride for Manning.

“And bring in the Ingersolls,” she said.

A minute later, there was a knock on the door and the two came in, escorted by an officer. Their eyes darted around the room, taking in everyone present. Then they sat down in the chairs set before Delaplane’s desk. The woman, Agnes, had an expression of stone — still in shock, no doubt, from the rush of unpleasant events — but her husband, Bertram, looked aggrieved, almost angry, like Sisyphus after being assigned a larger hill.

“Mr. Ingersoll,” she said, nodding, her voice clipped, uninflected, professional. “Mrs. Ingersoll. Thank you for coming.”

“Of course,” the woman mumbled without thinking. Her husband said nothing.

“I’ll be recording this conversation,” she said, snapping the machine on again. “Do I have your permission?”

“No problem,” said Mr. Ingersoll.

After going through the preliminaries of date, time, and those present, Delaplane launched into the questioning. “I know this must be difficult, but I’d like you to please go over again with me, one more time, the events leading up to your discovery of the body. Step by step, and please take your time and mention any new details you might have remembered since making your previous statements, no matter how minor.”

The couple was silent for a moment. Finally, the woman began to speak in a low, halting voice. The story she recounted was, almost word for word, the same one Delaplane had heard already: the walk through the quiet streets; the sudden rush of sound combined with an inexplicable sense of movement; and then, her husband sprawling over a body and her frantic call to 911. The husband winced as she went over certain details but otherwise remained silent.

Agnes Ingersoll’s story tailed off slowly, with a few final observations sputtering out as she recalled them. Then a silence fell over the room. Delaplane followed her usual strategy of letting a witness stew a little before speaking. More often than not, under the pressure of silence, they’d remember something else. But to her surprise, it was Pendergast who spoke.

“Mrs. Ingersoll,” he said. “Can you tell me how quickly you dialed 911 after your husband fell to the pavement?”

Through long practice, Delaplane managed to keep her expression neutral, despite the trivial nature of the question. She noticed, however, that Coldmoon shifted his eyes toward his partner.

The woman paused, thinking. “Um... well... Bertram fell, and as I said he cried out when he hit the pavement, and I knelt over him to make sure he was all right. It all happened so quickly, you know, it seemed everything was over within a second.”

“So,” Pendergast prodded, “how long would you estimate before the call? Ten seconds? Fifteen?”

The husband seemed about to object, but his wife answered first. “I saw he was moving, but it was fairly dark and I couldn’t tell how badly hurt he was. I saw the... the other body. Bertram moaned — and that was when I reached into my purse.” She hesitated. “Fifteen seconds.”

“Fifteen,” Pendergast repeated. “From the moment your husband fell over the body to when you called for assistance?”

“Yes,” the woman said a little hesitantly. Then, more firmly: “yes.”

“Very good. And — please forgive me if I dwell on these unpleasant events — the body your husband tripped over: did it seem to you it was already in place?”

The woman looked from Pendergast to her husband and back again. “I don’t understand.”

“Was the body in situ, on the ground? Or did you have any sense of motion immediately before the, ah, accident occurred? Such as a body that had fallen from above — jumped or pushed?”

“No,” she blurted.

“Mr. Ingersoll?” Pendergast asked.

The man stared at the agent with red-rimmed eyes. Then he merely shook his head.

“Thank you,” Pendergast said, glancing at Delaplane to signal, once again, that he had nothing more to ask.

Sheldrake asked a few perfunctory questions, and then Delaplane dismissed the couple with the usual warnings. As the door closed behind them, she turned to Pendergast. “May I ask why the interest in the timing of the 911 call?”

“Naturally. And I’d be happy to answer your question — once you’ve checked in with that cell phone specialist of yours.”

This had been another of Pendergast’s bizarre questions. “I’m not sure he’ll have an answer for us yet.”

“Please try him anyway, if you don’t mind.”

“Okay.” Delaplane dialed an internal extension, then turned on the speaker of her desk phone.

“Wrigley here,” came a voice over the speaker.

“Wrigley? It’s Alanna.”

“Oh. Hi, Commander.”

“Any joy?”

“As a matter of fact, I was just about to call you,” the disembodied voice replied. “It turns out I didn’t need to tinker with the microcode after all. Once I knew his location, the model of his phone, and its internal GPS ID, I tried the cell towers in that area, just in case. And I got lucky. The kid has a really old phone, and it pings the network a lot more frequently than today’s models when its flashlight is on or it’s being used as a compass. Some proposed IEEE standard that ultimately was never implemented. Anyway, sure enough, it was pinging the network: once every sixty seconds. Of course, newer phones go dormant much faster in order to save juice, but this—”

“Fascinating, Wrigley, but can we get to the point?”

“There were thirteen pings, each exactly sixty seconds apart. The first was at 3:02, and the last was at 3:14.”

“Excuse me,” Pendergast said. “But what was the exact time of the last ping?”

“Like I said,” the technician replied, “3:14.”

“I asked for the exact time, if you please.”

“Why didn’t you say so?” came the sarcastic response. “Three fourteen, forty seconds, and seventy-one centiseconds. That’s 3:14:40.71. I’d give you the milliseconds, but the ANI/ALI signal doesn’t—”

“Okay, Wrigley,” Delaplane said, trying to keep from smiling. “Good work.” And she hung up. “Now,” she said, turning to Pendergast, “I’m not sure what you’re driving at here.”

“Just one last favor, please,” Pendergast said in his most honeyed tone. “Would you please call your emergency dispatcher and find out when Mrs. Ingersoll dialed 911?”

“Let me guess. Down to the second.”

“If you’d be so kind.”

It took two calls, and about five minutes of waiting as the records were accessed, before Delaplane hung up again. “Three eighteen,” she said. “And, no, they couldn’t tell me how many hundredths of a second.”

“That’s quite all right, thank you,” said Pendergast, sliding the fingers of one hand over the nails of the other in a peculiar gesture. “We can assume both time sources are quite accurate — certainly accurate enough for our needs.”

“What are those needs, exactly?” Delaplane asked. She caught Coldmoon’s eye, and he grinned.

“To provide the variables for the following calculation: The Manning youth dropped his phone just as he started running away from whoever attacked his friend. That means the assault took place at 3:14 and about forty seconds. We also know that Mrs. Ingersoll dialed 911 at 3:18, less than four minutes later. Which means that was the time Brock Custis was dropped.”

“What the hell?” Coldmoon said, stirring behind the conference table, suddenly seeing the craziness of the timeline.

“Dropped?” Delaplane asked.

“My dear colleagues, consider the facts! The injury to the body, and the accounts of the eyewitnesses, make it clear that Custis had just fallen to the sidewalk a moment before Ingersoll tripped over him. Everyone has assumed that Custis fell from a window or off the roof. But that clearly isn’t the case.”

“How’s that?” Delaplane asked.

“Because the Bonaventure Cemetery, where Custis was accosted, is almost four miles from the location on Taylor Street where our friend Ingersoll tripped over Custis’s body. Given the narrow streets, urban congestion, and geographical impediments between the two locations, it’s impossible to drive that distance in less than sixteen minutes — I’ve checked all possible routes. But Custis, or rather his corpse, made it in just four minutes. This is why I say, Commander, that he was dropped. Because the only possible conclusion is that he flew from one spot to the other — or rather, was flown.”

“Flown?” Delaplane protested in a high, incredulous voice. After a moment, comprehension dawned on her face. “Oh. Oh, shit.”