Blue Labyrinth

14

As Pendergast entered the cluttered Museum office, Dr. Finisterre Paden quickly ushered him to the chair reserved for visitors.

“Ah, Agent Pendergast. Please have a seat.” The diffident tone of his phone message two days earlier was gone. Today the man was all smiles. He seemed pleased with himself.

Pendergast inclined his head. “Dr. Paden. I understand you have some new information for me?”

“I do. I do, indeed.” The mineralogist rubbed his chubby hands together. “I must confess, Mr. Pendergast — you will keep this between ourselves, I trust? — to feeling a degree, the very slightest degree, of chagrin.” He unlocked a drawer, reached inside, took out a soft cloth, unwrapped it to reveal the stone, then gave it a brief, almost caressing touch.

“Beautiful. How utterly beautiful.” The mineralogist seemed to recollect himself, and he passed the stone over to Pendergast. “In any case, since the stone was not immediately recognizable to me, or included in the obvious sources, I resorted to researching its chemical signature, refractive index, and other such avenues of attack. The fact is, I… ahem, not to put too fine a point on it… didn’t see the forest for the trees.”

“I’m not quite sure I follow you, Dr. Paden.”

“I should have been focusing on the appearance of the stone, rather than its chemical qualities. I told you from the start that your specimen was of a most unusual color, and that its spiderweb matrix is the most valuable of all. But you may recall I also told you that this deep-indigo turquoise is found in only three states. And that is true — save for one exception.”

He reached over to his color laser printer, plucked a sheet from its bin, and handed it to Pendergast.

The agent gave it a quick glance. The sheet appeared to contain an item from a jeweler’s catalog, or perhaps an auction listing. There were a few paragraphs of descriptive text, along with a photograph of a precious stone. While it was significantly smaller than the stone found in Alban’s stomach, in all other respects it appeared almost identical.

“The only azure American turquoise found outside of those three states,” Paden said almost reverently. “And the only azure turquoise with a golden spiderweb matrix that I’ve ever encountered.”

“Where did it come from?” Pendergast asked in a very low voice.

“From an obscure mine in California, known as the Golden Spider. It’s a very old mine, played out over a hundred years ago, and it wasn’t in any of the obvious books or catalogs. Even so, the stone is so unusual I feel I should have recognized it. But the mine was small, you see, with a very low output — the estimate is that no more than fifty or sixty pounds of top-grade turquoise was mined from it. It was that obscurity — and the California location — that tripped me up.”

“Where in California?” Pendergast asked, his voice even quieter.

“On the edge of the Salton Sea, northeast of Anza-Borrego and south of Joshua Tree National Park. A most unusual location, especially from a mineralogical perspective, because the only—”

Up until this point, Pendergast had been sitting motionless in the chair. Now, quite suddenly, he was in swift movement, rising and flitting out of the office, black suit jacket flapping, the printout clutched in one hand, a brief murmur of thanks floating back toward the startled curator.