Two Graves

+ Twenty-Six Hours

HORACE ALLERTON WAS PREPARING TO ENJOY HIS FAVORITE activity—a relaxing evening with a cup of coffee and a good scientific journal—when a knock sounded at the front door of his neat Lawrenceville bungalow.

He put down his cup and glanced at the clock with a frown. Quarter past eight: too late for a friend to be calling. He picked up the magazine, Stratigraphy Today, and opened it with a quiet sigh of contentment.

The knock came again, more insistent.

Allerton’s eyes rose from the magazine to the door. Jehovah’s Witnesses, maybe, or one of those annoying kids who went door-to-door, selling magazine subscriptions. Ignore them and they’d go away.

He had just started in on the magazine’s lead article—“Mechanical Stratigraphy Analysis of Depositional Structure,” a promising evening’s reading indeed—when he glanced up and had the shock of his life. A man in an elegant black suit, face as white as Dracula, stood in the center of his living room.

“What on earth—?” Allerton cried, leaping up.

“Special Agent Pendergast. FBI.” A shield and identification card appeared out of nowhere, shoved into his face.

“How, how did you get in? What do you want?”

“Dr. Horace Allerton, the geologist?” the agent asked. His voice was cool but with an underlying shimmer of threat.

Allerton nodded, swallowed.

Without a word, Pendergast stepped over to a chair, and now Allerton noticed the limp and the silver-headed cane. The geologist sat back guardedly in his own wing chair. “What’s this all about?”

“Dr. Allerton,” the FBI agent began as he took a seat, “I’ve come to you for help. You are known for your expertise in analyzing soil composition. And I’ve taken particular note of your knowledge of glacial deposition.”

“And?”

The agent reached into his pocket, took out two sealed plastic bags. He laid them both on the coffee table, separating them.

Allerton hesitated, then bent forward to examine them. One was filled with a sample of micaceous clay mingled with soil, the other with small broken pebbles of porphyritic granite.

“I need two things. First, I would like a distribution map of the type of clay found in sample one.”

Allerton nodded slowly.

“The pebbles in sample two are the product of a gravel crusher, are they not?”

The geologist opened the bag and slid the pebbles into his hand. They were rough, sharp, the edges unworn by time, weathering, or glacial abrasion. “They are.”

“I want to know where they came from.”

Allerton glanced from one bag to the other. “Why come to me at this time of night, sneaking in like this? You should make an appointment, see me at my Princeton office.”

A faint tremor passed over the FBI agent’s sculpted face. “If this were merely an idle request, Doctor, I would not have troubled you at such a late hour. A woman’s life is at stake.”

Allerton put the bags down beside his coffee cup. “What exactly is the, uh, time frame you had in mind?”

“You are known to have a small but quite fine mineralogy laboratory in your basement.”

“You mean… you mean you want these analyzed now?” Allerton asked.

In response, Pendergast merely leaned back in his chair, as if making himself comfortable.

“But that could take hours!” Allerton protested.

Pendergast continued to fix him with a level gaze.

Allerton glanced at the clock. It was now eight thirty. He thought of his magazine, and the article he’d been looking forward to. Then he glanced again at the FBI agent in the opposite chair. There were dark smudges beneath the man’s pale gray eyes, as if he had not slept in a long time. And the look in those eyes made him most uneasy.

“Perhaps if you told me why you needed these particular analyses?”

“I will. They were recovered from a car that had evidently spent some time driving over a crushed-gravel road and a muddy driveway. I need to find that location.”

Allerton scooped up the samples and rose. “Wait here,” he said.

As an afterthought, he took his cup of coffee with him to the basement.