'Don't let appearances fool you. We've got state-of-the-art equipment here. We're isolated, so we don't have to run a beauty contest.' He spread his hands. 'Apparently you don't like the way we do business. Maybe you don't like me. You may not like that I make eight million a year, and that we're now quite a profitable company. Fine. But we're innocent of these accusations. Totally innocent. Do I look like the kind of man involved in murder?'
'Prove it.'
Dalquist came around his desk. 'My first impulse is to stop you cold, make you get a warrant, fight this thing tooth and nail in the courts, use our highly paid attorneys to delay and harass you for weeks or months. Even if you prevailed, you'd end up with a limited search warrant and a mountain of paperwork. But you know what? I'm not going to do that. I'm going to give you a free pass, right here and now. You can go anywhere you like, look into anything, and have access to any documents. We've got nothing to hide. Will that satisfy you?'
Hayward glanced at Pendergast. His face was unreadable, his silvery eyes hooded.
'That would certainly be a start,' she said.
He leaned over his desk and pressed a button. 'Miss Farmer, please draft a letter for my signature giving these two people complete, total, and unlimited access to the entire facilities of Longitude Pharmaceuticals, with instructions that employees are to answer all questions fully and truthfully and provide access to even the most sensitive areas and documents.'
He punched the button and looked up. 'I just hope to see you off the premises as soon as possible.'
Pendergast broke a long silence. 'We shall see.'
57
BY THE TIME THEY REACHED THE FAR END of the Longitude Pharmaceuticals compound, Hayward felt exhausted. Dalquist had kept his word: they had been granted access to everything--labs, offices, archives. They had even been allowed to wander through the long-shuttered buildings that littered the sprawling campus. Nobody had accompanied them, no security harassed them; they were given free rein.
And they had found absolutely nothing. Beyond a few low-level service employees, nobody at the facility remained from the pre-bankruptcy days. The company records, which went back decades, made no reference to an avian flu project. Everything appeared to be on the up-and-up.
Which made Hayward suspicious. In her experience, everyone--even honest people--had something to hide.
She glanced at Pendergast as they walked down the corridor of the last shuttered building. She could discern nothing about his thoughts from his cool, alabaster face.
They exited the far door, a fire exit crash door that groaned as they opened it. It gave out onto a broken cement stoop and patchy lawn. To the right lay a narrow muddy lake, a stranded bayou, surrounded by bald cypress trees hung with Spanish moss. Straight ahead, through a tangle of vegetation, Hayward could see the remains of a brick wall covered with vines, and behind it a jutting, burned-out ruin tucked away at the far edge of the campus, surrounded on three sides by the dark fastness of Black Brake swamp. Beyond the ruin, an old pier, burned and ruined, hardly more than a series of pilings, fell away into the dark waters of the swamp.
A fine rain had begun to fall, bedewing the grass, and ominous clouds rolled low in the sky.
'I forgot my umbrella,' Hayward said, looking into the wet, dismal trees.
Pendergast, who had been staring off in the direction of the pier and the swamp, reached into his suit.
In a few minutes, they were squishing across the lawn toward the tangled remains of an old chain-link security fence, topped with concertina wire. A gate lay on the ground, sprawled and broken, and they entered through a narrow gap. Beyond lay the remains of the burned building. It was of yellow brick like the rest, but the roof had collapsed, great charred beams sticking into the sky, the windows and door frames black holes with scorched streaks above. Massive carpets of kudzu crept up the walls and lay in heavy mats over everything.
Hayward followed Pendergast through a shattered doorway. The detective paused to examine the door lying on the ground and the frame itself, and then he knelt and began fiddling with the door lock with some lock-picking tools.
'Curious,' he said, rising.
The entryway was strewn with charred pieces of wood, and the ceiling above had partially caved in, allowing a dim light to penetrate the interior. A flock of swallows burst out of the darkness and flew away, wheeling and crying at the disturbance. The odor of dampness clung faintly to everything. Water dripped from the black timbers, making pools on the once-tiled floor.
Pendergast slipped a penlight out of his pocket and shone it around. They moved into the interior, stepping over debris, the thin beam of Pendergast's light playing this way and that. Passing through a broken archway, they walked down an old corridor, burned-out rooms on either side. In places melted glass and aluminum had puddled on the floor, along with scorched plastic and the wire skeletons of furniture.
Hayward watched as Pendergast silently flitted through the dark rooms, probing and peering. At one point, he stopped at the remains of a filing cabinet and poked among a sodden mass of burned papers in the bottom of a drawer, pushing them apart. The very center remained unburned, and he plucked out a few pieces, examining them.
'Anything of interest?'
More poking. 'Unlikely.' Removing several charred fragments, he slipped them into a ziplock bag, which in turn disappeared into his suit jacket.
They arrived in a large central room where the fire appeared to have been fiercest. The ceiling was gone and mats of kudzu had risen over the debris, leaving humps and nodding growths. Pendergast glanced around, then walked over to one and reached into it, grabbing the vine and yanking it aside, exposing the skeleton of an old machine thick with wires and gears whose purpose Hayward couldn't begin to guess. He moved through the room, pulling aside more vines, exposing more melted, skeletal instrumentation.
'Any idea what this stuff was?' Hayward asked.
