Or was there?
“Lieutenant?” she asked. “Do you know what this is?”
He came over. “Not a clue,” he replied.
“
“You’re shitting me, right?”
Margo shook her head slowly. “I wish I were.”
They stood, unmoving, as the sun sank below the Palisades, gilding the distant buildings across the river in a halo of oblique light. She looked again at the plant in her hand, preparing to place it in her carryall, and noticed something that she had missed before.
At the end of the root base, she could make out a small graft scar along the xylem, a long double-V in the dim light. A graft scar like that, she knew, meant one of only two things. A common hybrid experiment.
Or a very sophisticated genetic engineering experiment.
HAYWARD PUSHED THE door open brusquely, her cheeks still full of lunch.
“Captain Waxie just called,” she said, swallowing the tuna fish. “Wants you down in the IU right away. They got him.”
D’Agosta looked up from placing the final pins in a missing-persons map that replaced the one taken by Waxie. “Got who?”
“
“No shit.” D’Agosta was at the door in a second, pulling his suit jacket off the hanger and shrugging into it.
“Caught him in the Ramble,” Hayward said as they walked through the office pool toward the elevator bank. “Somebody on stakeout heard a commotion, went to check it out. The guy had just knifed a vagrant and was preparing to cut off his head.”
“How’d they know that?”
Hayward shrugged. “Ask Captain Waxie.”
“And the knife?”
“Homemade job. Real rough. Just what they were looking for.” She didn’t sound convinced.
The elevator doors opened to reveal Pendergast. Seeing D’Agosta and Hayward about to step in, he raised his eyebrows quizzically.
“The killer’s in the IU,” D’Agosta said. “Waxie wants me down there.”
“Indeed?” The FBI agent stepped back and pressed the button for the second floor. “Well, let’s head down there by all means. I’m curious to see exactly what kind of fish angler Waxie has landed.”
The Interrogation Unit of One Police Plaza was a grim series of gray-colored rooms with cinder-block walls and heavy metal doors. The cop on desk duty buzzed them through, directing them to the observation area of room nine. Inside, Waxie was lounging in a chair, looking through the one-way glass into the interrogation cell. He glanced up when he heard them enter, frowned when he saw Pendergast, grunted at D’Agosta, and ignored Hayward.
“Is he talking?” D’Agosta said.
Waxie grunted again. “Oh, yeah. Talking is all he’s doing. But so far we’ve only heard a load of shit. Calls himself Jeffrey; won’t give anything else. We’ll get the real story out of him soon, though. Meanwhile, thought you might like to ask him a few questions.” In his triumph, Waxie was generous, brimming with smug self- confidence.
Looking through the glass, D’Agosta could see an unkempt, wild-eyed man. The rapid, silent movements of the suspect’s mouth were in almost humorous contrast with his stiff, unmoving body.
“This is the guy?” D’Agosta said in disbelief.
“That’s him.”
D’Agosta kept looking through the glass. “Looks kind of small to have done so much damage.”
Waxie’s mouth set in a defensive frown. “Maybe he got sand kicked in his face one too many times.”
D’Agosta leaned forward and pressed the mike button. Instantly, a torrent of curses spewed from the speaker above the one-way window. D’Agosta listened for a moment, then snapped the mike button off.
“What about the murder weapon?” he asked.
Waxie shrugged. “It’s a handmade thing, a piece of steel sunk into a wooden shank. The handle’s been wrapped in cloth, gauze, something like that. Too bloody to tell; we’ll have to wait until forensics gets done with it.”
“Steel,” Pendergast said.
“Steel,” Waxie replied.
“Not stone.”
“I said, it was steel. Take a look for yourself.”
