of forceps—plucked several small pebbles from the treads of the tire and placed them in a second bag. This, too, quickly disappeared into his pocket.
“That’s, uh, evidence,” the cop began.
Pendergast rose and turned toward the cop. He said nothing, but the cop took a step backward under the force of the FBI agent’s stare.
“Right. Keep us in the loop on that,” the cop muttered.
Still Pendergast skewered the man with his stare. He looked at the CSI team, each in turn, and then finally at D’Agosta. There was something accusatory in his gaze, as if they were guilty of some unnamed offense. Then he turned and began walking in the direction of the Rolls, limping slightly, using the cane for support.
D’Agosta scrambled after him. “What’s next?”
Pendergast did not stop walking. “I’m going to find Helen.”
“Will you be… working officially?” D’Agosta asked.
“Do not concern yourself with my status.”
D’Agosta was taken aback by his cold tone.
“Carry on with the official homicide and kidnapping investigation. If you uncover anything of interest, let me know. But remember also: this is my fight. Not yours.”
When D’Agosta stopped, Pendergast turned, his voice softening as he laid a hand on his arm. “Your place is here, Vincent. What I have to do, I must do alone.”
D’Agosta nodded. Pendergast turned away again and opened the car door, simultaneously raising his cell phone to one ear. As the door closed, D’Agosta could hear him speaking into the phone: “Mime? Anything? Anything at all?”
+ 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,
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
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.
+ Thirty Hours
MIDNIGHT. PENDERGAST SAT IN HIS ROLLS-ROYCE OUTSIDE the house of Dr. Allerton, engine idling.
He had been fortunate: the particular type of granite outcropped in only one area that also contained a gravel pit. This pit was owned by the Reliance Sand and Gravel Company, located just outside Ramapo, New York. They ran a large gravel-crushing operation that supplied an area covering a significant portion of Rockland County. Using his laptop to visit the Reliance website, Pendergast had been able to map the approximate geographic range of Reliance’s customer base, which he duly marked on an atlas of Rockland County.
Next he turned to Allerton’s analysis of the mud. It was largely composed of an unusual type of clay, identified as a weathered micaceous halloysite, fortunately not common to the region, although—according to the geologist—somewhat more so in Quebec and northern Vermont. Allerton had given Pendergast a map of its geographic distribution, copied from an online journal.
Pendergast compared this with the distribution region he had marked for the gravel. They intersected in only one area, somewhat less than a square mile in extent, north and east of Ramapo.
