Blue Labyrinth Read Free

almost have assumed this man Pendergast didn’t want his son’s murderer to be caught.
    Which was why he’d decided to interview the man himself, in—he glanced at his watch—precisely one minute.
    And precisely one minute later, the agent was ushered into his office. The man who did the ushering was Sergeant Loomis Slade, Angler’s aide-de-camp, personal assistant, and frequent sounding board. Angler took in the salient details of his visitor with a practiced glance: tall, lean, blond-white hair, pale-blue eyes. A black suit and a dark tie of severe pattern completed the ascetic picture. This was anything but your typical FBI agent. Then again, given his residences—an apartment in the Dakota, a veritable mansion on Riverside Drive where the body had been dumped—Angler decided he shouldn’t be surprised. He offered the agent a chair, then sat back down behind his desk. Sergeant Slade sat in a far corner, behind Pendergast.
    “Agent Pendergast,” he said. “Thank you for coming.”
    The man in the black suit inclined his head.
    “First of all, let me offer my condolences on your loss.”
    The man did not reply. He did not look bereaved, exactly. In fact, he betrayed no expression at all. His face was a closed book.
    Angler’s office was not like that of most lieutenants in the NYPD. Certainly, it had its share of case files and stacks of reports. But thewalls displayed, instead of commendations and photo ops with brass, a dozen framed antique maps. Angler was an avid cartographic collector. Normally, visitors to the office were immediately drawn to the page from LeClerc’s French Atlas of 1631, or Plate 58 from Ogilby’s Britannia Atlas, showing the road from Bristol to Exeter, or—his pride and joy—the yellowed, brittle fragment from the Peutinger Table, as copied by Abraham Ortelius. But Pendergast gave the collection not even a passing glance.
    “I’d like to follow up on your initial statement, if you don’t mind. And I ought to say up front that I will have to ask some awkward and uncomfortable questions. I apologize in advance. Given your own law enforcement experience, I’m sure you’ll understand.”
    “Naturally,” the agent replied in a mellifluous southern accent, but with something hard behind it, metallic.
    “There are several aspects to this crime that, frankly, I find baffling. According to your statement, and that of your—” a glance at the report on his desk—“your ward, Ms. Greene, at approximately twenty minutes past nine last evening, there was a knock on the front door of your residence. When Ms. Greene answered it, she found your son, his body bound with thick ropes, on your doorstep. You ascertained he was dead and chased a black Town Car south on Riverside Drive while calling nine-one-one. Correct?”
    Agent Pendergast nodded.
    “What gave you the impression—initially, at least—that the murderer was in that car?”
    “It was the only vehicle in motion at the time. There were no pedestrians in sight.”
    “It didn’t occur to you that the perpetrator could have been hiding somewhere on your grounds and made good his escape by some other route?”
    “The vehicle ran several lights, drove over a sidewalk and through a flower bed, entered the parkway on an exit ramp, and made an illegal U-turn. In other words, it gave a rather convincing impression of trying to elude pursuit.”
    The dry, faintly ironic delivery of this statement irritated Angler.
    Pendergast went on. “May I ask why the police helicopter was so dilatory?”
    Angler was further annoyed. “It wasn’t late. It arrived five minutes after the call. That’s pretty good.”
    “Not good enough.”
    Seeking to regain control of the interview, Angler said, rather more sharply than he intended: “Getting back to the crime itself. Despite a careful canvassing of the vicinity, my detective squad has turned up no witnesses beyond those on the West Side Highway who saw the Town Car itself. There were no