"Is the stump still around?"
"No. The tree was cut in 1933. But Wren found me an old map giving the location of the tree as eigthteen yards southwest of the monument. I've already entered the data into the GPS unit."
Pendergast walked southwest, keeping a careful eye on the device. "Here." He turned south. "Twenty — two rods, at sixteen point five feet the rod, is three hundred sixty — three feet." He punched some buttons on the GPS. "Follow me, please."
Pendergast set off again into the darkness, almost spectral in his black suit. D'Agosta followed, hoisting the heavy bag higher onto his shoulder. He could smell the marshes and mudflats along the Spuyten Duyvil and soon he could make out, filtering through the trees, the lights of the tall apartment buildings perched on the bluffs of Riverdale, just across the river. Abruptly, they came to the edge of the trees, which opened onto an expanse of matted grass, dropping down to a half — moon pebbled beach. Beyond, the river swirled and eddied, the lights of the Henry Hudson Parkway arching overhead and the apartment buildings across the water caught in the swirling tide, glittering and dimpling as the water flowed past. A low — lying mist drifted in patches across the water; the rumble of a boat could be heard.
"Wait a moment," Pendergast murmured, pausing at the verge of the trees. A police boat came slowly churning down the Spuyten Duyvil, its ghostly form sliding in and out of the mist, a spotlight mounted on the hardtop sweeping the shore. They crouched just as the light passed over them, lancing through the woods.
"Christ," muttered D'Agosta, "I'm hiding from my own damn men. This is crazy."
"This is the only solution. Have you any idea how long it would take to get the proper permissions to exhume a body buried, not in a cemetery, but on public land, without a death certificate, and with only a few newspaper articles as supporting evidence?"
"We've been through that."
Rising, Pendergast walked out of the trees and down through the sea grass to the edge of the cobbled beach. To the east, halfway up the cliffs, D'Agosta could just make out the vast ramshackle structure of the Ville's central church, rising like a fang above the trees, a faint yellow glow peeking from upper — story windows.
Pendergast stopped. "Right here."
D'Agosta looked around the shingle beach. "No way. Who would bury a body here, in such an exposed location?"
"Easier digging. And a hundred years ago, none of those buildings on the other side of the river had been built."
"Nice. How are we supposed to dig up a body with the whole world watching?"
"As quickly as possible."
With a sigh, D'Agosta dropped the bag, unzipped it, and hauled out the shovel and pick. Pendergast screwed the rods of the metal detector together, donned a pair of earphones and plugged them into the device, then turned it on. He began sweeping the ground.
"A lot of metal here," he said.
He swept the detector back and forth, back and forth, walking slowly forward. After proceeding about five feet he turned, came back. "I'm getting a consistent signal here, two feet down."
"Two feet? That seems awfully shallow."
"Wren tells me the general erosion of the ground level in this area would be about four feet since the time of the interment." He laid the metal detector aside, removed his jacket and hung it on a nearby tree, grasped the pick, and with surprising vigor began to break up the ground. D'Agosta pulled on a pair of work gloves and began shoveling out the loose dirt and pebbles.
Another rumble heralded the return of the police boat. D'Agosta hit the deck as the spotlight licked the shore, Pendergast quickly falling prone beside him. When the boat had passed, Pendergast rose. "How inconvenient," he said, dusting himself off and grasping the pick once again.
The rectangular hole deepened — twelve inches, eighteen. Pendergast tossed the pick aside, knelt, and began working with a trowel, scraping off layers of dirt that D'Agosta then shoveled out of the way. The pit exhaled the cloying smell of brackish seawater and rotting humus.
When the grave had deepened to about twenty inches, Pendergast swept it again with the metal detector. "We're almost there."
Five more minutes of work and the trowel scraped across something hollow. Pendergast quickly brushed the loose dirt away, revealing the back of a skull. More scraping revealed the posterior side of a scapula and the end of a wooden handle.
"Our friend appears to have been buried facedown," Pendergast said. He cleared around the wooden handle, exposing a guard and rusted blade. "With a knife in his back."
"I thought he was stabbed in the chest," said D'Agosta. The moon broke through the mist, and he glanced from the corpse to Pendergast. The agent's face had gone very grim and wan.
They worked together, gradually exposing the back of the skeleton. Rotting clothing came to light: a pair of shriveled shoes peeling off the foot bones, a rotting belt, old cufflinks, and a buckle. They cut the earth down around the skeleton, exposing the sides, whisking dirt off the old, brown bones.
D'Agosta rose — one eye toward the river and any sign of the police boat — and shined his light around. The skeleton lay face — down, arms and legs arranged neatly, toes bent inward. Pendergast reached in and lifted off a few rotting pieces of clothing that clung to the bones, first exposing the upper part of the skeleton, then pulling pieces of canvas off the legs, laying everything in the locker. The knife stuck out of the back, having been driven to the hilt through the left blade of the scapula, directly above the heart. Peering more closely, D'Agosta could see what looked like a severe depressed fracture on the back of the skull.
Pendergast bent low over the makeshift grave, taking a series of photographs of the skeleton from various angles. Then he rose. "Let's remove it," he said.
While D'Agosta held the flashlight, Pendergast pried up the bones one by one with the tip of his trowel, starting with the feet and working upward, handing them to D'Agosta for stowing in the evidence box. When he reached the chest, he slowly worked the knife out of the soil and handed it over.
"Do you see that, Vincent?" he asked, pointing. D'Agosta shined his light over a piece of wrought iron, like a long spike or rod, with an end that curved over the bones of the victim's upper arm. The long end of the spike was buried deep in the ground. "Pinned into the grave."
Pendergast pulled the spikes out and set them with the rest of the remains. "Curious. And do you see this?"
Now D'Agosta shined the light on the victim's neck. The remains of a thin, twisted hemp cord could still be seen, horribly constrictive around the neck bone.
"Strangled so hard," said D'Agosta, "it must have half decapitated him."
"Indeed. The hyoid bone is nearly crushed." Pendergast continued with his grisly task.
Soon all that was left to be exposed was the skull, which remained facedown in the dirt. Pendergast undermined it and the jaw with a small penknife, wiggling them loose, then freeing them as a single unit. He turned them over with the blade of his pen — knife.
"Oh, shit." D'Agosta took a step back. The skull's mouth was closed, but the space behind the teeth, where the tongue had been, was packed with a chalky, greenish white substance. A curled — up thread lay in a tangle in front, one end clamped between the teeth.
Pendergast picked out the thread and looked at it, then carefully placed it in a test tube. He then leaned in gingerly, sniffed the skull, pinched up a minuscule amount of the powder, and rubbed it between thumb and forefinger. "Arsenic. The mouth was filled with it and the lips sewn shut."
"Jesus. So what's a suicide doing strangled, with a knife in his back and a mouth sewn full of arsenic? You'd think the people who buried him would have noticed."