“My God,” Grove said, staring at the map, mouth agape. “It’s a trail. The killer left a goddamned trail!”
“Right to the Canadian border,” said Coldmoon, wondering when Pendergast had figured this out. “With each murder exactly two months apart.”
“There’s something else interesting about these murders,” Pendergast said. He placed his finger beside the southernmost pushpin — Oriol — then slid it slowly up to the northernmost: Baxter.
“All the deaths took place along I-95,” said Coldmoon.
Pendergast nodded. “Not only that, but they’re roughly equidistant from each other.” He paused. “So what do we have? Killings done in the same way: strangulation fashioned to look like suicide. Killings separated from each other by equivalent degrees of space and time. Killings that follow an obvious route: mile for mile, from one end to the other, Interstate 95 is the most heavily traveled road in America.”
He turned toward the group at the table. “I submit to you that, when viewed in such a manner, this series of crimes is almost painful in its regularity. This killer — or killers — was following a careful plan. A deliberate plan. It’s almost as if he wanted law enforcement to notice the pattern.”
“But you’ve forgotten one,” Coldmoon said.
Something almost like a smile flitted across Pendergast’s face. “Not forgotten, Agent Coldmoon — just withheld for the moment.” He picked up one more pushpin, pressed it into the map. “Agatha Flayley, the last of the suicide/murders: killed in Ithaca, New York, just eleven years ago. Two hundred miles from I-95. And with a different MO.” And with this he, too, took a seat at the table.
There was silence for a moment.
“I don’t understand,” Grove said. “You just laid out a flawless pattern — and then, with this Flayley killing, turned it on its head.”
“I’d phrase it differently, Commander. It’s quite possible Agent Coldmoon has the perfect Lakota aphorism for this situation, but I hope he’ll permit me to quote a Latin one instead: exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis. The exception that proves the rule. This last of the old murders is different from the others — but it’s that very difference I find most telling.” He clasped his hands on the table and leaned forward. “Consider: It takes place out of sequence — four months after Baxter’s death. All the other strangulations were two months apart. The MO is different. Even though Flayley was strangled, it was done with less force — so much less that she was still alive when she was thrown from the bridge. That, too, is different. The others were all hanged in bedrooms or bathrooms, but Flayley was thrown off a bridge, in a public place.”
He paused, and then said: “In the other killings, greater force was brought to bear on the right horn of the hyoid bone, suggesting a right-handed individual. In the Flayley case, the left wing of the hyoid was slightly fractured.” He paused. “A slightly weaker, left-handed individual, perhaps?” Now Pendergast let his chin rest lightly on his tented fingers as he looked from Coldmoon, to Grove, to Fauchet, almost impishly. When his gaze met Fauchet’s, he winked.
“A partner!” Fauchet and Coldmoon said simultaneously.
“Indeed,” Pendergast said. “Although I think the word apprentice might be more apt.”
“That handwriting guy, Ianetti, said the person who wrote the notes was left-handed,” Coldmoon added.
“Yes... yes, he did.” Grove, who’d seemed lost in thought during this exchange, suddenly straightened up. “Same with the throat slashings. It all fits.”
“It might explain not only why this killing was different — but why it was the last of its kind.”
“How do you figure that?” Coldmoon asked. Fascinating or not, he was a little annoyed at this Yoda-like line of questioning. Why hadn’t Pendergast shared these revelations with him earlier?
“Up until Ithaca, the murders had been growing increasingly efficient. The killer was gaining experience, perfecting his technique. But Flayley was different: her strangling was botched, a kind of homicidus interruptus, and the act of throwing her off a bridge — with the potential for witnesses — hints almost of desperation. And it suggests other things as welclass="underline" youthful impulsiveness, drama, the desire to impress.”
“So this apprentice had been an onlooker, so to speak,” Grove said. “And Flayley was a chance for him to ‘make his bones.’ But not having the experience or stomach for the job, he made a hash of it.”
Pendergast raised his chin from his fingertips. “The mixed metaphor notwithstanding, that seems likely. But there are still other points of interest about this particular killing.”
“It’s nowhere near I-95,” Fauchet said.
“Correct. In other words, we have a second killer — a squeamish apprentice — who takes his first killing in a new direction and almost botches it. Still, there’s a similarity: he also does his one and only killing near a major traffic artery.”
Coldmoon looked once more at the map. “I-81.”
Pendergast nodded.
“So they were swinging back south again?” Fauchet asked.
“It seems so. And now that we know the route the killers took, let us traverse it one more time — in reverse.”
Coldmoon turned back to the map, and — suddenly — saw where Pendergast was going with all this; how everything fell neatly into place. “Florida,” he said in a low voice. “They must have started in Florida.”
“I’m sorry,” Fauchet said. “I don’t get it. We haven’t found a killing with this MO in Florida.”
“My dear Dr. Fauchet, that’s because we haven’t looked in Florida. Commander Grove was asked to search for possible suicide-killings outside Florida. Perhaps the first homicide — victim zero, if you will — happened right here in Miami, two months before the one in Savannah. The distance fits. And if the time fits as well, it would have happened twelve years ago almost to the day.”
Coldmoon was thinking fast. “The killer — killers — headed north from Florida,” he said. “Following a precise schedule. They looped around after reaching Maine, killed again in Ithaca — then the killings stopped. Why?”
“An excellent question. Why do you think?” Pendergast asked.
“Well, a few possibilities. One: they were caught and imprisoned on some other charge. Two: one or both were killed or incapacitated. Or three: the apprentice refused to continue.” He paused.
“Refused to continue,” Pendergast murmured. “Was he, perhaps, horrified at what he’d done — or been forced to do? Could he escape his guilt? Did he, perhaps, grow up to become—”
“Brokenhearts!” Coldmoon snapped his fingers. “Brokenhearts was the apprentice.” Then another idea occurred to him — a horrifying one. “If that Mars profile of the killer is correct, and he can’t be more than twenty-five, then he must’ve been little more than a kid when he was forced to take this road trip. Maybe the killing stopped because... because the apprentice killed his master.”