“And?”
“That’s all. No toxins or drugs present in the blood or tissues. No unusual wounds or pathologies, at least none detectable after embalming and almost ten years in the ground.”
“No sign of heat?”
“Heat? What do you mean?”
“No indication that the body had experienced the perimortem application of heat?”
“Absolutely not. Heat would have caused a host of obvious cell changes. I’ve looked at forty, maybe fifty sections of tissue from this cadaver, and not one showed changes associated with heat. What an extraordinary question, Mr. Pendergast.”
Pendergast spoke again, his voice still low. “Small-cell lung cancer is caused almost exclusively by smoking. Am I correct, Doctor?”
“You are correct.”
“That he died of cancer is beyond a reasonable doubt, then, Doctor?” Pendergast allowed a skeptical tone to tinge his voice.
Exasperated, the pathologist reached down, grabbed two halves of a shriveled brown lump, and shoved them in Pendergast’s face. “There it is, Mr. Pendergast. If you don’t believe me, believe this. Take it. Feel the malignancy of this tumor. As sure as I’m standing here, that’s what killed Beckmann.”
It was a long, silent walk back to the car. Pendergast slipped behind the wheel—today he’d driven himself to Yonkers—and they exited the parking lot. As they left the gray huddle of downtown behind, Pendergast spoke at last.
“Beckmann spoke to us quite eloquently, wouldn’t you say, Vincent?”
“Yeah. And he stank, too.”
“What he said, however, was—I must confess—something of a surprise. I shall have to write the good doctor a letter of thanks.” He swung the wheel sharply, and the Rolls turned onto Executive Boulevard, passing the on-ramp for the Saw Mill River Parkway.
D’Agosta looked over in surprise. “Aren’t we heading back to New York City?”
Pendergast shook his head. “Jeremy Grove died exactly two weeks ago. Cutforth, one week ago. We came to Yonkers to get some answers. I’m not leaving until we have them.”
{ 45 }
The bus inched through a long, white-tiled tunnel in stop-and-go traffic and emerged from an underpass, a long ramp amidst steel girders in semidarkness.
New York City, thought the Reverend Wayne P. Buck.
Beyond the web of steel, he could see limpid sunlight, sooty tenements, a brief glimpse of skyscrapers. The bus lurched back into darkness, the brakes chuffing as the line of traffic stopped again.
Buck felt an indescribable mix of emotions: excitement, fear, destiny, a sense of confronting the unknown. It was the same thing he had felt a couple of years ago, the day he’d been released from prison after serving nine years for murder two. It had been a long, slow slide for Buck: delinquency, failed jobs, booze, stealing cars, bank robbery—and then the fateful day when everything went wrong and he’d ended up shooting a convenience store clerk. Killing a poor, innocent man. As the bus crept forward again, his mind went back over the arrest, trial, sentence of twenty-five to life, the manacled walk into the bowels of the prison. A period of darkness, best forgotten.
And then, conversion. Born again in prison. Just as Jesus raised up the whore, Mary Magdalen, He raised up the alcoholic, the murderer, the man who had been cast away by all others, even his own family.
After his salvation, Buck began reading the Bible: again and again, cover-to-cover, Old Testament and New. He started preaching a little, a few words here, a helping hand there. He formed a study group. Gradually, he’d built up the respect and trust of the prisoners who had ears for the Good Word. He was soon spending most of his time assisting in the salvation of others. That, and playing chess. There wasn’t much else to do: magazines were showcases of materialism, television was worse, and books other than the Bible seemed full of profanity, violence, and sex.
As parole grew near, Buck began to feel that his ministry in prison was preparation for something else; that God had a greater purpose for him which would be revealed in time. After he got out, he drifted from one small town to another, mostly along the border between California and Arizona, preaching the Word, letting God clothe and feed him. His reading began to expand: first Bunyan, then St. Augustine, then Dante in translation. And always, always, he waited for the call.