Coldmoon shook his head. “Sounds toxic.”
“Then perhaps I shouldn’t tell you the waffles are slathered in butter, the fried chicken is doused with hot sauce, and then the entire concoction is drowned in maple syrup.”
Coldmoon shuddered.
Pendergast paused while the waitress brought his tea. “In any case, this interregnum will give us a chance to review the forensic examination of Mr. Ellerby’s day-trading hobby.”
“Already?”
“I spoke to the gentleman who analyzed the computer hard drives. The results are curious, to say the least.”
Coldmoon’s plate of food arrived in record time, and he tucked into the hash browns.
“In the three weeks before his death,” Pendergast said in the same casual voice, “Mr. Ellerby made two hundred million dollars.”
Coldmoon had just forked a mess of hash browns into his mouth and now he nearly choked. He chewed and chewed, finally getting the bolus of food down. “You timed that bombshell, I know you did,” he said, wiping his mouth.
“What could you mean?” said Pendergast.
“Two hundred million?” Coldmoon asked. “How?”
“Simple day trading. Exclusively limited to the thirty companies on the Dow Jones Industrial Index. All of it quite straightforward, apparently, with no sign of insider trading, manipulation, fraud, or any other illegality.”
“How’s that possible?”
“The forensic accountant, in whose competence I have faith, says in all his years of analyzing cooked books and unscrupulous trading, he’s never seen anything like it. The hotel manager’s trades, every single one, appeared to be totally legitimate and aboveboard. He never made a killing, just steady gains, one after the other, across thousands of trades of stocks and options.”
“Crazy.”
“And,” Pendergast added, “he never, even once, lost money on a trade.”
“Impossible.”
“One would think so.”
“Do you believe this, um, impossibility is connected with his murder?”
It was the kind of question Pendergast often didn’t answer, and as Coldmoon expected, no answer was forthcoming. So Coldmoon went ahead. “Did the second victim trade in the market?”
“Never.”
“And the third victim—that college kid on the sidewalk—chances are he’s not an investor, either.”
“I should be most surprised to learn the contrary.”
Coldmoon continued eating his hash browns at a much slower pace than before. Why the hell did Pendergast need to make a ten-word statement in which nine of the words were superfluous? A simple Right would have sufficed.
He went on. “So the fact this hotel manager made two hundred million right before his death, and the others didn’t even play the market—well, if the trading is connected with his murder, what is the connection?”
Pendergast said nothing.
Coldmoon plucked a miniature tray of grape jelly from the little metal rack on the table, peeled off the top, and began spreading it on his buttered toast. “Who was Ellerby’s heir? Do we know who’s going to get the dough?”
“His eighty-year-old widowed mother. He was an only child.”
Coldmoon shook his head. “Kind of rules that out as a motive.”
“I would say so.”
“About this morning’s killing. What happened, exactly? Was that guy tossed off the roof? Was he sideswiped by a car and thrown onto the sidewalk? Or was he just beaten to a pulp? He sure looked like a mess.”
“He was lying too far from the house to have fallen,” Pendergast said. “Or to have been thrown. At least by a human being.”
What the hell was that supposed to mean? “But he was sucked dry of blood. Like the other two.”
Pendergast simply nodded.
“You think it’s a vampire,” Coldmoon said after a moment, shoving a piece of bacon into his mouth. “You, along with everyone else.”
Pendergast took a long, contemplative sip of tea. He placed the cup down. “Do you?”
“What? No. I mean, are you kidding? Of course not. Vampires don’t exist.”
“Do the Lakota have any legends about vampires?”
Coldmoon was surprised by the question. Pendergast rarely seemed to acknowledge, let alone take an interest in, his Native American heritage.
“The Lakota do have a sort of legend about a vampire. He was white, of course.”
“Naturally.”
“A settler moved into the Black Hills to look for gold, and he built a cabin in a sacred valley, defiling it. A year later, some Lakotas found him dead in his cabin, stone cold, with a silver knife in his heart. When they pulled out the knife, the corpse began to warm up, and they grew frightened and ran away. He later began attacking people, killing them and drinking their blood. The only way he could be stopped was to put that same knife back into his heart. And then he would get cold and still again. But he wouldn’t die—not really. They say his body is up there, in that cabin, waiting for someone to pull the knife out—”