in a black suit, as if one of Noah’s neighbors had climbed out of his
casket to go visiting.
The man stopped in the very row of graves in which Orson and I stood,
and he consulted a curious object in his left hand. It appeared to be
the size of a cellular telephone, with an illuminated display screen.
He tapped on the instrument’s keypad. The eerie music of electronic
notes carried briefly through the cemetery, but these were different
from telephone tones.
just as a scarf of cloud blew off the moon, the stranger brought the
sour-apple-green screen closer to his face for a better look at
whatever data it provided, and those two soft lights revealed enough
for me to make an identification. I couldn’t see the red of his hair
or his russet eyes, but even in profile the whippet-lean face and thin
lips were chillingly familiar: Jesse Pinn, assistant mortician.
He was not aware of Orson and me, though we stood only thirty or forty
feet to his left.
We played at being granite. Orson wasn’t growling anymore, even though
the soughing of the breeze through the oaks would easily have masked
his grumble.
Pinn raised his face from the hand-held device, glanced to his right,
at St. Bernadette’s, and then consulted the screen again. Finally he
headed toward the church.
He remained unaware of us, although we were little more than thirty
feet from him.
I looked at Orson.
He looked at me.
Squirrels forgotten, we followed Pinn.
The mortician hurried to the back of the church, never glancing over
his shoulder. He descended a broad set of stone stairs that led to a
basement door.
I followed closely to keep him in sight. Halting only ten feet from
the head of the stairs and at an angle to them, I peered down at him.
If he turned and looked up, he would see me before I could move out of
sight, but I was not overly concerned. He seemed so involved in the
task at hand that the summons of celestial trumpets and the racket of
the dead rising from their graves might not have drawn his attention.
He studied the mysterious device in his hand, switched it off, and
tucked it into an inside coat pocket. From another pocket he extracted
a second instrument, but the light was too poor to allow me to see what
he held; unlike the first item, this one incorporated no luminous
parts.
Even above the susurration of wind and oak leaves, I heard a series of
clicks and rasping noises. These were followed by a hard snap, another
snap, and then a third.
On the fourth snap, I thought I recognized the distinctive sound. A
Lockaid lock-release gun. The device had a thin pick that You slipped
into the key channel, under the pin tumblers. When You pulled the
trigger, a flat steel spring jumped upward and lodged some of the pins
at the sheer line.
A few years ago, Manuel Ramirez gave me a Lockaid demonstration.
Lock-release guns were sold only to law-enforcement agencies, and the
possession of one by a civilian was illegal.
Although Jesse Pinn could hang a consoling expression on his mug as
convincingly as could Sandy Kirk, he incinerated murder victims in a
crematorium furnace to assist in the cover-up of capital crimes, so he
was not likely to be fazed by laws restricting Lockaid ownership.
Maybe he had limits. Maybe, for instance, he wouldn’t push a nun off a
cliff for no reason whatsoever. Nevertheless, recalling Pinn’s sharp
face and the stiletto flicker of his red-brown eyes as he had
approached the crematorium window earlier this evening, I wouldn’t have
put money on the nun at any odds.
The undertaker needed to fire the lock-release gun five times to clear
all the pins and disengage the dead bolt. After cautiously trying the
door, he returned the Lockaid to his pocket.
When he pushed the door inward, the windowless basement proved to be
lighted. Silhouetted, he stood listening on the threshold for perhaps
half a minute, his bony shoulders canted to the left and his half-hung
head cocked to the right, wind-spiked hair bristling like straw;