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.
17
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; abruptly he jerked himself into a better posture, like a suddenly animated scarecrow pulling loose of its supporting cross, and he went inside, pushing the door only half shut behind him.
“Stay,” I whispered to Orson.
I went down the stairs, and my ever-obedient dog followed me.
When I put one ear to the half-open door, I heard nothing from the basement.
Orson stuck his snout through the eighteen-inch gap, sniffing, and although I rapped him lightly on the top of the head, he didn’t withdraw.
Leaning over the dog, I put my snout through the gap, too, not for a sniff but far enough inside to see what lay beyond. Squinting against the fluorescent glare, I saw a twenty-by-forty-foot room with concrete walls and ceiling, lined with equipment that served the church and the attached wing of Sunday-school rooms: five gas-fired furnaces, a big water heater, electric-service panels, and machinery that I didn’t recognize.
Jesse Pinn was three-quarters of the way across this first room, approaching a closed door in the far wall, his back to me.
Stepping away from the door, I unclipped the glasses case from my shirt pocket. The Velcro closure peeled open with a sound that made me think of a snake breaking wind, though I don’t know why, as I’d never in