Page 67 of King’s Ransom

The call cut off.

Someone else was indeed controlling that phone, while also watching us.

Suddenly, Audrey’s phone rang.

The caller ID said: trey.

She answered it on speaker: ‘Trey, how’d it go at the cathedral?’

Special Agent Hooper’s voice said, ‘We found one of those robot carts here, so we’ve got the bomb squad inbound. Any progress there?’

‘Not on King’s location—’

‘Then I’m staying here at the cathedral. Call me if anything changes.’ Then he just hung up.

I turned to Merritt Garrett. ‘Aristo King isn’t at the cathedral. He never was.’

‘How do you know?’ Heidi asked.

‘Because the cathedral didn’t answer all the clues. It fit the Carnegie and Chrysler clues, but it didn’t have any connection to the Ambien pill inside the hollowed-out Sherlock Holmes book. That’s the clue we have to figure out.’

‘Say that again,’ Merritt Garrett said, looking right at me.

‘We need to find an answer that not only addresses the Carnegie and Chrysler clue, but which also answers the riddle of the Ambien pill inside the hollowed Sherlock Holmes book.’

‘I think I know the answer,’ Garrett said. He shook his head. ‘Damn, I shoulda seen it before. It’s a true New York riddle for a true New Yorker.’

‘What is it?’ Xiao said.

Garrett said, ‘What does Ambien make you do? Sleep. And where did we find the Ambien pill? Inside a hollow book. The answer’s Sleepy Hollow.’

‘You mean the town?’ I said. ‘From the story about the headless horseman?’

‘Yes. As the crow flies, it’s only about twenty-five miles north of here, up the Hudson,’ Garrett said. ‘But here’s the thing. Sleepy Hollow is famous not only for the Washington Irving story, but for its cemetery. The cemetery at Sleepy Hollow contains the graves and mausoleums for a whole bunch of famous people, including Washington Irving, William Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie and Walter Chrysler.’

I gave Garrett a look.

He gave me a look.

We were both thinking the same thing.

‘Those calls with Aristo King,’ I said. ‘Dark place. Oxygen mask. The first note said he was with other worms. And he’s gonna run out of air at 2 p.m. Jesus, he’s been—’

‘—buried alive at the Sleepy Hollow cemetery,’ Garrett finished. ‘What time is it?’

It was 1:15 p.m.

‘We need to get to that cemetery now!’ Garrett said.

Minutes later, our little group—Garrett, Xiao, Audrey, Bill and me—burst out onto the roof of 59West and ran to the FBI chopper, now once again tied down on the helipad.

The helicopter’s windshield still bore a bullet hole and blood from when its pilot had been killed earlier, but we had to take it.

We needed to get to Sleepy Hollow fast.

We took off in the chopper, now flown by Bill Brewster.

(Heidi stayed behind to guard Mrs King and her son and the nanny and her boy. Given the strange people lurking around the tower and the killings that had already taken place when we’d been elsewhere, I didn’t entirely trust the two cops still there.)