Farrow spoke for the first time since he’d come to the table. “Cellular.”
The consultant looked at him. “Almost certainly. It would be timed to the moment of maximum density. The ceremony is that moment: guests seated, attention forward, the bride and groom at the head of the room, and complete silence. No one moving.”
“Casualty estimate?” Eamon asked.
“At a hundred and twenty seated guests, room at capacity, attention focused on the head of the room during a toast—fifty to ninety. Higher than a smaller venue would produce, because the clear-span roof failure mode generates more lethal debris than a partial collapse in a compartmentalized building. Lower than the worst-case scenario only because the glass curtain wall on the ocean side provides a partial escape route for guests near the perimeter who survive the initial collapse.”
Everyone was silent. Cabot had gone pale. He was looking at the aerial photograph, not the diagram.
I was running the numbers in my head. It was a December off-season Vineyard event with eighty guests at a private wedding on a private road off Katama. Reduced security at Eleanor’s request. It would be held in a clear-span event hall with a glass corridor that linked it to the main house, and a single fastener point holding the eastern roof load.
There was only one way in for the guests: through the main house, down the corridor, and into the hall. Two ways out under stress: back the way they came, through ninety feet of glass tube while the hall came down behind them, or through the closed terrace doors if they could be opened in time.
The corridor was the kill zone. I hated every part of it.
Farrow was watching me. He knew I was mapping the hall in my head, and he knew I was three steps into an evacuation plan.
“Detection on the Vineyard?” I asked.
“Harder than on the mainland. The closest backscatter unit accessible to civilian-side resources is in Boston. Trained dogs are easier. There’s a federal asset in Providence that could be on the Vineyard inside four hours if Eamon can get him there without flagging the operation.”
“Can you?” I asked Eamon.
“I can get him there,” Eamon said. “Whether I can get him onto the property before the wedding is the harder question. The family hasn’t authorized a sweep. They don’t know they need one.”
“And we don’t tell them?” I asked.
“We don’t tell them.”
The consultant nodded once and closed the folder. She had nothing more to add.
Cabot spoke. “Eleanor will sit in the front row, smiling.”
The room was silent.
He’d cracked the abstraction. Eighty guests was a number. Eleanor, smiling in the front row, was a woman I could see.
The Harcourts were real people to Cabot. He wrote about them with the careful precision of a man trained to see.
Now he was seeing them as bodies in a hall after the room collapsed on them.
I shifted my chair toward him. It wasn’t close enough to touch, but close enough to feel the change.
“If this is the direction they’re moving,” Eamon said, “Patterson was never the objective.”
Wiley’s voice was flat. “They were warning Patterson to stay away.”
Nobody disagreed.
The consultant stood. She left the three pages on the table. Eamon walked her to the side door.
I picked up the structural diagram and held it under the kitchen’s pendant light.
“Eamon.”
“Yes.”
“I need to be on that property this weekend,” I said.