“JAWStakes Manhattan ...

A wicked kicker in the final pages.”

—San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle

“First-rate thrills and chills.”

—Publishers Weekly

Want to pick up a thriller that arrives

with the kinetic energy

of a meteor smacking the earth? ReadRELIC…

By the time the writers have weaved

the wildly divergent elements together for an

inevitable and explosive climax,

anyone with a pulse will be nervously checking

the front door locks.”

—Tribune and Times, Tampa, FL

“Wonderfully spooky ...

A real page-turner.”

—Library Journal

“A straight thriller … That’s like saying that

GONE WITH THE WIND

was just another Civil War film.”

—Orlando Sentinel

“A real bone-chilling shocker.”

—Express Books

“Superbly exciting.”

—The Bergen Record

“Relicis a straight thriller. That’s like saying, however,

thatDie Hard was just another action adventure flick or

thatGone With the Wind was just another Civil War film.

Each stands as a superlative example of its type.”

—Orlando Sentinel

“A high-concept, high-energy thriller ... builds to a

su­perbly exciting climax, and then offers a final twist to

boot.”

—Publishers Weekley

“Preston and Child’s refreshing penchant for realistic detail

elevates their tale far above Crichton’s [Jurassic Park] ...

Containing just the right blend of gripping suspense, col­orful

characters, and credible science,Relic has all the

ingredients for well-deserved best-seller status.”

—Booklist

“Superbly exciting.”

—The Record(Bergen County, NJ)

“This is a real page-turner, partJaws , partPoseidon Adventure .”

—Library Journal

“It’s the year’s hottest.”

—Literary Guild Bulletin

“Relicsatisfies the primal desire to be scared out of one’s

wits ... The ending is a real bone-chilling shocker.”

—Express Books

“Jawstakes Manhattan”

—San Francisco Examiner and Chronicle

“Relicis as good as this type of novel gets.”

—Hartford Courant

By Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

Mount Dragon*

Relic

By Douglas Preston

Talking to the Ground

Jennie

Cities of Gold

Dinosaurs in the Attic

Edited by Lincoln Child

Dark Company

Dark Banquet

Tales of the Dark 1-3

*forthcoming

RELIC

DOUGLAS PRESTON

LINCOLN CHILD

FORGE

A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

NEW YORK

To Charles Crumly.

—D. P.

To Luchie, who came along for the ride.

And in memory of Nora and Gaga.

—L. C.

NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and de­stroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the authors’ imagination or are used ficti­tiously.

RELIC

Copyright © 1995 by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

Cover art by Tim Thiesen

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

Tor Books on the World-Wide Web:

http://www.tor.com

Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

ISBN: 0-812-54326-2

First edition: February 1995

First international mass market edition: November 1995

First mass market edition: January 1996

Printed in the United States of America

0 9 8 7 6 5 4

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

The authors wish to express their thanks to the fol­lowing persons, who generously lent their time and/or expertise in helping to makeRelic the book it is: Ken Goddard, Tom Doherty, Bob Gleason, Harvey Klinger, Anna Magee, Camille Cline, Denis Kelly, Georgette Piligian, Michael O’Con­nor, Carina Deleon, Fred Ziegler, Bob Wincott, Lou Perretti, and Harry Trumbore.

INTRODUCTION

= 1 =

The Amazon Basin, September 1987

At noon, the clouds clinging to the top of Cerro Gordo broke free and scattered. Far above, in the upper reaches of the forest canopy, Whittlesey could see golden tints of sunlight. Animals—probably spider monkeys­—thrashed and hooted above his head and a macaw swooped low, squawking obscenely.

Whittlesey stopped next to a fallen jacaranda tree and watched Carlos, his sweating camp assistant, catch up. “We will stop here,” he said in Spanish. “Baja la caja. Put down the box.”

Whittlesey sat down on the fallen tree and pulled off his right boot and sock. Lighting a cigarette, he applied its tip to the forest of ticks on his shin and ankle.

Carlos unshouldered an old army packboard, on which a wooden crate was awkwardly lashed.

“Open it, please,” said Whittlesey.

Carlos removed the ropes, unsnapped a series of small brass clasps, and pulled off the top.

The contents were packed tightly with the fibers of an [4] indigenous plant. Whittlesey pulled aside the fibers, ex­posing some artifacts, a small wooden plant press, and a stained leather journal. He hesitated a moment, then drew a small but exquisitely carved figurine of a beast from the shirt pocket of his field jacket. He hefted the artifact in his hand, admiring again its workmanship, its unnatural heaviness. Then he placed it reluctantly in the crate, covered everything with the fibers, and reattached the lid.

From his rucksack, Whittlesey took out a folded sheet of blank paper, which he opened on his knee. He brought a battered gold pen out of his shirt pocket and began writing:

Upper Xingú

Sept. 17, 1987

Montague,

I’ve decided to send Carlos back with the last crate and go on alone in search of Crocker. Carlos is trustworthy, and I can’t risk losing the crate should anything happen to me. Take note of the shaman’s rattle and other ritual objects. They seem unique. But the figurine I’ve enclosed, which we found in a deserted hut at this site, is the proof I’ve been looking for. Note the exaggerated claws, the rep­tilian attributes, the hints atbipedalia . The Koth­oga exist, and the Mbwun legend is not mere fabrication.

All my field notes are in this notebook. It also contains a complete account of the breakup of the expedition, which you will of course know about by the time this reaches you.

Whittlesey shook his head, remembering the scene that had played itself out the day before. That idiotic bastard, Maxwell. All he’d cared about was getting those specimens he’d stumbled on back to the Museum [5] un­damaged. Whittlesey laughed silently to himself. An­cient eggs. As if they were anything more than worthless seed pods. Maxwell should have been a paleobiologist instead of a physical anthropologist. How ironic they’d packed up and left a mere thousand yards from hisown discovery.

In any case, Maxwell was gone now, and the others with him. Only Carlos and Crocker, and two guides, had stayed. Now there was just Carlos. Whittlesey returned to the note.

Use my notebook and the artifacts, as you see fit, to help restore my good standing with the Museum. But above all else, take care of this figurine. I am convinced that its worth to anthropology is incal­culable. We discovered it yesterday by accident. It seems to be the centerpiece of the Mbwun cult. However, there is no other trace of habitation nearby. This strikes me as odd.

Whittlesey paused. He hadn’t described the discovery of the figurine in his field notes. Even now, his mind resisted the memory.

Crocker had wandered off the trail for a better look at a jacamar; otherwise they’d never have found the hidden path, slanting down steeply between moss-slick walls. Then, that crude hut, half-buried among ancient trees, in the wet vale where daylight barely penetrated … The two Botocudo guides, normally chattering nonstop to each other in Tupian, shut up immediately. When questioned by Carlos, one of them just muttered some­thing about a guardian of the hut, and a curse on any­body who violated its secrets. Then, for the first time, Whittlesey had heard them speak the wordKothoga . Kothoga. The shadow people.

Whittlesey was skeptical. He’d heard talk of curses before—usually, right before a request for higher wages. [6] But when he emerged from the hut, the guides were gone.

... Then that old woman, blundering out of the for­est. She was probably Yanomamo, obviously not Koth­oga. But she knew of them.She had seen them . The curses she’d hinted at ... And the way she’d just melted back into the forest, more like a jaguar yearling than a septuagenarian.

Then, they turned their attention to the hut.

The hut ... Gingerly, Whittlesey allowed himself to remember. It was flanked by two stone tablets with iden­tical carvings of a beast sitting on its haunches. Its claw held something weathered and indistinguishable. Behind the hut lay an overgrown garden, a bizarre oasis of bright color amid the green fastness.

The floor of the hut was sunken several feet, and Crocker almost broke his neck on the way in. Whittlesey followed him more carefully, while Carlos simply knelt in the entranceway. The air inside was dark and cool and smelt of decaying earth. Switching on his flashlight, Whittlesey saw the figurine sitting on a tall earthen mound in the middle of the hut. Around its base lay a number of strangely carved discs. Then the flashlight reached the walls.

The hut had been lined with human skulls. Examining a few of the closest, Whittlesey noticed deep scratch marks he could not immediately understand. Ragged holes yawned through the tops. In many cases, the oc­cipital bone at the base of the skull was also smashed and broken off, the heavy squamosal bones completely gone.

His hand shook, and the flashlight failed. Before he switched it on again, he saw dim light filtering through thousands of eye sockets, dust motes swimming slug­gishly in the heavy air.

Afterward, Crocker decided he needed a short walk—­to be alone for a while, he’d told Whittlesey. But he hadn’t come back.

[7] The vegetation here is very unusual. The cycads and ferns look almost primordial. Too bad there isn’t time for more careful study. We’ve used a particularly resilient variety as packing material for the crates; feel free to let Jörgensen take a look, if he’s interested.

I fully expect to be with you at the Explorer’s Club a month from now, celebrating our success with a brace of dry martinis and a good Macanudo. Until then, I know I can entrust this material and my reputation to you.

Your colleague,

Whittlesey

He inserted the letter beneath the lid of the crate.

“Carlos,” he said, “I want you to take this crate back to Pôrto de Mós, and wait for me there. If I’m not back in two weeks, talk to Colonel Soto. Tell him to ship it back with the rest of the crates by air to the Museum, as agreed. He will draw your wages.”

Carlos looked at him. “I do not understand,” he said. “You will stay here alone?”

Whittlesey smiled, lit a second cigarette, and resumed killing ticks. “Someone has to bring the crate out. You should be able to catch up with Maxwell before the river. I want a couple of days to search for Crocker.”

Carlos slapped his knee. “Es loco!I can’t leave you alone.Si te dejo atrás, te morirías.You will die here in the forest,Señor, and your bones will be left to the howler monkeys. We must go back together, that is best.”

Whittlesey shook his head impatiently. “Give me the Mercurochrome and the quinine, and the dried beef from your pack,” he said, pulling the filthy sock back on and lacing his boot.

Carlos started unpacking, still protesting. Whittlesey [8] ignored him, absently scratching insect bites on the back of his neck and staring up toward Cerro Gordo. “They will wonder,Señor . They will think I left you. It will be very bad for me,” Carlos said rapidly, placing the items in Whittlesey’s pack. “The cabouri flies will eat you alive,” he continued, moving over to the crate and lashing it shut. “You will catch malaria again, and die this time. I will stay with you.”

Whittlesey stared at the shock of snow-white hair plastered to Carlos’s sweaty forehead. That hair had been pure black yesterday, before Carlos looked into the hut. Carlos met his gaze for a moment, then lowered his eyes.

Whittlesey stood up. “Adiós,” he said, and disap­peared into the bush.

By late afternoon, Whittlesey noticed that the thick, low clouds had returned to shroud Cerro Gordo. For the last several miles, he had been following an ancient trail of unknown origin, barely a narrow alley in the brush. The trail cleverly worked its way through the blackwater swamps surrounding the base of thetepui , the soggy, jungle-clotted plateau that lay ahead. The trail had the logic of a human trail, Whittlesey thought. It moved with obvious purpose; animal tracks often wandered. And it was heading for a steep ravine in the shoulder of the approachingtepui . Crocker must have come this way.

He stopped to consider, unconsciously fingering the talisman—a gold arrow overlaid by another of silver—­that had hung around his neck since childhood. Besides the hut, they’d seen no sign of human habitation for the last several days except a long-deserted root-gatherer vil­lage. Only the Kothoga could have created this path.

As he approached the plateau, he could see a few braids of water cascading down its steep flanks. He would camp at the bottom tonight, and make the thou­sand-meter ascent in the morning. It would be steep, [9] muddy, and possibly dangerous. If he met the Koth­oga—well, he would be trapped.

But he had no reason to think the Kothoga tribe was savage. After all, it was this other creature, Mbwun, to which local myth cycles ascribed all the killing and sav­agery. Strange—an unknown creature, supposedly con­trolled by a tribe nobody had seen.Could Mbwun actually exist? he wondered. Conceivably, a small rem­nant could be alive in this vast rain forest; the area was virtually unexplored by biologists. Not for the first time, he wished that Crocker hadn’t taken his own Mannlicher .30 06 when he’d left camp.

But first, Whittlesey realized, he had to locate Crock­er. Then he could search for the Kothoga, prove they hadn’t died out centuries before. He’d be famous—the discoverer of an ancient people, living in a kind of Stone Age purity deep in the Amazon, on a plateau that floated above the jungle like Arthur Conan Doyle’sThe Lost World .

There was no reason to fear the Kothoga.Exceptthat hut ...

Suddenly, a sharp sickly smell assailed his nostrils, and he stopped. There was no mistaking it—a dead an­imal, and a big one. He took a dozen steps as the smell intensified. His heart quickened with anticipation: per­haps the Kothoga had butchered an animal nearby. There might be artifacts left at the site—tools, weapons, per­haps even something ceremonial in nature.

He crept forward. The sweet nauseating reek grew stronger. He could see sunlight in a patch of canopy high above his head—the sure sign of a nearby clearing. He stopped and tightened his pack, not wanting to be ham­pered in case he had to move fast.

The narrow trail, walled in by brush, leveled off and took a sudden turn into the head of the small clearing. There, on the opposite side, was the carcass of the ani­mal. The base of the tree it lay against had been ritually [10] carved with a spiral, and a bundle of bright green parrot feathers lay on top of the gaping, greasy brown rib cage. But as he walked closer, he saw that the carcass was wearing a khaki shirt.

A cloud of fat flies roared and swarmed about the open rib cage. Whittlesey noticed that a severed left arm was lashed to the tree trunk with a fibrous rope, the palm sliced open. A number of spent cartridge casings lay around the body. Then he saw the head. It lay face up under the corpse’s armpit, the back of the skull torn away, the cloudy eyes staring upward, the cheeks bulg­ing.

Whittlesey had found Crocker.

Instinctively, Whittlesey began stumbling backward. He saw how rows of claws had flayed the body with obscene, inhuman strength. The corpse looked stiff. Per­haps—if God was merciful—the Kothoga had already departed.

Assuming it was the Kothoga.

Then he noticed that the rain forest, normally over­flowing with the sounds of life, was silent. With a start, he turned to face the jungle. Something was moving in the towering brush at the edge of the clearing, and two slitted eyes the color of liquid fire took shape between the leaves. With a sob and a curse, he drew his sleeve across his face and looked again. The eyes had vanished.

There was no time to lose—he had to get back down the trail, away from this place. His path back into the forest lay directly ahead. He’d have to make a run for it.

Just then he saw something on the ground he hadn’t noticed before, and he heard movement, ponderous yet horrifyingly stealthy, through the brush in front of him.

= 2 =

Belém, Brazil, July 1988

This time, Ven was pretty sure the dock foreman was onto him.

He stood well back in the shadows of the warehouse alley, watching. Light rain obscured the bulky outlines of the tethered freighters and narrowed the dock lights into pinpoints. Steam rose as the rain hit the hot deck­boards, bringing with it the faint odor of creosote. From behind him came the nocturnal sounds of the port: the staccato bark of a dog; faint laughter leavened with Por­tuguese phrases; calypso music from the waterfront bars on the avenida.

It had been such a sweet deal. He’d come down when Miami got too hot, taking the long route. Here, it was mostly light trade, small freighters bound up and down the coast. The dock crew always needed stevedores, and he’d loaded boats before. He’d said his name was Ven Stevens, and no one questioned it. They wouldn’t have believed a first name of Stevenson, anyway.

The setup had all the right ingredients. He’d had [12] plenty of practice in Miami, plenty of time to sharpen his instincts. Those instincts paid off down here. Delib­erately, he spoke Portuguese badly, haltingly, so he could read eyes and gauge responses. Ricon, junior as­sistant to the harbormaster, was the last link Ven had needed.

Ven was alerted when a shipment was coming in from upriver. Usually he’d just be given two names: incoming and outgoing. He always knew what to look for, the boxes were always the same. He’d see that they were safely off-loaded and stowed in the warehouse. Then, he just made sure they were the last cargo loaded onto the designated freighter headed for the States.

Ven was naturally cautious. He’d kept a close eye on the dock foreman. Once or twice he’d had a feeling, like a warning bell in his brain, that the foreman suspected something. But each time Ven had eased up a little, and in a few days the warning bell had gone away.

Now he checked his watch. Eleven o’clock. He heard a door opening, then closing, from around the corner. Ven drew himself up against the wall. Heavy footfalls sounded against wooden planking, then the familiar form passed under a streetlight. When the footsteps receded, Ven peered around the corner. The office was dark, de­serted, as he knew it would be. With a last glance, he edged around the corner of the building, onto the docks.

An empty backpack slapped damply against his shoul­ders with each step. As he walked, Ven reached into a pocket, withdrew a key, and clenched it tightly. That key was his lifeline. Before he’d spent two days on the docks, he’d had an impression made of it.

Ven passed a small freighter berthed along the wharf, its heavy hawsers dripping black water onto rusted bitts. The ship seemed deserted, not even a harbor watch on deck. He slowed. The warehouse door lay directly ahead, near the end of the main pier. Ven glanced quickly over his shoulder. Then, with a quick turn of his hand, he unlocked the metal door and slipped inside.

[13] Pulling the door closed, he let his eyes grow accus­tomed to the darkness. Halfway home. He just had to finish up in here and get the hell out.

As soon as possible. Because Ricon was growing greedy, cruzeiros running through his hands like water. Last time, he’d made a crack about the size of his cut. Just that morning, Ricon and the foreman had been talk­ing fast and low, the foreman looking over at Ven. Now, Ven’s instincts told him to get away.

Inside, he saw the darkened warehouse resolve itself into a vague landscape of cargo containers and packing crates. He couldn’t chance a flashlight, but it didn’t mat­ter: he knew the layout well enough to walk it in his dreams. He moved forward carefully, threading a path through the vast mountains of cargo.

At last, he saw the landmark he’d been waiting for: a battered-looking stack of crates, six large and one small, stacked in a forlorn corner. Two of the larger crates were stenciledMNH, NEW YORK.

Months before, Ven had asked about these crates. The quartermaster’s boy had told him the story. Seemed the crates had come downriver from Pôrto de Mós the pre­vious fall. They’d been scheduled for air shipment to a New York museum, but something had happened to the people who’d made the arrangements—the apprentice couldn’t say exactly what. But payment hadn’t come through in time, and now the crates were snarled in a mass of red tape, seemingly forgotten.

Except by Ven. There was just enough room behind the forgotten crates for him to stash his shipments until the outgoing freighters were loading.

The warm night breeze came in from a broken win­dow high in the wall, stirring the sweat on Ven’s fore­head. He smiled in the darkness. Just the other week, he’d learned that soon the crates would finally be shipped back to the States. But he’d be long gone by then.

Now, he checked his own cache. Just a single box this [14] time, whose contents would fit nicely into the corners of his backpack. He knew where the markets were and what to do. And he’d be doing it—somewhere far away­—very soon.

As he was about to squeeze behind the large crates, Ven stopped abruptly. There was a strange odor here: something earthy, goatish, decaying. A lot of odd car­goes had come through the port, but none smelling quite like this.

His instincts were going off five-alarm, yet he couldn’t detect anything wrong or out of place. He slid forward, between the Museum cargo and the wall.

He stopped again. Something wasn’t right back here. Something wasn’t right at all.

He heard, rather than saw, something moving in the cramped space. The pungent odor welled forward, blan­keting him with its rotten stench. Suddenly, he was slammed against the wall with terrific force. Pain ex­ploded in his chest and gut. He opened his mouth to scream, but something was boiling in his throat, and then a stab like lightning tore through his skull, leaving only darkness behind.

PART ONE

MUSEUM OF

UNNATURAL

MYSTERY

= 3 =

New York, Present Day

The red-haired kid was clambering onto the platform, calling his younger brother a chicken, reaching toward the elephant’s foot. Juan eyed him silently, easing him­self forward just as the kid’s hand touched the exhibit.

“Yo!” Juan yelled, breaking into a trot. “Hey, no touching the elephants.” The boy looked scared and snatched back his hand; he was still at an age where a uniform impressed him. Older ones—fifteen, sixteen—­would give Juan the finger sometimes. They knew he was only a museum guard. Lousy fucking job. One of these days he was going to finish that equivalency shit and take the police exam.

He watched suspiciously as red-hair and little brother walked around the cases in the darkened hall, looking at the stuffed lions. At the case full of chimps, the boy started hooting and scratching under his arms, showing off for junior’s benefit. Where the hell were the parents?

Now Billy, the redhead, tugged his little brother into a chamber filled with African artifacts. A row of masks [18] with flat wooden teeth leered at them from a showcase. “Wow!” exclaimed Billy’s kid brother.

“That’sdumb ,” said Billy. “We’re going to see the dinosaurs.”

“Where’s Mommy?” said the kid, screwing his head around.

“Aw, she got lost,” said Billy. “Come on.”

They began to move through a vast, echoing hall filled with totem poles. At the far end, a woman holding a red flag was leading the final tour group of the day, her voice shrill. To Billy’s younger brother, the hall smelled faintly spooky, like smoke and old tree roots. When the group disappeared around a corner, the hall fell silent.

The last time they had been there, Billy remembered, they had seen the biggest brontosaurus in the world, and a tyrannosaurus and a trachydent. At least, that’s what he thought it was called, a trachydent. The teeth on the tyrannosaurus must have been ten feet long. That was just about the greatest thing Billy had ever seen. But he didn’t remember seeing these totem poles. Maybe the dinosaurs were through the next door. But that led only to the boring Hall of Pacific Peoples, full of jades and ivories and silks and bronze statues.

“Now look what you did,” said Billy.

“What?”

“You made me get lost, that’s what,” said Billy.

“Mommy’s gonna bereal mad,” the kid said.

Billy snorted. They weren’t supposed to meet his par­ents until closing time, on the big front steps. He’d find his way out, no problem.

They wound through several more dusty rooms, down a narrow flight of stairs, and into a long dim hall. Thousands of little stuffed birds lined the walls from floor to ceiling, white cotton poking out of sightless eyes. The hall was empty and smelled of mothballs.

“I know where we are,” said Billy, hopefully, peering into the dimness.

The kid started to snuffle.

[19] “Shut up,” said Billy. The snuffling stopped.

The hall took a sharp dogleg, ending in a darkened cul-de-sac full of dust and empty display cases. There were no visible exits except back through the hall of dead birds. The footfalls of the children echoed hol­lowly, far from the other Sunday tourists. Against the far side of the chamber stood a rolling barricade of can­vas and wood, pretending unsuccessfully to be a wall. Letting go of his brother’s hand, Billy walked up and peered behind the barricade.

“I been here before,” he said confidently. “They’ve closed this place off, but it was open last time. I bet we’re right below the dinosaurs. Lemme just see if there’s a way up.”

“You’re not supposed to go back there,” the kid brother warned.

“Listen, stupid, I’m going. And you’d better wait.” Billy ducked behind the barricade, and a few moments later the kid heard the squeal of metal as a door was pulled open.

“Hey!” came Billy’s voice. “There’s a spiral stair­case here. It only goes down, but it’s cool. I’m gonna try it out.”

“Don’t! Billy!” the kid cried, but the only answer was retreating footsteps.

The kid started to bawl, his thin voice rising in the gloom of the hall. After a few minutes he fell to hic­cupping, sniffed loudly, and sat down on the floor. He started pulling on a little flap of rubber that was coming off the toe of his sneaker, working it loose.

Suddenly, he looked up. The hall was silent and air­less. The lights in the cases threw black shadows on the floor. A forced-air duct thumped and began to rumble somewhere. Billy was gone for real now. The kid started to cry again, louder this time.

Maybe it would be okay if he followed Billy. Maybe it wasn’t such a scary thing after all. Maybe Billy had gone ahead and found his parents, and they were waiting [20] for him, there on the other side. But he had to hurry. The Museum was probably closed by now.

He stood up and slipped behind the partition. The hall continued on, the cases filled with the dust and mold of long-neglected exhibits. An ancient metal door on one side of the hall was slightly ajar.

The kid walked up to it and peered in. Behind the door was the top landing of a narrow spiral staircase that circled downward out of sight. It was even dustier here, and there was a strange smell in the air that made his nose wrinkle. He didn’t want to stand on those steps, at all. But Billy was down there.

“Billy!” he called. “Billy, come up!Please!”

In the cavernous gloom, his echoes were the only an­swer. The child sniffled, then gripped the railing and began walking slowly down into darkness.

=4 =

Monday

As Margo Green rounded the corner of West Seventy­-second Street, the early morning sun struck her square in the face. She looked down a minute, blinking; then, tossing her brown hair back, she crossed the street. The New York Museum of Natural History loomed before her like an ancient fortress, its vast Beaux Arts facade climbing ponderously above a row of copper beeches.

Margo turned down the cobbled driveway that led to the staff entrance. She walked past a loading dock and headed for the granite tunnel leading to the interior courtyards of the Museum. Then she slowed, wary. Flickering stripes of red light were painting the mouth of the tunnel in front of her. At the far end, she could see ambulances, police cars, and an Emergency Services vehicle, all parked at random.

Margo entered the tunnel and walked toward a glass pillbox. Normally, old Curly the guard would be dozing in his chair at this time of the morning, propped up against the pillbox corner, a blackened calabash pipe [22] resting on his ample front. But today he was awake and standing. He slid the door open. “Morning, Doctor,” he said. He called everyone ‘doctor,’ from graduate stu­dents to the Museum Director, whether they owned that title or not.

“What’s up?” Margo asked.

“Don’t know,” Curly said. “They just got here two minutes ago. But I guess I’d better see yourIDthis time.”

Margo rummaged in her carryall, wondering if she even had herID. It had been months since someone had asked to see it. “I’m not sure I’ve got it with me,” she said, annoyed that she hadn’t cleaned her bag of last winter’s detritus. Her carryall had recently won ‘messiest bag in the Museum’ status from her friends in the Anthro Department.

The pillbox telephone rang, and Curly reached for it. Margo found herIDand held it up to the window, but Curly ignored her, his eyes wide as he listened to the receiver.

He put it down without saying a word, his whole body rigidly at attention.

“Well?” Margo asked. “What’s happened?”

Curly removed his pipe. “You don’t want to know,” he said.

The phone rang again and Curly grabbed it.

Margo had never seen the guard move so quickly. She shrugged, dropped theIDback in her bag, and walked on. The next chapter of her dissertation was coming due, and she couldn’t afford to lose a single day. The week before had been a write-off—the service for her father, the formalities, the phone calls. Now, she couldn’t lose any more time.

Crossing the courtyard, she entered the Museum through the staff door, turned right, and hurried down a long basement corridor toward the Anthropology De­partment. The various staff offices were dark, as they always were until nine-thirty or ten o’clock.

[23] The corridor took an abrupt right angle, and she stopped. A band of yellow plastic tape was stretched across the corridor. Margo could make out the printing:NYPDCRIME SCENE—DO NOT CROSS. Jimmy, a guard usually assigned to the Peruvian Gold Hall, was standing in front of the tape with Gregory Kawakita, a young Assistant Curator in the Evolutionary Biology Depart­ment.

“What’s going on here?” Margo asked.

“Typical Museum efficiency,” Kawakita said with a wry smile. “We’ve been locked out.”

“Nobody’s told me nothing, except to keep everyone out,” the guard said nervously.

“Look,” Kawakìta said, “I’m giving a presentation to theNSFnext week, and this day’s going to be a long one. Now, if you’ll let me—”

Jimmy looked uncomfortable. “I’m just doing my job, okay?”

“Come on,” Margo said to Kawakita. “Let’s get some coffee up in the lounge. Maybe someone there will know what’s going on.”

“First I want to hunt down a men’s room, if I can find one that isn’t sealed off,” Kawakita responded irritably. “I’ll meet you there.”

The door to the staff lounge, which was never closed, was closed today. Margo put her hand on the knob, won­dering if she should wait for Kawakita. Then she opened the door. It would be a cold day in hell when she neededhim as backup.

Inside, two policemen were talking, their backs turned to her. One sniggered. “What was that, number six?” he said.

“Lost count,” the other replied. “But he can’t have any more breakfast to bring up.” As the officers moved apart, Margo got a look at the lounge behind them.

The large room was deserted. In the kitchen area at the far end, someone was leaning over the sink. He spat, [24] wiped his mouth, and turned around. Margo recognized Charlie Prine, the new conservation expert in the Anthro Department, hired on a temporary grant six months be­fore to restore objects for the new exhibition. His face was ashen and expressionless.

Moving to Prine’s side, the officers propelled him gently forward.

Margo stood aside to let the group pass. Prine walked stiffly, like a robot. Instinctively, Margo’s eyes traveled downward.

Prine’s shoes were soaked in blood.

Watching her vacantly, Prine registered the change of expression. His eyes followed hers; then he stopped so suddenly that the cop behind plowed into his back.

Prine’s eyes grew large and white. The policemen grabbed his arms and he resisted, neighing in panic. Quickly, they moved him out of the room.

Margo leaned against the wall, willing her heart to slow down as Kawakita came in, followed by several others. “Half this Museum must be sealed off,” he said, shaking his head and pouring himself a cup of coffee. “Nobody can get into their offices.”

As if on cue, the Museum’s ancientPAsystem wheezed into operation. “Attention please. All nonsupport personnel currently on the premises please report to the staff lounge.”

As they sat down, more staffers entered in twos and threes. Lab technicians, for the most part, and assistant curators without tenure; too early for the really important people. Margo watched them detachedly. Kawakita was talking but she couldn’t hear him.

Within ten minutes, the room was packed. Everyone was talking at once: expressing outrage that their offices were off-limits, complaining about how no one was tell­ing them anything, discussing each new rumor in shocked tones. Clearly, in a museum where nothing ex­citing ever seemed to happen, they were having the time of their lives.

[25] Kawakita gulped his coffee, made a face. “Will you look at that sediment?” He turned toward her. “Been struck dumb, Margo? You haven’t said a word since we sat down.”

Haltingly, she told him about Prine. Kawakita’s hand­some features narrowed. “My God,” he finally said. “What do you suppose happened?”

As his baritone voice boomed, Margo realized that the conversation in the lounge had died away. A heavyset, balding man in a brown suit was standing in the door­way, a police radio shoved into one pocket of his ill­-fitting jacket, an unlit cigar protruding from his mouth. Now he strode through, followed by two uniformed po­licemen.

He centered himself at the front of the room, hiked up his pants, removed his cigar, picked a piece of to­bacco off his tongue, and cleared his throat. “May I have your attention, please,” he said. “A situation has arisen that’s going to require you to bear with us for a while.”

Suddenly, a voice rang out accusingly from the back of the room. “Ex-cuseme, Mister?...”

Margo craned her neck over the crowd. “Freed,” Ka­wakita whispered. Margo had heard of Frank Freed, a testy Ichthyology curator.

The man in brown turned to look at Freed. “Lieuten­ant D’Agosta,” he rapped out. “New York City Police Department.”

It was a reply that would have shut most people up. Freed, an emaciated man with long gray hair, was un­daunted. “Perhaps,” he said sarcastically, “we may be informed of what exactly is going on around here? I think we have a right …”

“I’dlike to brief you on what happened,” D’Agosta resumed. “But at this point, all we can say is that a body has been found on the premises, under circumstances we are currently investigating. If—”

At the explosion of talk, D’Agosta wearily held up his hand.

[26] “I can only tell you that a homicide squad is on the scene and that an investigation is in progress,” he con­tinued. “Effective immediately, the Museum is closed. For the time being, no one may enter, and no one may leave. We expect this to be a very temporary condition.”

He paused. “If a homicide has occurred, there is a possibility, apossibility , that the killer is still inside the Museum. We would merely ask you to remain here an hour or two while a sweep is conducted. A police officer will be around to take your names and titles.”

In the stunned silence that followed, he left the room, closing the door behind him. One of the remaining po­licemen dragged a chair over to the door and sat down heavily in it. Slowly, the conversations began to resume. “We’re being locked in here?” Freed cried out. “This is outrageous.”

“Jesus,” Margo breathed. “You don’t suppose Prine is a murderer?”

“Scary thought, isn’t it?” Kawakita said. He stood up and went to the coffee machine, beating the last drops out of the urn with a savage, blow. “But not as scary as the thought of being unprepared for my presentation.”

Margo knew Kawakita, young fast-track scientist that he was, would never be unprepared for anything.

“Image is everything today,” Kawakita went on. “Pure science alone doesn’t get the grants anymore.”

Margo nodded again. She heard him, and she heard the swirl of voices around them, but none of it seemed important. Except for the blood on Prine’s shoes.

= 5 =

“Listen up,” the policeman said an hour later. “You’re free to go now. Just be sure to stay out of the areas behind the yellow tape.”

Margo raised her head from her arms with a start as a hand landed on her shoulder. Tall, lanky Bill Smith­back clutched two spiral notebooks in the other hand, and his brown hair looked, as usual, as if he’d just gotten out of bed. A chewed pencil was tucked behind one ear, his collar was unbuttoned and his grimy tie knot pulled down. The perfect caricature of a hard-driving journalist, and Margo suspected he cultivated the look. Smithback had been commissioned to write a book about the Mu­seum, focusing on theSuperstitionexhibition that would open next week.

“Unnatural doings at the Natural History Museum,” Smithback muttered darkly in her ear as he folded him­self into a chair beside her. He slapped his notebooks on the table, and a flood of handwritten papers, unla­beled computer diskettes, and photocopied articles [28] covered with yellow highlighting spilled across the Formica surface.

“Hello, Kawakita!” Smithback said jovially, slapping him on the shoulder. “Seen any tigers lately?”

“Only the paper variety,” Kawakita replied dryly.

Smithback turned to Margo. “I suppose you must know all the gory details by now. Pretty nasty, huh?”

“They didn’t tell us anything,” Margo said. “All we’ve heard is some talk about a killing. I guess Prine must have done it.”

Smithback laughed. “Charlie Prine? That guy couldn’t kill a six-pack, let alone a biped. No, Prine just found the body. Or should I say,them .”

“Them? What are you talking about?”

Smithback sighed. “You reallydon’t know anything, do you? I was hoping you’d heard something, sitting in here for hours.” He sprang up and went over to the coffee urn. He tipped and rattled and cursed it and came back empty handed. “They found the Director’s wife, stuffed in a glass case in the Primate Hall,” he said after settling himself in the chair again. “Been there twenty years before anyone noticed.”

Margo groaned. “Let’s hear the real story, Smith­back,” she said.

“All right, all right,” he sighed. “Around seven-thirty this morning, the bodies of two young boys were found dead in the Old Building basement.”

Margo pressed a hand to her mouth.

“How did you learn all this?” Kawakita demanded.

“While you two were cooling your heels in here, the rest of the world was stuck outside on Seventy-second Street,” Smithback went on. “They’d shut the gates on us. The press was out there, too. Quite a few, in fact. The upshot is, Wright’s going to give a press conference in the Great Rotunda at ten to quell the rumors. All that zoo talk. We’ve got ten minutes.”

“Zoo talk?” Margo pressed.

“It’s a zoo aroundhere . Oh, God. What a mess.” [29] Smithback was savoring not telling what he knew. “Seems the murders were pretty savage. And you know the press: They’ve always assumed you’ve got all sorts of animals locked up in here.”

“I think you’re actually enjoying this,” Kawakita smiled.

“A story like this would add a whole new dimension to my book,” Smithback went on. “The shocking true account of the grisly Museum killings, by William Smithback, Junior. Wild, voracious beasts roaming de­serted corridors. It could be a best-seller.”

“This isn’t funny,” Margo snapped. She was thinking that Prine’s laboratory wasn’t far from her own office in the Old Building basement.

“I know, I know,” Smithback said good-humoredly. “Itis terrible. The poor kids. But I’m still not sure I believe it. It’s probably some gimmick of Cuthbert’s to boost publicity for the exhibition.” He sighed, then started guiltily. “Hey, Margo—I was really sorry to hear about your father. I meant to tell you earlier.”

“Thanks.” Margo’s smile held little warmth.

“Listen, you two,” Kawakita said, rising, “I really have to—”

“I heard you were thinking of leaving,” Smithback continued to Margo. “Dropping your dissertation to work at your father’s company, or something.” He looked at her curiously. “Is that true? I thought your research was finally getting somewhere.”

“Well,” Margo said, “yes and no. Dissertation’s dragging a bit these days. I’ve got my weekly eleven o’clock with Frock today. He’ll probably forget, as usual, and schedule something else, especially with this tragedy. But I hope I do get in to see him. I found an interesting monograph on the Kiribitu classification of medicinal plants.”

She realized that Smithback’s eyes had already started to wander, and reminded herself once again that most people had no interest in plant genetics and [30] ethnopharmacology. “Well, I’ve got to get ready.” Margo stood up.

“Hold on a minute!” Smithback said, scrambling to gather up his papers. “Don’t you want to see the press conference?”

As they left the staff lounge, Freed was still complain­ing to anyone who would listen. Kawakita, already trot­ting down the hall ahead of them, waved over his shoulder as he rounded a bend and disappeared from sight.

They arrived in the Great Rotunda to find the press conference already in progress. Reporters surrounded Winston Wright, Director of the Museum, poking micro­phones and cameras in his direction, voices echoing cra­zily in the cavernous space. Ippolito, the Museum’s Security Director, stood at the Director’s side. Clustered around the periphery were other Museum employees and a few curious school groups.

Wright stood angrily in the quartz lights, fielding shouted questions. His usually impeccable Savile Row suit was rumpled, and his thin hair was drooping over one ear. His pale skin was gray, and his eyes looked bloodshot.

“No,” Wright was saying, “apparently they thought their children had already left the Museum. We had no prior warning. ... No, we donot keep live animals in the Museum. Well, of course, we have some mice and snakes for research purposes, but no lions or tigers or anything of that sort. ... No, I haven’t seen the bod­ies. ... I don’t know what kind of mutilation there was, if any. ... I don’t have the expertise to address that sub­ject, you’ll have to wait for the autopsies. ... I want to emphasize that there’s been no official statement made by the police. ... Until you stop shouting I won’t answer any more questions. ... No, I said we donot have wild animals in the Museum. ... Yes, that includes bears. ... No, I’m not going to give any names. ... How could I [31] possibly answer that question? ... This press conference is over. ... I said this press conference isover . ... Yes, of course we are cooperating in every way with the po­lice. ... No, I don’t see any reason why this should delay the opening of the new exhibition. Let me emphasize that the opening ofSuperstitionis right on schedule. ... We havestuffed lions, yes, but if you’re trying to im­ply. ... They were shot in Africa seventy-five years ago, for Heaven’s sake! The zoo? We have no affiliation with the zoo. ... I’m simply not going to respond to any more outrageous suggestions along those lines. ... Will the gentleman from thePost please stop shouting? ... The police are interviewing the scientist who found the bod­ies, but I have no information on that. ... No, I don’t have anything more to add, except that we’re doing everything we can. ... Yes it was tragic, of course it was. ...”

The press began to fan out, heading past Wright into the Museum proper.

Wright turned angrily toward the security director. “Where the hell were the police?” Margo heard him snap. As he turned, he said over his shoulder, “if you see Mrs. Rickman, tell her to come to my office imme­diately.” And he stalked out of the Great Rotunda.

=6 =

Margo moved deeper into the Museum, away from the public areas, until she reached the corridor called ‘Broadway.’ Stretching the entire length of the Mu­seum—six city blocks—it was said to be the longest single hallway in New York City. Old oaken cabinets lined the walls, punctuated every thirty feet by frosted­glass doors. Most of these doors had curators’ names in gold leaf edged in black.

Margo, as a graduate student, had only a metal desk and a bookshelf in one of the basement labs.At least I havean office, she thought, turning off from the corridor and starting down a narrow flight of iron stairs. One of her graduate-student acquaintances had only a tiny bat­tered school desk, wedged between two massive freezers in the Mammalogy Department. The woman had to wear heavy sweaters to work, even at the height of August.

A security guard at the bottom of the stairwell waved her on, and she moved down a dim tunnel, flanked on [33] both sides by mounted horse skeletons in ancient glass cases. No police tape was in sight.

In her office, Margo dropped her carryall beside her desk and sat down. Most of the lab was actually storage for South Seas artifacts: Maori shields, war canoes, and cane arrows stuffed into green metal cabinets that stretched from floor to ceiling. A hundred-gallon fish tank, a simulated swamp belonging to the Animal Be­havior Department, perched on an iron frame underneath a battery of lights. It was so overpopulated with algae and weeds that Margo had only rarely been able to catch sight of a fish peering out through the murk.

Next to her desk was a long worktable with a row of dusty masks. The conservator, a sour young woman, worked in angry silence, spending what seemed barely three hours each day at her task. Margo figured it took her about two weeks to conserve each mask, judging by the slow turnover. The particular mask collection she was assigned to contained five thousand such masks, but it didn’t seem to concern anyone that, at the rate she was going, the project would take close to two centuries to complete.

Margo logged onto her computer terminal. A message in green letters appeared, swimming into focus out of the depths of theCRT:

HELLO MARGO GREEN@BIOTECH@STF

WELCOME BACK TO MUSENET

DISTRIBUTED NETWORKING SYSTEM,

RELEASE 15-5

COPYRIGHT © 1989-1995 NYMNH

AND CERE­BRAL SYSTEMS INC.

CONNECTING AT 10:24:06 03-27-95

PRINT SERVICE ROUTED TO LJ56

YOU HAVE NO MESSAGE(S) WAITING

[34] She went into word-processing mode and called up her notes, preparing to review them before her meeting with Frock. Her adviser often seemed preoccupied dur­ing these weekly meetings, and Margo was constantly scrambling to give him something new. The problem was, there usually wasn’t anything new—just more ar­ticles read, dissected, and stuffed into the computer; more lab work; and maybe ...maybe ... another three or four pages of her dissertation. She understood how somebody could end up a permanent rider on the gov­ernment-grant gravy train, or what the scientists deri­sively referred to as anABD—All But Dissertation.

When Frock had first agreed to act as her adviser two years before, she half suspected some mistake had been made. Frock—intellect behind the Callisto Ef­fect, occupier of the Cadwalader Chair in Statistical Paleontology at Columbia University, Chairman of the Evolutionary Biology Department at the Museum—had chosen her as a research student, an honor awarded to only a handful each year.

Frock started his career as a physical anthropologist. Confined to a wheelchair by childhood polio, he had nonetheless done pioneering fieldwork that was still the basis of many textbooks. After several severe bouts with malaria made further field research impossible, Frock diverted his ferocious energy to evolutionary the­ory. In the mid 1980s, he had started a firestorm of con­troversy with a radical new proposal. Combining chaos theory and Darwinian evolution, Frock’s hypothesis dis­puted the commonly held belief that life evolved grad­ually. Instead, he postulated that evolution was sometimes much less gradual; he held that short-lived aberrations—“monster species”—were sometimes an offshoot of evolution. Frock argued that evolution wasn’t always caused by random selection, that the en­vironment itself could cause sudden, grotesque changes in a species.

[35] Although Frock’s theory was backed by a brilliant se­ries of articles and papers, much of the scientific world remained dubious. If bizarre forms of life exist, they asked, where are they hiding? Frock replied that his the­ory predicted rapid demise of genera as well as rapid development.

The more the experts called Frock misguided, even crazy, the more the popular press embraced his idea. The theory became known as the Callisto Effect, after the Greek myth in which a young woman is suddenly trans­formed into a wild creature. Although Frock deplored the widespread misconceptions of his work, he shrewdly used his celebrity to further his academic efforts. Like many brilliant curators, Frock was consumed by his re­search; sometimes, Margo suspected, everything else, in­cluding her work, bored him.

Across the room, the conservator got up and—without a word—left for lunch, a sure sign that it was approach­ing eleven o’clock. Margo scribbled a few sentences on a sheet of paper, cleared the screen, and scooped up her notebook.

Frock’s office was in the southwest tower, at the end of an elegant, Edwardian fifth-floor corridor; an oasis far from the labs and computer workstations that character­ized much of the behind-the-scene Museum. The heavy oak door of the inner office read simply,DR. FROCK.

Margo knocked.

She heard a great clearing of the throat and the low rumble of a wheelchair. The door opened slowly and the familiar ruddy-complexioned face appeared, bushy eye­brows knitted in surprise. Then his gaze brightened.

“Of course, it’s Monday. Come in.” He spoke in a low voice, touching her wrist with a plump hand and motioning her to an overstuffed chair. Frock was dressed, as usual, in a somber suit, white shirt, and loud paisley tie. His thick brush of white hair looked ruffled.

The walls of his office were lined with old, glass­fronted bookcases, many of the shelves filled with relics [36] and oddities from his early years in the field. Books were piled in enormous, tottering stacks against a wall. Two large bow windows looked out over the Hudson River. Upholstered Victorian chairs sat on the faded Persian carpet, and on Frock’s desk lay several copies of his latest book,Fractal Evolution .

Next to the books, Margo recognized a large chunk of gray sandstone. Embedded in its flat surface was a deep depression, oddly smudged and elongated along one end with three large indentations at the other. Ac­cording to Frock, this was a fossil footprint of a creature unknown to science: the single piece of physical evi­dence to support his theory of aberrant evolution. Other scientists differed: Many didn’t believe it was a fossil at all, calling it “Frock’s folly.” Most of them had never seen it.

“Clear away that stuff and sit down,” Frock said, wheeling back to his favorite spot under one of the bow windows. “Sherry? No, of course, you never do. Silly of me to forget.”

On the indicated chair lay several back issues ofNature and the typescript of an unfinished article titled “Phyletic Transformation and the Tertiary ‘Fern Spike.’ ” Margo moved them to a nearby table and sat down, wondering if Dr. Frock would mention some­thing about the deaths of the two little boys.

He looked at her for a moment, motionless. Then he blinked, and sighed. “Well, Miss Green,” he said. “Shall we begin?”

Disappointed, Margo flipped open her notebook. She skimmed her notes, then began explaining her analysis of Kiribitu plant classification and how it related to her next dissertation chapter. As she spoke, Frock’s head gradually dropped to his chest and his eyes closed. A stranger might think him asleep, but Margo knew Frock was listening with intense concentration.

When she finished, he roused himself slowly. “Clas­sification of medicinal plants by use, rather than [37] appear­ance,” he murmured at last. “Interesting. That article reminds me of an experience I had among the Ki tribe of Bechuanaland.” Margo waited patiently for the rem­iniscence that was sure to follow.

“The Ki, as you know”—Frock always assumed his listener was as familiar with a subject as he was—at one time used the bark of a certain bush as a headache remedy. Charrière studied them in 1869 and noted their, use of this bush in his field journals. When I showed up three quarters of a century later, they had stopped using the remedy. They believed instead that headaches were caused by sorcery.” He shifted in his wheelchair.

“The accepted remedy was now for the kinfolk of the headache victim to identify the sorcerer and, naturally, go off and murder him. Of course, the kin of the dead sorcerer were then required to avenge this death, so they often went right back and killed the person with the headache. You can imagine what eventually happened.”

“What?” Margo asked, assuming Frock was about to explain how all of this fit into her dissertation.

“Why,” Frock said, spreading his hands, “it was a medical miracle. People stopped getting headaches.”

His generous shirtfront shook with laughter. Margo laughed too—for the first time that day, she realized.

“Well, so much for primitive medicine,” Frock said a little wistfully. “Back then, fieldwork was still fun.” He paused for a minute. “There will be a whole section on the Ki tribe in the newSuperstitionexhibition, you know,” he went on. “Of course, it will be terribly played up for mass consumption. They’ve brought in some young fellow fresh from Harvard to curate the show. Knows more about computers and mass­marketing than pure science, I’m told.”

Frock shifted again in his wheelchair. “In any case, Miss Green, I think what you’ve described will make a fine addition to your work. I suggest you obtain some samples of the Kiribitu plants from the herbarium and proceed from there.”

[38] Margo was gathering her papers when Frock suddenly spoke again. “Bad business this morning.”

Margo nodded.

Frock remained silent for a moment. “I fear for the Museum,” he said finally.

Surprised, Margo said, “They were brothers. It’s a tragedy for the family. But things will die down soon­—they always do.”

“I think not,” Frock said. “I’ve heard something about the condition of the bodies. The force used was … of a nonnormal nature.”

“Surelyyou don’t think it was a wild animal?” Margo asked. Perhaps Frock was as crazy as everyone said.

Frock smiled. “My dear, I make no assumptions. I will await further evidence. For the moment, I simply hope this unpleasantness will not influence your decision on whether to remain with the Museum. Oh, yes, I’ve heard about it, and I was very sorry to get the news of your father’s death. But you’ve displayed three gifts that are indispensable to a first-class researcher: a sense of what to look for, a sense of where to look for it, and the zeal to see your theories through.” He moved the wheel­chair closer to her. “Academic zeal is just as important as zeal in the field, Miss Green. Always remember that. Your technical training, your lab work, has been excel­lent. It would be a shame if our profession were to lose someone of your talents.”

Margo felt a mix of gratitude and resentment. “Thank you, Dr. Frock,” she replied. “I appreciate the kind words—and your concern.”

The scientist waved his hand, and Margo said good­bye. But at the door, she heard Frock speak again.

“Miss Green?” he asked.

“Yes?”

“Please be watchful.”

= 7 =

Outside she nearly collided with Smithback. He leaned toward her, winking roguishly. “How about lunch?”

“No,” said Margo. “Too busy.” Twice in one day—­she wasn’t sure she could stand such a full dose of Smithback.

“Come on,” he urged. “I’ve got some more grisly details about the murders.”

“It figures.” She quickened her pace down the hall, irritated that her curiosity was aroused.

Smithback grabbed her arm. “I hear they’re serving a delicious aged and oven-dried lasagna in the cafete­ria.” He steered her toward the elevator.

The lunchroom was filled with the usual crowd of curators, beefy guards talking loudly, and assorted tech­nicians and preparators in white lab coats. One curator was passing specimens around to a table of fellow sci­entists, who were murmuring in admiration and interest. Margo took a closer look. The specimens were pickled parasitic worms, coiled in jars of cloudy formaldehyde.

[40] They sat down and Margo tried to saw through the crust of her lasagna.

“Just like I promised,” Smithback said, picking up a piece in his hand and biting off a corner with a crunch. “Been on the steam table since nine o’clock this morn­ing, at least.”

He chewed noisily. “Well, the police finally made it official. There were two murders here last night. Brilliant to have figured it out! And you remember all those ques­tions the reporters asked about wild animals? Well, there’s also a chance theywere mauled to death by a wild animal.”

“Not while I’m eating,” Margo said.

“That’s right. Literally shredded, by the sound of it.”

Margo looked up. “Please.”

“I kid you not,” Smithback continued. “And the heat is on to get this thingsolved , particularly with the big exhibition coming up. I hear the cops have even enlisted a special coroner. Someone who reads gaping claw wounds like Helen Keller reads braille.”

“Damn it, Smithback,” Margo said and dropped her fork. “I’m sick of this—your cavalier attitude and your gory particulars while I’m having lunch. Can’t I eat first and hear about this stuff later?”

“As I was saying,” Smithback continued, ignoring the outburst, “she’s supposedly an expert on big cats. Dr. Matilda Ziewicz. Some name, huh. Sounds fat.”

Despite her annoyance, Margo suppressed a smile. Smithback might be a jerk, but at least he was a funny jerk. She shoved her tray away. “Where’d you hear all this?” she asked.

Smithback grinned. “I have my sources.” He shov­eled another piece of lasagna into his mouth. “Actually, I ran into a friend who writes for theNews . Somebody got the story from a contact in theNYPD. It’s going to be all over the afternoon papers. Can you imagine Wright’s face when he sees that? Oh, God.”

Smithback cackled for a moment before filling his [41] mouth again. He’d finished his own and was starting on Margo’s. For a thin guy, he ate like a beast.

“But how could there be a wild animal loose in the Museum?” Margo asked. “That’s absurd.”

“Yeah? Well, get this: They’ve got someone in here with a bloodhound, trying to track the son of a bitch.”

“Now you’re joking.”

“Hey, not me. Ask any of the security guards. There’s a million square feet in this joint where a big cat or something could be roaming, including five miles of forced-air ducts big enough for a man to crawl around in. And under the Museum is a warren of abandoned tunnels. They’re taking it seriously.”

“Tunnels?”

“Yup. Didn’t you read my article in last month’s magazine? The first Museum was built on an artesian swamp that couldn’t be permanently drained. So they built all these tunnels to divert the water. Then, when the original Museum burned down in 1911, they built the present Museum on top of the old Museum’s base­ment. The subbasement is huge, multileveled ... much of it isn’t even electrified. I doubt if there’s anybody still alive who really knows their way around down there.”

Smithback munched the last piece of lasagna and pushed the tray aside. “And then, there’re the usual ru­mors about the Museum Beast.”

Anybody who worked in the Museum had heard that story. Maintenance men working late-night shifts saw it out of the corners of their eyes. Assistant curators wan­dering down dimly lit corridors on their way to specimen vaults saw it moving in the shadows. Nobody knew what it was, or where it had come from, but some claimed the beast had killed a man several years before.

Margo decided to change the subject. “Is Rickman still giving you trouble?” she asked.

At the mention of the name, Smithback grimaced. Margo knew that Lavinia Rickman, the Chief of Public Relations for the Museum, had hired Smithback to write [42] his book. She had also worked out the Museum’s cut of the advance and royalties. Although Smithback wasn’t happy about the contractual details, the exhibition prom­ised to be such a blockbuster that book sales, riding on the success of the exhibit, could easily climb into six figures. It hadn’t been a bad deal for Smithback at all, Margo thought, given the only modest success of his previous book on the Boston Aquarium.

“Rickman? Trouble?” Smithback snorted. “Oh, God. She’s the definition of trouble. Listen, I want to read you something.” He pulled a sheaf of papers out of a note­book.

“ ‘When Dr. Cuthbert pitched the idea for an exhi­bition onSuperstitionto the Museum Director, Wright was very impressed. It had all the makings of a block­buster exhibition, something on the level ofThe Treas­ures of King Tut orThe Seven Levels of Troy . That meant big money for the Museum, Wright knew, and an un­paralleled opportunity to raise funds from corporate and government sponsorship. But some older curators were unconvinced; they thought the exhibit smacked of sen­sationalism.’ ”

Smithback stopped. “Look what Rickman did.” He pushed the paper over to her. A big line sliced across the paragraph and a marginal note in fat red marker read:OUT!

Margo giggled.

“What’s so funny?” Smithback demanded. “She’s butchering my manuscript. Look at this.” He jabbed his finger at another page.

Margo shook her head. “What Rickman wants is a snow job for the Museum. You two won’t ever see eye to eye.”

“She’s driving me crazy. She’s taking out everything that’s the slightest bit controversial. She wants me to spend all my time talking to that nerd who’s curating the exhibition. She knows that he’ll only say what his boss Cuthbert tells him to.” He leaned forward [43] conspir­atorially. “You’ve never seen such a company man in your life.” He looked up, and groaned. “Oh, God, here he comes now.”

A young, slightly overweight man with horn-rimmed glasses materialized at their table, holding a tray bal­anced on a shiny leather briefcase. “May I join you?” he asked shyly. “I’m afraid this is practically the only seat left in the house.”

“Sure,” said Smithback. “Have a seat. We were just talking about you, anyway. Margo, meet George Mor­iarty. He’s the guy who’s curating theSuperstitionex­hibition.”

Smithback shook the papers at Moriarty. “Look what Rickman did to my manuscript. The only things she didn’t touch wereyour quotations.”

Moriarty scanned the pages and looked at Smithback with almost childlike gravity. “I’m not surprised,” he said. “Why air the Museum’s dirty linen, anyway?”

“Come on, George. This is what makes for an inter­esting story!”

Moriarty turned to Margo. “You’re the graduate stu­dent working on ethnopharmacology, aren’t you?” he asked.

“That’s right,” she said, flattered. “How did you know?”

“I’m interested in the subject.” He smiled and looked at her briefly. “The exhibition has several cases devoted to pharmacology and medicine. I wanted to talk to you about one of them, actually.”

“Sure. What did you have in mind?” She looked at Moriarty more closely. He was about as average a Mu­seum character as she could imagine: average height, a little pudgy, hair an average brown. His rumpled tweed jacket sported the heather tones that were regulation Mu­seum-issue. The only things unusual about him were his large wristwatch, shaped like a sundial, and his eyes: an unusually clear hazel, shining with intelligence from be­hind his horn-rims.

[44] Smithback sat forward, shifted irritably in his chair, and stared at the two. “Well,” he said, “I’d like to stay on and witness this charming scene, but I’m interviewing someone in the Bug Room on Wednesday, and I need to finish my current chapter. George, don’t sign any movie contracts for that exhibition of yours without talk­ing to me first.” He stood up with a snort and made for the door, threading a complex path between tables as he went.

= 8 =

Jonathan Hamm peered down the basement corridor through a thick pair of glasses that badly needed clean­ing. Leather leashes were wrapped around his black­gloved hands, and two hounds sat obediently at his feet. His assistant tracker stood beside him. Next to the as­sistant was Lieutenant D’Agosta, holding soiled, heavily creased blueprints, his two deputies leaning against the wall behind him. Police-issue pump-action Remington 12-gauges hung off their shoulders.

D’Agosta rustled through the blueprints. “Can’t the dogs smell which way to go?” he asked irritably. Hamm let out a long breath. “Hounds. They’re hounds. And they’re not on a scent. They haven’t been on a good scent since we began. Or rather, they’ve been on too many scents.”

D’Agosta grunted, withdrew a sodden cigar from his jacket pocket, and began to raise it toward his mouth. Hamm caught his eye.

[46]“Oh yeah,” said D’Agosta. He pushed the cigar back into his pocket.

Hamm sniffed the air. It was damp, which was good. But that was the only good thing about this little picnic. First, there was the usual stupidity of the police.What kind of dogs are these? they’d asked.We wanted blood­hounds . These were hounds, he’d explained, a blue-tick hound and a black-and-tan coonhound. Given the right conditions, these hounds could track a lost hiker after a three-foot blizzard.But these , thought Hamm,aren’t ex­actly the right conditions .

As usual, the crime scene had been fouled up. Chem­icals, spray paint, chalk, a thousand people tramping in and out. Besides, the area around the base of the stair­case had been literally bathed in blood; even now, eigh­teen hours or so after the crime, the smell hung heavily in the air, agitating the hounds.

They first tried to follow the scent from the crime scene itself. When that failed, Hamm suggested they “cut for scent,” making a perimeter loop around the crime scene, hoping to pick up the trail as it exited.

The hounds had never been trained to work indoors. Naturally, they were confused. But it wasn’t his fault. The police wouldn’t even tell him if they were looking for a human or an animal. Perhaps they didn’t know themselves.

“Let’s go this way,” said D’Agosta.

Hamm passed the leashes to his assistant, who started walking ahead, the hounds nosing the ground.

Next, the hounds had bayed up a storage room full of mastodon bones, and the paradichlorobenzene preser­vative that poured out when they opened the door had caused a half-hour delay while the hounds recovered their sense of smell. And that was just the first of a series of storage rooms full of animal pelts, gorillas in formal­dehyde, a freezer full of dead zoo specimens, a whole vault full of human skeletons.

They came to an archway with an open metal door [47] leading onto a descending stone stairway. The walls were covered with a crust of lime, and the stairway was dark.

“That must be the dungeon,” one of the policemen said, with a guffaw.

“This goes to the subbasement,” D’Agosta said, con­sulting the blueprints. He motioned to one of the officers, who handed him a long flashlight.

The shallow stairs ended in a tunnel made of herring-­bone brickwork, its arched ceiling barely the height of a man. The tracker moved forward with the dogs, D’Ag­osta and Hamm behind. The two policemen came last.

“There’s water on the floor,” said Hamm.

“So what?” D’Agosta said.

“If there’s been any water flowing through here there won’t be any scent.”

“I was told to expect puddles of water down here,” D’Agosta replied. “It only floods when it rains, and it hasn’t rained.”

“That’s reassuring,” said Hamm.

They reached a place where four tunnels came to­gether, and D’Agosta halted to consult the blueprints. “Somehow I thought you’d need to look at that,” Hamm said.

“Oh, yeah?” D’Agosta said. “Well, I’ve got a sur­prise for you. These blueprints don’t cover the subbase­ment.”

When one of the dogs whined and began furiously sniffing, Hamm came suddenly to attention. “This way. Quick.”

The dogs whined again. “They’ve got something!” said Hamm. “It’s a clear scent, it must be. Look at their hackles rise! Keep the light up here, I can’t see a blessed thing.”

The dogs were straining, pulling forward, noses up and sniffing the air ahead.

“You see, you see!” Hamm said. “It’s an air scent. [48] Feel the fresh air on your cheek? I should have brought the spaniels. They’re unbeatable with an air scent!”

The policemen slid past the dogs, one beaming his flashlight, the other carrying his shotgun at the ready. Ahead the tunnel forked again, and the dogs lunged to the right, breaking into a trot.

“Hold it, Mr. Hamm, there might be a killer out there,” D’Agosta said.

The dogs suddenly broke into a deafening baying. “Sit!” cried the assistant. “Heel! Castor! Pollux!Heel , damn you!” The dogs lunged forward, paying no atten­tion. “Hamm, I need a hand here!”

“What’s gotten into you?” cried Hamm, wading into the frantic dogs, trying to grab their collars. “Castor,heel !”

“Shut them up!” snapped D’Agosta.

“He’s loose!” cried the assistant, as one of the dogs bolted into the darkness. They rushed after the retreating sound of the dog.

“You smell it?” Hamm said, stopping short. “Christ Jesus, yousmell it?”

A pungent, goatish odor suddenly enveloped them. The other dog was frantic with excitement, leaping and twisting and suddenly breaking free.

“Pollux!Pollux !”

“Wait!” said D’Agosta. “Forget the fucking dogs for a second. Let’s proceed with a little order here. You two, get in front again. Safeties off.”

The two men pumped their shotguns.

In the echoing darkness ahead of them, the barking faltered, then stopped. There was a moment of silence. Then a terrible, unearthly shriek, like the screeching of tires, leapt from the inky tunnel. The two police officers looked at each other. The sound ended as suddenly as it began.

“Castor!” Hamm cried. “Oh, my God! He’s been hurt!”

“Get back, Hamm, goddammit!” barked D’Agosta.

[49] At that moment a shape suddenly hurtled at them from the darkness, and there were two stunning blasts from the shotguns, two flashes of light accompanied by deaf­ening roars. The rumble echoed and died in the tunnel, and there was an intense silence.

“You fucking idiot, you just shot my hound,” said Hamm quietly. Pollux lay five feet from them, blood pouring freely from his ruined head.

“He was coming right at me …” began one of the officers.

“Jesus Christ,” said D’Agosta, “Stow that shit. There’s still something out there.”

They found the other dog a hundred yards down the tunnel. He was torn nearly in half, guts strung out in crazy patterns.

“Jesus, will you look at that,” said D’Agosta. Hamm said nothing.

Just beyond the body the tunnel branched. D’Agosta continued to stare at the dog. “Without the dogs, there’s no way of knowing which way it went,” he said at last. “Let’s get the hell out of here and let forensics deal with this mess.”

Hamm said nothing.

= 9 =

Moriarty, suddenly alone with Margo in the cafete­ria, seemed even more uncomfortable. “So?” Margo prompted, after a brief silence.

“Actually, I reallydid want to talk to you about your work.” He paused.

“You did?” Margo was unused to anyone showing interest in her project.

“Well, indirectly. The primitive medicine cases for the exhibition are complete, except one. We’ve got this terrific collection of shamanistic plants and artifacts from the Cameroons we want to display in the last case, but they’re badly documented. If you’d be willing to take a look ...?”

“I’d love to,” Margo said.

“Great! When?”

“Why not now? I’ve got some time.”

They left the staff cafeteria and moved down a long basement hall lined with rumbling steam pipes and [51] pad­locked doors. One of the doors bore the labelDINOSAUR STOREROOM4—UPPER JURASSIC. Most of the Museum’s dinosaur bone and other fossil collections were stored here in the basement, since—she had heard—the great weight of petrified bone would cause the upper floors to collapse.

“The collection’s in one of the sixth-floor vaults,” Moriarty said apologetically as they entered a service elevator. “I hope I can find it again. You know what a warren of storage rooms they’ve got up there.”

“Have you heard anything more about Charlie Prine?” Margo asked quietly.

“Not much. Apparently he’s not a suspect. But I don’t think we’ll see him back here for quite a while. Dr. Cuthbert told me before lunch that he was severely trau­matized.” Moriarty shook his head. “What an awful thing.”

On the fifth floor, Margo followed Moriarty along a wide passageway and up a flight of metal stairs. The narrow, labyrinthine catwalks that made up this section of the sixth floor had been built directly underneath the Museum’s long pitched roofs. On either side were rows of low metal doors, behind which lay the hermetically sealed vaults of the perishable anthropology collections. In earlier times, a poisonous cyanic compound had pe­riodically been pumped into the vaults to kill vermin and bacteria; now, artifact preservation was handled with subtler methods.

As the two threaded their way along the catwalks, they passed a number of objects stacked against the walls: a carved war canoe, several totems, a row of slitted log drums. Even with one million square feet of storage space, every square inch had been utilized, including stairwells, corridors, and the offices of junior curators. Of fifty million artifacts and specimens, only about 5 percent was on exhibition; the rest was available only to scientists and researchers.

The New York Museum of Natural History consisted [52] not of a single building, but several large buildings, con­nected over the years to form one sprawling, rambling structure. As Margo and Moriarty passed from one of the buildings into another, the ceiling ascended, and the catwalk became a branching corridor. A dim light fil­tered down from a row of dirty skylights, illuminating shelves filled with plaster casts of aboriginal faces.

“God, this place is huge,” said Margo, feeling a sud­den cold thrust of fear, glad that she was seven stories above the dark spaces where the little boys had met their deaths.

“Largest in the world,” Moriarty said, unlocking a door stenciledCEN. AFRICA, D-2.

He switched on a naked, 25-watt bulb. Peering in, Margo could see a tiny room stuffed with masks, sha­man’s rattles, painted and beaded skins, and a group of long sticks topped by grimacing heads. Along one wall was a row of wooden cabinets. Moriarty nodded toward them.

“The plants are in there. This other stuff is the sha­man paraphernalia. It’s a great collection, but Eastman, the guy who assembled the Cameroon stuff, wasn’t ex­actly the most careful anthropologist when it came to documentation.”

“This is incredible,” said Margo. “I had no idea—“

“Listen,” Moriarty interrupted, “when we began re­searching this exhibition, you wouldn’tbelieve the things we found. There are close to a hundred anthro­pology vaults in this section alone, and I swear some of them haven’t been opened in forty years.”

Moriarty was suddenly more confident and animated. Margo decided that if he dumped the tweed jacket, shed a few pounds, and swapped the horn-rims for contacts, he could almost be cute.

But Moriarty was still talking. “Just last week, we found one of only a couple of existing examples of Yu­kaghir pictograph writing—right next door! As soon as I get time, I’ll be writing a note for theJAA.”

[53] Margo smiled. He was so excited, he could have been talking about discovering an unknown Shakespeare play. She was sure that only a dozen readers of theJournal of American Anthropology would be interested. But Moriarty’s enthusiasm was refreshing.

“Anyway,” Moriarty said, pushing his glasses up his nose, “I just need someone to help me make sense of this Cameroon stuff for the display case write-up.”

“What do you want me to do?” Margo asked, tem­porarily forgetting the next chapter of her dissertation. His enthusiasm was infectious.

“That’s easy,” said Moriarty. “I’ve got the rough script for the case right here.”

He extracted a document from his briefcase. “See,” he said, running a finger down the covering sheet, “this sets out what, ideally, we want the case to say. We call it the story line. All you have to do is flesh this out, plugging in a few of the artifacts and some of the plants.”

Margo scanned the document. It was starting to sound a little more time-consuming than she’d anticipated. “How long do you think this will take, by the way?”

“Oh, ten to fifteen hours, max. I’ve got the accession listings and some descriptive notes right here. But we’ve got to hurry. The opening is just a few days away.”

Back came the memory of her next chapter. “Now wait a minute,” she said. “This is a big job, and I’ve got a dissertation to write.”

The dismay on Moriarty’s face was almost comical. It hadn’t even occurred to him that she might have other things to do. “You mean you can’t help?”

“Maybe I can squeeze it in,” she murmured.

His face brightened. “Great! Listen, while we’re on the sixth floor, let me show you some of the other stuff up here.”

He led her to another vault and inserted a key. The door rasped open to a dazzling display of painted buffalo [54] skulls, rattles, feather bundles, and even a row of what she recognized as raven skeletons tied up with rawhide.

“Jesus,” Margo breathed.

“There’s a whole religion in here,” Moriarty said. “Wait till you see what we’re putting on display. This is just the stuff left behind. We’ve got one of the best Sun Dance shirts anywhere. And look at this!” He pulled open a drawer. “Original wax cylinder recordings of the Sun Dance cycle songs, every one. Recorded in 1901. We’ve put them on tape, and we’re going to play them in the Sioux room. What do you think?Great ex­hibition, huh?”

“It’s certainly caused a fuss in the Museum,” Margo replied cautiously.

“Actually, there isn’t as much controversy as people seem to make out,” Moriarty said. “There’s no reason why science and entertainment can’t meet as friends.”

Margo couldn’t resist. “I’ll bet your boss Cuthbert put you up tothat line.”

“He’s always felt that exhibitions should be more ac­cessible to the general public. People may attend this because they expect ghosts and goblins and a spooky show—and they’ll get them. But they’ll go away with more than you might expect. Besides, the show’s going to generate a lot of cash for the Museum. What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing,” Margo smiled. She’d leave the baiting to Smithback.

But Moriarty wasn’t finished. “I know the wordsu­perstition has a bad connotation in some people’s minds,” he said. “It smacks of exploitation. And it’s true that some of the effects we’re putting together for the show are ... well ... a bit sensational. But an exhibit calledAboriginal Religion just wouldn’t sell, would it?” He looked at her with mute appeal.

“I don’t think anyone objects to the title,” Margo said. “I guess there are a few people who don’t feel your ends are truly scientific.”

He shook his head. “Just the crusty old curators and the crackpots. Like Frock, for example. They chose theSuperstitionexhibition over his proposal for one on ev­olution. So of course he doesn’t have a good word to say about it.”

Margo’s smile faded. “Dr. Frock is a pretty brilliant anthropologist,” she said.

“Frock? Dr. Cuthbert says he’s gone off the deep end. ‘The man’s bloody daft,’ he says.” Moriarty imitated Cuthbert’s Scottish accent. The sound echoed unpleas­antly down the dim corridors.

“I don’t think Cuthbert is half the geniusyou feel he is,” Margo said.

“Now please, Margo. He’s top rate.”

“Not compared to Dr. Frock, he isn’t. What about the Callisto Effect?” Margo asked. “That’s some of the most cutting-edge work being done today.”

“Does he have a single speck of proof to back up his speculations? Have you seen evidence of any unknown, monstrous species roaming the earth?” Moriarty shook his head again, sending his glasses plunging dangerously down his nose. “Theoretical hype. I mean, theory has its place, but it has to be backed up with fieldwork. And that sidekick of his, Greg Kawakita, just encourages Frock with that extrapolation program he’s developing. I suppose Kawakita’s got his own reasons. But it’s pretty sad, really, to see a great mind take such a bad detour. I mean, just look at Frock’s new book.Fractal Evolution ? Even the title sounds more like a kid’s computer game than science.”

Margo listened with rising indignation. Perhaps Smithback had been right about Moriarty, after all. “Well,” she said, “considering my affiliations to Dr. Frock, I don’t suppose you’d want me messing with your exhibit. I might add too much hype to the script.” She turned and walked briskly out the door and down the corridor.

[56] Moriarty looked shocked. Too late, he remembered that Frock was her major advisor. He danced after her.

“Oh, no, no, I didn’t mean—“ he stammered. “Please, I was just ... You know that Frock and Cuth­bert don’t get along. I guess I’ve picked up some of that.”

He looked so horrified that Margo felt her anger fade.

“I didn’t know they hadthat much of a problem with each other,” she said, allowing Moriarty to stop her.

“Oh, yes. From way back. You know that ever since Frock came forward with this Callisto Effect, his star has been falling in the Museum. Now he’s a department head in name only, and Cuthbert pulls the strings. Of course, I’ve just heard one side of the story. I’m very sorry, really. Youwill do the case for me, right?”

“On the condition,” Margo countered, “that you get me out of this maze. I’ve got to get back to work.”

“Oh, sure. Sorry,” Moriarty said. The gaffe had brought back all of his shyness, and as they began retracing their way to the fifth floor, he was silent.

“So tell me more about your exhibition.” Margo tried to put him at ease. “I’ve heard a little about some fab­ulously rare artifacts that will be on display.”

“I guess you must mean the Kothoga tribe material,” Moriarty said. “Only one expedition has ever found any traces of them. The figurine of their mythical beast Mbwun is—well, it’s one of the centerpieces of the show.” He hesitated. “Or I should say, itwill be one of the centerpieces. It’s not on display yet.”

“Really?” Margo asked. “Isn’t that waiting till the last minute?”

“The situation is kind of unusual,” Moriarty replied. “But listen, Margo, this isn’t for public consumption.” They had returned to the catwalks, and Moriarty led her down the long corridors, speaking low. “There’s been a lot of high-level interest in the Kothoga arti­facts recently. People like Rickman, Dr. Cuthbert ... even Wright, apparently. There’s been controversy over [57] whether the material should be included in the exhibi­tion. Surely you’ve heard the stories of a curse on the figurine, that sort of nonsense?”

“Not much,” Margo said.

“The expedition that found the Kothoga material met with tragedy,” Moriarty continued, “and nobody’s been near the stuff since. It’s still in the original crates. Just last week, all the crates were taken from the basement area where they’d sat all these years and moved to the Secure Area. Nobody’s had access to them since, and I haven’t been able to prepare the final displays.”

“But why were they moved?” Margo pressed.

They entered the elevator. Moriarty waited until the door had closed before answering. “Apparently, the crates had been recently tampered with.”

“What? You mean somebody had broken in?”

Moriarty stared at Margo, his owlish face wearing its look of perpetual surprise. “I didn’t say that,” he re­plied.

He turned the key, and the elevator lurched down­ward.

= 10 =

D’Agosta wished with all his heart that the double-chili­-cheeseburger in his stomach would disappear. Not that it was bothering him—yet—but it was an unwelcome presence.

The place smelled like they all did. In fact it stank. All the disinfectants in the world couldn’t cover up the smell of death. And the vomit-green walls in the Medical Examiner’s Office didn’t help things any. Nor did the large gurney, currently empty, sitting like an uninvited guest under the bright lights of the autopsy suite.

His thoughts were interrupted as a large woman en­tered, two men following close behind. D’Agosta no­ticed stylish glasses, blonde hair escaping from under a surgeon’s cap. The woman strode over and held out her hand, her red lipstick creased in a professional smile.

“Dr. Ziewicz,” she said, with a crushing grip. “You must be D’Agosta. This is my assistant, Dr. Fred Gross.” Ziewicz indicated a short, skinny man. “And [59] this is our photographer, Delbert Smith.” Delbert nod­ded, clutching a 4x5 Deardorff to his chest.

“So, Dr. Ziewicz, you come here often?” D’Agosta asked, suddenly eager to say something, anything, to stall the inevitable.

“NYME’s my home away from home,” Ziewicz re­plied with the same smile. “My field is—how shall I put it—special forensics. For just about everybody. We do our thing and ship them back out. Then I read about what it all means in the papers.” She looked at him speculatively. “You’ve, ah, seen this kind of thing be­fore, right?”

“Oh yeah,” said D’Agosta. “All the time.” The burger in his gut felt like a lead ingot. Why didn’t he think ahead, remember what his afternoon schedule was before chowing down like a damned hog?

“That’s good.” Ziewicz consulted her clipboard. “Let’s see, parental consent? Good. Looks like everything’s in order. Fred, start with 5-B.”

She began slipping on latex gloves, three pairs, a mask, goggles, and a plastic apron. D’Agosta did like­wise.

Gross wheeled the gurney over to the morgue bank and slid out 5-B. The indistinct shape under the plastic looked strangely short to D’Agosta, with an odd bulge at one end. Gross slid the cadaver and its tray onto the gurney, wheeled the cart under the lights, checked the toe tag, and locked down the wheels. He placed a stain­less-steel bucket under the gurney’s outlet pipe.

Ziewicz was fiddling with the microphone hanging above the body.

“Testing, one two three ... Fred, this mike is totally dead.”

Fred bent over the reel-to-reel. “I can’t understand it, everything’s turned on.”

D’Agosta cleared his throat. “It’s unplugged,” he said.

There was a short silence.

[60] “Well,” said Ziewicz, “I’m glad there’s someone here who’s not a scientist. If you have any questions or comments, Mr. D’Agosta, please state your name and speak clearly toward the microphone. Okay? Everything goes on the tape. I’m just going to describe the state of the body first, and then we’ll start cutting.”

“Got it,” D’Agosta replied tonelessly.Cutting . It was one thing when a dead body was just lying there at the scene. But when they started cutting into it, peeling the layers away—he’d never gotten used to that.

“Are we up and running? Good. This is Dr. Matilda Ziewicz and Dr. Frederick Gross, and the date is Mon­day, March 27, at two-fifteen in the afternoon. We are joined by Detective Sergeant—?”

“Lieutenant Vincent.”

“Lieutenant Vincent D’Agosta, of theNYPD. We have here—“

Fred read off the tag. “William Howard Bridgeman, number 33-A45.”

“I am now removing the covering.” The thick plastic crackled.

There was a short silence. D’Agosta had a sudden flash of the gutted dog he’d seen that morning.The trick is not to think too much. Don’t think about your own Vinnie, eighth birthday just next week .

Dr. Ziewicz took a deep breath. “We have here a Caucasian male, a boy, age about, ah, ten to twelve years, height, well, I can’t give a height for this one because it’s decapitated. Maybe four feet ten inches, maybe five feet? Weight, about ninety pounds. This is very approximate. The state of the body is such that I can see no other identifying marks. Eye color and facial features indeterminate due to massive head trauma.”

“No anterior wounds or marks on the feet, legs, or genitals. Fred, please sponge off the abdominal area ... thank you. There are an undetermined number of large lacerations proceeding from the left anterior pectoral re­gion at a hundred and ninety degree angle downward [61] through the costals, sternum, and terminating at the right anterior abdominal region. This is a massive wound, per­haps two feet long and a foot wide. It appears that the pectoralis minor and pectoralis major are separated from the external thoracic cavity, the external and internal in­tercostals are separated, and the body is eviscerated to a great degree. The sternal process has been split and the rib cage exposed. Massive hemorrhaging in the aortal­—it’s hard to see before cleaning and exploration.

“Fred, clean the edge of the thoracic cavity. The vis­cera that are clearly exposed and fully protuberant are the stomach, small and large intestines. The retroperi­toneal organs appear to be in situ.

“Sponge the neck off, Fred. The neck area shows signs of trauma, some bruising, perhaps indicative of extravasation, possible spinal dislocation.

“Now for the head ... dear God.”

In the silence, Fred cleared his throat.

“The head is decapitated between the axial process and the atlas. The entire occipital portion of the calvar­ium and half the parietal process have been crushed, or rather seemingly punched through and removed, by means unknown, leaving a hole perhaps ten inches in diameter. The skull is empty. The entire brain appears to have fallen out or been extracted through this hole ... The brain, or what is left of it, is in a pan here to the right of the head, but there is no indication of its original position vis-à-vis the body.”

“It was found in pieces near the body,” said D’Ag­osta.

“Thank you, Lieutenant. But where’s the rest of it?”

“That’s all there was.”

“No. Something’s missing. You got full scene-of-­crime series for this?”

“Of course,” said D’Agosta, trying not to show his annoyance.

“The brain is severely traumatized. Fred, bring me a number 2 scalpel and transverse speculum. The brain [62] appears to have been severed at the medulla oblongata. The pons Varolii is intact, but separate. The cere­bellum shows surface lacerations but is otherwise intact. There is little evidence of bleeding, indicating post­mortem trauma. There’s the body of fornix, attached. The cerebrum has been completely severed from the mesencephalon and the mesencephalon has been bi­sected and—look, Fred, there’s no thalamoid region. And no pituitary. That’s what’s missing.”

“What’s that?” asked D’Agosta. He willed himself to look more closely. The brain, sitting in a stainless-steel pan, looked a hell of a lot more liquid than solid. He turned away. Baseball. Think about baseball. A pitch, the sound of a bat ...

“The thalamus and the hypothalamus. The body’s regulator.”

“The body’s regulator,” repeated D’Agosta.

“The hypothalamus regulates body temperature, blood pressure, heartbeat, and the metabolism of fats and carbohydrates. Also the sleep-wake cycle. We think it holds the centers of pleasure and pain. It’s a very com­plicated organ, Lieutenant.” She looked fixedly at him, anticipating a question. D’Agosta mumbled dutifully, “How does it do all that?”

“Hormones. It secretes hundreds of regulatory hor­mones into the brain and bloodstream.”

“Yeah,” D’Agosta replied. He stepped back. The baseball soaring deep into center field, the center fielder dropping back, glove raised ...

“Fred come over here and look at this,” Ziewicz said sharply.

Fred bent over the pan. “It looks like ... Well, I don’t know...”

“Come on, Fred,” Ziewicz coaxed.

“Well, it looks almost like—“ Fred paused. “Like a bite was taken out.”

“Exactly. Photographer!” Delbert rushed forward. [63] “Get this. Looks just like when one of my kids takes a bite out of a cake.”

D’Agosta leaned forward, but he could see nothing special in the gray, bloody mess.

“It’s semicircular, like a human’s, but it appears larger, more ragged than you’d expect. We’ll take sections. Let’s test for the presence of salivase enzymes, Fred, just in case. Take this to the lab, tell them to flash­freeze it and microsection here, here, and here. Five sec­tions each. Stain at least one with eosinophil. Stain one with salivase activating enzyme. Anything else you or they can think of.”

As Fred left, Ziewicz continued. “I am now bisecting the cerebrum. The posterior lobe is bruised, consistent with removal from the cranium. Photograph. The surface shows three parallel lacerations or incisions, approxi­mately four millimeters apart, about half an inch deep. I am parting the first incision. Photograph. Lieutenant, see how these lacerations start wide and then converge? What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” D’Agosta said, peering a little closer.It’s just a dead brain , he thought.

“Long fingernails, maybe? Sharpened fingernails? I mean, do we have a homicidal psychopath on our hands?”

Fred returned from the lab, and they continued working on the brain for what seemed an eternity to D’Agosta. Finally, Ziewicz told Fred to put it in the refrigerator.

“I will now examine the hands,” she spoke into the microphone. She removed a plastic bag from the right hand and carefully resealed it. Then she lifted the hand, rotated it, examined the fingernails. “There is foreign matter under the thumb, index, and ring fingers. Fred, three well slides.”

“He’s just a kid,” D’Agosta said. “You’d expect his fingernails to be dirty.”

“Perhaps, Lieutenant,” Ziewicz replied. She scraped [64] the material into small depressions in the slides, one fin­ger at a time. “Fred, the stereozoom? I want to look at this.”

Ziewicz placed the slide on the stage, peered down, and adjusted the instrument.

“Normal fingernail dirt under the thumb, from the looks of it. Same with the others. Fred, full analysis, just in case.”

There was nothing of interest on the left hand.

“I will now,” Ziewicz continued, “examine the lon­gitudinal trauma to the anterior portion of the body. Del, photographs, here, here, and here, and whatever else you think will show the wound best. Close-ups of the areas of penetration. It looks like the killer has done our Y­-incision for us, wouldn’t you say, Lieutenant?”

“Yeah,” D’Agosta said, swallowing hard.

There were a series of rapid flashes.

“Forceps,” Ziewicz continued. “Three ragged lacer­ations begin just above the left nipple in the greater pec­toral, penetrating and eventually separating the muscle. I am opening and probing the first laceration at the point of entry. Clamp there, Fred.

“I am now probing the wound. There is unidentified foreign matter here. Fred, a glassine? It looks like cloth­ing material, perhaps from the victim’s shirt. Photo­graph.”

The flash popped, and then she held up a small piece of what looked like bloody lint, dropping it into the glassine envelope. She continued probing in silence for a few moments.

“There is another piece of foreign material deep in the muscle, about four centimeters directly below the right nipple. It is lodged on a rib. It appears to be hard. Photograph. Stick a flag in there, Fred.”

She extracted it and held it up, a bloody lump poised at the end of the long forceps.

D’Agosta ventured forward. “What is it? Rinse it off, maybe, and see?”

[65] She glanced at him with a slight smile. “Fred, bring me a beaker of sterile water.”

As she dipped the object in and stirred, the water turned brownish red.

“Keep the water, we’ll see if there’s anything else in it,” she said, holding her find to the light.

“Jesus H. Christ,” said D’Agosta. “It’s a claw. A fucking claw.”

Ziewicz turned to her assistant. “That will be a charming snippet of monologue for our tape, won’t it, Fred?”

= 11 =

Margo dumped her books and papers on the sofa and glanced at the clock perched atop the television: ten-­fifteen. She shook her head. What an unbelievable, hor­rible day. Staying all those extra hours had only netted three new paragraphs on her dissertation. And she still had to work on the display-case copy for Moriarty. She sighed, sorry she’d ever agreed to the project.

Reflected neon light from a liquor store across the avenue struggled through the lone window of Margo’s living room, throwing the room into electric-blue chiar­oscuro. She turned on the small overhead light and leaned against the door, scanning the disorder slowly. Normally, she was neat to excess. But now after just one week of neglect, textbooks, letters of sympathy, legal documents, shoes, and sweaters were scattered across the furniture. Empty cartons from the Chinese restaurant downstairs lay neglected in the sink. Her old Royal type­writer and a fan of research papers were spread out on the hardwood floor.

[67] The shabby neighborhood—not-yet-gentrified upper Amsterdam Avenue—had given her father another rea­son why she should return home to Boston. “This is no place for a girl like you to live, Midge,” he had said, using her childhood nickname. “And that Museum is no place to work. Cooped up day after day with all those dead, stuffed creatures, things in jars. What kind of a life is that? Come back and work for me. We’d get you a house in Beverly, maybe Marblehead. You’ll be hap­pier there, Midge, I know you will.”

When she noticed her answering machine was blink­ing, Margo pressed the message button.

“It’s Jan,” the first message began. “I got back into town today, and I just heard. Listen, I’m really, really sorry to hear about your father’s death. I’ll call back later, okay? I want to talk to you. Bye.”

She waited. Another voice came on. “Margo, this is your mother.” And then a click.

She squeezed her eyes tightly for a moment, then took a deep breath. She wouldn’t call Jan, not just yet. And she wouldn’t return her mother’s call, either; not until tomorrow, at least. She knew what her mother would say:You have to come home to your father’s business. It’s what he would have wanted. You owe it to both of us .

Turning away, she settled herself cross-legged in front of the typewriter, and stared at the curators’ notes, cat­alogue data, and accession listings Moriarty had given her. It was due the day after tomorrow, he’d said, and the next chapter of her dissertation was due the follow­ing Monday.

She glanced at the papers for another minute or two, collecting her thoughts. Then she began to type. A few moments later, she stopped and stared into the dusk. She remembered how her father used to make omelettes­—the only thing he knew how to cook—on Sunday morn­ings. “Hey, Midge,” he would always say. “Not bad for an old ex-bachelor, huh?”

[68] Several of the lights outside had been shut off as the shops closed. Margo looked out at the graffiti, the boarded-up windows. Maybe her father was right: Pov­erty wasn’t much fun.

Poverty. She shook her head, remembering the last time she’d heard that word, remembering the expression on her mother’s face as she’d pronounced it. The two of them had been sitting in the cool, dark office of her father’s executor, listening to all the complex reasons why her father’s debt-to-equity ratio and lack of estate planning was forcing liquidation—unless some family member were to step in to keep his business afloat.

She wondered about the parents of the two little boys.They must have had high hopes for their children, too , she thought. Now, they’ll never know disappointment. Or happiness. Then her thoughts moved to Prine. And the blood on his shoes.

She got up and turned on more lights. Time to start dinner. Tomorrow, she’d lock herself in her office, get that chapter finished. Work on the Cameroon write-up for Moriarty. And put off making a decision—for one more day, at least. By next week’s meeting with Frock, she promised herself, she’d have made up her mind.

The telephone rang. Automatically, she picked it up.

“Hello,” she said. She listened for a moment. “Oh. Hello, Mother.”

= 12 =

Night came early to the Museum of Natural History. As five o’clock neared, the early spring sun was already setting. Inside, the crowds began to thin. Tourists, schoolchildren, and harried parents streamed down the marble staircases toward the exits. Soon the echoes and shouts and clatter of footsteps in the vaulted halls died away. One by one, the exhibit cases went dark, and as the night wore on, the remaining lights threw crazed shadows across the marble floors.

A lone guard wandered along a hall, making his rounds, swinging a long key chain and humming. It was the beginning of his shift, and he was dressed in the standard Museum-issue blue-and-black guard uniform. Long ago the novelty of the Museum had worn off.

The whole joint gives me the creeps, he thought.Look at that son of a bitch in there. Goddamn native shit. Who the hell would pay to look at this stuff? Half of it’s got curses on it, anyway.

The mask leered at him out of a dark case. He hurried [70] on to the next station, where he turned a key in a box. The box recorded the time: 10:23P.M.As he moved into the next hall, he had the unsettling impression—as he had so often—that his echoing footfalls were being care­fully duplicated by some unseen presence.

He came to the next station and turned the key. The box clicked, and registered 10:34P.M.

It only took four minutes to get to the next station. That gave him six minutes for a toke.

He ducked into a stairwell, closing and locking the door behind him, and peered down toward the darkened basement, where another door opened to an interior courtyard. His hand went for the light switch at the top of the stairs, but then withdrew. No sense calling atten­tion to himself. He gripped the metal handrail tightly as he crept downward. In the basement, he made his way along the wall until he felt a long horizontal handle. He pushed, and frigid night air streamed in. He wedged open the door and lit up a joint, inhaling the bitter smoke with pleasure as he leaned out into the courtyard. A thin light from the deserted cloister beyond gave a pale il­lumination to his movements. The faint hum of passing traffic, muffled by so many intervening walls, passages, and parapets, seemed to come from another planet. He felt, with relief, the warm rush of the cannabis—another long night made bearable. Smoke finished, he flicked the roach into the dark, ran his fingers through his crew cut, stretched.

Halfway up the stairs, he heard the door slam shut below. He stopped, feeling a sudden chill. Had he left the door open? No. Shit, what if someone had seen him toke up? But they couldn’t have smelt the smoke, and in the dark, it would’ve looked just like a cigarette.

There was a strange, rotten odor in the air that had nothing to do with weed. But no light flicked on, no footstep sounded on the metal steps. He started up to­ward the landing above.

Just as he reached it, he sensed a swift movement on [71] the stairs behind him. He spun around, and a hard jerk on his chest shoved him backward against the wall. The last thing he saw were his shadowy entrails rolling and slipping down the stairs. After a moment, he stopped wondering where all that gore had suddenly come from.

= 13 =

Tuesday

Bill Smithback sat in a heavy chair, watching the sharp, angular figure of Lavinia Rickman behind her birchwood veneer desk, reading his rumpled manuscript. Two bright red fingernails tapped on the glossy finish. Smithback knew that the fingernail ditty did not bode well. A very gray Tuesday morning sat outside the windows.

The room was not a typical Museum office. The un­tidy stacks of papers, journals, and books that seemed a fixture in other offices were missing. Instead, the shelves and desk were decorated with knickknacks from around the world: a storyteller doll from New Mexico, a brass Buddha from Tibet, several puppets from Indonesia. The walls were painted light institutional green, and the room smelled of pine air freshener.

Additional curios were arranged on both sides of her desk, as formal and symmetrical as shrubs in a French garden: an agate paperweight, a bone letter opener, a Japanese netsuke. And in the center of the motif hovered Rickman herself, bent primly over the manuscript. The [73] swirled stiff orange hair, Smithback thought, didn’t go well with the green walls.

The tapping speeded, then slowed as Rickman turned the pages. Finally she flicked over the last page, gathered the loose sheets together, and squared them in the precise center of the desk.

“Well,” she said, looking up with a bright smile. “I have a few small suggestions.”

“Oh,” said Smithback.

“This section on Aztec human sacrifice, for example. It’s much too controversial.” She licked her finger dain­tily and found the page. “Here.”

“Yes, but in the exhibition—“

“Mr. Smithback, the exhibition deals with the subjecttastefully . This, on the other hand, is not tasteful. It’s far too graphic.” She zipped a Magic Marker across his work.

“But it’s entirely accurate,” Smithback said, wincing inwardly.

“I am concerned withemphasis , not accuracy. Some­thing can beentirely accurate but have the wrong em­phasis, and thus give the wrong impression. Allow me to remind you that we have a large Hispanic population here in New York.”

“Yes, but how is this going to offend—”

“Moving on, this section on Gilborg simply must go.” She zipped another line across another page.

“But why—?”

She leaned back in her chair. “Mr. Smithback, the Gilborg expedition was a grotesque failure. They were looking for an island that did not exist. One of them, as you are so zealous in pointing out, raped a native wom­an. We were careful to keep all mention of Gilborgout of the exhibition. Now, is it really necessary to document the Museum’s failures?”

“But his collections were superb!” Smithback pro­tested feebly.

“Mr. Smithback, I am not convinced that you [74] understand the nature of this assignment.” There was a long silence. The tapping began again. “Do you really think that the Museum hired you, and ispaying you, to doc­ument failure and controversy?”

“But failure and controversy are part of science, and who’s going to read a book that—”

“There are many corporations that give money to the Museum, corporations that might very well be disturbed by some of this,” Mrs. Rickman interrupted. “And there are volatile ethnic groups out there, ready to attack, that might takestrong exception.”

“But we’re talking about things that happened a hun­dred years ago, while—”

“Mr. Smithback!” Mrs. Rickman had only raised her voice a little, but the effect was startling. A silence fell. “Mr. Smithback, I must tell you quite frankly …” She paused, then stood up briskly and walked around the desk until she was standing directly behind the writer.

“I must tell you,” Mrs. Rickman continued, “that it seems to be taking you longer than I thought to come around to our point of view. You are not writing a book for a commercial publisher. To put it bluntly, we’re looking for the kind of favorable treatment you gave the Boston Aquarium in your previous—ahem—­assignment.” She moved in front of Smithback, perching stiffly on the edge of the desk. “There are certain things we expect, and indeed, that we have aright to expect. They are—” she ticked them off on bony fingers.

“One: No controversy.

“Two: Nothing that might offend ethnic groups.

“Three: Nothing that might harm the Museum’s rep­utation.

“Now, is that so unreasonable?” She lowered her voice and, leaning forward, squeezed Smithback’s hand with her dry one.

“I ... no.” Smithback struggled with an almost over­whelming urge to withdraw his hand.

[75] “Well, then, that’s settled.” She moved behind the desk, and slid the manuscript over to him.

“Now, there’s one small matter we need to discuss.” She enunciated very precisely. “There were a few spots in the manuscript where you quoted some interesting comments by people ‘close to the exhibition,’ but ne­glected to identify the exact sources. Nothing important, you understand, but I’d like a list of those sources—for my files, nothing more.” She smiled expectantly.

Alarms rang in Smithback’s head. “Well,” he replied carefully, “I’d like to help you out, but the ethics of journalism won’t let me.” He shrugged his shoulders. “You know how it is.”

Mrs. Rickman’s smile faded quickly, and she opened her mouth to speak. Just then, to Smithback’s relief, the phone rang. He got up to leave, gathering his manuscript together. As he was closing the door, he heard a sharp intake of breath.

“Notanother !”

The door hissed shut.

= 14 =

D’Agosta just couldn’t get used to the Hall of the Great Apes. All those big grinning chimps, stuffed, hanging out of the fake trees, with their hairy arms and hilarious real­istic dicks and big human hands with real finger­nails. He wondered why it had taken so long for scientists to figure out that man was descended from the apes. Should’ve been obvious the first time they clapped eyes on a chimp. And he’d heard somewhere that chimps were just like humans, violent, excitable, always beating hell out of each other, even murdering and eating each other.Jesus , he thought,there must be some other way to get around the Museum without going through this hall .

“This way,” said the guard, “down this stairway. It’s pretty awful, Lieutenant. I was coming in at—”

“I’ll hear that later,” said D’Agosta. After the kid, D’Agosta was ready for anything. “You say he’s wear­ing a guard’s uniform. You know him?”

“I don’t know, sir. It’s hard to tell.”

The guard pointed down the dim stairs. The stairway [77] opened onto some kind of courtyard. The body lay at the bottom, in shadow. Everything was streaked and splattered in black—the floor, the walls, the overhead light. D’Agosta knew what the black was.

“You,” he said, turning to one of several policemen following him, “get some lights in here. I want the place dusted and swept for fibers pronto. Is theSOCunit on its way? The man’s obviously dead, so keep the ambu­lance people out for a while. I don’t want them messing things up.”

D’Agosta looked down the stairs again. “Jesus H. Christ,” he said, “whose footprints are those? Some jackass walked right through that pool of blood, it looks like. Or maybe our murderer decided to leave us a fat clue.

There was a silence.

“Are those yours?” He turned to the guard. “What’s your name?”

“Norris. Eric Norris. As I was saying, I—”

­“Yes or no?”

“Yes, but—”

“Shut up. Are those the shoes?”

“Yes. See, I was—”

“Take the shoes off. You’re ruining the carpet.”Fucking doorshaker , D’Agosta thought. “Take them to the forensics lab. Tell them to seal ‘em in a crime bag, they’ll know what to do. Wait for me there. No, don’t wait for me there. I’ll call you later. I’ll have a few questions for you. No, take the fucking shoes off right here.” He didn’t want another Prine on his hands. What was it about this Museum, people liked to go around wading in blood? “You’ll have to walk over there in your socks.”

“Yes, sir.”

One of the cops behind D’Agosta snickered.

D’Agosta looked at him. “You think it’s funny? He tracked blood all over the place. It’s not funny.”

D’Agosta moved halfway down the stairwell. The [78] head was lying in a far corner, face down. He couldn’t see it all that well, but he knew that he’d find the top of the skull punched out, the brains floating around some­where in all that gore. God, what a mess a body could be if it wanted to.

A step sounded on the stairway behind him. “SOC,” said a short man, followed by a photographer and several other men in lab coats.

“Finally. I want lights there, there, and there, and wherever else the photographer wants ‘em. I want a pe­rimeter set up, I want it set up five minutesago , I want every speck of lint and grain of sand picked up. I want TraceChem used on everything. I want—well, what else do I want? I want every test known to man, and I want that perimeter observed by everyone, got it? No fuck­-ups this time.”

D’Agosta turned. “Is the Crime Lab team on the premises? And the coroner’s investigator? Or are they out for coffee and croissants?” He patted the breast pocket of his jacket, looking for a cigar. “Put cardboard boxes over those footprints. And you guys, when you’re done, squeegee a trail around the body so we can walk without tracking blood everywhere.”

“Excellent.” D’Agosta heard a low, mellifluous voice behind him.

“Who the hell are you?” he said, turning to see a tall, slender man, wearing a crisp black suit, leaning against the top of the stairwell. Hair so blond it was almost white was brushed straight back above pale blue eyes. “The undertaker?”

“Pendergast,” the man said, stepping down and hold­ing out his hand. The photographer, cradling his equip­ment, pushed past him.

“Well, Pendergast, you better have a good reason to be here, otherwise—”

Pendergast smiled. “Special Agent Pendergast.”

“Oh.FBI? Funny, why aren’t I surprised? Well, how-­do, Pendergast. Why the hell don’t you guys phone [79] ahead? Listen, I got a headless, de-brained stiff down there. Where’re the rest of you, anyway?”

Pendergast withdrew his hand. “There’s just me, I’m afraid.”

“What? Don’t kid me. You guys always travel around in packs.”

The lights popped on, and the gore around them was bathed in brilliance. Everything that previously appeared black was suddenly illuminated, all the various shades of the body’s secret workings made visible. Something D’Agosta suspected was Norris’s breakfast was also vis­ible, lying amidst a wash of body fluids. Involuntarily, D’Agosta’s jaw started working. Then his eye caught a piece of skull with the dead guard’s crew cut still on it, lying a good five feet from the body.

“Oh Jesus,” said D’Agosta, stepping back, and then he lost it. Right in front of theFBIguy, in front ofSOC, in front of the photographer, he blew his own breakfast.I can’t believe it , he thought.The first time in twenty-­two years, and it’s happening at the worst possible mo­ment .

The coroner’s investigator appeared on the stairs, a young woman in a white coat and plastic apron. “Who’s the officer in charge?” she asked, sliding on her gloves.

“I am,” said D’Agosta, wiping his mouth. He looked at Pendergast. “For a few more minutes, anyway. Lieu­tenant D’Agosta.”

“Dr. Collins,” the investigator replied briskly. Followed by an assistant, she walked down to an area near the body that was being squeegeed free of blood. “Photographer,” she said, “I’m turning the body over. Full series, please.”

D’Agosta averted his gaze. “We got work to do, Pen­dergast,” he said authoritatively. He pointed at the vomit. “Don’t clean that up until theSOChas finished with these stairs. Got it?”

Everyone nodded.

“I wanna know ingress and egress as soon as possible. [80] See if you canIDthe body. If it’s a guard, get Ippolito down here. Pendergast, let’s go up to the command post, get coordinated, or liaised, or whatever the hell you call it, and then let’s return when the team is done for a look­see.”

“Capital” said Pendergast.

Capital?thought D’Agosta. The guy sounded deep South. He’d met types like this before, and they were hopeless in New York City.

Pendergast leaned forward and said quietly, “The blood splattered on the wall is rather interesting.”

D’Agosta looked over. “You don’t say.”

“I’d be interested in the ballistics on that blood.”

D’Agosta looked straight into Pendergast’s pale eyes. “Good idea,” he said finally. “Hey, photographer, get a close-up series of the blood on the wall. And you, you—”

“McHenry, sir.”

“I want a ballistic analysis done on that blood. Looks like it was moving fast at a sharp angle. I want the source pinpointed, speed, force, a full report.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I want it on my desk in thirty minutes.”

McHenry looked a little unhappy.

“Okay, Pendergast, any more ideas?”

“No, that was my only one.”

“Let’s go.”

In the temporary command post, everything was in place. D’Agosta always saw to that. Not one piece of paper was loose, not one file was out, not one tape re­corder sitting on a desk. It looked good, and now he was glad that it did. Everyone was busy, the phones were lit up, but things were under control.

Pendergast slipped his lean form into a chair. For a formal-looking guy, he moved like a cat. Briefly, D’Agosta gave him an overview of the investigation. [81] “Okay, Pendergast,” he concluded. “What’s your juris­diction here? Did we fuck up? Are we out?”

Pendergast smiled. “No, not at all. As far as I can tell, I would not have done anything differently myself. You see, Lieutenant, we’ve been in the case from the very beginning, only we didn’t realize it.”

“How so?”

“I’m from the New Orleans field office. We were working on a series of killings down there, some very odd killings. Not to get into specifics, but the victims had the backs of their skulls removed, and the brains extracted. Same modus operandi.”

“No shit. When was this?”

“Several years ago.”

“Severalyears ago? That—”

“Yes. They went unsolved. First it wasATF, because they thought drugs might have been involved, then it wasFBIwhenATFcouldn’t make any progress. But we couldn’t do anything with it, the trail was cold. And then yesterday, I read a wire service report about the double murder here in New York. TheMOis too, ah, too pe­culiar not to make an immediate connection, don’t you think? So I flew up last night. I’m not even officially here. Although I will be tomorrow.”

D’Agosta relaxed. “So you’re from Louisiana. I thought you might be some new boy in the New York office.”

“They’ll be here,” said Pendergast. “When I make my report tonight, they’ll be in on it. But I will be in charge of the case.”

“You? No way, not in New York City.”

Pendergast smiled. “I will be in charge, Lieutenant. I’ve been pursuing this case for years and I am, frankly, interested in it.” The way Pendergast saidinterested sent a strange sensation down D’Agosta’s back. “But don’t worry, Lieutenant, I am ready and willing to work with you, side by side, in perhaps a different way than the New York office might. If you’ll meet me halfway, that [82] is. This isn’t my turf and I’m going to need your help. How about it?”

He stood up and held out his hand.Christ , D’Agosta thought,the boys in the New York office will take him apart in two and a half hours and ship the pieces back to New Orleans .

“Deal,” said D’Agosta, grasping his hand. “I’ll in­troduce you around, starting with the security director, Ippolito. Provided you answer one question. You said theMOof the New Orleans killings was the same. What about the bite marks we found in the brain of the older boy? The claw fragment?”

“From what you told me about the autopsy, Lieuten­ant, theMEwas only speculating about the bite marks,” Pendergast replied. “I’ll be interested to hear the sali­vase results. Is the claw being tested?”

Later, D’Agosta would remember that his question had been only half answered. Now, he simply replied, “It’s being done today.”

Pendergast leaned back in his chair and made a tent of his fingers, his eyes looking off into space. “I’ll have to pay a visit to Dr. Ziewicz when she examines today’s unpleasantness.”

“Say, Pendergast? You aren’t by any chance related to Andy Warhol, are you?”

“I don’t care much for modern art, Lieutenant.”

The crime scene was packed but orderly, everyone mov­ing swiftly and speaking in undertones, as if in deference to the dead man. The morgue crew had arrived but was standing out of the way, patiently observing the pro­ceedings. Pendergast stood with D’Agosta and Ippolito, the Museum’s Security Director.

“Indulge me if you will,” Pendergast was saying to the photographer. “I’d like a shot from here, like this.” Pendergast demonstrated briefly. “And I’d like a series from the top of the stairs, and a sequence coming down.

[83] Take your time, get a nice play of line, shadow, and light going.”

The photographer looked carefully at Pendergast, then moved off.

Pendergast turned to Ippolito. “Here’s a question. Why was the guard—what did you say his name was, Mr. Ippolito, Jolley, Fred Jolley?—down here in the first place? This wasn’t part of his rounds. Correct?”

“That’s right,” Ippolito said. He was standing in a dry spot near the entrance to the courtyard, his face a poisonous green.

D’Agosta shrugged. “Who knows?”

“Indeed,” Pendergast said. He looked out into the courtyard beyond the stairwell, which was small and deep, brick walls rising on three sides. “And he locked the door behind himself, you say. We have to assume he went outside here, or was headed in that direction. Hmm. The Taurid meteor shower was peaking at about that time last night. Perhaps Jolley here is an aspiring astronomer. But I doubt it.” He stood still for a minute, looking around. Then he turned back toward them. “I believe I can tell you why.”

Christ, a real Sherlock Holmes, thought D’Agosta. “He came down the stairwell to indulge a habit of his. Marijuana. This courtyard is an isolated and well­-ventilated spot. A perfect place to, ah, smoke some weed.”

“Marijuana? That’s just a guess.”

“I believe I see the roach,” said Pendergast, pointing into the courtyard. “Just where the door meets the jamb.”

“I can’t see a thing,” said D’Agosta. “Hey, Ed. Check out the base of the door. Right there. What is it?”

“A joint,” said Ed.

“What’s the matter with you guys, can’t find a fuck­ing joint? I told you to pick up every grain of sand, for Chrissake.”

“We haven’t done that grid yet.”

“Right.” He looked at Pendergast.Lucky bastard. Probably wasn’t the guard’s joint anyway .

“Mr. Ippolito,” Pendergast drawled, “is it common for your staff to use illicit drugs while on duty?”

“Absolutely not, but I’m not convinced it was Fred Jolley that—”

Pendergast shut him up with a wave of the hand. “I assume you can account for all these footprints.”

“Those belong to the guard who found the body,” said D’Agosta.

Pendergast bent down. “These completely cover any local evidence that may remain,” he said, frowning. “Really, Mr. Ippolito,” he said, “you should have your men better trained in how to preserve a crime scene.”

Ippolito opened his mouth, then closed it again. D’Agosta suppressed a smirk.

Pendergast was walking carefully back underneath the stairwell, where a large metal door stood partially open. “Orient me, Mr. Ippolito. This door under the stairwell goes where?”

“A hallway.”

“Leading to—?”

“Well, there’s the Secure Area down to the right. But it’s not possible the killer went that way, because …”

“Excuse me for contradicting you, Mr. Ippolito, but I’m sure the killerdid go that way,” Pendergast replied. “Let me guess. Beyond the Secure Area is the Old Base­ment, am I right?”

“Right,” said Ippolito.

“Where the two children were found.”

“Bingo,” said D’Agosta.

“This Secure Area sounds interesting, Mr. Ippolito. Shall we take a stroll?”

Beyond the rusty metal door, a row of light bulbs stretched down a long basement corridor. The floor was covered in shabby linoleum, and the walls were hung with murals of Southwestern Pueblo Indians grinding corn, weaving, and stalking deer.

[85] “Lovely,” said Pendergast. “A shame they’re down here. They look like early Fremont Ellis.”

“They used to hang in the Hall of the Southwest,” said Ippolito. “It closed in the twenties, I think.”

“Ah!” said Pendergast, scrutinizing one of the mu­rals. “Itis Ellis. My heavens, these are lovely. Look at the light on that adobe facade.”

“So,” said Ippolito. “How do you know?”

“Why,” said Pendergast, “anyone who knows Ellis would recognize these.”

“I mean, how do you know the killer came through here?”

“I suppose I was guessing,” said Pendergast, exam­ining the next painting. “You see, when someone says ‘it’s impossible,’ I have this very bad habit, I can’t help myself, I immediately contradict that person in the most positive terms possible. A very bad habit, but one that I find hard to break. But of course, now wedo know the killer came through here.”

“How?” Ippolito seemed confused.

“Look at this marvelous rendition of old Santa Fe. Have you ever been to Santa Fe?”

There was a momentary silence. “Er, no,” said Ippol­ito.

“There is a mountain range behind the town, called the Sierra de Sangre de Cristo. It means the ‘Blood of Christ Mountains’ in Spanish.”

“So?”

“Well the mountainsdo look quite red in the setting sun, but not, I dare say,that red. That’s real blood, and it’s fresh. A shame, really, it’s ruined the painting.”

“Holy shit,” said D’Agosta. “Look at that.”

A broad streak of blood was smeared waist-high across the painting.

“You know, murder is a messy thing. We should find traces of blood all along this corridor. Lieutenant, we’ll need the crime lab people in here. I think we have your egress, at any rate.” He paused. “Let’s finish our little [86] tour, and then call them in. I’d like to go ahead and look for evidence, if you don’t mind.”

“Be my guest,” said D’Agosta.

“Careful where you walk, Mr. Ippolito, we’ll be ask­ing them to check the floors as well as the walls.” They came to a locked door markedRESTRICTED. “This is the Secure Area,” said Ippolito.

“I see,” said Pendergast. “And what exactly is the point of this Secure Area, Mr. Ippolito? Is the rest of the Museum insecure?”

“Not at all,” the Security Director replied quickly. “The Secure Area is for storing especially rare and val­uable objects. This is the best-protected museum in the country. We’ve recently installed a system of sliding metal doors throughout the Museum. They’re all linked to our computer system, and in the event of a burglary we can seal off the Museum in sections, just like the watertight compartments on a—”

“I get the picture, Mr. Ippolito, thank you very much,” Pendergast said. “Interesting. An old copper-­sheathed door,” he said, examining it closely.

D’Agosta saw that the copper covering was riddled with shallow dents.

“Fresh dents, by the look of them,” Pendergast said. “Now, what do you make of this?” He pointed down­ward.

“Jesus H. Christ,” breathed D’Agosta, looking at the lower section of the door. The wooden door frame was scored and gouged into a welter of fresh splinters, as if something with claws had been scrabbling at it.

Pendergast stepped back. “I want the entire door an­alyzed, if you please, Lieutenant. And now to see what’s inside. Mr. Ippolito, if you would be so kind as to open the door without getting your hands all over it?”

“I’m not supposed to let anyone in there without clearance.”

D’Agosta looked at him in disbelief. “You mean you want us to get a damn warrant?”

[87] “Oh, no, no, it’s just that—”

“He forgot the key,” said Pendergast. “We’ll wait.”

“I’ll be right back,” said Ippolito, and his hurried footsteps echoed down the corridor. When he was out of hearing D’Agosta turned to Pendergast. “I hate to say it, Pendergast, but I like the way you work. That was pretty slick, the painting, and the way you handled Ippol­ito. Good luck with the New York boys.”

Pendergast looked amused. “Thank you. The feeling is mutual. I’m glad I am working with you, Lieutenant, and not one of these hard-boiled fellows. Judging from what happened back there, you still have a heart. You’re still a normal human being.”

D’Agosta laughed. “Naw, it wasn’t that. It was the fucking scrambled eggs with ham and cheese and ketchup I had for breakfast. And that crew cut. I hate crew cuts.”

= 15 =

The herbarium door was shut, as usual, despite the sign that readDO NOT CLOSE THIS DOOR. Margo knocked.Come on, Smith, I know you’re in there . She knocked again, louder, and heard a querulous voice: “All right, hold your horses! I’m coming!”

The door opened and Bailey Smith, the old Curatorial Assistant of the herbarium, sat back down at his desk with an enormous sigh of irritation and began shuffling through his mail.

Margo stepped forward resolutely. Bailey Smith seemed to consider his job a gross imposition. And when at last he got around to things, it was hard to shut him up. Normally Margo would have merely sent down a requisition slip and avoided the ordeal. But she needed to examine the Kiribitu plant specimens as soon as pos­sible for her next dissertation chapter. Moriarty’s write-­up was still unfinished, and she’d been hearing rumors of another horrible killing that might shut the Museum down for the rest of the day.

[89] Bailey Smith hummed, ignoring her. Though he was nearly eighty, Margo suspected he only feigned deafness to annoy people.

“Mr. Smith!” she called out. “I need these speci­mens, please.” She pushed a list over the counter top. “Right away, if possible.”

Smith grunted, rose from his chair, and slowly picked up the list, scanning it disapprovingly. “May take awhile to locate, you know. How about tomorrow morning?”

“Please, Mr. Smith. I’ve heard they might close down the Museum at any moment. I really need these speci­mens.”

Scenting the chance to gossip, the old man became friendlier. “Terrible business,” he said, shaking his head. “In my forty-two years here I’ve never seen any­thing like it. But I can’t say I’m surprised,” he added, with a significant nod.

Margo didn’t want to get Smith going. She said noth­ing.

“But not the first, from what I hear. And not the last, either.” He turned with the list, holding it in front of his nose. “What’s this?Muhlenbergia dunbarii? We don’t have any of that.”

Then Margo heard a voice behind her.

“Not the first?”

It was Gregory Kawakita, the young Assistant Curator who had accompanied her to the staff lounge the pre­vious morning. Margo had read the Museum’s bio of Kawakita: born to wealthy parents, orphaned young, he had left his native Yokohama and grown up with rela­tives in England. After studying at Magdalene College, Oxford, he moved toM.I.T.for graduate work, then on to the Museum and an assistant curatorship. He was Frock’s most brilliant protégé, which made Margo oc­casionally resentful. To her, Kawakita didn’t seem the kind of scientist who’d wish to be allied with Frock. Kawakita had an instinctual sense for Museum politics, and Frock was controversial, an iconoclast. But despite [90] his self-absorption, Kawakita was undeniably brilliant, and he was working with Frock on a model of genetic mutation that no one but the two of them seemed to fully understand. With Frock’s guidance, Kawakita was de­veloping the Extrapolator, a program that could compare and combine genetic codes of different species. When they ran their data through the Museum’s powerful com­puter, the system’s throughput was reduced to such a degree that people joked it was in “hand calculator mode.”

“Not the first what?” asked Smith, giving Kawakita an unwelcoming stare.

Margo flashed a warning glance at Kawakita, but he continued. “You said something about this murder not being the first.”

“Greg, did youhave to?” Margo groaned sotto voce. “I’ll never get my plant specimens now.”

“I’m not surprised by any of this,” Smith continued. “Now, I’m not a superstitious man,” he said, leaning on the counter, “but this isn’t the first time some crea­ture has prowled the halls of the Museum. At least that’s what people say. Not that I believe a word of it, mind you.”

“Creature?” asked Kawakita.

Margo gave Kawakita a light kick in the shins.

“I’m only repeating what everyone’s talking about, Dr. Kawakita. I don’t believe in starting false rumors.”

“Of course not,” said Kawakita, winking at Margo. Smith fixed Kawakita with a stern glare. “They say it’s been around a long time. Living down in the base­ment, eating rats and mice and cockroaches. Have you noticed there aren’t any rats or mice loose in the Mu­seum? Thereshould be, God knows they’re all over the rest of New York. But not here. Curious, don’t you think?”

“I hadn’t noticed,” said Kawakita. “I’ll make a spe­cial effort to check that out.”

“Then there was a researcher here who was breeding [91] cats for some experiment,” Smith continued. “Sloane I think his name was, Doctor Sloane, in the Animal Be­havior Department. One day a dozen of his cats escaped. And you know what? They were never seen again. Van­ished. Now that’s kind of funny. You’d expect one or two at least to show up.”

“Maybe they left because there weren’t any mice to eat,” said Kawakita.

Smith ignored him. “Some say it hatched from one of those crates of dinosaur eggs brought back from Si­beria.”

“I see,” said Kawakita, trying to suppress a grin. “Dinosaurs loose in the Museum.”

Smith shrugged. “I only say what I hear. Others think it was something brought back from one of the graves they’ve robbed over the years. Some artifact with a curse. You know, like the King Tut curse. And if you ask me, those fellows deserve what they get. I don’t care what they call it, archaeology, anthropology, or hoodoo­ology, it’s just plain old grave robbing to me. You don’t see them digging uptheir grandmother’s graves, but they sure don’t hesitate to dig up somebody else’s and take all the goodies. Am I right?”

“Absolutely,” said Kawakita. “But what was that you said about these murders not being the first?”

Smith looked at them conspiratorially. “Well, if you tell anybody I told you this I’ll deny it, but about five years back, something strange happened.” He paused for a minute, as if to gauge the effect his story was having. “There was this curator, Morrissey, or Montana, or something. He was involved with that disastrous Ama­zon expedition. You know the one I mean, where every­one was killed. Anyway, one day he simply vanished. Nobody ever heard from him again. So people started to whisper about it. Apparently, a guard was overheard say­ing that his body had been found in the basement, hor­ribly mutilated.”

[92] “I see,” Kawakita said. “And you think the Museum Beast did it?”

“I don’t think anything,” Smith responded quickly. “I’m just telling you what I’ve heard, that’s all. I’ve heard a lot of things from a lot of people, I can tell you.”

“So has anyone seen this, ah, creature?” Kawakita asked, unsuccessfully stifling a smile.

“Why, yessir. Couple of people, in fact. You know old Carl Conover in the metal shop? Three years ago now he says he saw it, came in early to get some work done and saw it slouching around a corner in the base­ment. Saw it right there, plain as day.”

“Really?” said Kawakita. “What’d it look like?”

“Well—” Smith began, then stopped. Even he finally noticed Kawakita’s amusement. The old man’s expres­sion changed. “I expect, Dr. Kawakita, that it looked a bit like Mr. Jim Beam,” he said.

Kawakita was puzzled. “Beam? I don’t believe I know him—”

Bailey Smith suddenly roared with laughter, and Margo couldn’t help grinning herself. “George,” she said, “I think he meant that Conover was drunk.”

“I see,” said Kawakita stiffly. “Of course.”

All his good humor had vanished.Doesn’t like having the joke turned on him , Margo thought.He can dish it out, but he can’t take it .

“Well, anyway,” said Kawakita briskly, “I need some specimens.”

“Now, wait just a minute!” Margo protested as Ka­wakita pushed his own list onto the counter. The old man eyed it and peered at the scientist.

“Week after next okay?” he asked.

= 16 =

Several floors above, Lieutenant D’Agosta sat in a huge leather sofa in the curator’s study. He smacked his lips contentedly, propped one chubby leg upon the knee of the other, and looked around. Pendergast, absorbed in a book of lithographs, was reclining in an armchair behind a desk. Above his head, in a gold rococo frame, hung a massive Audubon painting depicting the mating ritual of the snowy egret. Oak paneling with a century’s patina ran along the walls above a beadboard wainscot. Deli­cate gilded lights of hand-blown glass hung just below the pressed tin ceiling. A large fireplace of elaborately carved Dolomite limestone dominated one corner of the room.Nice place , D’Agosta thought.Old money. Old New York. It has class. Not the place to smoke a two-­bit cigar . He lit up.

“It’s come and gone two-thirty, Pendergast,” he said, exhaling blue smoke. “Where the hell do you think Wright is?”

[94] Pendergast shrugged. “Trying to intimidate us,” he said, turning another page.

D’Agosta looked at theFBIagent for a minute.

“You know these Museum big shots, they think they can keep anybody waiting,” he said finally, watching for a reaction. “Wright and his cronies have been treat­ing us like second-class citizens since yesterday morn­ing.

Pendergast turned another page. “I had no idea the Museum had a complete collection of Piranesi’s Forum sketches,” he murmured.

D’Agosta snorted to himself.This should be interest­ing , he thought.

Over lunch, he’d made a few surreptitious calls to some friends in the Bureau. Turned out they’d not only heard of Pendergast, but they’d heard several rumors about him. Graduated with honors from some English university—probably true. A special forces officer who’d been captured in Vietnam and had later walked out of the jungle, the only survivor of a Cambodian death camp—D’Agosta wasn’t sure aboutthat one. But he was revising his opinion nevertheless.

Now the massive door opened silently and Wright came in, the Security Director at his heels. Abruptly, Wright sat down opposite theFBIagent. “You’re Pen­dergast, I suppose,” the Director sighed. “Let’s get this over with.”

D’Agosta sat back to watch the fun.

There was a long silence while Pendergast turned pages. Wright shifted. “If you’re busy,” he said irrita­bly, “We can come back another time.”

Pendergast’s face was invisible behind the large book. “No,” he said finally. “Now is a good time.” Another page was leisurely turned. Then another.

D’Agosta watched with amusement as the Director reddened.

“The Security Director isn’t needed for this meet­ing,” came the voice from behind the book.

[95] “Mr. Ippolito is part of the investigation—”

The agent’s eyes suddenly appeared over the spine of the book. “I’m in charge of the investigation, Dr. Wright,” Pendergast said quietly. “Now, if Mr. Ippolito would be so kind—?”

Ippolito glanced nervously at Wright, who flicked his hand in dismissal.

“Look, Mr. Pendergast,” Wright began as the door closed. “I’ve got a Museum that needs running, and I don’t have much time. I hope this can be brief.”

Pendergast laid the open book carefully on the desk in front of him.

“I’ve often thought,” he said slowly, “that this early classicist stuff of Piranesi’s was his best. Do you agree?” Wright looked utterly astonished. “I fail to see,” he stammered, “what that has to do with—”

“His later work was interesting, of course, but too fantastical for my taste,” Pendergast replied.

“Actually,” said the Director in his best lecture voice, “I’ve always thought—”

The book slammed shut like a shot. “Actually, Dr. Wright,” Pendergast said tightly, his courtly manner gone, “it’s time to forget what you’vealways thought. We’re going to play a little game here. I’m going to talk, and y’all are going to listen. Understood?”

Wright sat speechless. Then his face mottled in anger. “Mr. Pendergast, I will not be spoken to in that man­ner—”

Pendergast cut him off. “In case you haven’t read the headlines, Dr. Wright, there have been three grisly mur­ders in this Museum in the last forty-eight hours.Three . The press is speculating that some kind of ferocious beast is responsible. Museum attendance is down fifty percent since the weekend. Your staff isvery upset, to put it mildly. Have you bothered taking a stroll through your Museum today, Dr. Wright? You might find it ed­ifying. The feeling of dread is almost palpable. Most [96] people, if they leave their offices at all, travel in twos and threes. The maintenance staff is finding any reasons it can to avoid the Old Basement. Yet you prefer to act as if nothing is wrong. Believe me, Dr. Wright, some­thing is extremely wrong.”

Pendergast leaned forward, and slowly folded his arms on top of the book. There was something so menacing in his deliberateness, so cold in his pale eyes, that the Director sat back involuntarily. D’Agosta unconsciously held his breath. Then Pendergast continued.

“Now we can handle this one of three ways,” he said. “Your way, my way, or the Bureau’s way. So far, your way has been far too much in evidence. I understand that the police investigation has been subtly obstructed. Phone calls are returned late, if at all. Staff are busy or not to be found. Those whoare available—such as Mr. Ippolito—have not proven particularly useful. People are late to appointments. Why, it’s enough to make one sus­picious. As of now, your way is no longer acceptable.”

Pendergast waited for a response. There was none, and he went on.

“Ordinarily, the Bureau’s way would be to close the Museum, suspend operations, cancel exhibitions. Very bad publicity, I assure you. Very expensive, to the tax­payers and to you. Butmy way is a bit more hospitable. All other things being equal, the Museum can remain open. Still, there will be certain conditions. Number one,” he said, “I want you to assure complete cooper­ation of Museum personnel. We will need to speak to you and other senior staff members from time to time, and I want total compliance. I will also need a list of the entire staff. We want to interview everyone who works in, or has had any reason to be in, the vicinity of the murders. There will be no exceptions. I would ap­preciate your making sure of this personally. We’ll be setting up a schedule, andeveryone is to show up on time.”

[97] “But there are twenty-five hundred employees—” be­gan Wright.

“Number two,” Pendergast continued. “Starting to­morrow, we’re going to be limiting employee access to the Museum, until such time as this investigation is con­cluded. The curfew is to be for the safety of the staff. At least, that is what you will tell them.”

“But there’s vital research going on here that—”

“Number three—” Pendergast casually pointed three fingers, derringer-like, at Wright “—from time to time we may need to close the Museum, either fully or in part. In some instances, only visitors will be denied en­try; in others, the Museum will be closed to staff as well. Notice may be short. Your cooperation will be ex­pected.”

Wright’s fury mounted. “This Museum is closed only three days a year: Christmas, New Year’s, and Thanks­giving,” he said. “This is unprecedented. It will look terrible.” He gave Pendergast a long, appraising look. “Besides, I’m not convinced you have the authority to do that. I think we should—” He stopped. Pendergast had picked up the telephone.

“What’s that for?” Wright demanded.

“Dr. Wright, this is growing tiresome. Perhaps we should discuss this with the Attorney General.”

Pendergast started to dial.

“Just a moment,” said Wright. “Surely we can dis­cuss this without involving other people.”

“That’s up to you,” said Pendergast as he finished dialing.

“For Heaven’s sake, put down that phone,” Wright said angrily. “Of course, we’ll cooperate fully—within reason.”

“Very good,” Pendergast said. “And if in the future you start to feel that anything is unreasonable, we can always do this again.” He replaced the receiver gently.

“If I’m going to cooperate,” Wright continued, “I think I’ve a right to be informed about just what’s been [98] done since this latest atrocity. As far as I can see, you’ve made precious little progress.”

“Certainly, Doctor,” Pendergast said. He looked at papers on the desk. “According to your time clocks, the most recent victim, Jolley, met his demise shortly after ten-thirty last night,” he said. “The autopsy should con­firm this. He was, as you know, lacerated in a fashion similar to the previous victims. He was killed while mak­ing his rounds, although the stairwell where he was found wasn’t part of his normal route. He may have been investigating a suspicious noise or something of that na­ture. He may have just stopped for some reefer. A re­cently smoked marijuana cigarette was found near the archway directly outside the stairwell exit. We will, nat­urally, be testing the body for drug use.”

“God, that’s all we need,” said Wright. “But haven’t you found anyuseful clues? What about this wild animal business? You—”

Pendergast held his palm up and waited for silence. “I would prefer not to speculate until we discuss the available evidence with experts. Some of these experts may be from among your own staff. For the record, we’ve found no signs as yet that any kind of animal had been in the vicinity.

“The body was found lying at the bottom of the stair­well, although it was clear that the attack occurred near the top, as blood and viscera were found along the length of the stairs. He either rolled or was dragged to the bot­tom. But don’t take my word for it, Dr. Wright,” Pen­dergast said, picking up a manila envelope from the desk, “see for yourself.” He pulled out a glossy pho­tograph and laid it carefully on the tabletop.

“Oh, my God,” Wright said, staring at the photo­graph. “Heaven help us.”

“The right-hand wall of the stairwell was covered with splattered blood,” Pendergast said. “Here’s a pho­tograph.”

[99] He handed it to Wright, who slid it quickly on top of the first.

“It’s a simple matter to do a ballistics analysis on splattered blood,” Pendergast went on. “In this case, the evidence is consistent with a massive blow directed downward, instantaneously disemboweling the victim.”

Pendergast replaced the photographs and checked his watch. “Lieutenant D’Agosta will be checking in with you to make sure that everything is proceeding along the lines we’ve discussed,” he said. “One last question, Doctor. Which of your curators knows the most about the anthropology collections here?”

Dr. Wright seemed not to have heard. Finally he said, “Dr. Frock,” in a barely audible voice.

“Very good,” said Pendergast. “Oh, and Doctor—I told you earlier that the Museum can remain open,all other things being equal . But if anybody else dies inside these walls, the Museum will have to be shut down im­mediately. The matter will be out of my hands. Under­stood?”

After a long moment, Wright nodded.

“Excellent,” Pendergast replied. “I’m very aware, Doctor, that yourSuperstition exhibition is scheduled to open this coming weekend, and that you have a large preview planned for Friday evening. I’d like to see your opening proceed unvexed, but everything will depend on what we discover in the next twenty-four hours. Pru­dence may require us to delay the opening party.”

Wright’s left eyelid began to twitch. “That’s quite impossible. Our entire marketing campaign would be de­railed. The publicity would be devastating.”

“We shall see,” Pendergast replied. “Now, unless there’s anything else, I don’t think we need keep you any longer.”

Wright, his face drained of color, stood up and, with­out a word, walked stiffly out of the room.

D’Agosta grinned as the door closed. “Softened up that bastard nicely,” he said.

[100] “What’s that again, Lieutenant?” Pendergast asked, leaning back in the leather chair and picking up the book with renewed enthusiasm.

“Come on, Pendergast,” D’Agosta said, looking cagily at theFBIagent. “I guess you can drop the genteel act when it suits you.”

Pendergast blinked innocently at D’Agosta. “I’m sorry, Lieutenant. I apologize for any unseemly behavior. It’s simply that I can’t stand pompous, bureaucratic individuals. I’m afraid I can become quite short with them.” He raised the book. “It’s a bad habit, but very hard to break.”

= 17 =

The laboratory looked out over the East River and across to the warehouses and decaying industrial buildings of Long Island City. Lewis Turow stood in the window and watched an enormous barge, piled with garbage and surrounded by countless seagulls, being pushed out to sea.Probably one minute’s worth of New York City garbage , he thought.

Turow turned away from the window and sighed. He hated New York, but one had to make choices. The choice for him was enduring the city and working in one of the best genetic labs in the country, or working in some halfassed facility in a nice rural spot somewhere. So far he’d chosen the city, but his patience was running out.

He heard a low beeping, then the soft hiss of a miniprinter. The results were coming through. Another soft beep indicated the print job was finished. The threemillion-dollar Omega-9 Parallel Processing Computer, which took up a series of large gray boxes along one wall, was now completely silent. Only a few lights [102] indicated that anything was happening. It was a special, hardwired model designed for sequencingDNAand mapping genes. Turow had come to the lab six months before specifically because of this machine.

He fetched the paper out of the bin and scanned it. The first page was a summary of the results, followed by a sequence of nucleic acids found in the sample. Next to those were columns of letters that identified primer sequences and mapped genes from the target group.

The target group, in this case, was unusual: big cats. They had asked for gene matches with Asiatic tiger, jaguar, leopard, bobcat. Turow had thrown in the cheetah, since its genetics were so well known. The outgroup chosen was, as usual,Homo sapiens , a control to check that the genetic matching process had been accurate and the sample sound.

He scanned the summary.

Run 3349A5 990

SAMPLE: NYC Crime Lab LA-33

SUMMARY

TARGET GROUP

                                               % matches           degree of confidence

Panthera leo                        5.5                          4%

Panthera onca                    7.1                          5%

Felis lynx                             4.0                          3%

Felis rufa                              5.2                          4%

Acinonyx jubatus               6.6                          4%

OUTGROUP CONTROL

Homo sapiens                    45.2                       33%

Well, this is complete bullshit, thought Turow. The sample matched the outgroup a lot more than it matched the target group—the opposite of what should have [103] happened. Only a 4 percent chance that the genetic material was from a big cat, but a 33 percent chance it was from a human being.

Thirty-three percent. Still low, but within the realm of possibility.

So that meant trying GenLab for a match. GenLab was an enormous internationalDNAdatabase—two hundred gigs and growing—that containedDNAsequences, primers, and mapped genes for thousands of organisms, from theEscherichia coli bacterium toHomo sapiens . He would run the data against the GenLab database, and see just what thisDNAwas from. Something close toHomo sapiens , it looked like. Not high enough to be an ape, but maybe something like a lemur.

Turow’s curiosity was piqued. Till now, he didn’t even know that his laboratory did work for the police department.What the hell made them think this sample came from a big cat? he wondered.

The results ran to a hefty eighty pages. TheDNAsequencer printed out the identified nucleotides in columnar format, indicating species, identified genes, and unidentified sequences. Turow knew that most of the sequences would be unidentified, since the only organism with a complete genetic map wasE. coli .

C-G                                                      G-C        Unidentified

G-C                                                       G-C        *

G-C        Homo sapiens                     T-A        *

C-G                                                       T-A        *

A-T        A-1 allele                              T-A        *

T-A        marker                                  T-A        *

C-G                                                       G-C        *

A-T        Al                                           C-G        *

A-T        Polymorphism                   C-G        *

A-T        begin                                     C-G        *

A-T        *                                            T-A        *

G-C        *                                            G-C        *

T-A        *                                            T-A        *

G-C        *                                             T-A        *

T-A        -                              

A-T        -

T-A        -

G-C        -

C-G        -

C-G        A1 Poly end

[104] Turow glanced over the figures, then carried the paper over to his desk. With a few keystrokes on hisSPARC-station 10, Turow could access information from thousands of databases. If the Omega-9 did not have the information he sought, it would automatically dial into the Internet and find a computer that did.

Scanning the printout more closely, Turow frowned.It must be a degraded sample , he thought.Too much unidentifiedDNA.

A-T        Unidentified        A-T        Hermdactylus

A-T        -                              T-A        turcicus

A-T        -                              C-G        cont’d

A-T        -                              T-A        *

A-T                                        C-G        *

A-T        -                              T-A        *

T-A        -                              G-C        *

G-C        -                              G-C        *

G-C        -                              G-C        *

A-T        *Hemidactylus   G-C        *

T-A        turcicus                G-C        *

C-G        *                             G-C        *

G-C        *                             G-C        *

G-C        -                              G-C        *

T-A        *                             G-C        *

C-G        *                             G-C        *

A-T        *                             G-C        *

[105] He stopped flipping the pages. Here was something truly odd: the program had identified a large chunk ofDNAas belonging to an animal namedHemidactylus turcicus .

Now what the hell is that?thought Turow. The Biological Nomenclature Database told him:

COMMON NAME: TURKISH GECKO

What?thought Turow. He typed,EXPAND.

HEMIDACTYLUS TURCICUS: TURKISH GECKO.

ORIGINAL RANGE: NORTHERN AFRICA

PRESENT BIOLOGICAL RANGE: FLORIDA, BRAZIL, ASIA MINOR, NORTHERN AFRICA.

MEDIUM-SIZE LIZARD OF THE GECKO FAMILY, GEKKONIDAE, ARBOREAL, NOCTURAL, LACKING MOVEABLE EYELIDS

Turow flicked out of the database while the information was still scrolling by. It was pure nonsense, obviously. LizardDNAand humanDNAin the same sample? But this wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. You couldn’t blame the computer, really. It was an inexact procedure, and only the smallest fractions of theDNAsequences of any given organism were known.

He scanned down the printed list. Less than 50 percent of the matches were human—a very low proportion, assuming the subject was human, but not out of the question in a degraded sample. And there was always the [106] possibility of contamination. A stray cell or two could ruin an entire run. This last possibility was looking more and more likely to Turow.Well, what can you expect from theNYPD?They couldn’t even get rid of the guy who sold crack openly on the corner across from his apartment building.

He continued his scan.Wait , he thought,here’s another long sequence: Tarentola mauritanica. He punched up the database, entered the name. The screen read:

TARENTOLA MAURITANICA: WALL GECKO

Give me a break, Turow thought.This is some kind of joke . He glanced at the calendar: April first was Saturday.

He started to laugh. It was a very good joke. A very, very good joke. He didn’t think old Buchholtz had it in him. Well, he had a sense of humor, too. He started his report.

Sample LA-33

Summary: Sample conclusively identified as

Homo Gekkopiens, common name Gecko-man ...

When he finished the report he sent it upstairs immediately. Then he went out for coffee, still chuckling. He was proud of how he’d handled it. He wondered where in the world Buchholtz got his gecko samples from.Probably sold them in pet stores . He could see Buchholtz blending up sample cells from two or three geckos in the ultrablender with a few drops of his own blood.Let’s see what our new man Turow makes of this, he’d probably been thinking . Turow, returning with the coffee, had to laugh out loud. He found Buchholtz waiting for him in the lab, only Buchholtz wasn’t laughing.

= 18 =

Wednesday

Frock sat in his wheelchair, dabbing his forehead with a Gucci handkerchief. “Sit down, please,” he said to Margo. “Thank you for coming so promptly. It’s dreadful, just dreadful.”

“The poor guard,” she replied. Nobody in the Museum was talking about anything else.

“Guard?” Frock looked up. “Oh yes, quite a tragedy. No, I mean this.” He held up a memorandum.

“All sorts of new rules,” said Frock. “Very inconvenient. Effective today, staff are only allowed in the building between ten and five. No working late or on Sundays. There will be guards stationed in each department. You’ll be expected to sign in and out of Anthropology each day. They are asking everybody to carryIDs at all times. Nobody will be allowed to enter or leave the Museum without one.”

He continued reading. “Let’s see, what else ... ah, yes. Try as much as possible to keep to your assigned section. And I’m supposed to tell you not to go into [108] isolated areas of the Museum alone. If you need to go somewhere, go with someone. The police will be interviewing everyone who works in the Old Basement. Yours is scheduled for early next week. And various sections of the Museum are being posted as off-limits.” He pushed the memo across the desk.

Margo saw a floor plan attached, the off-limits areas shaded in red. “Don’t worry,” Frock continued. “I note your office is just outside the area.”

Lovely, thought Margo.Just outside where the murderer is probably lurking . “This seems like a complicated arrangement, Professor Frock. Why didn’t they just close the whole Museum?”

“No doubt they tried, my dear. I’m sure Winston talked them out of it. IfSuperstitiondoesn’t open on schedule, the Museum will be in deep trouble.” Frock held out his hand for the memo. “Shall we consider this discussed? There are other things I wish to talk to you about.”

Margo nodded.The Museum will be in deep trouble . It seemed to her that it already was. Her office mate, along with half of the Museum staff, had called in sick that morning. Those who did show up were spending most of their time at the coffee machines or photocopiers, trading rumors and staying in groups. If that wasn’t bad enough, the Museum’s exhibit halls were nearly empty. The vacationing families, school groups, shouting children—the normal visitors—were few and far between. Now the Museum attracted mostly ghoulish rubberneckers.

“I was curious whether you’d obtained any of the plants for your chapter on the Kiribitu yet,” Frock continued. “I thought it might be a useful exercise for both of us to run them through the Extrapolator.”

The telephone rang. “Blast,” Frock said, picking up the receiver. “Yes?” he demanded.

There was a long silence. “Is this necessary?” Frock asked. Then he paused. “If you insist,” he concluded, [109] dropping the phone into its cradle and heaving a great sigh.

“The authorities want me down in the basement, Heaven knows why. Somebody named Pendergast. Would you mind wheeling me down? We can chat along the way.”

In the elevator, Margo continued. “I was able to get a few specimens from the herbarium, though not as many as I’d wanted. But I don’t understand. You’re suggesting we run them through theG.S.E.?”

“Correct,” Frock replied. “Depending on the condition of the plants, of course. Is there printable material?”

G.S.E. stood for Genetic Sequence Extrapolator, the program being developed by Kawakita and Frock for analyzing genetic “prints.”

“The plants are in good condition, for the most part,” Margo admitted. “But, Dr. Frock, I don’t see what use they could be to the Extrapolator.”Am I just jealous of Kawakita? She wondered to herself.Is that why I’m resisting?

“My dear Margo, your situation is tailor-made!” Frock exclaimed, using her first name in his excitement. “You can’t replay evolution. But you cansimulate it with computers. Perhaps these plants are allied genetically, along the same lines as the Kiribitu shamans have developed for their own classification. Wouldn’t that make an interesting sidebar for your dissertation?”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Margo said.

“We’re beta-testing the program now, and this is exactly the kind of scenario we need,” Frock continued eagerly. “Why don’t you talk to Kawakita about working together?”

Margo nodded. Privately, she thought that Kawakita didn’t seem like the type who wanted to share his spotlight—or even his research—with anybody.

The elevator door opened onto a checkpoint manned by two police officers armed with shotguns. “Are you Dr. Frock?” one asked.

[110] “Yes,” Frock replied irritably.

“Come with us, please.”

Margo wheeled Frock through several intersections, arriving at last at a second checkpoint. Behind the barricade stood two more policemen and a tall, thin man in a somber black suit, blond white hair combed severely back from his forehead. As the policemen moved the barricade, he stepped forward.

“You must be Dr. Frock,” he said, extending his hand. “Thank you for coming down. As I told you, I’m expecting another visitor, so I wasn’t able to come by your office myself. Had I known you were—” he indicated the wheelchair with a nod, “—I would never have asked. Special Agent Pendergast.” He held out his hand.Interesting accent , thought Margo.Alabama? This guy doesn’t look anything like anFBIagent.

“Quite all right,” said Frock, mollified by Pendergast’s courtesy. “This is my assistant, Miss Green.” Pendergast’s hand felt cool in Margo’s grasp.

“It’s an honor to meet such a distinguished scientist as yourself,” Pendergast continued. “I hope time will permit me to read your latest book.”

“Thank you.” Frock nodded.

“In it, do you apply the ‘Gambler’s Ruin’ scenario to your theory of evolution? I always thought that backed up your hypothesis rather well, especially if you assume most genera start out close to the absorbing boundary.”

Frock sat up in his wheelchair. “Well, ah, I was planning to make certain references to that in my next book.” He seemed at a loss for words.

Pendergast nodded to the officers, who readjusted the barrier. “I need your help, Dr. Frock,” he said in a lower tone.

“Certainly,” Frock said amiably. Margo was amazed at how quickly Pendergast had won Frock’s cooperation.

“I must ask, first of all, that this discussion be kept among ourselves for the time being,” said Pendergast. “May I have your assurance? And that of Ms. Green?”

[111] “Of course,” said Frock. Margo nodded.

Pendergast motioned to one of the officers, who brought forward a large plastic bag markedEVIDENCE. From it he removed a small, dark object, which he handed to Frock.

“What you’re holding,” he said, “is the latex cast of a claw found embedded in one of the children that were murdered last weekend.”

Margo leaned forward for a closer look. It was about an inch long, perhaps a little less, curved and jagged.

“A claw?” Frock said, bringing the object close to his face and examining it. “Very unusual. But I’d guess it’s a fake.”

Pendergast smiled. “We haven’t been able to identify its source, Doctor. But I’m not sure it’s a fake. In the root canal of the claw we found some matter, which is now being sequenced forDNA. The results are still ambiguous, and our tests are continuing.”

Frock raised his eyebrows. “Interesting.”

“Now this,” said Pendergast, reaching into the bag and withdrawing a much larger object, “is a reconstruction of the instrument that raked the same child.” He handed it to Frock.

Margo looked at the cast with disgust. At one end, the latex was mottled and uneven, but at the other, details were clear and well-defined. It ended in three hooked claws: a large central claw, and two shorter talons on either side.

“Good heavens!” said Frock. “This looks saurian.”

“Saurian?” asked Pendergast dubiously.

“Dino-saurian,” said Frock. “Typical ornithischian forelimb, I should say, with one difference. Look here. The central digital process is thickened enormously, while the talons themselves are undersized.”

Pendergast raised his eyebrows in mild surprise. “Well, sir,” he said slowly, “we’d been leaning toward the big cats, or some other mammalian carnivore.”

[112] “Butsurely you know, Mr. Pendergast, that all mammalian predators have five digits.”

“Of course, Doctor,” said Pendergast. “If you would indulge me for a moment, I’d like to describe a scenario to you.”

“Certainly,” said Frock.

“There is a theory that the murderer is using this—” he hefted the forelimb—“as a weapon to rake his victims. We feel that what I’m holding might be the impression of anartifact of some kind, something made by a primitive tribe out of, say, a jaguar or lion forelimb. TheDNAappears to be degraded. It may be an old artifact, collected by the Museum a long time ago, then stolen.”

Frock’s head lowered until his chin was on his chest. The silence stretched out, broken only by the shuffling of the policemen by the barricade. Then Frock spoke.

“The guard who was killed? Did his wounds show evidence of a broken or missing claw?”

“Good question,” Pendergast said. “See for yourself.” He slid his hand into the plastic bag and removed a heavy plaque of latex, a long rectangle with three jagged ridges down its middle.

“This is a cast of one of the guard’s abdominal wounds,” Pendergast explained. Margo shuddered. It was a vile-looking thing.

Frock peered at the deep ridges intently. “The penetration must have been remarkable. But the wound shows no indication of a broken claw. Therefore, you are suggesting thattwo such artifacts are in use by the murderer.”

Pendergast looked a little uncomfortable, but nodded.

Frock’s head sank once more. The silence went on for minutes. “Another thing,” he suddenly said, quite loudly. “Do you see how the claw marksdraw together slightly? How they are farther apart at the top than at the bottom?”

“Yes?” said Pendergast.

[113] “Like a hand clenching into a fist. That would indicate flexibility in the instrument.”

“Granted,” said Pendergast. “Human flesh, however, is rather soft and easily distorted. We cannot read too much into these casts.” He paused. “Dr. Frock, is any artifact capable of doing this missing from the collection?”

“There is no such artifactin the collection,” said Frock with a faint smile. “You see, this comes from no living animal I’ve studied. Do you see how this claw has a conical shape, a deep fully enclosed root? See how it tapers to an almost perfect tripyramidal cross section near the top? This appears in only two classes of animal: dinosaur and bird. That is one of the reasons some evolutionary biologists think birds evolved from dinosaurs. I would say itis from a bird, except that it is far too large. Thus, dinosaurian.”

He placed the latex claw in his lap and looked up again. “Certainly, a clever person familiar with dinosaur morphology could have shaped a claw like this, and used it as a tool for murder. I assume you have tested the original fragment to see if it indeed is composed of a genuine biological material, such as keratin, rather than being cast or carved from some inorganic material?”

“Yes, Doctor. It is real.”

“And you are sure that theDNAwas real, and not simply blood or flesh from the victim?”

“Yes,” Pendergast replied. “As I said, it came from the root canal, not under the cuticle.”

“And what, pray tell,was theDNAfrom?” “The final report isn’t in yet.”

Frock held up his hand. “Understood, But tell me, why aren’t you making use of our ownDNAlaboratory, here in the Museum? We have facilities equal to that of anybody in the state.”

“Equal to anybody in the country, Doctor. But you must understand that our procedures forbidit. Could we be sure of the results if the tests were conducted at the [114] crime scene? With perhaps the murderer himself oper­ating the equipment?” Pendergast smiled. “I hope you’ll forgive my persistence, Doctor, but would you be willing toconsider the possibility that this weapon is constructed from relics belonging to the Anthropology collection, and to think about what artifact or artifacts this cast most closely resembles?”

“If you’d like,” Frock replied.

“Thank you. We can discuss it again in a day or so. Meanwhile, would it be possible to obtain a printed in­ventory of the Anthropology collection?”

Frock smiled. “Six million items? You can use the computer catalog, however. Wouldyoulike a terminal set up?”

“Perhaps later,” said Pendergast, replacing the latex plaque in the plastic bag. “It’s kind of you tooffer.Our command post is currently in the unused gallery behind reprographics.”

Footsteps sounded behind them. Margo turned to see the tall form of Dr. Ian Cuthbert, Deputy Director of the Museum, followed by the two officers from the elevator.

“Look here, how long is this going to take?” Cuthbert was complaining. He stopped at the barricade. “Oh, Frock, so they’ve got you, too. What a damned nuisance this is.”

Frock nodded imperceptibly.

“Dr. Frock,” said Pendergast, “I’m sorry. This is the gentleman I’d been waiting for when we first spoke. You’re welcome to remain; if you’d care to.” Frock nodded again.

“Now, Dr. Cuthbert,” said Pendergast briskly, turn­ing to the Scotsman. “I asked you to come down be­cause I’d like some information about this area behind me.” He indicated a, large doorway.

“The Secure Area? What about it? Surely somebody else could—” Cuthbert began.

“Ah,but my questions are for you,” Pendergast in­terrupted, politely butfirmly.“Shall we step inside?”

[115] “If it won’t take much time,” Cuthbert said. “I’ve got an exhibition to mount.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Frock, his tone faintly sardonic. “Anexhibition.”He motioned Margo to wheel him for­ward.

“Dr. Frock?” Pendergast said politely.

“Yes?”

“I wonder if I might have that cast back.”

The copper-sheathed door to the Museum’s Secure Area had been removed and a new steel one installed in its place. Across the hall was a small door labelledPACHY­DERMAE.Margo wondered how the staff had been able to fit huge elephant bones through it.

Turning away, she wheeled Frock into the narrow walkway beyond the open door to the Secure Area. The Museum kept its most valuable artifacts in small vaults on either side: sapphires and diamonds; ivory and rhi­noceros horns heaped on racks like cordwood; bones and skins of extinct animals; Zuñi war gods. Two men in dark suits stood at the far end, talking in low tones. They straightened up when Pendergast entered.

Pendergast stopped at one open vault door, much like the others, sporting a large black combination knob, brass lever, and ornate decorative scrollwork. Inside, a bulb threw a harsh light across the metal walls. The vault was empty except for several crates, all of which were quite large except one. The smaller crate’s lid was re­moved, while one of the larger crates was badly dam­aged, with excelsior-like stuffing protruding.

Pendergast waited until everybody was inside the vault. “Allow me to provide some background,” Pen­dergast said. “The murder of the guard took place not far from this spot. It appears that afterward, the murderer came down the hallway just outside. The murderer at­tempted to break down the door that leads to the Secure Area. He may have tried before.Theattempts were un­successful.

[116] “At first we weren’t sure what the killer was after. As you know, there is a lot of valuable material in here.” Pendergast motioned to one of the policemen, who came over and handed him a piece of paper. “So we asked around, and found that nothing has come in or out of the Secure Area for six months. Except these crates. They were moved into this vault last week. On your orders, Dr. Cuthbert.”

“Mr. Pendergast, allow me to explain—” said Cuth­bert.

“One moment, if you please,” said Pendergast. “When we inspected the crates, we found something very interesting.” He pointed to the damaged crate. “Notice the slats. The two-by-sixes here are deeply scored by claw marks. Our forensic people tell me the marks on the victims were probably made by the same object or instrument.”

Pendergast stopped and looked intently at Cuthbert.

“I had no idea—” said Cuthbert. “Nothing had been taken. I merely thought that... ” His voice trailed away.

“I wonder, Doctor, if you could enlighten us as to the history of these crates?”

“That’s easily explained,” said Cuthbert. “There’s no mystery about it. The crates are from an old expedition.”

“I gathered that,” Pendergast said. “Which expedi­tion?”

“The Whittlesey expedition,” Cuthbert replied.

Pendergast waited.

Finally Cuthbert sighed. “It was a South American expedition that took place over five years ago. It was ... not entirely successful.”

“It was a disaster,” Frock said derisively. Oblivious to Cuthbert’s angry glance, he continued. “It caused a scandal in the Museum at the time. The expedition broke up early, due to personality conflicts. Some of the ex­pedition members were killed by hostile tribesmen; the rest were killed in a plane crash on the way back to New [117] York. There were the inevitable rumors of a curse, that kind of thing.”

“That’s an exaggeration,” Cuthbert snapped. “There was no scandal of any sort.”

Pendergast looked at them. “And the crates?” he said mildly.

“They were shipped back separately,” Cuthbert said. “But this is all beside the point. There was a very un­usual object in one of these crates, a figurine created by an extinct South American tribe. It’s to be an important element in theSuperstition exhibition.”

Pendergast nodded. “Go on.”

“Last week, when we went to retrieve the figurine, I found that one of the crates had been broken into.” He pointed. “So I ordered all of the crates moved tempo­rarily to the Secure Area.”

“What was taken?”

“Well, now, that was a little odd,” said Cuthbert. “None of the artifacts were missing from the crate. The figurine itself is worth a fortune. It’s unique, the only one of its kind in the world. The Kothoga tribe that made it vanished years ago.”

“You meannothing was missing?” Pendergast asked. “Well, nothing important. The only thing that seemed to be missing were the seed pods, or whatever they were. Maxwell, the scientist who packed them, died in the plane crash near Venezuela.”

“Seed pods?” asked Pendergast.

“I honestly don’t know what they were. None of the documentation survived except for the anthropological material. We had Whittlesey’s journal, you see, but that was all. There was a little reconstructive work done when the crates first came back, but since then... ” he stopped.

“You’d better tell me about this expedition,” said Pendergast.

“There’s not much to tell. They had originally assem­bled to search for traces of the Kothoga tribe, and to do [118] a survey and general collection in a very remote area of the rain forest. I think the preliminary work estimated that ninety-five percent of the plant species in the area were unknown to science. Whittlesey, an anthropologist, was the leader. I believe there was also a paleontologist, a mammalogist, a physical anthropologist, perhaps an entomologist, a few assistants. Whittlesey and an assis­tant named Crocker disappeared and were probably killed by tribesmen. The rest died in the plane crash. The only thing we had any documentation on was the figurine, from Whittlesey’s journal. The rest of the stuff is just a mystery, no locality data, nothing.”

“Why did the material sit in these crates for so long? Why wasn’t it unpacked and cataloged and put in the collections?”

Cuthbert stirred uncomfortably. “Well,” he said de­fensively, “ask Frock. He’s the chairman of the depart­ment.”

“Our collections are enormous,” said Frock. “We have dinosaur bones still crated up from the 1930s that have never been touched. It costs a tremendous amount of money and time to curate these things.” He sighed. “But in this particular case, it’s not a question of mere oversight. As I recall, the Anthropology Department was forbidden to curate these crates upon their return.” He looked pointedly at Cuthbert.

“That was years ago!” Cuthbert replied acidly.

“How do you know there are no rare artifacts in the unopened boxes?” Pendergast asked.

“Whittlesey’s journal implied that the figurine in the small crate was the only item of importance.”

“May I see this journal?”

Cuthbert shook his head. “It’s gone missing.”

“Were the crates moved on your own authority?”

“I suggested it to Dr. Wright after I learned the crates had been tampered with,” Cuthbert said. “We kept the material together in its original crates until it could be curated. That’s one of the Museum’s rules.”

[119] “So the crates were moved late last week,” Pender­gast murmured, almost to himself. “Just prior to the kill­ing of the two boys. What could the killer have been after?” Then he looked back at Cuthbert. “What did you say had been taken from the crates? Seed pods, was it?”

Cuthbert shrugged. “As I said, I’m not sure what they were. They looked like seed pods to me, but I’m no botanist.”

“Can you describe them?”

“It’s been years, I don’t really remember. Big, round, heavy. Rugose on the outside. Light brown color. I’ve only seen the inside of the crate twice, you understand; once when it first came back, and then last week, looking for Mbwun. That’s the figurine.”

“Where is the figurine now?” Pendergast asked.

“It’s being curated for the show. It should be on dis­play already, we’re sealing the exhibition today.”

“Did you remove anything else from the box?”

“No. The figurine is the unique piece of the lot.”

“I would like to arrange to see it,” said Pendergast. Cuthbert shifted irritably on his feet. “You can see it when the show opens. Frankly, I don’t know what you’re up to. Why waste time on a broken crate when there’s a serial killer loose in the Museum and you chaps can’t even find him?”

Frock cleared his throat. “Margo, bring me closer, if you will,” he asked.

Margo wheeled him over to the crates. With a grunt he bent forward to scrutinize the broken boards.

Everyone watched.

“Thank you,” he said, straightening up. He eyed the group, one at a time.

“Please note that these boards are scored on theinside as well as the outside,” he said finally. “Mr. Pendergast, are we not making an assumption here?” he finally said.

“I never make assumptions,” replied Pendergast, with a smile.

“But you are,” Frock persisted. “All of you are [120] making an assumption—that some one, or some thing, brokeinto the crate.”

There was a sudden silence in the vault. Margo could smell the dust in the air, and the faint odor of excelsior.

And then Cuthbert began to laugh raucously, the sound swelling harshly through the chamber.

As they approached Frock’s office once again, the cu­rator was unusually animated.

“Did you see that cast?” he said to Margo. “Avian attributes, dinosaurian morphology. This could be the very thing!” He could scarcely contain himself.

“But, Professor Frock, Mr. Pendergast believes it was constructed as a weapon of some sort,” Margo said quickly. As she said it, she realized thatshe wanted to believe it, too.

“Stuff!” Frock snorted. “Didn’t you get the sense, looking at that cast, of something tantalizingly familiar, yet utterly foreign? We’re looking at an evolutionary aberration, the vindication of my theory.” Inside the of­fice, Frock immediately produced a notebook from his jacket pocket and started scribbling.

“But, Professor, how could such a creature—?” Margo stopped as she felt Frock’s hand close over hers. His grip was extraordinarily strong.

“My dear girl,” he said, “there are more things in heaven and earth, as Hamlet pointed out. It isn’t always for us to speculate. Sometimes we must simply ob­serve.” His voice was low, but he trembled with ex­citement. “We can’t miss this opportunity, do you hear? Damn this steel prison of mine! You must be my eyes and ears, Margo. You must go everywhere, search up and down, be an extension of my fingers. We mustnot let this chance pass us by. Are you willing, Margo?”

He gripped her hand tighter.

= 19 =

The old freight elevator in Section 28 of the Museum always smelled like something had died in it, Smithback thought. He tried breathing through his mouth.

The elevator was huge, the size of a Manhattan studio, and the operator had decorated it with a table, chair, and pictures cut from the Museum’s nature magazine. The pictures focused on a single subject. There were giraffes rubbing necks, insects mating, a baboon displaying its rump, native women with pendulous breasts.

“You like my little art gallery?” the elevator man asked, with a leer. He was about sixty years old and wore an orange toupee.

“It’s nice to see someone so interested in natural his­tory,” Smithback said sarcastically.

As he stepped out, the smell of rotting flesh hit him with redoubled force; it seemed to fill the air like a Maine fog. “How do you stand it?” he managed to gasp to the elevator man.

[122] “Stand what?” the man said, pausing as he rolled the hoistway doors shut.

A cheerful voice came ringing down the corridor. “Welcome!” An elderly man shouted over the sound of the forced-air ducts as he grasped Smithback’s hand. “Nothing but zebra cooking today. You miss the rhi­noceros. But come in anyway, come in, please!” Smith­back knew his thick accent was Austrian.

Jost Von Oster ran the osteological preparation area, the Museum Laboratory in which animal carcasses were reduced to bones. He was over eighty, but looked so pink, cheerful, and plump that most people thought he was much younger.

Von Oster had started at the Museum in the late twen­ties, preparing and mounting skeletons for display. His crowning achievement in those days had been a series of horse skeletons, mounted walking, trotting, and gal­loping. It was said that these skeletons had revolution­ized the way animals were exhibited. Von Oster had then turned to creating the lifelike habitat groups popular in the forties, making sure every detail—down to the saliva on an animal’s mouth—looked perfectly real.

But the era of the habitat group had passed, and Von Oster had eventually been relegated to the Bug Room. Disdaining all offers of retirement, he cheerfully pre­sided over the osteological lab, where animals—now mostly collected from zoos—were turned into clean white bones for study or mounting. However, his old skills as a master habitat sculptor were still intact, and he had been called in to work on a special shaman life­-group for theSuperstition exhibition. It was the pain­staking preparation of this display group that Smithback wanted to include as one chapter in his book.

Following Von Oster’s gesture, Smithback stepped into the preparation area. He’d never seen this famous room before. “So glad you could come see my work­shop,” Von Oster said. “Not many people down here [123] now, what with these dreadful killings. Very glad in­deed!”

The workshop looked more like a bizarre industrial kitchen than anything else. Deep stainless-steel tanks lined one wall. On the ceiling near the tanks hung mas­sive pulleys, chains, and grappling hooks for handling the larger carcasses. A drain was drilled into the center of the floor, a small broken bone caught in its grill. In a far corner of the workshop a stainless-steel gurney stood, bearing a large animal. If it hadn’t been for the large, hand-lettered sign taped to one leg of the gurney, Smithback wouldn’t have guessed that the creature had once been a Sargasso Sea Dugong; it was now almost fully decomposed. Around the corpse lay picks, pliers, tiny knives.

“Thanks for taking time to see me,” Smithback man­aged.

“Not at all!” Von Oster exploded. “I wish we could give tours, but you know this area is off limits to the tourists, the more is the pity. You should have been here for the rhinoceros.Gott , she was something!”

Walking briskly across the room, he showed Smith­back the maceration tank containing the zebra carcass. Despite a hood drawing the vapors away, the smell was still strong. Von Oster lifted the lid and stood back like a proud cook.

“What you think ofzat!”

Smithback looked at the soupy brown liquid filling the vat. Under the muddy surface lay the macerating zebra carcass, its flesh and soft tissues slowly liquefying.

“It’s a little ripe,” Smithback said weakly.

“What you mean, ripe? It just perfect! Under here we got the burner. It keep the water at an even ninety-five degrees. See, first we gut the carcass and drop it in the vat here. Then it rot and in two weeks we pull the plug and drain everything down the sink. What we got left is this big pile of greasy bones. So then we refill the vat [124] and add a little alum and boil those bones. You don’t want to boil them too long, they get soft.”

Von Oster paused again for air. “You know, just like when they cook the chicken too long. Phhhhtui! Bad! But those bones still greasy, so we wash themmit the benzene. That make them pure white.”

“Mr. Von Oster—” Smithback began. If he didn’t redirect this interview quickly, he would never get out. And he couldn’t stand the smell much longer. “I was wondering if you could tell me a little about the shaman group you worked on. I’m writing a book aboutSuper­stition . You remember our conversation?”

“Ja, ja!Of course!” He charged over to a desk and pulled out some drawings. Smithback switched on his microcassette recorder.

“First, you paint the background on a double-curved surface, so you get no corners, see? You want the illu­sion of depth.”

Von Oster began describing the process, his voice pitched with excitement.This is going to be good , Smithback thought.The guy’s a writer’s dream .

Von Oster went on for a long time, stabbing the air, making sweeping gestures, taking deep breaths between his heavily accented sentences. When he was finished, he beamed at Smithback. “Now, you want to see the bugs?” he asked.

Smithback couldn’t resist. The bugs were famous. It was a process Von Oster himself had invented, but was now in use by all the large natural history museums in the country: the beetles would strip a small carcass of its flesh, leaving behind a cleaned, perfectly articulated skeleton.

The “safe” room that housed the beetles was hot and humid, and little larger than a closet. The beetles, called dermestids, came from Africa and lived in white por­celain tubs with slick sides, roofed with screens. The beetles slowly crawled over rows of dead, skinned ani­mals.

[125] “What are those things?” Smithback asked, peering at the bug-covered carcasses inside the tubs.

“Bats!” said Von Oster. “Bats for Dr. Huysmans. It will take about ten days to clean up those bats.” He pronounced it “zose bets.”

Between the odors and the bugs, Smithback had had enough. He stood up and extended his hand toward the old scientist. “I gotta go. Thanks for the interview. And those bugs are really something.”

“You’re most welcome!” Von Oster responded. “Now, wait. Interview, you say. Who you writing this book for?” The idea had suddenly occurred to him that he’d been interviewed.

“For the Museum,” said Smithback. “Rickman’s in charge of it.”

“Rickman?” Von Oster’s eyes suddenly narrowed.

“Yes. Why?” Smithback asked.

“You working for Rickman?” Von Oster said.

“Not really. She’s just, well, interfering mostly,” Smithback said.

Von Oster broke into a pink grin. “Ach, she poison, that one! Why you working for her?”

“That’s just the way it happened,” Smithback said, gratified at having found an ally. “You wouldn’t believe the kind of crap she’s put me through. Oh, God.”

Von Oster clapped his hands. “I believe it! I believe it! She making trouble everywhere! This exhibit, she making all kind of trouble!”

Suddenly Smithback was interested. “How so?” he asked.

“She in there every day, sayingzis not good,zat not good.Gott , that woman!”

“That sounds like her,” Smithback said with a grim smile. “So what wasn’t good?”

“That, what you call it, that Kothoga tribe stuff. I was in there just yesterday afternoon and she was carrying on. ‘Everybody leave the exhibition! We bring in Koth­oga figurine!’ Everybody had to drop work and leave.”

[126] “The figurine? What figurine? What’s so sensitive about it?” It suddenly occurred to Smithback that some­thing so upsetting to Rickman might someday be useful to him.

“That Mbwun figurine, big deal in the exhibition. I not know much about. But she was very upset, I tell you!”

“Why?”

“Like I tell you, that figurine. You not heard? Lots of talk about it, very very bad. I try not to hear.”

“What kind of talk would that be, for instance?”

Smithback listened to the old man for quite a while longer. Finally, he backed himself out of the workshop, Von Oster pursuing as far as the elevator.

As the doors rolled shut, the man was still talking. “You unlucky, working for her!” he called after Smith­back just before the elevator lurched upward. But Smith­back didn’t hear him. He was busy thinking.

= 20 =

As the afternoon drew to a close, Margo looked up wear­ily from her terminal. Stretching, she punched a com­mand to the printer down the hall, then sat back, rubbing her eyes. Moriarty’s case write-up was finally done. A little rough around the edges, perhaps; not as compre­hensive as she would have liked; but she couldn’t afford to spend any more time on it. Secretly, she was rather pleased, and found herself eager to take a printout up to Moriarty’s office on the fourth floor of the Butterfield Observatory, where the project team for theSuperstition exhibition was housed.

She thumbed through her staff directory, looking for Moriarty’s extension. Then she reached for her phone and dialed the four-digit number.

“Exhibition central,” drawled a voice. There were loud good-byes in the background.

“Is George Moriarty there?” Margo asked.

“I think he’s down at the exhibition,” the voice re­sponded. “We’re locking up here. Any message?”

[128] “No, thanks,” Margo replied, hanging up. She looked at her watch: almost five. Curfew time. But the exhibi­tion was being unveiled Friday evening, and she’d prom­ised Moriarty the material.

As she was about to get up, she remembered Frock’s suggestion that she call Greg Kawakita. She sighed, picking up the phone again.Better give him a try . Chances are he’d be out of the building now, and she could just leave a message on phone-mail.

“Greg Kawakita speaking,” came the familiar bari­tone voice.

“Greg? This is Margo Green.”Stop sounding so apologetic. It’s not like he’s a department head or any­thing .

“Hi, Margo. What’s up?” She could hear the clacking of keys coming over the line.

“I have a favor to ask. It’s a suggestion of Dr. Frock’s, actually. I’m doing an analysis of some plant specimens used by the Kiribitu tribe, and he suggested I run them through your Extrapolator. Perhaps it will find some genetic correspondences in the samples.”

There was silence. “Dr. Frock thought it might be a useful test of your program, as well as a help to me,” she urged.

Kawakita paused. “Well, you know, Margo, I’d like to help you out, I really would. But the Extrapolator really isn’t in shape yet to be used by just anybody. I’m still chasing down bugs, and I couldn’t vouch for the results.”

Margo’s face burned. “Just anybody?”

“Sorry, that was a poor choice of words. You know what I mean. Besides, it’s a really busy time for me, and this curfew won’t help matters any. Tell you what, why don’t you check with me again in a week or two? Okay? Talk to you then.”

The line went dead.

Margo stood up, grabbed her jacket and purse, and went down the hall to retrieve her printout. She knew [129] he was planning to postpone her indefinitely. Well, to hell with Kawakita. She’d hunt Moriarty down and give him the copy before she left. If nothing else, it might get her that guided tour of the exhibition, maybe find out what all the fuss was about.

A few minutes later, Margo walked slowly across the deserted Selous Memorial Hall. Two guards were sta­tioned at the entrance, and a single docent stood inside the information center, locking away ledgers and arrang­ing sale items in preparation for the next day’s visitors.Assuming there are any , thought Margo. Three police­men stood just under the huge bronze statue of Selous, talking among themselves. They didn’t notice Margo.

Margo found her thoughts returning to the morning’s talk with Frock. If the killer wasn’t found, the security measures could get stricter. Maybe her dissertation de­fense would be delayed. Or the entire Museum could be closed. Margo shook her head. If that happened, she was Massachusetts-bound for sure.

She headed for the Walker Gallery and the rear en­trance toSuperstition . To her dismay, the large iron doors were closed, and a velvet rope was suspended be­tween two brass posts in front of them. A policeman stood beside the sign, motionless.

“Can I help you, Miss?” he said. His nameplate readF. BEAUREGARD .

“I’m going to see George Moriarty,” Margo replied. “I think he’s in the exhibition galleries. I have to give him something.” She brandished the printout in front of the policeman, who looked unimpressed.

“Sorry, Miss,” he said. “It’s past five. You shouldn’t be here. Besides,” he said more gently, “the exhibi­tion’s been sealed until the opening.”

“But—” Margo began to protest, then turned and walked back toward the rotunda with a sigh.

After rounding a corner, she stopped. At the end of the empty hallway she could see the dim vastness of the Hall. Behind her, Officer F. Beauregard was out of sight [130] around the corner. On impulse, she veered sharply left through a small, low passage that opened into another, parallel walkway. Maybe it wasn’t too late to find Mor­iarty, after all.

She moved up a wide flight of stairs, and, looking carefully around before proceeding, walked slowly into a vaulted hall devoted to insects. Then she turned right and entered a gallery that ran around the second level of the Marine Hall. Like everyplace else in the Museum, it felt eerie and deserted.

Margo descended one of the twin sweeping staircases to the granite floor of the main hall. Moving more slowly now, she passed by a life-size walrus habitat group and a meticulously constructed model of an underwater reef. Dioramas such as these, originally fashioned in the thir­ties and forties, could no longer be made, she knew­—they had become much too expensive to produce.

At the far end of the Hall was the entrance to the Weisman Gallery, where the larger temporary exhibi­tions were held. This was one of the suite of galleries in which theSuperstition exhibition was being mounted. Black paper covered the inside of the double glass doors, fronted by a large sign that read:GALLERY CLOSED. NEW EXHIBITION IN PROGRESS. THANK YOU FOR YOUR UNDERSTANDING .

The left-hand door was locked. The right one, how­ever, pushed open easily.

As casually as possible, she looked over her shoulder: nobody.

The door hissed shut behind her, and she found herself in a narrow crawl space between the outer walls of the gallery and the back of the exhibition proper. Plywood boards and large nails were strewn around in disarray, and electrical cables snaked across the floor. On her left a huge structure of Sheetrock and boards, hammered clumsily together and supported by wooden buttresses, looked very much like the back side of a Hollywood set. [131] It was the side of theSuperstition exhibition that no Museum visitor would ever see.

She moved carefully down the crawl space, scouting for some way to get into the exhibition. The light was poor—metal-shielded light bulbs, spaced about twenty feet apart—and she didn’t want to stumble and fall. Soon she came across a small gap between the wooden pan­els—just big enough, she decided, to squeeze through.

She found herself in a large, six-sided anteroom. Gothic arches in three of the walls framed passages. that receded into the gloom. Most of the light came from several backlit photographs of shamans high up on the walls. She looked speculatively at the three exits. She had no idea where she was in the exhibition—where it began, where it ended, or which way she should go to find Moriarty. “George?” she called softly, somehow unable to raise her voice in the silence and gloom.

She took the central passage to another dark hall, longer than the last and crowded with exhibits. At in­tervals, a brilliant spot illuminated some artifact: a mask, a bone knife, a strange carving covered with nails. The artifacts appeared to float in the velvet darkness. Crazy, dim patterns of light and shadow played across the ceil­ing.

At the far end of the gallery, the walls narrowed. Margo had the odd feeling that she was walking back into a deep cave.Pretty manipulative , she thought. She could see why Frock was upset.

She went deeper into the gloom, hearing nothing but her own footsteps padding on the thick carpet. She couldn’t see the exhibits until she was almost on top of them, and she wondered how she’d retrace her steps to the room of the shamans. Perhaps there would be an unlocked exit—a well-lit unlocked exit—someplace else in, the exhibit.

Ahead of her, the narrow hall forked. After a mo­ment’s hesitation, Margo chose the right-hand passage. As she continued, she noticed small alcoves to either [132] side, each containing a single grotesque artifact. The si­lence was so intense that she found herself holding her breath.

The hall widened into a chamber, and she stopped in front of a set of Maori tattooed heads. They weren’t shrunken—the skulls were clearly still inside, preserved, the label said, by smoking. The eye sockets were stuffed with fibers, and the mahogany-colored skins glistened. The black, shriveled lips were drawn back from the teeth. There were six of them, a crowd grinning hyster­ically, bobbing in the night. The blue tattoos were breathtakingly complex: intricate spirals that intersected and reintersected, curving in endless patterns around the cheeks and nose and chin. The tattooing had been done in life, the label said, and the heads preserved as a sign of respect.

Just beyond, Margo could see the gallery narrowing to a point. A massive, squat totem pole stood before it, lit from beneath by a pale, orange light. The shadows of giant wolf heads and birds with cruel, hooked beaks thrust upward from the pole and splashed across the ceil­ing, gray against black. Certain she had reached a dead end, Margo approached the totem pole unwillingly. Then she noticed a small opening, ahead and on the left, lead­ing into an alcove. She continued slowly, walking as quietly as possible. Any thought of calling out again for Moriarty had long since vanished.Thank God I’m no­where near the Old Basement , she thought.

The alcove held a display of fetishes. Some were sim­ple stones carved in the shapes of animals, but the ma­jority were monsters depicting the darker side of human superstition. Another opening brought Margo into a long, narrow room. Thick black felt covered all of the room’s surfaces, and a dim blue light filtered from hid­den recesses. The ceiling was low above Margo’s head.Smithback would have to go through here on his hands and knees , she thought.

The room broadened into an octagonal space beneath [133] a high groined vault. A dappled light filtered down from stained-glass depictions of medieval underworlds set into the vaulted ceiling. Large windows dominated each wall.

She approached the closest window and found herself looking down into a Mayan tomb. A skeleton lay in the center, covered with a thick layer of dust. Artifacts were scattered around the site. A gold breastplate sat on the ribcage, and gold rings encircled bony fingers. Painted pots were arranged in a semicircle around the skull. One of these contained an offering of tiny, dried corncobs.

The next window displayed an Eskimo rock burial, in­cluding an Eskimo mummy-bundle wrapped in skins. The next was even more startling: a lidless, rotting European­-style coffin, complete with corpse. The corpse was dressed in a much-decayed frock coat, tie, and tails, and was well on its way toward decomposition. Its head was bent stiffly toward Margo as if prepared to tell her a se­cret, sightless eye sockets bulging, mouth ossified into a rictus of pain. She took a step backward.Good God , she thought,that’s somebody’s great-grandfather . The mat­ter-of-fact tone of the label, which tastefully described the rituals associated with a typical nineteenth-century Amer­ican burial, belied the visual hideousness of the scene.It’s true , she thought;the Museum is definitely taking a chance with stuff as strong as this .

She decided to forego the other windows and pro­ceeded through a low archway in the far side of the octagonal room. Beyond, the passage forked. To her left was a small cul-de-sac; to her right, a long, slender pas­sage led into darkness. She didn’t want to go that way; not just yet. She wandered into the dead-end room, and stopped suddenly. Then she moved forward to examine one of the cases more closely.

The gallery dealt with the concept of ultimate evil in its many mythic forms. There were various images of a medieval devil; there was the Eskimo evil spirit, Tor­narsuk. But what arrested her was a crude stone altar, placed in the center of the gallery. Sitting on the altar, [134] lit by a yellow spot, was a small figurine, carved in such detail it took Margo’s breath away. Covered in scales, it crouched on all fours. Yet there was something—the long forearms, the angle of its head—that was disturb­ingly human. She shuddered. What kind of imagination gave rise to a being with both scales and hair? Her eyes dropped to the label.

MBWUN. This carving is a representation of the mad god Mbwun, possibly carved by the Kothoga tribe of the Upper Amazon basin. This savage god, also known as He Who Walks On All Fours, was much feared by the other indigenous tribes of the area. In local myth, the Kothoga tribe was said to be able to conjure Mbwun at will, and send him on errands of destruction against neighboring tribes. Very few Kothoga artifacts have ever been found, and this is the sole image of Mbwun known to exist. Except for trace references in Amazonian legends, nothing else is known about the Kothoga, or about their mysterious “devil.”

Margo felt a chill creep over her. She looked closer, repulsed by the reptilian features, the small, wicked eyes ... the talons. Three on each forelimb.

Oh, dear God. It couldn’t be.

Suddenly, she realized that every instinct she had was telling her to keep absolutely still. A minute passed, then two.

Then it came again—the sound that had galvanized her. An odd rustling, slow, deliberate, maddeningly soft. On the thick carpet, the footsteps had to be close ... very close. A horrible goatish stench threatened to choke her.

She looked around wildly, fighting down panic, searching for the safest exit. The darkness was complete. As quietly as possible, she moved out of the cul-de-sac [135] and across the fork. Another rustling noise and she was running, running, headlong through the darkness, past the ghoulish displays and leering statues that seemed to leap out of the blackness, down twisting forks and pas­sages, trying always to take the most hidden path.

At last, thoroughly lost and out of breath, she ducked into an alcove containing a display on primitive medi­cine. Gasping, she crouched behind a case holding a tre­panned human skull upon an iron pole. She hid in its shadow, listening.

There was nothing; no noise, no movement. She waited as her breath slowed and reason returned. There was nothing out there. There had never been anything out there, in fact—it was her overzealous imagination, fueled by this nightmarish tour.I was foolish to sneak in , she thought.Now, I don’t know if I’ll ever want to come back—even on the busiest Saturday .

Anyway, she had to find a way out. It was late now, and she hoped people were still around to hear her knocking, should she come up against a locked exit. It would be embarrassing, having to explain herself to a guard or policeman. But at least she’d be out.

She peeked over the case lid. Even if ithad all been her imagination, she didn’t care to go back in the same direction. Holding her breath, she stepped quietly out, then listened. Nothing.

She turned left and moved slowly down the corridor, searching for a likely looking route out of the exhibit. At a large fork she stopped, eyes straining in the dark­ness, debating which of the branching pathways to take.Shouldn’t there be exit signs? Guess they haven’t been installed yet. Typical . But the hall to her left looked promising: the passage seemed to open up into a large foyer, ahead in the blackness where sight failed.

Movement registered in her peripheral vision. Limbs frozen, she glanced hesitatingly to the right. A shadow—­black against black—was gliding stealthily toward her, [136] moving with an inky sinuousness over the display cases and grinning artifacts.

With a speed born of horror, she shot down the pas­sage. She felt, more than saw, the walls of the passage roll back and widen about her. Then she saw twin slits of vertical light ahead, outlining a large double doorway. Without slackening her pace, she threw herself against it. The doors flew back, and something on the far side clattered. Dim light rushed in—the subdued red light of a museum at night. Cool air moved across her cheek.

Weeping now, she slammed the doors closed and leaned against them, eyes shut, forehead pressed against the cold metal, sobbing, fighting to catch her breath.

From the crimson gloom behind her came the unmis­takable sound of something clearing its throat.

PART TWO

SUPERSTITION

EXIBITION

= 21 =

“What’s going on here?” came the stern voice.

Margo whirled around and almost collapsed with re­lief. “Officer Beauregard, there’s—” she began, stop­ping in mid-sentence.

F. Beauregard, who was righting the brass posts that the swinging door had knocked over, looked up at the sound of his name. “Hey, you’re the girl who tried to get in earlier!” The policeman’s eyes narrowed. “What’s wrong, Miss, can’t take no for an answer?”

“Officer, there’s a—” Margo tried to start again, then faltered.

The officer stepped back and folded his arms across his chest, waiting. Then a look of surprise crossed his face. “What the hell? Hey, you okay, lady?”

Margo was slumped over, laughing—or crying, she wasn’t sure which—and wiping tears from her face. The policeman freed one folded hand and took her arm. “I think you should come with me.”

The implications of that last sentence—sitting in a [140] room full of policemen, telling her story again and again, maybe having Dr. Frock or even Dr. Wright called in, having to go back into that exhibition—forced Margo to straighten up.They’ll just think I’m crazy . “Oh no, that’s not necessary,” she said, snuffling. “I just had a bit of a scare.”

Officer Beauregard looked unconvinced. “I still think we should go talk to Lieutenant D’Agosta.” With his other hand, he pulled a large, leather-bound notebook out of his back pocket. “What’s your name?” he asked. “I’ll have to make a report.”

It was clear he wouldn’t let her go until she gave him the information. “My name’s Margo Green,” she said finally. “I’m a graduate student working under Dr. Frock. I was doing an assignment for George Moriarty—he’s curating this exhibition. But you were right. No­body was in there.” She gently freed her arm from the policeman’s grip as she spoke. Then she started backing away, toward Selous Memorial Hall, still talking. Officer Beauregard watched her and finally, with a shrug, he flipped open the notebook and started writing.

Back in the Hall, Margo paused. She couldn’t go back to her office; it was almost six, and the curfew was sure to be enforced by now. She didn’t want to go home­—shecouldn’t go home, not just yet.

Then she remembered Moriarty’s copy. She pressed one elbow against her side-sure enough, her carryall was still there, hanging unnoticed through the ordeal. She stood still another moment, then walked over to the deserted information kiosk. She picked up the receiver of an internal phone and dialed.

One ring, then: “Moriarty here.”

“George?” she said. “It’s Margo Green.”

“Hi, Margo,” Moriarty answered. “What’s up?”

“I’m in the Selous Hall,” she replied. “I just came from the exhibition.”

“My exhibition?” Moriarty said, surprised. “What were you doing there? Who let you in?”

[141] “I was looking for you,” she answered. “I wanted to give you the Cameroon copy.Were you in there?” She felt panic rising once again to the surface.

“No. The exhibition’s supposed to be sealed, in prep­aration for Friday night’s opening,” Moriarty said. “Why?”

Margo was breathing deeply. trying to control herself. Her hands were trembling, and the receiver knocked against her ear.

“What did you think of it?” Moriarty asked curi­ously.

A hysterical giggle escaped Margo. “Scary.”

“We brought in some experts to work out the lighting and the placement of the visuals. Dr. Cuthbert even hired the man who designed Fantasyworld’s Haunted Mauso­leum. That’s considered the best in the world, you know.”

Margo finally trusted herself to speak again. “George, something was in that exhibition with me.” A security guard on the far side of the Hall had spotted her, and was walking in her direction.

“What do you mean,something?”

“Exactly that!” Suddenly, she was back in the ex­hibit, in the dark, beside that horrible figurine. She re­membered the bitter taste of terror in her mouth.

“Hey, stop shouting!” Moriarty said. “Look, let’s go to The Bones and talk this over. We’re both supposed to be out of the Museum, anyway. I hear what you’re saying, but I don’t understand it.”

The Bones, as it was called by everyone in the Museum, was known to other local residents as the Blarney Stone Tavern. Its unimposing facade was nestled between two huge, ornate co-op buildings, directly across Seventy­-second Street from the Museum’s southern entrance. Un­like typical Upper West Side fern bars, the Blarney Stone did not serve hare pâté or five flavors of mineral [142] water; but you could get homemade meatloaf and a pitcher of Harp for ten dollars.

Museum staffers called it The Bones because Boylan, the owner, had hammered and wired an amazing number of bones into every available flat surface. The walls were lined with countless femurs and tibias, arranged in neat ivory ranks like bamboo matting. Metatarsals, scapulas, and patellas traced bizarre mosaics across the ceiling. Craniums from strange mammals were lodged in every conceivable niche. Where he got the bones was a mys­tery, but some claimed he raided the Museum at night.

“People bring ‘em in,” is all Boylan would ever say, shrugging his shoulders. Naturally, the place was a fa­vorite hangout among the Museum staff.

The Bones was doing brisk business, and Moriarty and Margo had to push their way back through the crowd to an empty booth. Looking around, Margo spot­ted several Museum staffers, including Bill Smithback. The writer was seated at the bar, talking animatedly to a slender blonde woman.

“Okay,” Moriarty said, raising his voice over the babble. “Now what were you saying over the phone? I’m not quite sure I caught it.”

Margo took a deep breath. “I went down to the ex­hibition to give you the copy. It was dark. Something was in there. Following me.Chasing me.”

“There’s that word again,something . Why do you say that?”

Margo shook her head impatiently. “Don’t ask me to explain. There were these sounds, like padded steps. They were so stealthy, so deliberate, I—” she shrugged, at a loss. “And there was this strange smell, too. It was horrible.”

“Look, Margo—” Moriarty began, then paused while the waitress took their drink orders. “That exhibition was designed to be creepy. You told me yourself that Frock and others consider it too sensational. I can [143] imag­ine what it must have been like: being locked in there, alone in the dark... ”

“In other words, I just imagined it.” Margo laughed mirthlessly. “You don’t know how much I’d like to be­lieve that.”

The drinks arrived: a light beer for Margo, and a pint of Guinness for Moriarty, topped with the requisite half-­inch of creamy foam. Moriarty sipped it critically. “These killings, all the rumors that have been going around,” he said. “I probably would have reacted the same way.”

Margo, calmer now, spoke hesitantly. “George, that Kothoga figurine in the exhibition ... ?”

“Mbwun? What about it?”

“Its front legs have three claws.”

Moriarty was enjoying the Guinness. “I know. It’s a marvelous piece of sculpture, one of the highlights of the show. Of course, though I hate to admit it, I suppose its biggest attraction is the curse.”

Margo took an exploratory sip from her beer.

“George. I want you to tell me, in as much detail as you can, what you know about the Mbwun curse.”

A shout came bellowing over the din of conversation. Looking up, Margo saw Smithback appear out of the smoky gloom, carrying an armful of notebooks, his hair backlit and sticking out from his head at a variety of angles. The woman he’d been talking to at the bar was nowhere to be seen.

“A meeting of the shut-outs,” he said. “This curfew is a real pain. God save me from policemen andPR directors.” Uninvited, he dropped his notebooks on the table and slid in next to Margo.

“I’ve heard that the police are going to start inter­viewing those working in the vicinity of the murders,” he said. “Guess that means you, Margo.”

“Mine’s set for next week,” Margo replied.

“I haven’t heard anything about it,” said Moriarty. He didn’t look pleased at Smithback’s appearance.

[144] “Well, you don’t have much to worry about, perched up in that garret of yours,” Smithback told Moriarty. “The Museum Beast probably can’t climb stairs, any­way.”

“You’re in a foul mood this evening,” Margo said to Smithback. “Did Rickman perform another amputation on your manuscript?”

Smithback was still talking to Moriarty. “Actually, you’re just the man I wanted to see. I’ve got a question for you.” The waitress came by again, and Smithback waved his hand. “Macallan, straight up.”

“Okay,” Smithback went on. “What I wanted to know is, what’s the story behind this Mbwun figurine?”

There was a stunned silence.

Smithback looked from Moriarty to Margo. “What’d I say?”

“We were just talking about Mbwun,” Margo said uncertainly.

“Yeah?” Smithback said. “Small world. Anyway, that old Austrian in the Bug Room, Von Oster, told me he heard Rickman kicking up a fuss about Mbwun being put on display. Something about sensitive issues. So I did a little digging.”

The scotch arrived and Smithback held the glass high in a silent toast, then tossed it off.

“I’ve obtained a little background so far,” he contin­ued. “It seems there was this tribe along the Upper Xingú river in the Amazon, the Kothoga. They’d appar­ently been a bad lot—supernatural-dabbling, human sac­rifice, the whole bit. Since the old boys hadn’t left many traces around, anthropologists assumed they died out centuries ago. All that remained was a bunch of myths, circulated by local tribes.”

“I know something of this,” Moriarty began. “Margo and I were just discussing it. Except not everybody felt—”

“I know, I know. Hold your water.

[145] Moriarty settled back, looking annoyed. He was more used to giving lectures than listening to them.

“Anyway, several years ago, there was this guy named Whittlesey at the Museum. He mounted an ex­pedition to the Upper Xingú, purportedly to search for traces of the Kothoga—artifacts, ancient dwelling sites, whatever.” Smithback leaned forward conspiratorially. “But what Whittlesey didn’t tell anybody was that he wasn’t just going in search of this old tribe’s traces. He was going in search of the tribeitself . He’d got it into his noggin that the Kothoga still existed, and he was pretty certain he could locate them. He’d developed something he called ‘myth triangulation.’ ”

This time, Moriarty wouldn’t be stopped. “That’s where you locate all the spots on a map where legends about a certain people or place are heard, identify the areas where the legends are most detailed and consistent, and locate the exact center of this myth region. That’s where the source of the myth cycles is most likely to be found.”

Smithback looked at Moriarty for a moment. “No kid­ding,” he said. “Anyway, this Whittlesey goes off in 1987 and disappears into the Amazon rain forest, never to be seen again.”

“Von Oster told you all this?” Moriarty rolled his eyes. “Tiresome old guy.”

“He may be tiresome, but he knows a hell of a lot about this Museum.” Smithback examined his empty glass forlornly. “Apparently, there was a big confron­tation in the jungle, and most of the expedition team started back early. They’d found something so important they wanted to leave right away, but Whittlesey disa­greed. He stayed, along with a fellow named Crocker. Apparently, they both died in the jungle. But when I asked Von Oster for more details about this Mbwun fig­urine, he suddenly clammed up.” Smithback stretched languorously and began looking for the waitress. “Guess [146] I’ll have to hunt down somebody who was part of that expedition.”

“Lots of luck,” Margo said. “They were all killed in a plane crash coming back.”

Smithback peered at her intently. “No shit. And how do you know that?”

Margo hesitated, remembering Pendergast’s request for confidentiality. Then she thought of Frock, and how he’d gripped her hand so fiercely that morning.We can’t miss this opportunity. We must not let this chance slip us by . “I’ll tell you what I know,” she said slowly. “But you must keep this to yourselves. And you must agree to help me in any way you can.”

“Be careful, Margo,” Moriarty cautioned.

“Help you? Sure, no problem,” said Smithback. “With what, by the way?”

Hesitantly, Margo told them about the meeting with Pendergast in the Secure Room: the casts of the claw and wound, the crates, Cuthbert’s story. Then she described the sculpture of Mbwun she’d seen in the exhibition­—omitting her panic and flight. She knew Smithback wouldn’t believe her any more than Moriarty had.

“So what I was asking George when you came up,” she concluded, “is exactly what he knows about this curse of the Kothoga.”

Moriarty shrugged. “Not all that much, really. In local legend, the Kothoga tribe was a shadowy group, a witch­doctor cult. They were supposed to be able to control demons. There was a creature—a familiar if you will—­they used for vengeance killings. That was Mbwun, He Who Walks On All Fours. Then, Whittlesey came across this figurine, and some other objects, packed them up, and sent them back to the Museum. Of course, such disturbance of sacred objects has been done countless times before. But then when he gets lost in the jungle and never comes out, and the rest of the expedition dies [147] on the return trip... ” He shrugged his shoulders. “The curse.”

“And now, people are dying in the Museum,” Margo said.

“What are you saying—that the Mbwun curse, the stories of a Museum Beast, and these killings are all linked?” asked Moriarty. “Come on, Margo, don’t read too much into it.”

She looked at him intently. “Didn’t you tell me that Cuthbert kept the figurine out of the exhibition until the last minute?”

“That’s right,” Moriarty said. “He handled all work on that relic himself. Not unusual, considering it’s such a valuable piece. As for delaying its placement in the exhibition, that was Rickman’s idea, I believe. Probably thought it would generate more interest.”

“I doubt it,” Smithback replied. “That’s not the way her mind works. If anything, she was trying toavoid interest. Blow scandal at her, and she shrivels up like a moth in a flame.” He chuckled.

“Just what’syour interest in all this, anyway?” Mor­iarty demanded.

“You don’t think a dusty old artifact would interest me?” Smithback finally caught the eye of the waitress and ordered another round for the table.

“Well, it’s obvious Rickman wouldn’t let you write about it,” Margo said.

Smithback made a face. “Too true. It might offend all the ethnic Kothoga tribesmen in New York. Actually, it’s because Von Oster said that Rickman was bent out of shape about this. So I thought maybe I could dig around, get some dirt. Something that will put me in a better bargaining position when our nexttête-à-tête comes along. You know, ‘This chapter stays, or I’m tak­ing the Whittlesey story toSmithsonian magazine,’ that sort of thing.”

“Now, wait a minute,” Margo said. “I didn’t take you into my confidence just so you could make some [148] money off it. Don’t you understand? We have to learn more about these crates. Whatever is killing people wants something that’s in them. We have to find out what it is.”

“What we really need to do is find that journal,” Smithback said.

“But Cuthbert says it’s been lost,” Margo said.

“Have you checked the accession database?” Smith­back said. “Maybe there’s some information there. I’d do it myself, but my security rating is rock-bottom.”

“So is mine,” Margo replied. “And it hasn’t been my day for computers.” She told them about her talk with Kawakita.

“How about Moriarty, here?” Smithback said. “You’re a computer whiz, right? Besides, as an Assis­tant Curator, you have high security access.”

“I think you should let the authorities handle this.” Moriarty drew back, dignified. “This isn’t for us to mess around with.”

“Don’t you understand?” Margo pleaded. “Nobodyknows what we’re dealing with here. People’s lives­—perhaps the Museum’s future—are at stake.”

“I know your motives are good, Margo,” Moriarty said. “But I don’t trust Bill’s.”

“My motives are pure as the Pierian spring,” Smith­back retorted. “Rickman is storming the citadel of jour­nalistic truth. I’m just looking to defend the ramparts.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier to just do what Rickman wants?” Moriarty asked. “I think your vendetta is a lit­tle childish. And you know what? You won’t win.”

The drinks came, and Smithback tossed his off and exhaled with gusto.

“Someday I’ll get that bitch,” he said.

= 22 =

Beauregard finished the entry, then stuffed his notebook in a back pocket. He knew he really ought to call the incident in.Hell with it . That girl had looked so scared, it was obvious she wasn’t up to anything. He’d make his report when he got the chance, and no sooner.

Beauregard was in a bad mood. He didn’t like door-­shaker duty. Still, it beat directing traffic at a broken light. And it made a good impression down at O’Ryans.Yeah , he would say,I’m assigned to the Museum case. Sorry, can’t talk about it .

For a museum, this place is damn quiet, Beauregard thought. He supposed on a normal day the Museum would be bustling with activity. But the Museum hadn’t been normal since Sunday. At least during the day, staff members had come in and out of the new exhibition halls. But then, they’d closed it off for the opening. Ex­cept with written permission from Dr. Cuthbert, you couldn’t get in unless you were police or security on official business. Thank God his shift ended at six and [150] he could look forward to two days away from this place. A solo fishing trip to the Catskills. He’d been looking forward to it for weeks.

Beauregard ran his hand reassuringly along the holster of hisS&W .38 special. Ready for action, as always. And on his other hip, a shot-shell pistol loaded with enough capstun to bring an elephant to its knees.

Behind him, Beauregard heard a muffled pattering sound.

He spun around, heart suddenly racing, to face the closed doors of the exhibition. He located a key, un­locked the doors, and peered in.

“Who’s there?”

Only a cool breeze fanned his cheek.

He let the doors close and tested the lock. You could come out, but you couldn’t go in. That girl must have gone in through the front entrance. But wasn’t that kept locked, too? They never told him anything.

The sound came again.

Well, hell, he thought,it ain’t my job to check inside. Can’t let anyone into the exhibition. Never said anything about anyone coming out.

Beauregard started humming a tune, tapping the beat on his thigh with two fingers. Ten more minutes and he’d be out of this frigging spookhouse.

The sound came again.

Beauregard unlocked the doors a second time, and stuck his head deep inside. He could see some dim shapes: exhibition cases, a gloomy-looking entranceway. “This is a police officer. You in there, please respond.”

The cases were dark, the walls vague shadows. No answer.

Withdrawing, Beauregard pulled out his radio. “Beau­regard to Ops, do you copy?”

“This isTDN . What’s up?”

“Reporting noises at the exhibition’s rear exit.”

“What kind of noises?”

“Uncertain. Sounds like someone’s in there.”

[151] There was some talk and a stifled laugh.

“Uh ... Fred?”

“What?” Beauregard was growing more irritated by the minute. The dispatcher in the situation room was a first-class asshole.

“Better not go in there.”

“Why not?”

“It might be the monster, Fred. Might get you.”

“Go to hell,” Fred muttered under his breath. He wasn’t supposed to investigate anything without backup, and the dispatcher knew it.

A scratching noise came from behind the doors, as if something with nails was scrabbling against it. Beaure­gard felt his breath come hard and fast.

His radio squawked. “Seen the monster yet?” came the voice.

Trying to keep his voice as neutral as possible, Beau­regard said: “Repeat, reporting unidentified sounds in the exhibition. Request backup to investigate.”

“He wants backup.” There was the sound of muffled laughter. “Fred, we don’t have any backup. Everyone’s busy.”

“Listen,” said Beauregard, losing his temper. “Who’s that with you? Why don’t you send him down?”

“McNitt. He’s on a coffee break. Right, McNitt?”

Beauregard heard some more laughter.

Beauregard switched off the radio.Fuck those guys , he thought.Some professionalism . He just hoped the Lieutenant was listening in on that frequency.

He waited in the dark hallway.Five more minutes and I’m history .

“TDNcalling Beauregard. You read?”

“Ten-four,” said Beauregard.

“McNitt there yet?”

“No,” said Beauregard. “He finally finish his coffee break?”

[152] “Hey, I was just kidding around,”TDN said a little nervously. “I sent him right up.”

“Well, he’s lost, then,” said Beauregard. “And my duty ends in five minutes. I’m off the next forty-eight, and nothing’s going to interfere with that. You better radio him.”

“He isn’t reading,” saidTDN .

An idea suddenly occurred to Beauregard. “How did McNitt go? Did he take the Section 17 elevator, the one behind the sit room?”

“Yep, that’s what I told him. Section 17 elevator. I got this map, same one you have.”

“So in order to get here he has to go through the exhibition. That was real smart. You should have sent him up through food services.”

“Hey, don’t talk to me about smart, Freddy boy. He’s the one who’s lost. Call me when he arrives.”

“One way or another, I’m outta here in five minutes,” said Beauregard. “It’ll be Effinger’s headache then. Over and out.”

That was when Beauregard heard a sudden commo­tion from the exhibition. There was a sound like a muf­fled thud.Jesus , he thought,McNitt . He unlocked the doors and went in, unsnapping the holster of his .38.

TDNplaced another doughnut in his mouth and chewed, swallowing it with a mouthful of coffee. The radio hissed.

“McNitt to Ops. Come in,TDN .”

“Ten-four. Where the hell are you?”

“I’m at the rear entrance. Beauregard ain’t here. I can’t raise him or anything.”

“Lemme try.” He punched the transmitter. “TDNcalling Beauregard. Fred, come in.TDN calling Beau­regard ... Hey, McNitt, I think he got pissed off and went home. His shift just ended. How did you get up there, anyway?”

“I went the way you said, but when I got to the front [153] end of the exhibition it was locked, so I had to go around. Didn’t have my keys. Got a little lost.”

“Stay tight, all right? His relief should arrive any min­ute. Effinger, it says here. Radio me when he arrives and then come on back.”

“Here comes Effinger now. You gonna report Beau­regard?” McNitt asked.

“You kidding? I’m no damn baby-sitter.”

= 23 =

D’Agosta looked over at Pendergast, reclining in the shabby backseat of the Buick.Jesus , he thought,a guy like Pendergast ought to pull at least a late model Town Car . Instead, they gave him a four-year-old Buick and a driver who could barely speak English.

Pendergast’s eyes were half closed.

“Turn on Eighty-sixth and take the Central Park trans­verse,” shouted D’Agosta.

The driver swerved across two lanes of Central Park West and roared into the transverse.

“Take Fifth to Sixty-fifth and go across,” said D’Agosta. “Then go one block north on Third and take a right at Sixty-sixth.”

“Fifty-nine faster,” said the driver, in a thick Middle Eastern accent.

“Not in the evening rush hour,” called D’Agosta. Christ, they couldn’t even find a driver who knew his way around the city.