by C. S. Poe
I stood and carefully stretched, testing the aches of various body parts, then started toward the bathroom.
My cell rang.
The biggest coffee they offer, I thought, mentally answering Neil’s inevitable question on the other end of the call. I returned to the beds and picked it up from the nightstand.
Not Neil.
Not a number I recognized, in fact.
My underarms immediately began to sweat as I hit Accept and brought the phone to my ear. “H-hello?”
I was greeted by living silence. I nearly spoke again but caught myself at the subtle sound of rubbing or scratching against the microphone.
Then it grew louder.
A huff of air—of breath.
“B-baby?”
One word. My favorite word. That’s all it took to fill me with hope again. My knees buckled, and I dropped to the floor like a sack of potatoes. “Calvin? Oh—God—where are… are you okay?”
Calvin grunted again. “Machinery,” he murmured before there was more friction over the line.
Machinery?
“Calvin?” I asked more insistently.
“Old machinery,” he clarified, voice gruff and thick, as if every word was a struggle to pronounce correctly.
He sounded out of breath. In pain. He must have been disoriented, because what the fuck was he talking about? And why was he dragging the phone across what sounded like a wooden floor?
“Gray… ngh… skyline. Rooftops. It’s—” Calvin stopped. His breathing was erratic. “P-probably five… seven… stories.”
“I don’t understand,” I answered.
Why wasn’t he—wait.
Stop.
Think.
Calvin was a soldier. He had a decade of experience working overseas in hostile situations. He would have been trained to survive dangerous encounters. To document the details of his environment. And in the worst scenario imaginable, he would be able to assess whether escape would be possible. Belatedly I realized he wasn’t wasting his time or sparse energy on sweet nothings, nor was he confused and babbling incoherently. He was telling me everything he could about his location. Calvin had already determined he couldn’t escape without intervention.
I jumped to my feet, ran to the desk, and started writing down everything he said on the complimentary notepad. “You can see the sky,” I said, clarifying that I now understood. “You’re high up—higher than the surrounding buildings. There’s old machines. What else?”
Calvin cleared his throat as he tried to speak again. Every unsteady breath he took sent me into a near tailspin, but I had to keep my shit together. If I lost it now, Calvin had zero chance.
“Calvin?” I pressed. “Can you hear anything?”
“Hum,” he murmured.
“Like… like a person humming?”
“Ngh… steady hum.” The phone clattered like it’d been dropped. I could hear Calvin swear from the distance. “Baby.”
“I’m here.”
“It was bumpy.” He sounded as if he’d fallen and was on the floor, close to the phone. Calvin made another pained sound. “Can’t… remember.”
“You’re doing great,” I insisted.
“Bare brick.”
Brick?
Brick helped, actually.
“Calvin—the floors. What do the floors look like?”
He made a sound, as if consciousness was becoming more difficult to hold on to by the second. “Wood. Dusty. Broken.”
Without warning, Calvin gave an unintelligible shout into the phone. There was a struggle, like someone had joined him in an unfair match of human strength—and Calvin was on the losing side. And all at once, the distorted sounds silenced.
“Calvin?” I called. “Calvin?”
An inhumanly deep and robotic voice spoke suddenly—one of those voice distorters. Stereotypical in all the worst ways. “Party C’s behavior is somewhat remiss. You have twelve hours to collect your reward.”
“T-twelve? No!” I shot a look back at the alarm clock. “I still have twenty-four hours. I know what you want—the skull of Edward Drinker Cope. I’ll find it. But I need the full forty-eight hours you promised!”
“Should Party B fail to collect on his sum, will he wage a bitter war against Party A?”
“I won’t fail!”
“It would be such a sensational scandal. Until the very end.”
“Tell me where Calvin is,” I demanded. “I’ll get the skull. I’ll meet you there.”
The robotic voice laughed.
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
“CALVIN’S IN Brooklyn!” I all but shouted at Neil.
“You don’t know that, Seb! Yes, sorry, I’m here,” Neil said into his phone, essentially putting his argument with me on hold.
“You say that like I wasn’t born and raised here—like I wouldn’t be able to put these clues together,” I continued without a breath, waving my piece of paper in his face.
Neil grabbed my wrist, pulled my hand out of his line of vision, and strained to listen to the voice on the other end of the call. “Ben Dover.” Neil looked at me. “What does that name mean to you?”
“That he should have gone by Benjamin,” I retorted, yanking free from Neil’s vise grip.
Neil rolled his eyes, thanked the caller, and hung up. “That was the lab. DNA came back on the first victim—the one who was mailed to Frank last week. Ben Dover. He was reported missing last Wednesday when he didn’t show up to work and wasn’t returning calls.”
“Where’d he work?”
“NYU. He was a professor of photography. How’s that tie in with your Cope skull history lesson?” Neil questioned. He typed out a text message at the speed of light before looking up at me.
“Who gives a fuck?”
“You gave many fucks last night.”
“The Collector has taken twelve hours off the clock, Neil. We don’t have time to play their game. Calvin needs help now!” I held up the paper again. “He thinks the building is five to seven stories. He can see over roofs, so he must be near the top, and it’s definitely turn-of-the-century. Exposed-brick walls, what sounds like original wood flooring—he said there’s machinery in the room. I suspect it’s an old warehouse or factory that hasn’t been converted into some swanky hipster joint. That fits into the search radius Quinn and I discussed yesterday.”
“Sure it does,” Neil agreed. “But that description alone covers Dumbo, Vinegar Hill—hell, even the Navy Yard could be a possibility. I can’t set you loose on Brooklyn, shouldering down more doors, without at least narrowing that radius to a single neighborhood.” He dialed another number on his cell. “I’ll put in a request to have that number Calvin phoned from get tracked by cell towers, but I’m going to guess it was a burner. We might not get much.”
“You know who else is from Brooklyn? Rossi.”
“Please stop talking, Seb. For thirty seconds.” Neil stared at me hard before a static voice over the phone captured his attention.
“I’ll stop talking when I’m dead,” I muttered. I moved away from Neil as I chose Pop’s number from my contacts and gave him a ring.
He answered immediately, as if he’d been staring at his phone, waiting for me to call. “Sebastian?”
“I need your help, Pop.”
“What’s wrong?” he asked with alarm.
“Did you know a professor at NYU named Benjamin Dover?”
I could practically hear Pop’s struggle to calm himself upon realizing I wasn’t asking for him to come bail me out of jail or informing him I was in the ER. “Ah… no. No, I don’t think so. Why?”
“He taught photography up until last week,” I explained.
“Photography? Definitely not, then. You know how little overlap—what happened last week?”
“He was murdered.”
“Good God,” Pop murmured.
“Do you think you can do a little recon on him?”
“What kind of i
nformation are you looking for?”
“I’m not sure. But these murders and word games, the nonsense surrounding Edward Cope—it’s all connected to the Museum of Natural History. And yet Benjamin Dover, working in a completely unrelated field, at an unrelated location, was Patient Zero. I need to know why.”
“What if it’s nothing more than his reputation, Sebastian?” Pop asked. “Like you. You, too, work an unrelated field, and yet you’ve been pulled into this.”
I thought of Rossi, of how he was a perfect example of six degrees of separation, and said, “No. I kind of… figured out my connection to the museum.”
Pop took a breath.
“Start with the obvious,” I instructed. “See if his curriculum somehow involves fossils or dinosaurs or that sort of thinking. Check to see if he has any personal exhibits currently open somewhere in the city.”
“I’ll talk to a few colleagues,” Pop agreed. “But, kiddo, I’m no detective. I can’t promise I’ll find anything more than dead ends.”
I glanced up to see Neil had finished his phone call and was watching me. “I know, Dad. But I’ve only got twelve hours, and I need all the help I can get.”
Chapter Thirteen
“I WANT you to go with Quinn,” Neil said as we exited the hotel. “Check out Benjamin Dover’s apartment and see what you can find.”
“It’s a waste of time,” I said. “My dad’s making some calls about this guy. We don’t need to go looking in his underwear drawer in the meantime. Let’s go to Brooklyn and—”
Neil stopped buttoning his jacket and took my shoulders with both hands. “In every you-can’t-make-this-shit-up mystery you’ve been involved in, the history has mattered. The murders have always been traced back to a thing—an artifact—with some kind of ridiculous significance.” He let go with a bit more care before adding, “Don’t forget you’re smart and history is what you do best.”
“But if we know—”
“We don’t know where Calvin is,” Neil retorted. “And we can’t have the entirety of the NYPD running to the rescue, right? Calvin managed to make a phone call and pissed this guy off enough to cut our remaining time in half. And,” Neil continued, leaning closer, “if it is Rossi, the moment he sees uniformed officers or even me or Quinn, he might go to extremes. These remaining hours—these are the most dangerous for Calvin. We can’t get sloppy now.”
“I hate you.”
“You like me,” Neil corrected. “And you hate that.”
After we spent a few minutes shivering in the morning cold on the side of the road, a light-colored car pulled to the curb in front of us.
The passenger window was rolled down, and from behind the wheel, Quinn called, “Get in. We’re going to solve a murder.”
“Seb,” Neil said, stopping me as I walked toward the edge of the sidewalk.
“What?” I looked over my shoulder, hand on the car door. “Be good?”
Neil smiled a little. “Be careful.” Both of our names were called from down the block, and Neil quickly looked to the left. I couldn’t make out the figure’s details, but I did recognize the voice.
Detective Wainwright.
Surprise, surprise.
Neil motioned discreetly for me to get going, walked toward Wainwright, and cut the officer off from approaching me.
“Sebastian,” Quinn snapped.
I opened the door and slid into the passenger seat. I’d barely shut it behind me when Quinn pulled onto the road again and shot off toward Ninth Avenue. “Jesus, Quinn!”
“Buckle up,” she said around the end of her cigarillo.
I didn’t have to be told twice. Hell, I didn’t even need to be told once. I shoved my bag down onto the floor between my feet and quickly pulled the seat belt on. “That was Wainwright.”
Quinn gave her rearview mirror a quick look, removed her cigarillo to tap ash out her partially open window, then nodded. “Yeah.”
“Why was it Wainwright?”
“Because Wainwright smells shit in the ranks.”
“Rossi.”
She snorted and took a puff of the vanilla-flavored tobacco. “Close.”
I furrowed my brow and looked at her. “What do you mean?”
Quinn shook her head a little and leaned one arm on the door. “Trying to convince Major Cases that you’re a harmless pain in the ass is easier said than done. I’ve been suspended without pay.”
“What?” I protested. “Why?”
“Wainwright thinks I’m suspicious.” She took another puff. “Can’t blame him, under the circumstances. Why is Calvin’s partner trying to hold the NYPD back from rescuing him, you know?”
“Because Rossi took him, and if any cops see him, then his whole plan blows up in his face.”
“Yup.”
“And Rossi’s already panicking,” I explained. “Calvin called me this morning.”
Quinn shot me a look. Half a dozen different expressions seemed to dance across her face. She turned to the road again, grip tightening on the steering wheel. “And?”
“He’s alive.”
“Well, he sure as shit wasn’t calling from beyond the grave.”
“He sounded drugged. He could barely form coherent sentences.”
She swore.
“He gave me details about his location. Neil’s trying to reduce the search radius. He’s somewhere in Brooklyn. You were right about that.”
“Ever the soldier,” she said, mostly to herself.
“The Collector—you know, fuck it. Rossi caught him. I think he gave Calvin more drugs to knock him out. Then he told me I only had twelve hours left instead of twenty-four.”
Quinn made a sharp turn downtown, and the traffic she cut off honked noisily.
I grabbed the dash. “Could you stick to the road and not the sidewalk?”
“You heard his voice?”
“He used one of those modifiers.” I looked in the side mirror, although the hotel was long behind us. “What’s going to happen to Neil?”
“Wainwright’s probably seeing to his suspension too.”
ACCORDING TO the missing persons’ report Neil had obtained that morning, Benjamin Dover was fifty years old, six feet tall, an estimated 170 pounds, with brown and gray hair. He’d last been seen leaving a bar at 2:00 a.m. in Greenwich Village and walking home a week ago last Sunday. He had not been heard from since. He was unmarried and had no known significant other, so a wellness check wasn’t performed until Wednesday when a colleague called the police. The responding officers noted that the apartment was orderly, nothing appeared missing or out of place, but that there was also no indication Dover had gone on any sort of impromptu trip.
Despite her suspension status, Quinn had been able to gather a few additional details on Dover while driving to the hotel to grab me before Wainwright did. Dover had been an instructor at New York University for eighteen years, with the occasional freelance gig or personal art show on the side. Before he’d landed his position of teaching the next up-and-coming Robert Corneliuses of our time, Dover had been pursuing a career in photojournalism.
“I don’t understand the connection Dover has to the museum.” I shut the passenger door and slung my bag over one shoulder.
I hurried across Sullivan Street with Quinn to a multiuse building. The ground floor storefront was under construction, despite the freezing-cold weather. Guys in hard-hats and reflective vests moved in and out of what was technically the window display. Hammers banged, electric saws deafened the city ambiance, and the side door leading to the apartments above had been left propped open from all the comings and goings.
My stomach growled noisily as I caught a whiff from the dumpling store to the left. I hadn’t partaken in the pastries or coffee Neil had brought up from the hotel’s morning buffet, because Calvin had phoned and I was, rightfully so, in a tizzy at the time. Now that I hadn’t had more than half a pretzel since around noon yesterday, I was getting pretty terrible hunger pains. But worse was the gui
lt over even wanting to take a breath and eat something. Because how was it fair—going into a warm restaurant, sitting down, and filling my belly—while Calvin was cold, drugged, and in imminent danger?
“I didn’t think college professors made such good money,” Quinn said, ignoring my statement.
“What?” I looked away from Divine Dumplings’ window decal and down at her.
“Didn’t your father teach at NYU?”
“Sure. I mean, Pop has a nice place too, although he’s been there most of his life. It’s rent-controlled.”
“This is an expensive neighborhood.” Quinn made a motion to her left and right. “Plus he’s got a view of the Empire on one end, and One World Trade on the other.”
I glanced either direction, and sure enough, I could barely make out the blurry, gray shape of spires on the horizons. “The report did say he freelanced,” I suggested.
“Must be an artiste.”
I spared her a small smile. “You mean, he must sell pretentious collections for a cool mil that can only be described as ‘the communal sense of self is a wasteland,’ or ‘the absence of objectivity represents the performance of my manhood.’”
Quinn took a final puff from the butt of her cigarillo, dropped it to the ground, stomped it out with her heel, and muttered under her breath. She went to the side door and strolled in with the confidence of someone who lived in the building. I followed, the two of us quickly taking the stairs to the second floor. Quinn unbuttoned her coat as she reached the landing. Her steps slowed as she removed a pistol from her shoulder holster and approached the lone apartment door.
“I thought you were on suspension,” I whispered.
She glanced at me and raised the gun. “My off-duty weapon,” she said nonchalantly.
