Reliquary

by Douglas Preston

  On the deck of the police launch, Lieutenant D’Agosta watched with detached interest as the novice diver was hauled to the surface. He was a remarkable sight: thrashing around, bubbling yells partly muffled by mud, streams of the ochre-colored stuff bleeding away from his dry suit and staining the water chocolate. The diver must’ve lost his hold on the rope at some point; he was lucky, very lucky, to have found his way back to the surface. D’Agosta waited patiently while the hysterical diver was brought on board, unsuited, rinsed off, and calmed down. He watched the man vomit over the side—not on deck, D’Agosta noted approvingly. He’d found a skeleton. Two of them, apparently. Not what he’d been sent down for, of course, but not bad, for a virgin dive. He would write the poor guy a commendation. The kid would probably be okay if he hadn’t breathed in any of that shit that clung to his nose and mouth. If he had… well, it was miraculous what they could do with antibiotics these days.

  The first skeleton, when it appeared at the churning surface, was still coated with sludge. A sidestroking diver dragged it to the side of D’Agosta’s launch, eased a net around it, and clambered onto the deck. It was hoisted up the side, scraping and dribbling, sliding onto a tarp at D’Agosta’s feet like some grisly catch.

  “Jesus, you could have rinsed it off a bit,” D’Agosta said, wincing at the smell of ammonia. Above the surface the skeleton became his jurisdiction, and he fervently wished it could simply go back from whence it came. He could see that where the skull should have been there was nothing.

  “Shall I hose it down, sir?” the diver asked, reaching for the pump.

  “Hose yourself down first.” The diver looked ridiculous, an unraveled condom plastered to the side of his head, filth dribbling from his legs. Two divers climbed aboard and began gingerly hauling in another rope while a third diver brought up the other skeleton, buoying it with a free hand. When it landed on the deck and those aboard saw that it, too, had no head, an awful silence fell. D’Agosta glanced over at the huge brick of heroin, also recovered and safely sealed in a rubber evidence bag. Suddenly, the brick had grown a lot less interesting.

  He drew thoughtfully on his cigar and looked away, scanning the Cloaca. His eyes came to rest on the ancient mouth of the West Side Lateral Drain. A few stalactites dripped from the ceiling, like small teeth. The West Side Lateral was one of the biggest in the city, draining practically the entire Upper West Side. Every time Manhattan got a hard rain, the Lower Hudson Sewage Treatment Plant hit capacity and shunted thousands of gallons of raw sewage out the West Side Lateral. Right into the Cloaca.

  He tossed the remains of his cigar over the side. “You guys are gonna have to get wet again,” he said, exhaling loudly. “I want those skulls.”

  = 2 =

  LOUIE PADELSKY, Assistant Medical Examiner for the City of New York, glanced at the clock, feeling his gut rumble. He was, quite literally, starving. He’d had nothing but SlimCurve shakes for three days, and today was his day for a real lunch. Popeye’s fried chicken. He ran his hand over his ample gut, probing and pinching, thinking that there might be less there. Yup, definitely less there.

  He took a gulp from his fifth cup of black coffee and glanced at the ref sheet. Ah—at last, something interesting. Not just another shooting, stabbing, or OD.

  The stainless steel doors at the end of the autopsy suite banged open, and the ME nurse, Sheila Rocco, rolled in a brown corpse and laid it out on a gurney. Padelsky glanced at it, looked away, glanced back again. Corpse was the wrong word, he decided. The thing on the gurney was little more than a skeleton, covered with shreds of flesh. Padelsky wrinkled his nose.

  Rocco positioned the gurney under the lights and began hooking up the drainage tube.

  “Don’t bother,” Padelsky said. The only thing that needed draining around here was his coffee cup. He took a large swallow, tossed it into the wastebasket, checked the corpse’s tag against the ref sheet and initialed it, then pulled on a pair of green latex gloves.

  “What have you brought for me now, Sheila?” he asked. “Piltdown Man?”

  Rocco frowned and adjusted the lights above the gurney.

  “This one must’ve been buried for a couple of centuries, at least. Buried in shit, too, from the smell of it. Perhaps it’s King Shitankhamen himself.”

  Rocco pursed her lips and waited while Padelsky roared with laughter. When he was finished, she silently handed him a clipboard.

  Padelsky scanned the sheet, lips moving as he read the typed sentences. Suddenly, he straightened up. “Dredged out of Humboldt Kill,” he muttered. “Christ almighty.” He eyed the nearby glove dispenser, considered putting on an extra pair of gloves, decided against it. “Hmm. Decapitated, head still missing… no clothing, but found with a metal belt around its waist.” He glanced over at the cadaver and spied the ID bag hanging from the gurney.

  “Let’s have a look,” he said, taking up the bag. Inside was a thin gold belt with an Uffizi buckle, set with a topaz. It had already been run through the lab, he knew, but he still wasn’t allowed to touch it. He noticed the belt had a number on its back plate.

  “Expensive,” Padelsky said, nodding toward the belt. “Maybe it’s Piltdown Woman. Or a transvestite.” And he roared again.

  Rocco frowned. “May we show the dead a little more respect, Dr. Padelsky?”

  “Of course, of course.” He hung the clipboard on a hook and adjusted the microphone that hung above the gurney. “Switch on the tape recorder, will you, Sheila darling?”

  As the machine snapped on, his voice suddenly became clipped and professional. “This is Dr. Louis Padelsky. It’s August 2, 12:05 P.M. I am assisted by Sheila Rocco, and we’re commencing examination of”—he glanced at the tag—“Number A-1430. We have here a headless corpse, virtually skeletonized—Sheila, will you straighten it out?—perhaps four feet eight inches in length. Add the missing skull and you probably got someone five foot six, seven. Let’s sex the skeleton. Pelvic rim’s a little wide. Yup, it’s gynecoid; we’ve got a woman here. No lipping of the lumbar vertebrae, so she’s under forty. Hard to say how long she’s been submerged. There is a distinct smell of, er, sewage. The bones are a brownish orange color and look like they’ve been in mud for a long time. On the other hand, there is sufficient connective tissue to hold the corpse together, and there are ragged ends of muscle tissue around the medial and lateral condyles of the femur and more clinging to the sacrum and ischium. Plenty of material for blood typing and DNA analysis. Scissors, please.”

  He snipped off a piece of tissue and slipped it into a bag. “Sheila, could you turn the pelvis over on its side? Now, let’s see… the skeleton is still mostly articulated, except of course for the missing skull. Looks like the axis is also missing… six cervical vertebrae remaining… missing the two floating ribs and the entire left foot.”

  He continued describing the skeleton. Finally he moved away from the microphone. “Sheila, the rongeur, please.”

  Rocco handed him a small instrument, which Padelsky used to separate the humeras from the ulna.

  “Periosteum elevator.” He dug into the vertebrae, removing a few samples of connective tissue, cutting away at the bone. Then he pulled a pair of disposable plastic goggles over his head.

  “Saw, please.”

  She handed him a small nitrogen-driven saw and he switched it on, waiting a moment while the tachometer reached the correct rpm. When the diamond blade touched the bone, a high-pitched whine, like an enraged mosquito, filled the small room. Along with it came the sudden smell of bone dust, sewage, rotten marrow, and death.

  Padelsky took sections at various points, which Rocco sealed in bags.

  “I want SEM and stereozoom pictures of each microsection,” Padelsky said, stepping away from the gurney and turning off the recorder. Rocco wrote the requests on the Ziploc bags with a large black marker.

  A knock sounded at the door. Sheila went to answer, stepped outside for a moment, then poked her head back in.

  “They have a
tentative ID from the belt, Doctor,” she said. “It’s Pamela Wisher.”

  “Pamela Wisher, the society girl?” asked Padelsky, taking off the goggles and backing off a little. “Jeez.”

  “And there’s a second skeleton,” she continued. “From the same place.”

  Padelsky had moved to a deep metal sink, preparing to remove his gloves and wash up. “A second one?” he asked irritably. “Why the hell didn’t they bring it in with the first? I should have been looking at them side by side.” He glanced at the clock: one-fifteen already. Goddammit, that meant no lunch until at least three. He felt faint with hunger.

  The doors banged open and the second skeleton was wheeled under the bright light. Padelsky turned the tape recorder back on and went to pour himself yet another cup of coffee while the nurse did the prep work.

  “This one’s headless, too,” Rocco said.

  “You’re kidding, right?” Padelsky replied. He walked forward, glanced at the skeleton, then froze, coffee cup to his lips.

  “What the—?” He lowered the cup and stared, open-mouthed. Laying the cup aside, he stepped up quickly to the gurney and bent over the skeleton, running the tips of his gloved fingers lightly over one of the ribs.

  “Dr. Padelsky?” Rocco asked.

  He straightened, went back to the tape recorder, and brusquely switched it off. “Cover it up and get Dr. Brambell. And don’t breathe a word about this”—he nodded at the skeleton—“to anyone.”

  She hesitated, looking at the skeleton with a puzzled expression, her eyes gradually widening.

  “I mean now, Sheila darling.”

  = 3 =

  THE PHONE RANG abruptly, shattering the stillness of the small museum office. Margo Green, face mere inches from her computer terminal, sat back guiltily in her chair, a shock of short brown hair falling across her eyes.

  The phone rang again, and she moved to answer it, then hesitated. No doubt it was one of the computer jocks in data processing, calling to complain about the enormous amount of CPU time her cladistic regression program was soaking up. She settled back and waited for the phone to stop ringing, the muscles of her back and legs pleasantly sore from the previous night’s workout. Picking up the hand trainer from her desk, she began squeezing it in a routine so familiar it had grown almost instinctive. Another five minutes and her program would be finished. Then they could complain all they wanted.

  She knew about the new cost-cutting policy requiring that large batch jobs be submitted for approval. But that would have meant a flurry of e-mail before she could run the program. And she needed the results right away.

  At least Columbia, where she’d been an instructor until accepting the assistant curatorship at the New York Museum of Natural History, wasn’t always in the midst of some new round of budget cutting. And the more the Museum got into financial trouble these days, the more it seemed to rely on show instead of substance. Already, Margo had noticed the early buildup for next year’s blockbuster exhibition, 21st Century Plagues.

  She glanced up at the screen to check the progress of her regression program, then put down the hand trainer, reached into her bag and drew out the New York Post. The Post and a cup of black Kilimanjaro coffee had become her weekday morning ritual. There was something refreshing about the Post’s truculent attitude, like that of the Fat Boy in The Pickwick Papers. Besides, she knew she’d catch hell from her old friend Bill Smithback if he ever found out she’d missed a single homicide article carrying his byline.

  She smoothed the tabloid on her knees, grinning at the headline despite herself. It was vintage Postean, a screaming 96-point banner that covered three-quarters of the front page:

  SEWAGE CORPSE

  IDENTIFIED AS MISSING DEB

  She glanced down at the opening paragraph. Sure enough, it was Smithback’s work. Second front-page article this month, she thought; on the strength of this, Smithback would be strutting and primping, even more impossible to be around than usual.

  She quickly skimmed the article. It was quintessential Smithback: sensationalist and macabre, full of loving attention to the gruesome details. In the opening paragraphs, he quickly summarized the facts that were by now well known to all New Yorkers. The “beautiful trust-funder” Pamela Wisher, known for her marathon late-night carousings, had disappeared two months earlier from a basement club on Central Park South. Ever since, her “smiling face with its dazzling teeth, vacant blue eyes, and expensive blond hair” had been plastered at every street corner from 57th to 96th. Margo had often seen the color photocopies of Wisher as she jogged to the Museum from her apartment on West End Avenue.

  Now, the article breathlessly announced, the remains found the previous day—“buried in raw sewage” in Humboldt Kill and “locked in a bony embrace” with another skeleton—had been identified as Pamela Wisher’s. The second skeleton remained unidentified. An accompanying photo showed Wisher’s boyfriend, the young Viscount Adair, sitting on the curb in front of the Platypus Lounge with his head in his hands, minutes after learning of her grisly death. The police were, of course, “taking vigorous action.” Smithback closed with several man-on-the-street quotations of the “I hope they fry the bastard who did this” variety.

  She lowered the paper, thinking of the grainy face of Pamela Wisher staring out at her from the numerous posters. She deserved a better fate than becoming New York’s big story of the summer.

  The shrill sound of the phone again interrupted Margo’s thoughts. She glanced over at her terminal, pleased to see that the program had finished at last. Might as well answer it, she thought; she’d have to get this lecture over with sooner or later.

  “This is Margo Green,” she said.

  “Dr. Green?” came the voice. “About time.”

  The thick Queens accent was distantly familiar, like a half-forgotten dream. Gruff, authoritarian. Margo searched her memory for the face belonging to the voice on the other end of the phone.

  …All we can say is that a body has been found on the premises, under circumstances we are currently investigating…

  She sat back in surprise.

  “Lieutenant D’Agosta?” she asked.

  “We need you in the Forensic Anthropology lab,” D’Agosta said. “Right away, please.”

  “Can I ask—?”

  “You may not. Sorry. Whatever you’re doing, forget it and come downstairs.” The line went dead with a sharp click.

  Margo held the phone away from her face, looking at the mouthpiece as if waiting for further explanation. Then she opened her carryall and replaced the Post—carefully covering a small semiautomatic pistol in the process—pushed the chair away from the computer, and stepped quickly out of her office.

  = 4 =

  BILL SMITHBACK STROLLED nonchalantly past the grand facade of Nine Central Park South, a stately McKim, Mead, and White building of brick and carved limestone. A brace of doormen stood beneath the gold-trimmed awning that stretched to the curb. He could see a variety of other service people standing at attention inside the opulent lobby. As he’d feared, it was one of those ridiculously overstaffed parkfront apartment buildings. This was going to be tough. Very tough.

  He turned the corner of Sixth Avenue and paused, considering how best to proceed. He felt in the outside pocket of his sports jacket, locating the record button of his microcassette recorder. He could turn it on unobtrusively when the time came. He glanced at his image, reflected among countless Italian shoes in a nearby shop window: he was the very model of preppiedom, or as near as his wardrobe would permit. He took a deep breath and returned around the corner, walking with confident step toward the cream-colored awning. The closer of the two uniformed doormen gazed at him imperturbably, one gloved hand on the great brass handle of the door.

  “I’m here to see Mrs. Wisher,” Smithback said.

  “Name, please?” the man asked in a monotone.

  “A friend of Pamela’s.”

  “I’m sorry,” the man said, unmoving, “but Mrs
. Wisher is not receiving any visitors.”

  Smithback thought quickly. The doorman had asked who was calling before telling him this. That meant Mrs. Wisher was expecting someone.

  “If you must know, it’s about this morning’s appointment,” Smithback said. “I’m afraid there’s been a change. Could you ring her for me?”

  The doorman hesitated a moment, then opened the door, leading Smithback across the gleaming marble floor. The journalist looked around. The concierge, a very old and very gaunt-looking man, was standing behind a bronze construction that looked more fortress than front desk. At the back of the lobby, a security guard sat behind a Louis XVI table. An elevator operator stood beside him, legs slightly apart, hands folded across his belt.

  “This gentleman is calling on Mrs. Wisher,” the doorman said to the concierge.

  The concierge gazed down at him from his marble pillbox. “Yes?”

  Smithback took a deep breath. At least, he’d broached the lobby. “It’s about the appointment she’s expecting. There’s been a change.”

  The concierge paused a moment, his hooded eyes checking out Smithback’s shoes, running up his sport coat, examining his haircut. Smithback waited, silently chafing under the examination, hoping he’d captured the look of an earnest young man from a well-to-do family.

  “Who may I say is calling?” the concierge rasped.

  “A friend of the family will do.”

  The concierge waited, staring at him.

  “Bill Smithback,” he added quickly. Mrs. Wisher, he was certain, did not read the New York Post.

  The concierge looked down at something that was spread in front of him. “What about the eleven o’clock appointment?” he asked.

  “They sent me instead,” Smithback replied, suddenly glad that it was 10:32 A.M.

  The concierge turned around and disappeared into a small office. He came out again sixty seconds later. “Please pick up the house telephone on the table beside you,” he said.