Reliquary

by Douglas Preston

  Smithback held the receiver to his ear.

  “What? Did George cancel?” said a small, crisp, expensive voice.

  “Mrs. Wisher, may I come up and speak with you about Pamela?”

  There was a silence. “Who is this?” the voice asked.

  “Bill Smithback.”

  There was another silence, longer this time. Smithback continued. “I have something very important, some information about your daughter’s death, that I am sure the police haven’t told you. I feel sure you would want to know—”

  The voice broke in. “Yes, yes, I’m sure you do.”

  “Wait—” Smithback said, his mind racing again.

  There was a silence.

  “Mrs. Wisher?”

  He heard a click. The woman had hung up.

  Well, Smithback thought, he had given it his best shot. Maybe he could wait outside, on a park bench across the street, on the chance she’d emerge later in the day. But even as he considered this, Smithback knew that Mrs. Wisher would not be leaving her elegant fastness for the foreseeable future.

  A phone rang at the concierge’s elbow. Mrs. Wisher, no doubt. Eager to avoid a bum’s rush, Smithback turned and started walking quickly out of the lobby.

  “Mr. Smithback!” the concierge called loudly.

  Smithback turned. This was the part he hated.

  The concierge gazed at him expressionlessly, telephone at his ear. “The elevator is over there.”

  “Elevator?” Smithback asked.

  The concierge nodded. “Eighteenth floor.”

  The elevator operator slid open first the brass cage, then the heavy oak doors, depositing Smithback directly into a peach-colored foyer crammed top to bottom with flower arrangements. A side table was overflowing with sympathy cards, including a fresh stack that had not been opened. At the far end of the silent room, a set of French doors stood ajar. Smithback walked toward them slowly.

  Beyond the doors lay a large drawing room. Empire sofas and chaise longues were placed at neat symmetric angles on the dense carpet. Along the far wall stood a series of tall windows. Smithback knew that, when open, they would afford a spectacular view of Central Park. But now they were tightly closed and shuttered, throwing the tastefully appointed space into heavy gloom.

  There was a brief movement to one side. Turning, Smithback saw a small, neat woman with well-coiffed brown hair seated at one end of a sofa. She was wearing a dark, simple dress. Without speaking, she motioned him to sit down. Smithback selected a wing chair opposite Mrs. Wisher. A tea service had been laid out on a low table between them, and the journalist’s eye roved over the array of scones, marmalades, dishes of honey and clotted cream. The woman made no move to offer any, and Smithback realized the setting had been for the intended appointment. A brief uneasiness came across him at the thought that George—no doubt the real eleven o’clock arrival—might appear at any moment.

  Smithback cleared his throat. “Mrs. Wisher, I’m very, very sorry about your daughter,” he said.

  As he spoke, he realized he might actually mean it. Seeing this elegant room, seeing how little all this wealth mattered in the face of ultimate tragedy, somehow brought the woman’s loss forcefully home to him.

  Mrs. Wisher continued to gaze back, hands folded in her lap. She may have made a barely perceptible nod, but Smithback couldn’t be sure in the dim light. Time to get the show on the road, he thought, reaching casually into his jacket pocket and slowly pressing the record button.

  “Turn off that tape recorder,” said Mrs. Wisher quietly. Her voice was thin and a little strained, but remarkably commanding.

  Smithback jerked his hand out of the pocket. “I’m sorry?”

  “Please remove the recorder from your pocket and place it here, where I can see that it’s turned off.”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” Smithback said, fumbling with the machine.

  “Have you no sense of decency?” the woman whispered.

  Smithback, placing the recorder on the low table, felt his ears begin to burn.

  “You say you’re sorry about my daughter’s death,” the quiet voice continued, “while at the same time turning on that filthy thing. After I invited you into my home.”

  Smithback shifted uncomfortably in his chair, reluctant to meet the woman’s eyes. “Yes, well,” he babbled. “I’m sorry, I’m just… well, it’s my job.” The words sounded lame even as he spoke them.

  “Yes. I’ve just lost my only child, the only family I had left. Whose sensitivities do you think should take precedence, Mr. Smithback?”

  Smithback fell silent, forcing himself to look at the woman. She sat unmoving, staring steadily back at him across the gloom, hands still folded on her lap. A strange thing was happening to him, a very strange thing, so foreign to his nature that he almost didn’t recognize the emotion. He was feeling embarrassed. No, that wasn’t it: he was feeling ashamed. If he’d fought for the scoop, unearthed it himself, perhaps it would be different. But to be brought up here, to see the woman’s grief… All the excitement of getting assigned a big story drained away beneath this novel sensation.

  Mrs. Wisher raised one of her hands and made the briefest of movements, indicating something on a reading table beside her.

  “I assume you are the Smithback who writes for this paper?”

  Smithback followed her gesture and noticed, with a sinking feeling, a copy of the Post. “Yes,” he said.

  She folded her hands again. “I just wanted to be sure. Now, what about that important information regarding my daughter’s death? No, don’t say it—no doubt that was a ruse, as well.”

  There was another silence. Now, Smithback found himself almost wishing that the real eleven o’clock appointment would show up. Anything to get out of here.

  “How do you do it?” she asked at last.

  “Do what?”

  “Invent this garbage? It isn’t enough for my daughter to be brutally murdered. People like you have to sully her memory.”

  Smithback swallowed. “Mrs. Wisher, I’m just—”

  “Reading this filth,” she continued, “one would think that Pamela was just some selfish society girl who got what she deserved. You make your readers glad my daughter was murdered. So, what I wonder is simple. How do you do it?”

  “Mrs. Wisher, people in this town don’t pay attention to something unless you slap them in the face with it,” Smithback began, then stopped. Mrs. Wisher wasn’t buying his self-justification any more than he was.

  The woman sat forward very slowly on the sofa. “You know absolutely nothing about her, Mr. Smithback. You only see what’s on the surface. That’s all you’re interested in.”

  “Not true!” Smithback burst out, surprising himself. “I mean, that’s not all I’m interested in. I want to know the real Pamela Wisher.”

  The woman regarded him for a long moment. Then she stood up and left the room, returning with a framed photograph. She handed it to Smithback. A girl of about six was pictured, swinging on a rope tied to a massive oak branch. The girl was hollering at the camera, her two front teeth missing, pinafore and pigtails flying.

  “That’s the Pamela I’ll always remember, Mr. Smithback,” Mrs. Wisher said evenly. “If you really are interested, then print this picture. Not that one you keep running that makes her look like a brainless debutante.” She sat down again, smoothing her dress across her knees. “She was just beginning to smile again, after the death of her father six months ago. And she wanted to have some fun before starting work this fall. What’s criminal about that?”

  “Work?” Smithback asked.

  There was a short silence. Smithback felt Mrs. Wisher’s eyes on him in the funereal gloom. “That’s correct. She was starting a job in a hospice for AIDS patients. You would have known that if you’d done your research.”

  Smithback swallowed.

  “That’s the real Pamela,” the woman said, her voice suddenly breaking. “Kind, generous, full of life. I want you to writ
e about the real Pamela.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Smithback mumbled.

  Then the moment was over, and Mrs. Wisher was again composed and distant. She inclined her head, made a brief movement of her hand, and Smithback realized he had been released. He mumbled his thanks, retrieved his tape recorder, and headed for the elevator as quickly as he dared.

  “One other thing,” Mrs. Wisher said, her voice suddenly hard. Smithback stopped at the French doors. “They can’t tell me when she died, why she died, or even how she died. But Pamela will not have died in vain, I promise you that.”

  She spoke with a new intensity, and Smithback turned to face her. “You said something just now,” she went on. “You said that people in this town don’t pay attention to something unless you slap them in the face with it. That’s what I intend to do.”

  “How?” Smithback asked.

  But Mrs. Wisher withdrew onto the sofa, and her face fell into deep shadow. Smithback walked through the foyer and rang for the elevator, feeling drained. It wasn’t until he was back on the street, blinking in the strong summer light, that he looked down again at the childhood picture of Pamela Wisher, still clutched in his right hand. It was beginning to dawn on him exactly how formidable a woman Mrs. Wisher was.

  = 5 =

  THE METAL DOOR at the end of the gray hallway was discreetly marked FORENSIC ANTHROPOLOGY in stenciled capitals. It was the Museum’s state-of-the-art facility for analyzing human remains. Margo tried the knob and to her surprise found it locked. This was odd. She’d been here countless times, assisting in examinations of everything from Peruvian mummies to Anasazi cliff dwellers, and the door had never been locked before. She lifted her hand to knock. But the door was already being opened from the inside, and she found her rap falling onto thin air.

  She stepped in, then stopped abruptly. The lab, normally brightly lit and bustling with grad students and curatorial assistants, looked dim and strange. The bulky electron microscopes, X-ray viewers, and electrophoresis apparatus sat against the walls, silent and unused. The window that normally boasted a panoramic view of Central Park was covered by a heavy curtain. A single pool of brilliant light illuminated the center of the room; at its edge, a semicircle of figures stood among the shadows.

  In the center of the light lay a large specimen table. Something brown and knobby lay on it, along with a blue plastic sheet covering some other long, low object. As she stared curiously, Margo realized that the knobby object was a human skeleton, decorated with desiccated strips of sinew and flesh. There was a faint but unmistakable odor of corpse-reek.

  The door closed and locked behind her. Lieutenant Vincent D’Agosta, wearing what looked like the same suit she remembered from the Museum Beast murders of eighteen months before, walked back to join the group, nodding briefly at her as he passed. He seemed to have shed a few pounds since she’d last seen him. Margo noticed that his suit matched the dirty brown color of the skeleton.

  Margo scanned the row of figures as her eyes adjusted to the dim light. To D’Agosta’s left was a nervous man in a lab coat, a cup of coffee gripped in his pudgy hand. Next came the tall, thin form of the Museum’s new director, Olivia Merriam. Another figure stood farther back in the shadows, too dim for Margo to make out anything but a vague outline.

  The Director gave Margo a wan smile. “Thank you for coming, Dr. Green. These gentlemen”—she waved vaguely in D’Agosta’s direction—“have asked for our help.”

  There was a silence. Finally, D’Agosta sighed irritably. “We can’t wait for him any longer. He lives way the hell out in Mendham, and didn’t seem too thrilled about coming in when I telephoned last night.” He looked at each person in turn. “You saw the Post this morning, right?”

  The Director looked at him with distaste. “No.”

  “Let me backtrack a bit, then.” D’Agosta gestured toward the skeleton on the stainless steel table. “Meet Pamela Wisher. Daughter of Anette and the late Horace Wisher. No doubt you’ve seen her picture all over town. She disappeared around 3:00 A.M. on the morning of May 23. She spent the evening at the Whine Cellar, one of those basement clubs off Central Park South. Went to make a phone call and never came back. At least, not until yesterday, when we found her skeleton—minus the skull—in the Humboldt Kill. Apparently it was flushed out of a West Side storm drain, probably during a recent heavy rain.”

  Margo looked again at the remains on the table. She had seen countless skeletons before, but none belonging to anyone she’d known, or even heard of. It was difficult to believe that this grisly assemblage of bones had once been the pretty blond woman she had been reading about barely fifteen minutes before.

  “And with the remains of Pamela Wisher we also found this.” D’Agosta nodded at the thing lying beneath the blue plastic sheet. “So far, the press knows only that a second skeleton was found—thank God.” He glanced at the figure standing apart in the shadows. “I’ll let Dr. Simon Brambell; Chief Medical Examiner, do the talking.”

  As the figure stepped into the light, Margo saw a slender man of about sixty-five. The skin lay tight and smooth across a devious old skull, and a pair of beady black eyes glittered at the assembled company behind ancient horn-rims. His long lean face was as devoid of expression as his head was devoid of hair.

  He laid a finger across his upper lip. “If you would all take a few steps forward,” he said in a soft Dublin accent, “you might have a better view.”

  There was a sound of reluctant shuffling. Dr. Brambell grasped the end of the blue sheet, paused a moment to look impassively around again, then flipped it off with a deft motion.

  Beneath, Margo saw the remains of another headless corpse, as brown and decayed as the first. But as her eyes scanned the remains, she sensed there was something odd. Her breath drew in sharply as she realized what it was: The bizarre thickening of the leg bones, the odd curvatures of several of the major joint structures, was all wrong.

  What the hell? she thought.

  There came a sudden thump on the door.

  “Christ.” D’Agosta moved toward it quickly. “At last.”

  The door swung wide to reveal Whitney Cadwalader Frock, the famous evolutionary biologist, now a reluctant guest of Lieutenant D’Agosta. His wheelchair creaked as it approached the specimen table. Without looking at the assembled company, he examined the bony corpses, his eyes coming to rest on the second skeleton. After a few moments, he leaned back, a shock of white hair falling away from his wide pink forehead. He nodded at D’Agosta and the Museum Director. Then he saw Margo, and a look of surprise came over his face, changing quickly to a delighted smile.

  Margo smiled and nodded in return. Although Frock had been her primary adviser during her graduate work at the Museum, she had not seen him since his retirement party. He had left the Museum to concentrate on his writing, yet there was still no sign of the promised follow-up volume to his influential work, Fractal Evolution.

  The Medical Examiner, who had paid Frock’s entrance only the briefest of glances, now continued. “I invite you,” he said pleasantly, “to examine the ridging of the long bones, the bony spicules and osteophytes along the spine and at the joints. Also the twenty-degree outward rotation of the trochanters. Note that the ribs have a trapezoidal, instead of the normal prismatic, cross section. Finally, I would direct your attention to the thickening of the femurs. On the whole, a rather unbecoming fellow. Of course, these are only some of the more outstanding features. You can no doubt see the rest for yourselves.”

  D’Agosta breathed out through his nose. “No doubt.”

  Frock cleared his throat. “Naturally, I haven’t had a chance for a thorough examination. But I wonder if you’ve considered the possibility of DISH.”

  The ME looked at Frock again, more carefully this time. “A very intelligent guess,” he said. “But quite wrong. Dr. Frock is referring to diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis, a type of severe degenerative arthritis.” He shook his head dismissively. “Nor is it
osteomalacia, though if this wasn’t the twentieth century I’d say it was the most nightmarish case of scurvy ever recorded. We’ve searched the medical databases, and can find nothing that would account for this condition.”

  Brambell ran his fingers lightly, almost affectionately, along the spinal column. “There is another curious anomaly shared by both skeletons, which we only noticed last night. Dr. Padelsky, would you please bring the stereozoom?”

  The overweight man in the lab coat disappeared into the gloom, then returned, rolling before him a large microscope with an open stage. He positioned it over the neck bones of the deformed skeleton, peered through the eyepieces, made a few adjustments, then stepped back.

  Brambell gestured with the palm of his hand. “Dr. Frock?”

  Frock rolled forward and, with some difficulty, fit his face to the visor. He remained motionless for what seemed several minutes, leaning over the skeletonized cadaver. At last he rolled his wheelchair back, saying nothing.

  “Dr. Green?” the ME said, turning to her. Margo stepped up to the microscope and peered in, aware of being the focus of attention.

  At first, she could make nothing of the image. Then she realized that the stereozoom was focused on what appeared to be a cervical vertebra. There were several shallow, regular scores along one edge. Some foreign brownish matter clung to the bone, along with bits of cartilage, strings of muscle tissue, and a greasy bulb of adipocere.

  Slowly she straightened up, feeling the old familiar fear return, unwilling to consider what those scores along the bone reminded her of.

  The ME raised his eyebrows. “Your opinion, Dr. Green?”

  Margo drew in her breath. “If I were to guess, I’d say they look like teeth marks.”

  She and Frock exchanged glances.

  She knew now—they both knew—exactly why Frock had been called to this meeting.

  Brambell waited while the others took turns staring through the microscope. Then, wordlessly, he wheeled the stereozoom over to Pamela Wisher’s skeleton, focusing this time on the pelvis. Again, Frock took up a position at the microscope, followed by Margo. No denying it this time; Margo noticed that some of the marks had punctured the bone and penetrated into the marrow spaces.