Cemetery Dance

by Douglas Preston

  The figure shambled forward, slashing clumsily at her. Nora backed up, then turned and ran, thrashing through the curtains of plastic as she tried to fight her way to the rear of the room. Surely she would find a back door. Behind her, she could hear the figure cutting through the plastic, the knife almost shrieking as it nicked hanging bones.

  Shhchrroooggggnnn. The figure made horrible sounds as it drew in ragged breaths through a wet windpipe. She cried out in fear and dismay, her voice echoing crazily in the cavernous gloom.

  She was disoriented now, unsure she was going in the right direction. She fought against the plastic, struggling for breath, getting entangled again, finally throwing herself to the ground and crawling frantically under the rustling, swinging shrouds. She had become completely lost.

  Sssshrrooogggnnn, came the awful, sucking noise behind her.

  In desperation, she stood up underneath the plastic drape of a low-hanging skeleton, reached up and seized a whale’s rib bone, then swung herself up, crawling into the rib cage as if it were some monstrous piece of playground equipment. She climbed frantically, the desiccated bones swaying and clacking together, until she had reached the top of the rib cage. Here a slot between two ribs was big enough to squeeze through. She slashed a hole in the covering plastic with the piece of glass, then hauled herself between the bones and through the plastic, clambering onto the back of the skeleton. For a moment, despite everything, she paused, frozen by the bizarre sight: a sea of whale skeletons, large and small, hanging in all directions beneath her, arranged so close together they were touching.

  The skeleton beneath her feet began to sway again. She looked down. Fearing was below her, climbing up into the jungle gym of bones.

  With a groan of fear, she ran as quickly as she dared along the top of the skeleton, crouched, then jumped to the next, grabbing on tight as it swayed crazily beneath her. She ran along the second backbone, jumping to a third skeleton. From here, she could just make out a door at the far end of the hall.

  Please let it be unlocked.

  The hideous figure appeared on top of a skeleton, rearing out of the rend in the plastic. It scuttled forward, leaping from one skeleton to the next, and Nora realized that despite its shambling movements it was more agile than she had realized. All she had accomplished by climbing atop the skeletons was to give it an advantage.

  Slashing another hole in the plastic beneath her, she climbed back down, then dropped to the floor, crawling as fast as she could toward the rear of the vault. Behind, she could hear Fearing thrashing his way after her, the horrifying sucking sounds growing louder.

  Suddenly she broke free of the mass of bones. There, no more than ten feet ahead of her, was the door: heavy and old-fashioned, without a security keypad. She ran for it, grasped the handle.

  Locked.

  With a sob of dismay she turned, setting her back against the door and clutching the sliver of glass, ready to make a last stand.

  The skeletons swayed and creaked on their chains, the agitated curtains of plastic restlessly scraping the ground. She waited, preparing herself as best she could for the final struggle.

  A minute went by, then another. Fearing did not appear. Gradually, the rustling and swaying of the skeletons settled down. Silence returned to the storage room.

  She took one shuddering breath after another. Had he broken off the chase? Had he gone?

  From the far side of the storage room, she heard the creak of a door, shuffling footsteps, and then silence.

  No, no. He hadn’t gone.

  “Who’s in here?” a voice rang out, quavering slightly with ill-suppressed anxiety. “Show yourself!”

  It was a night guard. Nora almost sobbed with relief. Fearing must have heard approaching footsteps and been frightened off. But she held her breath. She couldn’t reveal herself now; not while her DNA analysis was in process.

  “Anybody here?” the guard called out, clearly reluctant to advance into that forest of whale skeletons. The feeble beam of a light played about the dimly lit room.

  “Last call, I’m locking the door.”

  Nora didn’t care. As a curator, she had the security code to the front door.

  “All right, you asked for it.”

  A shuffling, the lights went out, and then the slamming of a door.

  Slowly, Nora got her breathing under control. She dropped to her knees and peered forward in the dim light trickling in from the small window set into the door.

  Was he, like her, still in the room? Was he waiting, ready to ambush? What did he want—to finish the job he’d failed to finish in the apartment?

  Dropping to her hands and knees, she crawled under the now-still plastic, moving slowly, as quietly as possible, heading for the front door. Every few minutes, she stopped to peer around and listen. But there were no sounds, no shadows—just the great hanging whale bones in their shrouds.

  As she reached the middle of the skeletons, she paused in her journey. She could see the faint glimmer of a scattering of broken glass. The rest of her makeshift weapon, broken to pieces. In the gloom, she made out a faint dark streak along the glistening edge of one large shard. So she had struck Fearing with the glass—and cut him. That was blood… his blood.

  She drew in a breath, then another, trying to think as clearly as possible. Then, with shaking fingers, she withdrew one of the spare reaction tubes she’d shoved into her pocket. Carefully breaking the sterile seal, she picked up the glass, dipped it into the liquid, and resealed the tube. Pendergast had already given her DNA samples from Fearing’s mother, and mother–son mitochondrial DNA were always identical. Now she could test his DNA and compare it directly with the unknown DNA recovered from the crime scene.

  She slipped the tube back in her pocket and made her way—quietly and carefully—to the door. It responded to the code and opened. She closed and locked it quickly behind her, then walked on shaky legs down the corridor and back to the PCR lab. There was no sign of Fearing. Entering the code into the keypad, she slipped into the lab, shut the door behind her, and turned off the overhead light. She’d finish her work by the glow of the instrumentation.

  The thermal cycler was halfway done with its pass. Her heart still thumping, Nora racked the tube with her attacker’s blood next to the others, ready for the next run.

  By tomorrow night, she would know for sure whether or not it was really Fearing who had killed her husband—and tried to kill her twice.

  18

  D’Agosta entered the waiting room for the morgue annex, careful to breathe through his mouth. Pendergast followed, taking in the room with a quick glance, then slipping cat-like into one of the ugly plastic chairs that lined the wall, flanking a table heaped with dog-eared magazines. The agent picked up the one with the lightest wear, flipped through the pages, then began to read.

  D’Agosta made a circuit of the room, then another. The New York City morgue was a place full of horrible memories for him, and he knew he was about to undergo an experience that would lodge another in his head—perhaps the worst one of all. Pendergast’s preternatural coolness irritated him. How could he remain so nonchalant? He glanced over and saw the agent was reading Mademoiselle with evident interest.

  “What are you reading that for?” D’Agosta asked irritably.

  “There is an instructive article on bad first dates. It reminds me of a case I once had: a particularly untoward first date that ended in murder-suicide.” Pendergast shook his head at the memory and continued reading.

  D’Agosta hugged himself, then took yet another turn around the room.

  “Vincent, do sit down. Use your time constructively.”

  “I hate this place. I hate the smell of it. I hate the look of it.”

  “I quite sympathize. The intimations of mortality here are—shall we say—hard to ignore? Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”

  The pages rustled as Pendergast read on. A few dreadful minutes passed before the door to the morgue finally opened
. One of the pathologists, Beckstein, stood there. Thank God, thought D’Agosta: they had pulled Beckstein for the autopsy. He was one of the best and—surprise—an almost normal human being.

  Beckstein peeled off his gloves and mask, dropped them in a bin. “Lieutenant. Agent Pendergast.” He nodded his greetings, not offering his hand. Shaking hands just wasn’t done in the morgue. “I’m at your disposal.”

  “Dr. Beckstein,” said D’Agosta, taking the lead, “thanks for taking the time to see us.”

  “My pleasure.”

  “Give us a rundown, light on the jargon, please.”

  “Certainly. Would you like to observe the cadaver? The prosector is still working on it. It sometimes helps to see—”

  “No thank you,” said D’Agosta decisively.

  He felt Pendergast’s gaze on him. Screw it, he thought determinedly.

  “As you wish. The cadaver showed fourteen full or partial knife wounds, pre-mortem, some to the hands and arms, several in the lower back, and a final one, also with a posterior entry, that passed through the heart. I would be glad to provide you with a diagram—”

  “Not necessary. Any postmortem wounds?”

  “None. Death was almost immediate after the final, fatal blow to the heart. The knife entered horizontally, between the second and third posterior rib, at a downward angle of eighty degrees from the vertical, penetrating the left atrium, the pulmonary artery, and splitting the conus arteriosus at the top of the right ventricle, causing massive exsanguination.”

  “I get the picture.”

  “Right.”

  “Would you say that the killer did what he had to do to kill the victim, and no more?”

  “That statement is consistent with the facts, yes.”

  “The weapon?”

  “A blade ten inches long, two inches in width, very stiff, probably a high-quality kitchen knife or a scuba knife.”

  D’Agosta nodded. “Anything else?”

  “Blood toxicology showed a blood alcohol level within legal limits. No drugs or other foreign substances. The contents of the stomach—”

  “I don’t need to know that.”

  Beckstein hesitated, and D’Agosta saw something in his eyes. Uncertainty, unease.

  “Yeah?” he urged. “Something else?”

  “Yes. I haven’t written the report yet, but there was one thing, quite strange, that was missed by the forensic team.”

  “Go on.”

  The pathologist hesitated again. “I’d like to show it to you. We haven’t moved it—yet.”

  D’Agosta swallowed. “What was it?”

  “Please, just let me show it to you. I can’t… well, I can’t very well describe it.”

  “Of course,” said Pendergast, stepping forward. “Vincent, if you’d prefer to wait here—?”

  D’Agosta felt his jaw set. “I’m coming.”

  They followed the technician through the set of double stainless-steel doors into the green light of a large tiled room. They donned masks, gloves, and scrubs from nearby bins, then continued on, passing into one of the autopsy suites.

  Immediately D’Agosta saw the prosector hunched over the cadaver, the whine of the Stryker saw in his hands like an angry mosquito. A diener lounged nearby, eating a bagel with lox. A second dissecting table was covered with various tagged organs. D’Agosta swallowed again, harder.

  “Hey,” the diener said to Beckstein. “You’re just in time. We were about to run the gut.”

  A hard stare from Beckstein silenced the man. “Sorry. Didn’t know you had guests.” He smirked, rubbery lips crunching down on his breakfast. The room smelled of formalin, fish, and feces.

  Beckstein turned to the prosector. “John, I’d like to show Lieutenant D’Agosta and Special Agent Pendergast the, ah, item we found.”

  “No problem.” The saw powered down and the prosector stepped away. With huge reluctance, D’Agosta stepped slowly forward, then looked down at the cadaver.

  It was worse than he had ever imagined it could be. Worse even than his worst nightmares. Bill Smithback: naked, dead, opened. His scalp was peeled back, the brown hair all bunched up at the base, bloody skull exposed, fresh saw marks running in a semicircle around the cranium. Body cavity yawning, ribs spread, organs removed.

  He bowed his head and closed his eyes.

  “John, would you mind fixing a spreader in the mouth?”

  “Not at all.”

  D’Agosta kept his eyes closed.

  “There.”

  He opened his eyes. The mouth had been forced open with a piece of stainless steel. Beckstein adjusted the overhead light to illuminate the interior. Hooked into Smithback’s tongue was a fish-hook, tied with feathers, like a dry fly. Against his will, D’Agosta bent forward for a closer examination. The hook had a knotted head of light-colored twine, on which had been painted a tiny, grinning skull. A miniature pouch, like a tiny pill, was attached to the hook’s neck.

  D’Agosta glanced over at Pendergast. The agent was staring down at the open mouth, his silvery eyes full of rare intensity. And it seemed to D’Agosta there was more than intensity in that look. There was regret, disbelief, sorrow—and uncertainty. Pendergast’s shoulders slumped visibly. It was as if the agent had been hoping against hope he’d been wrong about something… only to learn with huge dismay that, in fact, he had been all too right.

  The silence lasted minutes. Finally, D’Agosta turned to Beck-stein. He suddenly felt very old and tired. “I want this photographed and tested. Remove it with the tongue—leave it embedded. I want forensics to analyze that thing, open up the tiny pouch, and report its contents to me.”

  The diener peered over D’Agosta’s shoulder, chewing his bagel. “Looks like we got a real psychopath running around. Think what the Post would do with this one!” A loud crunch, followed by the sounds of mastication.

  D’Agosta turned to him. “If the Post finds out,” he growled, “I’ll personally see to it you spend the rest of your life toasting bagels instead of eating them.”

  “Hey, sorry, man. Touchy, touchy.” The diener backed away.

  Pendergast’s eyes flickered up at D’Agosta. He straightened up and stepped away from the corpse. “Vincent, it occurs to me that I haven’t paid a visit to my dear aunt Cornelia in ages. Would you care to accompany me?”

  19

  Nora turned the key in the deadbolt and pushed her apartment door open. It was two in the afternoon, and the low-angle sunlight flooded through the blinds and illuminated—pitilessly—every last fragment of her life with Bill. Books, paintings, objets d’art, even carelessly thrown magazines: each brought back a flood of unwanted, painful memories. Double-locking the front door, she walked, eyes down, through the living room and into the bedroom.

  Her work on the PCR machine was complete. The DNA samples supplied by Pendergast had each been multiplied by millions, and she had stashed the test tubes in the rear of the lab refrigerator where nobody would notice them. She had then put in a respectable day in the anthropology lab. No one minded that she’d left early. Tonight, at one, she would return for the second and final stage: the gel electrophoresis test. In the meantime, she desperately needed sleep.

  Dropping her bag unceremoniously on the floor, she threw herself on the bed and covered her head with pillows. And yet, though she lay motionless, sleep refused to come. An hour went by, then two, and finally she gave up. She might as well have stayed at the museum. Perhaps she should return there now.

  Nora glanced over at her answering machine: twenty-two messages. Additional expressions of sympathy, no doubt. She simply could not bear to hear any more. With a sigh, she pressed the replay button, deleting each message as soon as she heard a note of concern sound in the caller’s voice.

  The seventh message was different. It was from the West Sider reporter.

  “Dr. Kelly? It’s Caitlyn Kidd. Listen, I was just wondering if you’d found out anything more about those animal stories Bill was working on. I read
the ones he published. They’re very hard hitting. I was curious if he’d found out anything new that he hadn’t had time to publish—or maybe that someone didn’t want him to publish. Call me when you get the chance.”

  As the next message started, Nora pressed the stop button. She stared thoughtfully at the machine a moment. Then she rose from the bed, walked back into the living room, sat down at the desk, and booted up her laptop. She didn’t know Caitlyn Kidd, didn’t especially trust Caitlyn Kidd. But she’d work with the devil himself if he could help her track down the people behind Bill’s death.

  She stared at the screen, took a deep breath. Then—quickly, before she could reconsider—she logged into her husband’s private account at the New York Times. The password was accepted: the account had not yet been deactivated. A minute later, she was staring at an index of articles he’d written over the last year. Sorting them chronologically, she moused back several months, then began scrolling forward through them, examining the titles. It was remarkable how many sounded unfamiliar, and now she bitterly regretted not being more involved in his work.

  The first topical story on animal sacrifice had been published about three months back. It was primarily a background piece on how, far from being a thing of the distant past, animal sacrifice was still being actively—if secretly—practiced in the city. She continued moving forward. There were several other articles: an interview with somebody named Alexander Esteban, spokesman for Humans for Other Animals; an investigative piece on cockfighting in Brooklyn. Then Nora came upon the most recent article, published two weeks before, titled “For Manhattanites, Animal Sacrifice Hits Close to Home.”

  She brought up the text and scanned it quickly, her eye hovering over one paragraph in particular:

  The most persistent stories of animal sacrifice come from In-wood, the northernmost neighborhood of Manhattan. A number of complaints have reached police and animal welfare agencies from the Indian Road and West 214th Street neighborhoods, in which residents claim to have heard the sounds of animals in distress. These animal cries, which residents describe as coming from goats, chickens, and sheep, allegedly issue from a deconsecrated church building at the center of a reclusive community in Inwood Hill Park known familiarly as “the Ville.” Efforts to speak to residents of the Ville and its community leader, Eugene Bossong, were unsuccessful.