Relic (Pendergast, Book 1)

by Preston, Douglas

  “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 witch-doctor 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 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 to avoid interest. Blow scandal at her, and she shrivels up like a moth in a flame.” He chuckled.

  “Just what’s your 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 next tête-à-tête comes along. You know, ‘This chapter stays, or I’m taking the Whittlesey story to Smithsonian 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 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. “Nobody knows 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 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 his S&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 is TDN. What’s up?”

  “Reporting noises at the exhibition’s rear exit.”

  “What kind of noises?”

  “Uncertain. Sounds like someone’s in there.”

  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 f
irst-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.

  “TDN calling Beauregard. You read?”

  “Ten-four,” said Beauregard.

  “McNitt there yet?”

  “No,” said Beauregard. “He finally finish his coffee break?”

  “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,” said TDN.

  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.

  * * *

  TDN placed 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. “TDN calling 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 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.

  As the car swerved and rattled down the avenue, the driver flew on past Sixty-fifth Street.

  “What the hell are you doing?” said D’Agosta. “You just missed Sixty-fifth.”

  “Apology,” said the driver, turning down Sixty-first into a massive traffic jam.

  “I can’t believe this,” D’Agosta said to Pendergast. “You ought to have this joker fired.”

  Pendergast smiled, his eyes still half closed. “He was, shall we say, a gift of the New York office. But the delay will give us a chance to talk.” He settled back into the torn seat.

  Pendergast had spent the last half of the afternoon at Jolley’s autopsy. D’Agosta had declined the invitation.

  “This lab found several kinds of DNA in our sample,” Pendergast continued. “One was human, the other, from a gecko.”

  D’Agosta looked at him. “Gecko? What’s a gecko?” he asked.

  “A kind of lizard. Harmless enough. They like to sit on walls and bask in the sun. When I was a child, we rented a villa overlooking the Mediterranean one summer, and the walls were covered with them. At any rate, the results were so surprising to the lab technician that he thought it was a joke.”

  He opened his briefcase. “Here’s the autopsy report on Jolley. There’s nothing much new, I’m afraid. Same MO, body horrifically mauled, thalamoid region of the brain removed. The coroner’s office has estimated that to create such deep lacerations in a single stroke, the required force would exceed—” he consulted a typewritten sheet “—twice what a strong human male can achieve. Needless to say, it’s an estimation.”

  Pendergast turned some pages. “Also, they’ve now run salivase enzyme tests on brain sections from the older boy and from Jolley.”

  “And—?”

  “Both brains tested positive for the presence of saliva.”

  “Jesus. You mean the killer’s eating the fucking brain?”

  “Not only eating, Lieutenant, but slobbering over the food as well. Clearly, he, she, or it has no manners. You have the SOC report? May I see it?”

  D’Agosta handed it over. “You won’t find any surprises there. The blood on the painting was Jolley’s. They found traces of blood leading past the Secure Area and down into a stairwell to the subbasement. But last night’s rain flushed all traces out of there, of course.”

  Pendergast scanned the document. “And here’s the report on the door to the vault. Someone did quite a lot of pounding and banging, possibly with a blunt instrument. There were also three-pronged scratches consistent with those found on the victims. Once again, the force used was considerable.”

  Pendergast handed over the files. “It sounds as if we’ll need to devote more attention to the subbasement. Basically, Vincent, this DNA business is our best chance for now. If we can trace the origin of that claw fragment, we’ll have our first solid lead. That’s why I’ve asked for this meeting.”

  The car pulled up in front of a warren of ivy-covered redbrick buildings overlooking the East River. A guard ushered them into a side entrance.

  Once inside the lab, Pendergast took up a position against a table in the center of the room and chatted with the scientists, Buchholtz and Turow. D’Agosta admired how easily the Southerner could take charge of a scene.

  “My colleague and I would like to understand the DNA sequencing process,” Pendergast was saying. “We need to know how you arrived at these results, and whether any further analysis might be called for. I’m sure you understand.”

&
nbsp; “Certainly,” said Buchholtz. He was busy and small and as bald as Mount Monadnock. “My assistant, Dr. Turow here, did the analysis.”

  Turow stepped forward nervously. “When we were given the sample,” he said, “we were asked to identify whether it had come from a large carnivorous mammal. Specifically, a big cat. What we do in such a case is compare the DNA in the sample to the DNA of, say, five or six species that are likely matches. But we would also select an animal that was definitely not of the sample, and we call this the outgroup. It’s a kind of control. Am I making sense?”

  “So far,” said Pendergast. “But go easy on me. I’m a child in these matters.”

  “We usually use human DNA as the outgroup, since we’ve mapped so much of it. Anyway, we do a PCR—that is, a Polymerase Chain Reaction—on the sample. This causes thousands and thousands of copies of the genes to be made. It gives us a lot to work with, you see.”

  He pointed to a large machine with long clear strips of Plexiglas attached to its flanks. Behind the strips were dark vertical bands arrayed in complicated patterns. “This is a pulsed-field gel electrophoresis machine. We place the sample in here, and portions of the sample migrate out along these strips through the gel, according to their molecular weights. They show up as these dark bands. By the pattern of bands, and with the aid of our computer, we can figure out what genes are present.”

  He took a deep breath. “Anyway, we got a negative reading on the big cat genes. A very negative reading. It wasn’t anywhere close. And to our surprise, we got a positive reading on the outgroup, that is, Homo sapiens. And, as you know, we identified DNA strands from several species of gecko—or so it appears.” He looked a little sheepish. “But even so, most of the genes in the sample were unidentified.”

  “So that’s why you presumed it was contaminated.”

  “Yes. Contaminated or degraded. A lot of repeated base pairs in the sample suggested a high level of genetic damage.”

  “Genetic damage?” asked Pendergast.

  “When DNA is damaged or defective, it often uncontrollably replicates long repeating sequences of the same base pair. Viruses can damage DNA. So can radiation, certain chemicals, even cancer.”