by Brad Meltzer
There was a sharp noise from the wife.
Lee signed his name in Chinese; emboldened, it seemed, by the opposition of his wife.
“Now give me the keys and we’re done.”
“Have to make copy of keys.”
“You give me those keys. It’s my apartment now. I’ll make the copies for you at my own expense. I need to start moving in right away.”
Lee reluctantly handed her the keys. Nora took them, folded one of the leases into her pocket, and stood up. “Thank you very much,” she said cheerfully, holding out her hand.
Lee shook it limply. As the door closed, Nora heard another sharp irruption of displeasure from the wife. This one sounded as if it might go on for a long time.
THREE
NORA IMMEDIATELY RETURNED TO THE APARTMENT BELOW. O’Shaughnessy appeared by her side as she unlocked the door. Together, they slipped into the living room, and Nora secured the door with deadbolts and chains. Then she moved to the barred window. Two nails stuck out from either side of the lintel, on which someone had once hung a makeshift curtain. She removed her coat and hung it across the nails, blocking the view from outside.
“Cozy place,” O’Shaughnessy said, sniffing. “Smells like a crime scene.”
Nora didn’t answer. She was staring at the floor, already working out the dig in her mind.
While O’Shaughnessy cased the apartment, Nora made a circuit of the living room, examining the floor, gridding it off, plotting her lines of attack. Then she knelt and, taking a penknife from her pocket—a knife her brother, Skip, had given her for her sixteenth birthday and which she never traveled without—eased it between the edges of two bricks. Slowly, deliberately, she cut her way through the crust of grime and old floor wax. She rocked the knife back and forth between the bricks, gently loosening the stonework. Then, bit by bit, she began to work the closest brick from its socket. In a moment it was free. She pulled it out.
Earth. The damp smell rose toward her nostrils. She poked her finger into it: cool, moist, a little slimy. She probed with the penknife, found it compact but yielding, with little gravel or rocks. Perfect.
She straightened up, looked around. O’Shaughnessy was standing behind her, looking down curiously.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Checking the subflooring.”
“And?”
“It’s old fill, not cement.”
“Is that good?”
“It’s outstanding.”
“If you say so.”
She tapped the brick back into place, then stood. She checked her watch. Three o’clock, Friday afternoon. The Museum would close in two hours.
She turned to O’Shaughnessy. “Look, Patrick, I need you to get up to my office at the Museum, plunder my field locker for some tools and equipment I’ll need.”
O’Shaughnessy shook his head. “Nothing doing. Pendergast said I was to stay with you.”
“I remember. But I’m here now, safe. There must be five locks on that door, I won’t be going anywhere. I’ll be a lot safer here than walking the streets. Besides, the killer knows where I work. Would you rather I went uptown and you waited here?”
“Why go anywhere? What’s the hurry? Can’t we wait until Pendergast is out of the hospital?”
She stared at him. “The clock’s ticking, Patrick. There’s a killer out there.”
O’Shaughnessy looked at her. Hesitated.
“We can’t afford to just sit around. I hope you’re not going to give me a hard time. I need those tools, and I need them now.”
Still, hesitation.
Nora felt her anger rise. “Just do it. Okay?”
O’Shaughnessy sighed. “Double-lock the door behind me, and don’t open it for anybody. Not the landlord, not the fire department, not Santa Claus. Only me. Promise?”
Nora nodded. “I promise.”
“Good, I’ll be back ASAP.”
She drew up a quick list of items, gave O’Shaughnessy directions, and locked the door carefully behind him, shutting out the sound of the growing storm. Slowly, she stepped away from the door, her eyes swiveling around the room, coming to rest at last on the brickwork beneath her feet. One hundred years before, Leng, for all his genius, could not have anticipated the reach of modern archaeology. She would excavate this site with the greatest care, sifting through his old laboratory layer by layer, bringing all her skills to bear in order to capture even the smallest piece of evidence. And there would be evidence, she knew that. There was no such thing as a barren archaeological site. People—wherever they went, whatever they did—always left a record.
Taking out her penknife, she knelt and, once again, began easing the blade between the old bricks. There was a sudden peal of thunder, louder than any that had come before; she paused, heart beating wildly with terror. She forced her feelings back under control, shaking her head ruefully. No killer was going to stop her from finding out what was beneath this floor. She wondered briefly what Brisbane would say to this work. The hell with him, she thought.
She turned the penknife over in her hands, closed it with a sigh. All her professional life, she had unearthed and catalogued human bones without emotion—with no connection to the ancient skeletons beyond a shared humanity. But Mary Greene had proven utterly different. There, outside the girl’s house, Pendergast had thrown Mary Greene’s short life and awful death into sharp relief. For the first time, Nora realized she had excavated, handled, the bones of someone that she could understand, grieve for. More and more, Pendergast’s tale of Mary Greene was sinking in, despite her attempts to keep a professional distance. And now, she had almost become another Mary Greene.
That made it personal. Very personal.
Her thoughts were interrupted by the rattle of wind at the door, and another, fainter, rumble of thunder. Nora rose to her knees, opened the penknife again, and began scraping vigorously at the brickwork beneath her feet. It was going to be a long night.
FOUR
THE WIND SHOOK THE BARRED DOOR, AND OCCASIONAL flickers of lightning and grumblings of thunder penetrated the room. Now that O’Shaughnessy had returned, the two worked together, the policeman moving the dirt, Nora focusing on uncovering the details. They labored by the light of a single yellow bulb. The room smelled strongly of decaying earth. The air was close, humid, and stifling.
She had opened a four-square-meter dig in the living room floor. It had been carefully gridded off, and she had stepped down the excavation, each meter grid to a different level, allowing her to climb in and out of the deepening hole. The floor bricks were neatly piled against the far wall. The door leading to the kitchen was open, and through it a large pile of brown dirt was visible, piled in the center of the room atop a sheet of heavy plastic. Beside it was a smaller sheet of plastic, containing bagged items recovered from the digsite.
At last Nora paused, putting her trowel aside to take stock. She removed her safety helmet, drew the back of her hand across her brow, replaced the helmet on her head. It was well past midnight, and she felt exhausted. The excavation at its deepest point had gone down more than four feet below grade: a lot of work. It was difficult, also, to work this rapidly while maintaining a professional excavation.
She turned to O’Shaughnessy. “Take five. I’d like to examine this soil profile.”
“About time.” He straightened up, resting on his shovel. His brow was streaming with sweat.
Nora shone her flashlight along the carefully exposed wall of dirt, reading it as one might read a book. Occasionally she would shave off a little with a trowel to get a clearer view.
There was a layer of clean fill on the top going down six inches—laid, no doubt, as a base for the more recent brick floor. Below was about three feet of coarser fill, laced with bits of post-1910 crockery and china. But she could see nothing from Leng’s laboratory—at least, nothing obvious. Still, she had flagged and bagged everything, by the book.
Beneath the coarse fill, they had struck a lay
er containing bits of trash, rotting weeds, pieces of mold-blown bottles, soup bones, and the skeleton of a dog: ground debris from the days when the site had been a vacant lot. Under that was a layer of bricks.
O’Shaughnessy stretched, rubbed his back.“Why do we have to dig so far down?”
“In most old cities, the ground level rises at a fixed rate over time: in New York it’s about three quarters of a meter every hundred years.” She pointed toward the bottom of the hole. “Back then, that was ground level.”
“So these old bricks below are the original basement flooring?”
“I think so. The floor of the laboratory.” Leng’s laboratory.
And yet it had yielded few clues. There was a remarkable lack of debris, as if the floor had been swept clean. She had found some broken glassware wedged into the cracks of the brick; an old fire grate with some coal; a button; a rotten trolley ticket, a few other odds and ends. It seemed that Leng had wanted to leave nothing behind.
Outside, a fresh flash of lightning penetrated the coat Nora had hung over the window. A second later, thunder rumbled. The single bulb flickered, browned, then brightened once again.
She continued staring thoughtfully at the floor. At last, she spoke. “First, we need to widen the excavation. And then, I think we’ll have to go deeper.”
“Deeper?” said O’Shaughnessy, a note of incredulity in his voice.
Nora nodded. “Leng left nothing on the floor. But that doesn’t mean he left nothing beneath it.”
There was a short, chilly silence.
Outside, Doyers Street lay prostrate under a heavy rain. Water ran down the gutters and disappeared into the storm drains, carrying with it trash, dog turds, drowned rats, rotting vegetables, the guts of fish from the market down the street. The occasional flash of lightning illuminated the darkened facades, shooting darts of light into the curling fogs that licked and eddied about the pavement.
A stooped figure in a derby hat, almost obscured beneath a black umbrella, made its way down the narrow street. The figure moved slowly, painfully, leaning on a cane as it approached. It paused, ever so briefly, before Number 99 Doyers Street; then it drifted on into the miasma of fog, a shadow merging with shadows until one could hardly say that it had been there at all.
FIVE
CUSTER LEANED BACK IN HIS OVERSIZED MEDITERRANEAN office chair with a sigh. It was a quarter to twelve on Saturday morning, and by rights he should have been out with the bowling club, drinking beer with his buddies. He was a precinct commander, for chrissakes, not a homicide detective. Why did they want him in on a frigging Saturday? Goddamn pointless public relations bullshit. He’d done nothing but sit on his ass all morning, listening to the asbestos rattle in the heating ducts. A waste of a perfectly good weekend.
At least Pendergast was out of action for the time being. But what, exactly, had he been up to? When he’d asked O’Shaughnessy about it, the man was damned evasive. You’d think a cop with a record like his would do himself a favor, learn what to kiss and when. Well, Custer had had enough. Come Monday, he was going to tighten the leash on that puppy, but good.
The buzzer on his desk rang, and Custer poked at it angrily. “What the hell is it now? I was not to be disturbed.”
“Commissioner Rocker is on line one, Captain,” came Noyes’s voice, carefully neutral.
Omigod holy shit sonofabitch, thought Custer. His shaking hand hovered over the blinking light on his telephone. What the hell did the commissioner want with him? Hadn’t he done everything they’d asked him to do, the mayor, the chief, everybody? Whatever it was, it wasn’t his fault…
A fat, trembling finger depressed the button.
“Custer?” The commissioner’s desiccated voice filled his ear.
“What is it, sir?” Custer squeaked, making a belated effort to lower the pitch of his voice.
“Your man. O’Shaughnessy.”
“Yes sir? What about O’Shaughnessy?”
“I’m a little curious here. Why, exactly, did he request a copy of the forensic report from the ME’s office on the remains found down on Catherine Street? Did you authorize this?” The voice was slow, weary.
What the hell was O’Shaughnessy up to? Custer’s mind raced. He could tell the truth, say that O’Shaughnessy must have been disobeying his orders. But that would make him look like a fool, a man who couldn’t control his own. On the other hand, he could lie.
He chose the latter, more habitual course.
“Commissioner?” he managed to bring his voice down to a relatively masculine pitch. “I authorized it. You see, we didn’t have a copy down here for our files. It’s just a formality, you know, dotting every t and crossing every i. We do things by the book, sir.”
There was a silence. “Custer, since you are so nimble with aphorisms, you surely know the expression ’Let sleeping dogs lie’?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I thought the mayor made it clear we were going to let that particular sleeping dog lie.” Rocker didn’t sound like he had the greatest faith in the mayor’s judgment.
“Yes, sir.”
“O’Shaughnessy isn’t freelancing, is he, Custer? He’s not, by any chance, helping that FBI agent while he’s laid up—is he?”
“He’s a solid officer, loyal and obedient. I asked him to get the report.”
“In that case, I’m surprised at you, Custer. Surely you know that once the report is down at the precinct, every cop there will have access to it. Which is one step from laying it on the doorstep of the New York Times.”
“I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t think of that.”
“I want that report—every copy of that report—sent back up to me. Personally. By courier. You understand? No copy is to remain at precinct.”
“Yes, sir.” Christ, how was he going to do that? He would have to get it from O’Shaughnessy, the son of a bitch.
“I get the funny feeling. Custer, that you don’t quite appreciate the full situation here. This Catherine Street business has nothing to do with any criminal investigation. It is a historical matter. That forensic report belongs to Moegen-Fairhaven. It’s private property. They paid for it and the remains were found on their land. Those remains have been given a respectful but anonymous burial in a private cemetery, with the appropriate religious ceremonies, all arranged by Moegen-Fairhaven. The matter is closed. Follow me so far?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now, Moegen-Fairhaven is a good friend of the mayor—as the mayor has taken pains to point out to me—and Mr. Fairhaven himself is working very hard to see that he is re-elected. But if this situation gets any more botched up, Fairhaven might not be so enthusiastic in his support. He might decide to sit this one out. He might even decide to throw his weight behind the other fellow who’s running.”
“I understand, sir.”
“Good. Now we’ve got a psychopath out there, this so-called Surgeon, carving people up. If you’d focus your talents on that, Custer, I’d appreciate it. Good day.”
There was a click as the line went abruptly dead.
Custer sat up in his chair, gripping the phone, his porcine frame trembling. He swallowed, brought his shaking voice under control, and pressed the buzzer on his desk. “Get O’Shaughnessy on the line. Try whatever you need, radio, emergency frequency, cell, home number, whatever.”
“He’s off duty, Captain,” Noyes said.
“I don’t give a rat’s ass what he is. Get him.”
“Yes, sir.” And the speaker crackled back into silence.
SIX
NORA TOOK HER TROWEL, KNELT, AND BEGAN PRYING UP one of the old bricks that made up the ancient floor. It was rotten and waterlogged, and it crumbled under the trowel. She quickly plucked out the pieces, then began prying up its neighbors, one after the other. O’Shaughnessy stood above her, watching. They had worked through the night, and past noon of the following day, widening the excavation to eight square meters. She felt weary beyond description. But this was still one tas
k she wanted to do herself.
Once he’d gotten wind of their progress, Pendergast had forced himself out of his hospital bed—despite the fearful protests of the doctors and nurses—and made the journey down to Doyers Street himself. Now he lay near the digsite on an orthopedic mattress, newly delivered from Duxiana. He remained there, arms across his chest, eyes closed, moving infrequently. With his black suit and pallid face, he looked alarmingly like a corpse. At Pendergast’s request Proctor, his chauffeur, had delivered a variety of items from the Dakota apartment: a small table, a Tiffany lamp, and an array of medicines, unguents, and French chocolates, along with a stack of obscure books and maps.
The soil beneath the floor of Leng’s old laboratory was waterlogged and foul-smelling. Nora cleared a one-meter square of the floor bricks, then began digging a diagonal test trench with her trowel. Anything under the floor would not be deep. There wasn’t much farther to go. She was almost in the water table.
She struck something. A deft bit of brushwork revealed a rusted, rotten nineteenth-century umbrella, only its whalebone skeleton intact. She carefully cleared around it, photographed it in situ, then removed it and laid its rotting pieces on a sheet of acid-free specimen paper.
“You’ve found something?” Pendergast asked, eyes still closed. A long white hand removed a chocolate from a box and placed it in his mouth.
“The remains of an umbrella.” She worked more quickly. The dirt was looser, muddier.
Fourteen inches down, in the left-hand corner of the grid, her trowel struck heavily against something. She began clearing away the sodden dirt around it. Then her brush hand jerked aside reflexively. It was a circlet of hair about a smooth dome of brown bone.
A distant rumble of thunder pierced the silence. The storm was still upon them.
She heard a faint intake of breath from O’Shaughnessy.
