The man said nothing.
“I’m just an artifact collector, checking the place out.” Almost groveling, Pendergast ducked his head and took a step closer, as if to genuflect in front of the man. “Please don’t shoot me.”
He ducked his head again, fell to his knees with a repressed sob. “Please.”
The pry bar on his vest—given a touch of assistance—fell to the tiled floor with a clatter. And in this millisecond of distraction, Pendergast rose up in one explosive movement, striking the man’s right wrist, cracking it and sending the gun flying.
But instead of lunging for his gun, the man pivoted on the sole of one foot and sent the other foot, karate-style, slamming into Pendergast’s chest so fast he could not pull his own weapon. He was again knocked to the floor, but this time—cognizant of his attacker, no longer caught unaware—he spun over just in time to fend off another brutal kick and flipped to his feet, just managing to lean away from a roundhouse punch. He jammed his heel into the inside of the man’s right knee as he sprang back, hearing the popping of tendons. His attacker staggered, delivered a cross punch. Pendergast feinted away, then drew him in with a pull counter; as the man delivered the punch into air, Pendergast jerked back and responded with a blow to his face, his fingers in the kung fu “tiger hand” position. The man reared back, the blow missing him by less than an inch, while simultaneously sinking a fist into Pendergast’s stomach, almost knocking the wind from him.
It was the most peculiar of battles, conducted in pitch black, in utter silence, with singular intensity and ferocity. The man said nothing, made no sound save for the occasional grunt. He moved so quickly that he gave Pendergast no time to extract his Les Baer. The man was possessed of excellent fighting skills, and for an eternity of sixty seconds they seemed equally matched. But Pendergast had a superior range of martial arts moves, along with highly unusual self-defense techniques he had learned at a certain Tibetan monastery. At last, using one of these latter moves called a Crow Beak—a lightning-like sword-slash of two hands held together as if in prayer—he knocked the goggles from his adversary’s face. This gave him an instant advantage, and he used it to land a flurry of blows that brought the man to his knees, gasping. In another moment Pendergast had his .45 out, trained on the man. He gave him a brief search, pulling out a knife, which he tossed away.
“FBI,” he said. “You’re under arrest.”
The man did not reply. Indeed, he hadn’t spoken a word throughout the entire encounter.
“Open the door.”
Silence.
Pendergast spun the man around, zip-tied his hands behind his back, sought out a loop of pipe, found one, and further zip-tied him to that. “Very well. I’ll open it myself.”
Again, the man said nothing, giving no indication he had even heard. He just sat on the floor, tied to the pipe, face blank.
As Pendergast went to the door to fire a few rounds into the lock, something strange happened. The room began to fill with a distinct scent: the delicate, sweet smell of lilies. Pendergast glanced around for the source of the odor. It seemed to come from the vent in the ceiling directly above where he had tied the assailant—a vent that had previously been closed, but was now open, a mist descending with a whisper of air. Pendergast’s assailant, blinded by the loss of his goggles, stared about in fear as the cloud of mist cloaked his face and body, and he began to cough and shake his head.
Quickly Pendergast aimed at the lock, pulled the trigger. The sound was explosive in the confined space, the round deflected by the metal—a major surprise. But even as he prepared to fire again, he felt his limbs get heavy, his movements begin to grow sluggish. A strange sensation flooded his head—a feeling of fullness and a sense of well-being, serenity, and lassitude. Black spots danced before the green field of his vision. He swayed, caught himself, swayed again, dropped the gun. Just as blackness overtook him and he sank to the floor, he heard the ceiling grate begin to close again. And with it came the whispered words:
“You have Alban to thank for this…”
Later—he did not know how much later—Pendergast swam slowly up from dark dreams and broke the surface into consciousness. He opened his eyes to a green haze. For a moment, he was disoriented, unsure of what he was looking at. Then he realized he was still wearing the goggles, and the green object was the ceiling vent… and everything came back to him.
He rose to his knees, and then—painfully—to his feet. He was sore from the fight but otherwise felt oddly strong, refreshed. The smell of lilies was gone. His opponent was crumpled on the floor, still unconscious.
Pendergast took stock. He surveyed the room through his goggles, far more intently this time. Porcelain tiles rose four feet up the walls, above which was stainless steel. Although there was the closed grate in the ceiling, and nozzles set high up in the walls, the drain in the floor had been sealed with cement.
It reminded Pendergast of another, very different, kind of room that had once been used for unspeakably barbaric purposes.
The silence, the darkness, and the strange quality of the room chilled him. He reached into his pocket, fumbled for his cell phone, began to dial.
As he did so, there was another audible click; the lock snapped free and the metal door swung ajar, revealing the short corridor beyond, empty of anything save his own footsteps in the dust.
Lieutenant D’Agosta showed up promptly at one PM. As he closed the door quietly behind him, Margo gestured toward a chair.
“What have you got?” he asked as he sat down, glancing curiously at the bone-littered table before him.
She took a seat beside him, flipping open her laptop. “Remember what the accession record said? A Hottentot male, aged approximately thirty-five?”
“How could I forget? He haunts my dreams.”
“What we actually have here is the skeleton of a Caucasian woman, most likely American, and probably not a day under sixty.”
“Jesus. How do you know that?”
“Take a look at this.” Margo reached over, carefully picked up the pelvic bone. “The best way to sex a skeleton is to examine its pelvis. See how wide the pelvic girdle is? That’s designed for giving birth. In a male pelvis, the spread of the ilia would be different. Also, note the bone density, the way the sacrum is tilted back.” She replaced the pelvis on the table, picked up the skull. “Take a look at the shape of the forehead, the relative lack of eyebrow ridges—additional indicators of sex. Then, can you see how both the sagittal suture and the coronal suture are fully fused: here, and here? That would argue for somebody over the age of forty. I examined the teeth under a stereozoom, and the wear indicates someone even older—at least sixty, perhaps sixty-five.”
“Caucasian?”
“That’s not quite so cut and dried, but you can frequently tell a skeleton’s racial heritage from its skull and jawbone.” She turned the skull over in her hands. “Note the shape of the nasal cavity—triangular—and the gentle slope of the eye socket. Those are consistent with European ancestry.” She pointed to the sinus at the bottom of the skull. “See this? The arch of the maxilla is parabolic. If this was a so-called Hottentot, it would be hyperbolic in shape. Of course, you’d need to do DNA sequencing to be absolutely sure—but I’d bet the family Bible this was a white lady in her sixties.”
Through the window set into the closed door of the examination room, Margo could see somebody walk past in the corridor beyond, then stop and turn. Dr. Frisby. He looked through the window at her, then at D’Agosta, his expression turning to a scowl. Frisby looked back at her once more, then turned away and disappeared down the corridor. She shivered. She’d never liked the guy and wondered what D’Agosta had done to apparently antagonize him.
“And the American part?” D’Agosta asked.
Margo looked back at him. “That’s more a guess. The teeth are evenly worn and well maintained. Good bone health, no apparent diseases. Chemical tests could tell you more definitively—there are isotopes in teeth
that can indicate where a person lived and, often, what his diet was.”
D’Agosta whistled. “You learn something new every day.”
“Another thing. The accession record says the skeleton is complete. But it’s now missing a long bone.”
“Clerical error?”
“Never. A ‘complete’ notation was unusual. Not something you’d normally mistake, and the long bone is one of the biggest in the body.”
The examination room fell silent. Margo began returning the bones to their tray while D’Agosta looked on, slumped in the chair, a thoughtful expression on his face.
“How in hell did this skeleton end up here? Does the Museum have little old lady collections?”
“No.”
“Any idea how old it is?”
“Based on the look of the dental work, I’d say late nineteenth century. But we’d have to do radiocarbon dating to be positive. That could take weeks.”
D’Agosta digested this. “Let’s make sure the mislabeling wasn’t a mistake, and that the missing bone didn’t end up nearby. I’ll ask our pal Sandoval to pull all the skeletons from the surrounding drawers and those with adjacent accession numbers. You wouldn’t mind coming back and seeing if any of those look more like, um, a thirty-five-year-old Hottentot?”
“Glad to. There are other tests I’d like to run on this skeleton, anyway.”
D’Agosta laughed. “If Pendergast was around, you can bet he’d say something like: That bone is critical to solving this case.” He stood up. “I’ll give you a call to set up the next session. Keep this under wraps, will you? Especially from Frisby.”
As Margo was making her way back down the central passage of Osteology, Frisby seemed to materialize out of the dim dustiness of a side corridor to walk alongside her.
“Dr. Green?” He looked straight ahead as he walked beside her.
“Yes, hello, Dr. Frisby.”
“You were talking to that policeman.”
“Yes.” She tried to sound relaxed.
Frisby continued to look straight ahead. “What did he want?”
“He asked me to examine a skeleton.”
“Which one?”
“The one Vic Marsala pulled for that, ah, visiting scientist.”
“He asked you to examine it? Why you?”
“I’ve known the lieutenant a long time.”
“And what did you find?”
This was rapidly becoming an inquisition. Margo tried to stay calm. “According to the accession label, a Hottentot male, added to the collection in 1889.”
“And just what possible bearing could a hundred-and-twenty-five-year-old skeleton have on Marsala’s murder?”
“I couldn’t say, sir. I was just helping the police at their request.”
Frisby snorted. “This is intolerable. The police are barking up the wrong tree. It’s as if they’re looking to draw my department deeper into this pointless murder case, into scandal and suspicion. All this poking around—I’ve had a bellyful of it.” Frisby stopped. “Did he ask you for any other assistance?”
Margo hesitated. “He mentioned something about examining a few other skeletons from the collection.”
“I see.” Now at last Frisby looked at her. “I believe you’ve got some high-level research privileges around here.”
“Yes, and I’m very thankful for that.”
“What would happen if those privileges were rescinded?”
Margo looked at him steadily. This was outrageous. But she was not going to lose her cool. “It would deep-six my research. I might lose my job.”
“What a shame that would be.” He said nothing else, only turned and strode down the corridor, leaving Margo standing there, staring at his tall, brisk, receding form.
The third-floor suite of the Palm Springs Hilton was dimly lit, the curtains drawn across the picture windows overlooking the swimming pool and cocktail cabana, shimmering in the late-morning sun. In a far corner of the suite, Agent Pendergast was reclining in an armchair, a pot of tea on a table beside him. His legs were crossed at the ankles on a leather ottoman, and he was speaking into his cell phone.
“He’s being held in lieu of bail at the Indio jail,” he said. “There was no identification on his person, and his fingerprints aren’t in any database.”
“Did he say why he attacked you?” came the voice of Constance Greene.
“He’s been as silent as a Trappist monk.”
“You were both knocked out by some anesthetizing agent?”
“So it would seem.”
“To what purpose?”
“That is still a mystery. I’ve been to the doctor, I’m in perfect health—save for the injuries inflicted during the struggle. There’s no trace of any poison or ill effects. No needle marks or anything to indicate I was interfered with while unconscious.”
“The person who attacked you must have been in league with whoever administered the sedative. It seems strange he would have anesthetized his own associate.”
“The entire sequence of events is strange. I believe the man was duped as well. Until he talks, his motive remains obscure. There is one thing, however, that is quite clear. And it is much to my discredit.”
He paused.
“Yes?”
“All of this—the turquoise, the Golden Spider Mine, the Salton Fontainebleau, the ineffectually erased tire tracks, the map of the mine itself, and possibly the old man I spoke to—was a setup. It was carefully orchestrated to lure me into that particular animal handling room where that gas could be administered. That room was built years ago for the very purpose of administering anesthetic gas to dangerous animals.”
“So what’s to your discredit?”
“I thought I was one step ahead of them, when in reality they were always several steps ahead of me.”
“You say they. Do you really believe that Alban could have been involved, somehow?”
Pendergast did not answer at once, and then repeated, in a low voice, “You have Alban to thank for this. A rather unambiguous statement, don’t you think?”
“Yes.”
“This complex arrangement at the Salton Fontainebleau, over-engineered as if to compensate for any possible failure, has all the tricky hallmarks of something Alban would delight in setting up. And yet—it was his murder that set the trap in motion.”
“A strange kind of suicide?” asked Constance.
“I doubt it. Suicide is not Alban’s style.”
The line lapsed into silence before Constance spoke again. “Have you told D’Agosta?”
“I haven’t informed anybody, especially Lieutenant D’Agosta. He already knows more about Alban than is good for him. As for the NYPD in general, I have no faith that they can be of any assistance to me in this matter. If anything, I fear they would trod about, doing damage. I’ll go back to the Indio jail this afternoon to see if I can get anything out of this fellow.” A pause. “Constance, I’m terribly chagrined I fell into this trap to begin with.”
“He was your son. You weren’t thinking clearly.”
“That’s neither comfort nor excuse.” And with that, Pendergast ended the call, slipped the cell phone into a pocket of his suit jacket, and remained unmoving, a vague, thoughtful figure in a darkened room.
Terry Bonomo was the NYPD’s crack Identi-CAD expert. He was also a wiseass in the true Jersey-Italian tradition and, consequently, one of D’Agosta’s favorite people on the force. Just sitting in forensics, among the computers and displays and charts and lab equipment, D’Agosta felt his spirits rise. It felt good to be away from the musty, dim confines of the Museum. It also felt good to actually be doing something. Of course he had been doing things, trying to identify the visiting “professor”—while his forensic team scoured the bones and tray for latents, DNA, hair, and fiber. But creating a composite sketch of the phony Dr. Waldron’s face was different. It would be a major step forward. And nobody was better at facial composites than Terry Bonomo.
D’Agos
ta leaned over Bonomo’s shoulder and watched as he worked with the complex software. Across the table sat Sandoval, the Osteology tech. The job could have been done in the Museum, but D’Agosta always preferred to bring witnesses down to headquarters for this kind of work. Being in a police station was intimidating and helped a witness focus. And Sandoval—who looked a little paler than usual—was clearly concentrating.
“Hey, Vinnie,” Bonomo said in his booming New Jersey accent. “You recall the time I was putting together a portrait of a suspected murderer—using the testimony of the murderer himself?”
“That was legendary,” D’Agosta said with a chuckle.
“Jesus H. Christopher. The guy thought he was being cute, pretending to be a witness to a murder rather than the killer. His idea was to put together a bullshit portrait, throw us off. But I began to smell a rat almost as soon as we started.” Bonomo worked while he talked, tapping away at the keys and moving around the mouse. “Lots of witnesses have bad memories. But this clown—he was giving us the exact opposite of what he looked like. He had a big nose—so he said the bad guy’s was small. His lips? Thin. So the perp had thick lips. His jaw? Narrow. Perp had a big jaw. He was bald—so the perp had long full hair.”
“Yeah, I’ll never forget when you caught on and started putting in the opposite of what he said. When you were done, there was our perp, staring up at us from the screen. By trying to be clever, he’d fed us his own ugly mug.”
Bonomo brayed a laugh.
D’Agosta watched him working on a facial rough, based on Sandoval’s answers, as a new window popped up here, an additional layer was created there. “That’s quite a program,” he said. “Improved since the last time I was in here.”
“They’re always upgrading it. It’s like Photoshop with a single purpose. Took me three months to master it, and then they redid it. Now I’ve got the sucker nailed. You remember the old days, with all those little cards and the blank face templates?”
D’Agosta shuddered.
Bonomo hit a final key with a flourish, then swiveled the laptop around so Sandoval could see it. A large central window held a digital sketch of a man’s face, with other smaller windows surrounding it. “How close is that?” he asked Sandoval.
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