The Cabinet of Curiosities

Immediately, dozens of lice leapt into view, dead and dry, clinging to the crudely woven fabric, intermingled with smaller mites and several giant fleas. She jerked her head back involuntarily. Then, smiling at herself, she took a closer, more studied look. The dress was a rich landscape of foreign biology, along with an array of substances that could occupy a forensic chemist for weeks. She wondered how useful such an analysis would be, considered the cost, and temporarily shelved the idea. She brought the forceps forward to take more samples.

Suddenly, the silence in her office seemed all too absolute; there was a crawling sensation at the base of her neck. She swiveled, gasped; Special Agent Pendergast was standing behind her, hands behind his back.

“Jesus!” she said, leaping out of the chair. “You scared the hell out of me!”

Pendergast bowed slightly. “My apologies.”

“I thought I locked that door.”

“You did.”

“Are you a magician, Agent Pendergast? Or did you simply pick my lock?”

“A little of both, perhaps. But these old Museum locks are so crude, one can hardly call it ‘picking.’ I am well known here, which requires me to be discreet.”

“Do you think you could call ahead next time?”

He turned to the dress. “You didn’t have this yesterday afternoon.”

“No. I didn’t.”

He nodded. “Very resourceful of you, Dr. Kelly.”

“I went back last night—”

“No details of any questionable activities, please. However, my congratulations.”

She could see he was pleased.

He held out his hand. “Proceed.”

Nora turned back to her work. After a while, Pendergast spoke. “There were many articles of clothing in the tu

Without a word, Nora carefully turned up the pleats of the dress, exposing a crudely sewn patch in the cotton lining. Immediately, Pendergast moved closer.

“There’s a piece of paper sewn inside,” she said. “I came upon it just before they shut down the site.”

“May I borrow your loup?”

Nora lifted it over her head and handed it to him. Bending over the dress, he examined it with a thorough professionalism that surprised and impressed Nora. At last he straightened up.

“Very hasty work,” he said. “You’ll note that all the other stitching and mending was done carefully, almost lovingly. This dress was some girl’s prize garment. But this one stitch was made with thread pulled from the dress itself, and the holes are ragged—I would guess they were made with a splinter of wood. This was done by someone with little time, and with no access to even a needle.”

Nora moved the microscope over the patch, using its camera to take a series of photographs at various magnifications. Then she fixed a macro lens and took another series. She worked efficiently, aware that Pendergast’s eyes were upon her.

She put the microscope aside and picked up the tweezers. “Let’s open it up.”

With great care, she teased the end of the thread out and began to undo the patch. A few minutes of painstaking work and it lay loose. She placed the thread in a sample tube and lifted the material.

Underneath was a piece of paper, torn from the page of a book. It had been folded twice.

Nora put the patch into yet another Ziploc bag. Then, using two pairs of rubber-tipped tweezers, she unfolded the paper. Inside was a message, scratched in crude brown letters. Parts of it were stained and faded, but it read unmistakably:

i a M MarY GreeNe, agt 19 years, No. 16 WaTTer  sTreeT

Nora moved the paper to the stage of the stereozoom and looked at it under low power. After a moment she stepped back, and Pendergast eagerly took her place at the eyepieces. Minutes went by as he stared. Finally he stepped away.

“Written with the same splinter, perhaps,” he said.

Nora nodded. The letters had been formed with little scratches and scrapes.

“May I perform a test?” Pendergast asked.

“What kind?”

Pendergast slipped out a small stoppered test tube. “It will involve removing a tiny sample of the ink on this note with a solvent.”

“What is that stuff?”

“Antihuman rabbit serum.”

“Be my guest.” Strange that Pendergast carried forensic chemicals around in his pockets. What did the agent not have hidden inside that bottomless black suit of his?

Pendergast unstoppered the test tube, revealing a tiny swab. Using the stereozoom, he applied it to a corner of a letter, then placed it back in its tube. He gave it a little shake and held it to the window. After a moment, the liquid turned blue. He turned to face her.

“So?” she asked, but she had already read the results in his face.

“The note, Dr. Kelly, was written in human blood. No doubt the very blood of the young woman herself.”EIGHT

SILENCE DESCENDED IN the Museum office. Nora found she had to sit down. For some time nothing was said; Nora could vaguely hear traffic sounds from below, the distant ringing of a phone, footsteps in the hall. The full dimension of the discovery began to sink in: the tu

“What do you think it means?” she asked.

“There can be only one explanation. The girl must have known she would never leave that basement alive. She didn’t want to die an unknown. Hence she deliberately wrote down her name, age, and home address, and then concealed it. A self-chosen epitaph. The only one available to her.”

Nora shuddered. “How horrible.”

Pendergast moved slowly toward her bookshelf. She followed him with her eyes.

“What are we dealing with?” she asked. “A serial killer?”

Pendergast did not answer. The same troubled look that had come over him at the digsite had returned to his face. He continued to stand in front of the bookshelf.

“May I ask you a question?”

Pendergast nodded again.

“Why are you involved in this? Hundred-and-thirty-year-old serial killings are not exactly within the purview of the FBI.”

Pendergast plucked a small Anasazi bowl from the shelf and examined it. “Lovely Kayenta black-on-white.” He looked up. “How is your research on the Utah Anasazi survey going?”

“Not well. The Museum won’t give me money for the carbon-14 dates I need. What does that have to—”

“Good.”

“Good?”

“Dr. Kelly, are you familiar with the term, ‘cabinet of curiosities’?”

Nora wondered at the man’s ability to pile on non sequiturs. “Wasn’t it a kind of natural history collection?”

“Precisely. It was the precursor to the natural history museum. Many educated gentlemen of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries collected strange artifacts while roaming the globe—fossils, bones, shrunken heads, stuffed birds, that sort of thing. Originally, they simply displayed these artifacts in cabinets, for the amusement of their friends. Later—when it became clear people would pay money to visit them—some of these cabinets of curiosities grew into commercial enterprises. They still called them ‘cabinets of curiosities’ even though the collections filled many rooms.”

“What does this have to do with the murders?”

“In 1848, a wealthy young gentleman from New York, Alexander Marysas, went on a hunting and collecting expedition around the world, from the South Pacific to Tierra del Fuego. He died in Madagascar, but his collections—most extraordinary collections they were—came back in the hold of his ship. They were purchased by an entrepreneur, John Canaday Shottum, who opened J. C. Shottum’s Cabinet of Natural Productions and Curiosities in 1852.”

“So?”

“Shottum’s Cabinet was the building that once stood above the tu

“How did you find all this out?”

“Half an hour with a good friend of mine who works in the New York Public Library. The tu