The Cabinet of Curiosities

Nora was very fit, but Finester and O’Grady surprised her. They were fast, too. At the far end of the hall, she glanced back and noticed that the taller sergeant, O’Grady, was actually gaining ground.

She flung open a stairwell door and began flying down the stairs, two at a time. Moments later, the door opened again: she heard loud voices, the pounding of feet.

She plunged downward even more quickly. Reaching the basement, she pushed the panic bar on the door and burst into the paleontological storage area. A long corridor ran ahead, arrow-straight, gray and institutional, illuminated by bare bulbs in wire cages. Doors lined both sides: Probiscidia, Eohippii, Bovidae, Pongidae.

The thudding of approaching feet filled the stairwell behind her. Was it possible they were still gaining? Why couldn’t she have gotten the two porkers at the table to her left?

She sprinted down the hallway, veered abruptly around a corner, and ran on, thinking fast. The vast dinosaur bone storage room was nearby. If she was going to lose these two, her best chance lay in there. She dug into her purse as she ran: thank God she’d remembered to bring her lab and storage keys along that morning.

She almost flew past the heavy door, fumbling with the keys. She turned, jammed her key into the lock, and pushed the door open just as the cops came into view around the corner.

Shit. They’ve seen me. Nora closed the door, locked it behind her, turned toward the long rows of tall metal stacks, preparing to run.

Then she had an idea.

She unlocked the door again, then took off down the closest aisle, turning left at the first crossing, then right, angling away from the door. At last she dropped into a crouch, pressing herself into the shadows, trying to catch her breath. She heard the tramp of feet in the corridor beyond. The door rattled abruptly.

“Open up!” came O’Grady’s muffled roar.

Nora glanced around quickly, searching for a better place to hide. The room was lit only by the dim glow of emergency lighting, high up in the ceiling. Additional lights required a key—standard procedure in Museum storage rooms, where light could harm the specimens—and the long aisles were cloaked in darkness. She heard a grunt, the shiver of the door in its frame. She hoped they wouldn’t be stupid enough to break down an unlocked door—that would ruin everything.

The door shivered under the weight of another heavy blow. Then they figured it out: it was almost with relief that she heard the jiggling of the handle, the creak of the opening door. Warily, silently, she retreated farther into the vast forest of bones.

The Museum’s dinosaur bone collection was the largest in the world. The dinosaurs were stored unmounted, stacked disarticulated on massive steel shelves. The shelves themselves were constructed of steel I-beams and angle iron, riveted together to make a web of shelving strong enough to support thousands of tons: vast piles of tree-trunk-thick legbones, skulls the size of cars, massive slabs of stone matrix with bones still imbedded, awaiting the preparator’s chisel. The room smelled like the interior of an ancient stone cathedral.

“We know you’re in here!” came the breathless voice of Finester.

Nora receded deeper into the shadows. A rat scurried in front of her, scrambling for safety within a gaping allosaurus eye socket. Bones rose on both sides like great heaps of cordwood, shelves climbing into the gloom. Like most of the Museum storage rooms, it was an illogical jumble of shelves and mismatched rows, growing by accretion over the last century and a half. A good place to get lost in.

“Ru

She shrank behind a giant turtle almost the size of a studio apartment, trying to reconstruct the layout of the vault in her head. She couldn’t remember seeing a rear door in previous visits. Most storage vaults, for security purposes, had only one. There was only one way out, and they were blocking it. She had to get them to move.

“Dr. Kelly, I’m sure we can work something out! Please!”

Nora smiled to herself. What a pair of blunderers. Smithback would have had fun with them.

Her smile faded at the thought of Smithback. She was certain now of what he’d done. Smithback had gone to Leng’s house. Perhaps he had heard Pendergast’s theory—that Leng was alive and still living in his old house. Perhaps he’d wheedled it out of O’Shaughnessy. The guy could have made Helen Keller talk.

On top of that, he was a good researcher. He knew the Museum’s files. While she and Pendergast were going through deeds, he’d gone straight to the Museum and hit paydirt. And knowing Smithback, he’d have run right up to Leng’s house. That’s why he’d rented a car, driven it up Riverside Drive. Just to check out the house. But Smithback could never merely check something out. The fool, the damned fool . . .

Cautiously, Nora tried dialing Smithback on her cell phone, muffling the sound with the leather of her purse. But the phone was dead: she was surrounded by several thousand tons of steel shelves and dinosaur bones, not to mention the Museum overhead. At least it probably meant the radios of the cops would be equally useless. If her plan worked, that would prove useful.

“Dr. Kelly!” The voices were coming from her left now, away from the door.

She crept forward between the shelves, strained to catch a glimpse of them, but she could see nothing but the beam of a flashlight stabbing through the dark piles of bone.

There was no more time: she had to get out.

She listened closely to the footsteps of the cops. Good: they seemed to still be together. In their joint eagerness to take credit for the collar, they’d been too stupid to leave one to guard the door.

“All right!” she called. “I give up! Sorry, I guess I just lost my head.”

There was a brief flurry of whispers.

“We’re coming!” O’Grady shouted. “Don’t go anywhere!”

She heard them moving in her direction, more quickly now, the flashlight beam wobbling and weaving as they ran. Watching the direction of the beam, she scooted away, keeping low, angling back toward the front of the storage room, moving as quickly and silently as she could.

“Where are you?” she heard a voice cry, fainter now, several aisles away. “Dr. Kelly?”

“She was over there, O’Grady.”

“Damn it, Finester, you know she was much farther—”

In a flash Nora was out the door. She turned, slammed it shut, turned her key in the lock. In another five minutes she was out on Museum Drive.

Panting hard, she slipped her cell phone out of her purse again and dialed.

SEVEN

THE SILVER WRAITH glided noiselessly up to the Seventy-second Street curb. Pendergast slid out and stood for a moment in the shadow of the Dakota, deep in thought, while the car idled.

The interview with his great-aunt had left him with an unfamiliar feeling of dread. Yet it was a dread that had been growing within him since he first heard of the discovery of the charnel pit beneath Catherine Street.

For many years he had kept a silent vigil, sca

“Good evening, Mr. Pendergast,” the guard said at his approach, stepping out of the sentry box. An envelope lay in his white-gloved hand. The sight of the envelope sent Pendergast’s dread soaring.

“Thank you, Johnson,” Pendergast replied, without taking the envelope. “Did Sergeant O’Shaughnessy come by, as I mentioned he would?”

“No sir. He hasn’t been by all evening.”

Pendergast grew more pensive, and there was a long moment of silence. “I see. Did you take delivery of this envelope?”