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Custer shrugged philosophically. “The very question I asked you. But then, why do any serial killers kill? Why did Jack the Ripper kill? Why Jeffrey Dahmer? That’s a question for the psychiatrists to answer. Or maybe for God.”
On this note, Custer turned back to Noyes. “Set up a press conference for midnight. One Police Plaza. No, hold on—let’s make it on the front steps of the Museum. Call the commissioner, call the press. And most importantly, call the mayor, on his private line at Gracie Mansion. This is one call he’ll be happy to get out of bed for. Tell them we collared the Surgeon.”
“Yes, sir!” said Noyes, turning to go.
“My God, the publicity . . .” Brisbane’s voice was high, strangled. “Captain, I’ll have your badge for this . . .” He choked up with fear and rage, unable to continue.
But Custer wasn’t listening. He’d had another masterstroke.
“Just a minute!” he called to Noyes. “Make sure the mayor knows that he’ll be the star of our show. We’ll let him make the a
As the door closed, Custer turned his thoughts to the mayor. The election was a week away. He would need the boost. Letting him make the a
SEVEN
AGAIN, NORA LOOKED at Pendergast. And again she was u
“The face. It looks just like—” Nora struggled to understand, to articulate her thoughts.
Pendergast did not respond.
“It looks just like you,” Nora finally managed.
“Yes,” came the whispered response. “Very much like me.”
“But who is it—?”
“Enoch Leng.”
Something in the way he said this caused Nora’s skin to crawl.
“Leng? But how can that be? I thought you said he was alive.”
With a visible effort Pendergast wrenched his eyes from the glass case and turned them on her. In them, she read many things: horror, pain, dread. His face remained colorless in the dim light.
“He was. Until recently. Someone appears to have killed Leng. Tortured him to death. And put him in that case. It seems we are now dealing with that other someone.”
“I still don’t—”
Pendergast held up one hand. “I ca
He turned from the figure, slowly, almost painfully, his light stabbing farther into the gloom.
Nora inhaled the antique, dust-laden air. Everything was so strange, so terrible and unexpected; the kind of weirdness that happened only in a nightmare. She tried to calm her pounding heart.
“Now he is unconscious, being dragged,” whispered Pendergast. His eyes were once again on the floor, but his voice and ma
With the flashlight as a guide, they followed the marks across the reception hall to a set of closed doors. Pendergast opened them to reveal a carpeted, well-appointed space: a two-story library, filled with leather-bound books. The beam probed farther, slicing through drifting clouds of dust. In addition to books, Nora saw that, again, many of the shelves were lined with specimens, all carefully labeled. There were also numerous freestanding specimens in the room, draped in rotting duck canvas. A variety of wing chairs and sofas were positioned around the library, the leather dry and split, the stuffing unraveling.
The beam of the flashlight licked over the walls. A salver sat on a nearby table, holding a crystal decanter of what had once been port or sherry: a brown crust lined its bottom. Next to the tray sat a small, empty glass. An unsmoked cigar, shriveled and furred with mold, lay alongside it. A fireplace carved of gray marble was set into one of the walls, a fire laid but not lit. Before it was a tattered zebra skin, well chewed by mice. A sideboard nearby held more crystal decanters, each with a brown or black substance dried within. A hominid skull—Nora recognized it as Australopithecine—sat on a side table with a candle set into it. An open book lay nearby.
Pendergast’s light lingered on the open book. Nora could see it was an ancient medical treatise, written in Latin. The page showed engravings of a cadaver in various stages of dissection. Of all the objects in the library, only this looked fresh, as if it had been handled recently. Everything else was layered with dust.
Once again, Pendergast turned his attention to the floor, where Nora could clearly see marks in the moth-eaten, rotting carpet. The marks appeared to end at a wall of books.
Now, Pendergast approached the wall. He ran his light over their spines, peering intently at the titles. Every few moments he would stop, remove a book, glance at it, shove it back. Suddenly—as Pendergast removed a particularly massive tome from a shelf—Nora heard a loud metallic click. Two large rows of adjoining bookshelves sprang open. Pendergast drew them carefully back, exposing a folding brass gate. Behind the closed gate lay a door of solid maple. It took Nora a moment to realize what it was.
“An old elevator,” she whispered.
Pendergast nodded. “Yes. The old service elevator to the basement. There was something exactly like this in—”
He went abruptly silent. As the sound of his voice faded away, Nora heard what she thought was a noise coming from within the closed elevator. A shallow breath, perhaps, hardly more than a moan.
Suddenly, a terrible thought burst over Nora. At the same time, Pendergast stiffened visibly.
She let out an involuntary gasp. “That’s not—” She couldn’t bring herself to say Smithback’s name.
“We must hurry.”
Pendergast carefully examined the brass gate with the beam. He reached forward, gingerly tried the handle. It did not move. He knelt before the door and, with his head close to the latching mechanism, examined it. Nora saw him remove a flat, flexible piece of metal from his suit and slide it into the mechanism. There was a faint click. He worked the shim back and forth, teasing and probing at the latch, until there was a second click. Then he stood up and, with infinite caution, drew back the brass gate. It folded to one side easily, almost noiselessly. Again, Pendergast approached, crouching before the handle of the maple door, regarding it intently.
There was another sound: again a faint, agonized attempt to breathe. Her heart filled with dread.
A sudden rasping noise filled the study. Pendergast jumped back abruptly as the door shot open of its own accord.
Nora stood transfixed with horror. A figure appeared in the back of the small compartment. For a moment, it remained motionless. And then, with the sound of rotten fabric tearing away, it slowly came toppling out toward them. For a terrible moment, Nora thought it would fall upon Pendergast. But then the figure jerked abruptly to a stop, held by a rope around its neck, leaning toward them at a grotesque angle, arms swinging.
“It’s O’Shaughnessy,” said Pendergast.
“O’Shaughnessy!”
“Yes. And he’s still alive.” He took a step forward and grabbed the body, wrestling it upright, freeing the neck from the rope. Nora came quickly to his side and helped him lower the sergeant to the floor. As she did so, she saw a huge, gaping hole in the man’s back. O’Shaughnessy coughed once, head lolling.
There was a sudden jolt; a protesting squeal of gears and machinery; and then, abruptly, the bottom dropped out of their world.
EIGHT
CUSTER LED THE makeshift procession down the long echoing halls, toward the Great Rotunda and the front steps of the Museum that lay beyond. He’d allowed Noyes a good half hour to give the press a heads-up, and while he was waiting he’d worked out the precedence down to the last detail. He came first, of course, followed by two uniformed cops with the perp between them, and then a phalanx of some twenty lieutenants and detectives. Trailing them, in turn, was a ragged, dismayed, disorganized knot of museum staffers. This included the head of public relations; Manetti the security director; a gaggle of aides. They were all in a frenzy, clearly out of their depth. If they’d been smart, if they’d assisted rather than tried to impede good police work and due process, maybe this circus could have been avoided. But now, he was going to make it hard on them. He was going to hold the press conference in their own front yard, right on those nice wide steps, with the vast spooky facade of the Museum as backdrop—perfect for the early morning news. The cameras would eat it up. And now, as the group crossed the Rotunda, the echoes of their footsteps mingling with the murmuring of voices, Custer held his head erect, sucked in his gut. He wanted to make sure the moment would be well recorded for posterity.