Blue Labyrinth

“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.

21

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.

22

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.