Blue Labyrinth

She squeezed inside and eased the door shut to the point where it was open only a few inches.

Forcing down the feeling of panic, remembering to take things one step at a time, Margo turned her attention to the handwritten labels on the drawers, sca

She returned to sca

This was going unbelievably well. If she could keep her fear under control, she’d be out of the building in ten minutes. She realized she was covered with a clammy sweat, and she couldn’t stop her heart from pounding, but her one-step-at-a-time strategy was, at least, keeping her wits about her.

There were three Thismia plates, one containing several underground rhizomes, another with samples of the aboveground plant, and a final one of the blossoms and seeds.

Margo recalled Jörgensen’s words. I would never allow the destruction of an extinct plant specimen, the last of its kind, for a one-off medicinal treatment. What is the value of an ordinary human life in the face of the last specimen of an extinct plant in existence? She stared at the plant, with its tiny white flower. She couldn’t agree less with such a misanthropic worldview. Maybe they wouldn’t need all three specimens — but she was taking all of them regardless.

She slipped them carefully into her bag, zipped it up, and slung it over her shoulder. With an excess of caution, she turned off the headlamp and pushed open the door of the vault. She stepped into the darkness, listening intently. When all seemed silent, she stepped out and, feeling with her hands, shut the vault door, then turned the wheel. It locked automatically, and the green light switched back to red.

Done! She turned back around and, reaching up, turned on her headlamp.

The shadowy outline of a man stood there. And then a bright light suddenly flicked on, blinding her.

62

D’Agosta stood up from his desk and stretched. His back ached from hours of sitting in the hard wooden chair, and his right ear throbbed from having a phone receiver pressed against it.

He’d spent hours, it seemed, on the phone with the DA’s office, trying to get a subpoena to have John Barbeaux brought in for questioning. But the DA’s office wouldn’t see it his way and said he hadn’t met probable cause — especially for a guy like Barbeaux, who would immediately lawyer up and make their lives hell.

The chain of reasoning seemed obvious to D’Agosta: Barbeaux had hired Howard Rudd to pose as the fake Dr. Jonathan Waldron, who had in turn used Victor Marsala in order to get access to the skeleton of the long-dead Mrs. Padgett. Barbeaux needed a bone from that skeleton in order to reverse-engineer the components of Hezekiah Pendergast’s elixir, thus allowing him to resynthesize that elixir and use it on Pendergast. D’Agosta had no doubt that, once Alban was placed on Pendergast’s doorstep and the plot was in motion, Rudd killed Marsala as a way of tying up loose ends — he’d no doubt lured the tech to a remote corner of the Museum, under pretext of payment or some such thing. It seemed equally clear that Barbeaux had then used Rudd as bait to lure Pendergast into the animal handling room at the Salton Fontainebleau — and been gassed with the elixir for his trouble. All in seeking revenge for Hezekiah’s poisoning of Barbeaux’s great-grandparents and the death of his son.

Although he couldn’t be sure, D’Agosta was fairly confident that Barbeaux had hired Rudd three years ago, paid off his gambling debts, given him a new face and a new identity, and kept him on as an anonymous enforcer he could use for any number of nefarious jobs — keeping him loyal by threatening his family with harm. It made complete sense.

The DA had dismissed all this with barely concealed contempt, calling it a conspiracy theory of supposition, speculation, and fantasy, and entirely unsupported by hard medical data.

D’Agosta had then spent a good part of the early evening phoning various botanical experts and pharmaceutical specialists, looking for that medical data. But he quickly understood that there would have to be tests, analyses, blind studies, and so on and so forth, before any conclusions could be drawn.

There had to be a way to dig up enough evidence to at least get Barbeaux’s ass in his office long enough for Margo and Constance to do their thing.

Probable cause. Son of a bitch. There must be a piece of evidence out there, somewhere, that he’d overlooked, which would suggest Barbeaux was crooked. Frustrated, he got up from his desk. It was nine o’clock; he needed some fresh air; a walk to clear his head. Shrugging into his jacket, D’Agosta strode to the door, snapped off the lights, then began to make his way down the corridor. After a few steps, he paused. Maybe Pendergast would have some ideas on how to squeeze Barbeaux. But no — the agent would be too weak for that conversation. Pendergast’s condition filled him with anger and a sick feeling of impotence.

As he exited his office, he paused. The Marsala files were next door: what he really should do is go through them again in case he’d overlooked something. He stepped into the vacant room he was using for overflow storage.

Turning on the lights, D’Agosta began to survey the stacks of folders piled on the conference table and against the walls. He’d take everything related to Howard Rudd. Maybe Barbeaux had a co

At that moment D’Agosta went quite still. His roving eye had stopped at the room’s lone garbage can. It contained only one thing: a crumpled-up licorice toffee wrapper.

Slade’s ubiquitous toffee. What the hell had he been doing in here?

D’Agosta took a breath, then another. It was only a candy wrapper, and yes, Slade did have access and authority to be in there, looking at these files. D’Agosta wasn’t sure why, but all of a sudden his cop instincts were going off. He looked around again, more carefully this time. Boxes and filing cabinets were stacked against the walls. The files were where he remembered leaving them. Slade should have checked with him, that was true, but maybe Angler didn’t want D’Agosta to know. After all, the guy was obviously not too keen on Pendergast, and D’Agosta was known to be a friend of the agent.

As he moved to grab the Rudd files, his eye spied a dusting of white plaster on the rug, a spot near the wall that was shared with his own office. D’Agosta approached the wall and moved the boxes away from it. There was a small hole drilled in the wall, just above the baseboard.

He knelt and peered more closely, let his finger drift over the hole. It was about half a millimeter in diameter. He probed it with an unbent paper clip and found it didn’t go all the way through.

His gaze went back to the dusting of white plaster. This hole had been made recently.