Blue Labyrinth

Angler licked his lips. “Look, Agent Pendergast. I realize it’s your son who’s on that gurney, and that this can’t be easy for you. But this is an official investigation, we have rules to obey and procedures to follow, and with evidence so short here you must know that—”

“I have resources that can help. I need that stone. I must have it.” Pendergast stepped closer, skewering Angler with his gaze. “Please.”

Angler had to consciously keep from retreating before the intensity of Pendergast’s gaze. Something told him that please was a word Pendergast used rather infrequently. He stood silent a moment, torn between conflicting emotions. But the exchange had one strong effect on Angler — he was now persuaded that Pendergast actually did want to find out what had happened to his son. He suddenly felt sorry for the man.

“It needs to be logged as evidence,” he said. “Photographed, fully described, cataloged, entered into the database. Once all that is complete, you may sign it out from Evidence, but only with the chain-of-custody protocols strictly observed. It must be returned within twenty-four hours.”

Pendergast nodded. “Thank you.”

“Twenty-four hours. No longer.”

But he found himself speaking to Pendergast’s back. The man was moving swiftly toward the door, the green gown flapping behind him.

7

The Osteology Department of the New York Museum of Natural History was a seemingly endless warren of rooms tucked under broad rooftops, reachable only by a massive set of double doors at the end of a long corridor containing the Museum’s fifth-floor offices, and thence by a gigantic, slow-moving freight elevator. When D’Agosta had stepped into that elevator (and found himself sharing the space with the carcass of a monkey stretched out on a dolly), he realized why the department was situated so far from the public spaces of the Museum: the place stank — as his father would have said — like a whorehouse at low tide.

The freight elevator boomed to a stop, the doors opened, top and bottom, and D’Agosta stepped out into the Osteology Department, looked around, and rubbed his hands together impatiently. His next scheduled interview was with Morris Frisby, the chair of both the Anthropology and Osteology Departments. Not that he held out much hope for the interview, because Frisby had just returned this morning from a conference in Boston, and had not been in the Museum at the time of the technician’s death. More promising was the youth shuffling over to meet him, one Mark Sandoval, an Osteology technician who’d been out for a week with a bad summer cold.

Sandoval closed the main Osteology door behind them. He looked as if he was still sick as a dog: his eyes were red and swollen, his face pale, and he was dabbing at his nose with a Kleenex. At least, D’Agosta thought, the guy was spared the terrible smell. Then again, he was probably used to it.

“I’m ten minutes early for my meeting with Dr. Frisby,” D’Agosta said. “Mind showing me around? I want to see where Marsala worked.”

“Well…” Sandoval swallowed, glanced over his shoulder.

“Is there a problem?” D’Agosta asked.

“It’s…” Another glance over the shoulder, followed by a lowering of voice. “It’s Dr. Frisby. He’s not too keen on…” The voice trailed off.

D’Agosta understood immediately. No doubt Frisby was a typical Museum bureaucrat, jealous of his petty fiefdom and gun-shy about adverse publicity. He could picture the curator: tweed jacket trailing pipe dottle, pink razor-burned wattles quivering in fussy consternation.

“Don’t worry,” D’Agosta said. “I won’t quote you by name.”

Sandoval hesitated another moment and then began leading the way down the corridor.

“I understand you were the person who worked most closely with Marsala,” D’Agosta said.

“As close as anybody could, I suppose.” He still seemed a little on edge.

“He wasn’t popular?”

Sandoval shrugged. “I don’t want to speak ill of the dead.”

D’Agosta took out his notebook. “Tell me anyway, if you don’t mind.”

Sandoval dabbed at his nose. “He was… well, a hard guy to get along with. Had something of a chip on his shoulder.”

“How so?”

“I guess you could say he was a failed scientist.”

They walked past what looked like the door of a gigantic freezer. “Go on.”

“He went to college, but he couldn’t pass organic chemistry — and without that, you’re dead meat as far as a PhD in biology goes. After college he came to work here as a technician. He was really good at working with bones. But without an advanced degree he could only go so far. It was a real sore point. He didn’t like the scientists ordering him around, everyone had to walk on eggshells with him. Even me — and I was the closest thing to a friend Victor had here. Which isn’t saying much.”

Sandoval led the way through a doorway on the left. D’Agosta found himself in a room full of huge metal vats. Overhead, a row of gigantic vents were busily sucking out the air, but it didn’t seem to help — the smell was much stronger.

“This is the maceration room,” Sandoval said.

“The what?”

“The maceration room.” Sandoval dabbed at his nose with the Kleenex. “See, one of the main jobs here in Osteology is to receive carcasses and reduce them to bones.”

“Carcasses? As in human?”

Sandoval gri

Just then, a technician came in pushing the dolly with the monkey on it. “And that,” said Sandoval, “is a snow monkey from the Central Park Zoo. We’ve a contract with them — we get all their dead animals.”

D’Agosta swallowed uncomfortably. The smell was really getting to him now, and the spicy fried Italian sausages he’d had for breakfast weren’t sitting all that well.

“That was Marsala’s primary job,” Sandoval said. “Overseeing the maceration process. He also worked with the beetles, of course.”

“Beetles?”

“This way.” Sandoval walked back out into the main corridor, passed several more doors, then stepped into another lab. Unlike the maceration room, this space was full of small glass trays, like aquariums. D’Agosta walked up to one and peered within. Inside, he saw what appeared to be a large, dead rat. It was swarming with black beetles, busily engaged in gorging themselves on the carcass. He could actually hear the noise of their munching. D’Agosta stepped back quickly with a muttered curse. His breakfast stirred dangerously in his stomach.

“Dermestid beetles,” Sandoval explained. “Carnivorous. It’s how we strip the flesh from the bones of smaller specimens. Leaves the skeletons nicely articulated.”

“Articulated?” D’Agosta asked in a strangled voice.

“You know — wiring the bones together, mounting them on metal frames for display or examination. Marsala cared for the beetles, watched over the specimens that were brought in. He did the degreasing, too.”

D’Agosta didn’t ask, but Sandoval explained anyway. “Once a specimen is reduced to bones, it’s immersed in benzene. A good soaking turns them white, dissolves all the lipids, gets rid of the odor.”

They returned to the central hallway. “Those were his main responsibilities,” Sandoval said. “But as I told you, Marsala was a whiz with skeletons. So he was often asked to articulate them.”

“I see.”

“In fact, the articulation lab was the place Marsala made his office.”

“Lead the way, please.”

Dabbing at his nose again, Sandoval continued down the seemingly endless corridor. “These are some of the Osteology collections,” he said, gesturing at a series of doors. “The bone collections, arranged taxonomically. And now we’re entering the Anthropology collections.”