Reliquary (Pendergast, Book 2) (Relic) Read online

  “Beats me,” Smithback said. “But Greg’s the kind of guy that always lands on his feet. He’s probably moonlighting in some think tank, earning three hundred grand a year.” He checked his watch. “I’ve got to file my story on the rally by nine. Which means we have time for another drink.”

  Margo stared at him in mock amazement. “Bill Smithback, buying a friend a second round? How could I leave now? History is being made here tonight.”

  16

  Nick Bitterman eagerly climbed the stone steps of Belvedere Castle, then waited at the parapet for Tanya to catch up. Below him, the dark bulk of Central Park was spread out beneath a setting sun. Nick could feel the icy coldness of the bottle of Dom Pérignon creeping through the paper bag under his arm. It felt pleasant in the heat of evening. The glasses clinked in his jacket pocket as he moved. Automatically, he felt for the square box that contained the ring. A Tiffany-cut one-carat diamond set in platinum that had cost him four large on 47th Street. He’d done well. Here came Tanya, giggling and gasping. She knew about the champagne but she didn’t know about the ring.

  He remembered seeing a movie in which two characters drank champagne on the Brooklyn Bridge, then threw the glasses into the river. That was pretty good, but this was going to be better. You couldn’t get a more spectacular view of Manhattan than from the ramparts of Belvedere Castle at sunset. You just had to make sure you got your ass out of the Park before dark.

  He grabbed Tanya’s hand as she climbed the last steps, and they walked together to the edge of the stone parapet. The tower rose above them, black in the gloaming, its Gothic trappings humorously offset by the weather apparatus protruding from the topmost crenelations. He looked back the way they had come. At their feet lay the small castle pond, and beside it the Great Lawn, leading up to the row of trees that shaded the Reservoir. The Reservoir itself was a sheet of beaten gold in the sunset. To his right, the buildings of Fifth Avenue marched stolidly northward, their windows flashing orange; to his left sat the dark outlines of the ramparts of Central Park West, in shadow below a layer of clouds.

  He pulled the bottle of champagne from its brown tissue, tore off the foil and the wire netting, took careful aim, then wiggled the cork inexpertly out of the neck. They watched as it burst free with a loud pop, sailing out of sight. In a few seconds there was a splash as it hit the pond far below.

  “Bravo!” cried Tanya.

  He filled the glasses and handed her one.

  “Cheers.” They clinked glasses and he drank his down in a gulp, then watched as Tanya sipped gingerly. “Drink up,” he urged, and she drained the glass, wrinkling her nose as she did so.

  “It tickles,” she giggled as he refilled the glasses, drinking his off again in a few quick gulps.

  “Attention, citizens of Manhattan!” he yelled from the ramparts, holding up the empty glass, his voice disappearing into space. “This is Nick Bitterman speaking! I proclaim August seventh to be Tanya Schmidt day in perpetuity!”

  Tanya laughed, as he filled the glasses a third time, overflowing the rims and draining the bottle. When the glasses were empty, Nick wrapped his arm around the girl. “Custom demands that we throw them off, too,” he said sternly.

  They winged the glasses into space, leaning over the parapet to watch as they flashed in a downward arc, landing in the pond with a splash. As he watched, Nick noticed that the sunbathers, roller skaters, and various Park loungers were now gone, and the base of the castle was deserted. He’d better get the show on the road. Plunging his hand into his jacket pocket, he removed the box and handed it to her. He stepped backward, watching proudly as she opened it.

  “Nick, my God!” she cried. “It must have cost a fortune!”

  “You’re worth a fortune,” Nick smiled as she placed it on her finger, then pulled her to him and gave her a quick, hard kiss. “You know what it means?” he asked.

  She turned to him, eyes shining. Over her shoulders, the gloom was starting to gather in the trees.

  “Well?” he urged.

  She kissed him back and whispered in his ear.

  “Until death do us part, baby,” he replied, and kissed her again, longer this time, cupping one of her breasts in his hand.

  “Nick!” she said, laughing and pulling away.

  “There’s nobody here,” he said, placing his other hand on her rear and pulling her hips hard against his.

  “Just the whole city watching,” she said.

  “Let them. They might learn something.” His hand slipped inside her shirt and teased her hard little nipple as he glanced around at the encroaching darkness. “We’d better move this to my apartment,” he whispered into her ear.

  She smiled, then moved away from him toward the stone stairs. Watching her, admiring the natural grace in her walk, Nick felt the expensive champagne running through his veins. Nothing like a champagne buzz, he thought. Goes straight to the head.

  Straight to the bladder, too. “Hold on,” he said aloud. “I’ve got to drain the main vein.”

  She turned to wait as he walked to the tower. There were rest rooms hidden on its back side, he remembered, beside the metal maintenance staircase that led up to the weather equipment and down to the pond. Under the shadow of the tower it was still; the sounds of the traffic on the East Drive seemed muffled and distant. He located the men’s room door and pushed through, unzipping his fly as he crossed the scuffed tile, past the row of dark stalls toward the bank of urinals. The room was deserted, as he knew it would be. He leaned against the cool porcelain and closed his eyes.

  He opened them again quickly as a slight sound broke his champagne reverie. No, he realized; it was nothing. He laughed, shaking his head at the paranoia that was always bubbling just under the skin of even the most jaded New Yorker.

  The sound came again, much louder, and he turned in surprise and fear, his dick still in his hand as he saw that someone was in one of the stalls, after all, and was coming out, fast.

  Tanya waited, standing at the parapet, the night breeze quickening on her face. She felt the engagement ring, heavy and foreign on her finger. Nick was taking his sweet time. The Park was dark now, the Great Lawn deserted, the bright lights of Fifth Avenue winking off the surface of the pond.

  Impatient, she walked toward the tower, then skirted around its dark bulk. The men’s room door was shut. She knocked, timidly at first, then louder.

  “Nick? Hey, Nick! You in there?”

  There was no sound, only the wind sighing through the trees. The wind carried a strange smell: a pungent odor that reminded her, unpleasantly, of feta cheese.

  “Nick? Stop playing games.”

  She pushed open the door and stepped inside.

  For a moment, silence settled again over Belvedere Castle. And then the screams began: ululating, rising louder and louder as they rent the soft summer night.

  17

  Smithback took a seat at the counter of his favorite Greek coffeeshop, nodding at the griddleman for his usual breakfast order: two poached eggs on a double portion of red flannel hash. He sipped the cup of coffee that was placed in front of him, sighed contentedly, and slipped the newspapers out from under his arm. He turned first to the Post, frowning slightly as he scanned Hank McCloskey’s front-page article on the Belvedere Castle murder. His own piece on the rally at Grand Army Plaza had been demoted to page four. By rights, he should have owned the front page that day, with his story on the Museum’s involvement and the teethmark angle. But he’d promised Margo. Tomorrow would be different. Besides, maybe his forbearance would land him more scoops down the road.

  The breakfast arrived and he dug into the hash with relish, putting aside the Post and cracking open the New York Times as he did so. He scanned the top headlines—tastefully understated and tidy—with derision. Then his eye, traveling below the fold, stopped at a one-column headline that read merely “Museum Beast Returns?” It was bylined Bryce Harriman, Special to the Times.

  Smithback read on, the hash turnin
g to wallpaper paste in his mouth.

  August 8—Scientists at the New York Museum of Natural History are continuing their analysis of the headless corpses of Pamela Wisher and an unknown person, trying to determine if teeth marks found on the bones are the postmortem work of feral animals or possibly the cause of death itself.

  The brutal murder and decapitation of Nicholas Bitterman at Belvedere Castle in Central Park yesterday evening has increased the pressure on the forensic team to find answers. Several deaths among homeless persons over the past months also may fit the pattern. It is not known if these corpses will also be brought to the Museum for analysis. Pamela Wisher’s remains have been returned to her family, and will be interred in a 3:00 P.M. service this afternoon at Holy Cross Cemetery, Bronxville.

  The autopsies have been proceeding under a cloak of secrecy at the Museum. “They don’t want to have a panic on their hands,” said a source. “But the unspoken word on everyone’s lips is Mbwun.”

  Mbwun, as the Museum Beast is known to scientists, was an unusual creature that was inadvertently brought back to the Museum by a failed Amazonian expedition. In April of last year, the creature’s presence in the Museum’s subbasement became known when several museumgoers and some guards were killed. The creature also attacked a large crowd during a Museum opening, causing panic and a mistriggering of the Museum’s alarm system. This resulted in 46 deaths and nearly three hundred injuries, one of the worst disasters in New York in recent years.

  The name Mbwun was given to the creature by the now-extinct Kothoga tribe, who lived in the animal’s original habitat along the upper Xingu River in the Amazon Basin. For decades, anthropologists and rubber tappers had heard rumors of a large, apparently reptilian animal in the upper Xingu. Then, in 1987, a Museum anthropologist, Julian Whittlesey, organized an expedition to the Upper Xingu to seek clues about the tribe and the creature. Whittlesey disappeared in the rain forest, and the other members of the ill-fated expedition were tragically killed in a plane crash as they were returning to the United States.

  Several crates containing relics from the expedition made their way back to New York. The artifacts were packed in plant fibers which contained a substance that the Mbwun animal craved. Although the manner in which the creature reached the Museum is not known, curators theorize that it was inadvertently locked into a freight container along with the expedition’s collections. The creature lived in the Museum’s vast subbasement until it ran out of its natural food and began attacking visitors and guards.

  The animal was killed during the resulting melee, and its carcass was removed by authorities and destroyed before detailed taxonomic research could be performed. Although there are still many mysteries about the creature, it was determined that it lived on an isolated plateau in the Amazon called a tepui. Recent hydraulic gold mining in the Upper Xingu has severely impacted the area and probably caused the extinction of the species. Professor Whitney Cadwalader Frock of the Museum’s anthropology department, author of Fractal Evolution, believed the creature to be an evolutionary aberration produced by its isolated rain forest habitat.

  It was suggested by the source that the recent killings might be the work of a second Mbwun animal, perhaps the mate of the original. That, it seems, is also the unspoken worry of the New York City Police Department. Apparently, the police have asked the Museum laboratory to determine if the teeth marks on the bones are consistent with a feral dog or something far more powerful—something like Mbwun.

  Smithback pushed the uneaten eggs away with a hand that was trembling with rage. He didn’t know what was worse: having that prick Harriman scoop him, or the knowledge that he, Smithback, had already had the story and had allowed himself to be talked out of running it.

  Never again, Smithback vowed. Never again.

  On the fifteenth floor of One Police Plaza, D’Agosta put aside the same newspaper with a withering expletive. The NYPD public affairs spin doctors were going to have to work overtime to avert hysteria. Whoever had leaked this, he thought, was going to have his barbecued butt served up on a rotisserie. At least, he thought, this time it wasn’t his pain-in-the-ass friend Smithback.

  Then he reached for the telephone and dialed the office of the Chief of Police. While on the subject of asses, he’d better take care of his own while he still had one. With Horlocker, it was always better to call than be called.

  All he got was the voice mail of the Chief’s secretary.

  D’Agosta reached for the newspaper again, then pushed it away, frustration welling up inside him. Waxie would be here in a minute, no doubt bawling about the Belvedere Castle murder and the Chief’s deadline. At the thought of seeing Waxie, D’Agosta shut his eyes involuntarily, but the feeling of weariness that surged over him was so great that he immediately opened them again. He’d only had two hours of sleep, and was bone tired after spending much of the night clambering over Belvedere Castle in the aftermath of the Bitterman murder.

  He stood up and walked over to the window. Below, amidst the gray urban sprawl, he could make out a small square of black: the playground of PS 362. The tiny shapes of young kids were racing around it, playing tag and hopscotch, no doubt screeching and hollering their way through midmorning recess. God, he thought, what he wouldn’t give to be one of them now.

  As he turned back to the desk, he noticed that the edge of the newspaper had knocked over the framed photograph of his ten-year-old son, Vinnie Junior. He righted it carefully, smiling involuntarily at the face that smiled back at him. Then, feeling a little better, he dug into his coat pocket and pulled out a cigar. The hell with Horlocker. What was going to happen was going to happen.

  He lit up, tossed the match into an ashtray, and walked over to a large map of the west side of Manhattan tacked to a bulletin board. The precinct board was pocked with white and red pins. A legend taped to one corner showed that the white pins indicated disappearances over the last six months, while the red pins indicated deaths that fit the suspect MO. D’Agosta reached into a plastic tray, pulled out a red pin, located Central Park Reservoir on the board, and carefully pressed the pin directly to its south. Then he stood back, staring at it, trying to see the pattern through the visual noise.

  The white pins outnumbered the red pins ten to one. Of course, many of those wouldn’t pan out. People disappeared for a lot of reasons in New York. Still, it was an unusually high number, over three times the norm for a six-month period. And a remarkable number seemed to be in the region of Central Park. He kept staring. The dots didn’t look random somehow. His brain told him there was a pattern, but he hadn’t any idea what it was.

  “Daydreaming, Lieutenant?” came the familiar, dusky voice. D’Agosta jumped in surprise, then turned around. It was Hayward, now officially on the case along with Waxie.

  “Ever hear of knocking?” D’Agosta snapped.

  “Yeah, I’ve heard of it. But you said you wanted this stuff as soon as possible.” Hayward held a thick sheaf of computer printouts in her slender hand. D’Agosta took the papers and began leafing through them: more homeless murders going back six months, most in Waxie’s Central Park/West Side jurisdiction. None had been investigated, of course.

  “Christ,” he muttered, shaking his head. “Well, we’d better get these mapped.” He began reading out locations while Hayward pressed red pins into the precinct board. Then he paused for a moment, glancing up at her shock of dark hair, her pale skin. Though he hadn’t let her know it, of course, D’Agosta was secretly glad Hayward was assisting him. Her imperturbable self-assurance was like a calm haven at the center of a howling storm. And he had to admit she didn’t hurt the eyes either.

  From the hall came the sound of running and raised voices. Something heavy fell over with a crash. Frowning, D’Agosta nodded for Hayward to check it out. Soon there was more yelling, and D’Agosta heard his own name being spoken in a whiny, high-pitched voice.

  Curious, he poked his head out the door. An almost unbelievably filthy-looking man was
standing in the Homicide lobby, struggling with two cops who were trying to subdue him. Hayward was on the sidelines, her small frame tensed as if awaiting an opportunity to wade in. D’Agosta took in the dirt-clotted hair; the sallow, jaundiced skin; the narrow, hungry frame; the ubiquitous black garbage bag holding the man’s worldly possessions.

  “I want to see the Lieutenant!” the homeless man screeched in a thin, reedy voice. “I have information! I demand—”

  “Fella,” said one officer, a look of disgust on his face as he restrained the man by his greasy coat, “if you have anything to say, say it to me, okay? The Lieutenant’s busy.”

  “There he is now!” the man pointed a trembling finger at D’Agosta. “See, he’s not busy! Get your hands off me, you, or I’ll file a complaint, you hear me? I’ll call my lawyer!”

  D’Agosta retreated into his office, shut the door, and resumed his scrutiny of the map. The barrage of voices continued, the shrill whine of the homeless man particularly grating, punctuated by the increasingly irritated tones of Hayward. This one didn’t want to leave.

  Suddenly the door banged open and the homeless man half-fell, half-stumbled inside, a furious Hayward on his heels. The man backed into a corner of the office, holding the garbage bag in front of him protectively.

  “You have to listen to me, Lieutenant!” he yelped.

  “He’s a slippery bastard,” Hayward panted, wiping her hands on her slender thighs. “Quite literally.”

  “Stay back!” the homeless man squealed at Hayward.

  D’Agosta sighed wearily. “It’s okay, Sergeant,” he said. Then he turned to the homeless man. “All right. Five minutes. But leave that outside.” He gestured toward the bag as its ripe smell reached his nostrils.