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

  Another ten feet, and he’d go back up. Even that bastard Fernandez couldn’t snigger after this.

  Abruptly, his swinging arm bumped against something. When Snow pulled at it, the thing drifted toward him with the kind of slow resistance that implied weight. Snow tucked the guide rope around the crook of his right arm and felt the thing. Whatever it was, it was not a brick of heroin. He let it go, pushing himself away.

  The thing swung around in the treacly eddy of his flippers and bumped up against him in the blackness, knocking his visor back and momentarily loosening his regulator. Regaining his balance, Snow began moving his hand over the object, looking for a hold with which to push it away.

  It was like reaching into a tangle of something. A large tree branch, maybe. But it was inexplicably soft in places. He felt along it, feeling the smooth surfaces, the rounded knobs, the pliable lumps. Then, in a flash of understanding, Snow realized he was feeling along a bone. Not just one bone, but several, connected by leathery strips of sinew. It was the halfskeletonized remains of something, a horse maybe; but as he felt farther along its length he realized that it could only be human.

  A human skeleton. He tried again to slow his breathing, get his mind working properly. Common sense and training told him he couldn’t just leave it there. He’d have to bring it up.

  He began threading the guide rope through the hip joint and down around the long bones as best he could in the thick muck. He figured there was still enough gristle on the bones to hold the thing together on its trip to the surface. Snow had never tried to tie a knot with gloved fingers in pitch-black mud before. This was something the Sergeant hadn’t gone into during Basic.

  He hadn’t found the heroin. But it was still a stroke of luck: Snow had stumbled onto something important. An unsolved murder, perhaps. Muscle-bound Fernandez would shit a brick when he found out.

  Yet, somehow, Snow felt no exhilaration. All he wanted was to get the hell up and out of this mud.

  His breath was coming in quick, short pants, and he no longer made any effort to control it. His suit was cold, but he couldn’t stop to inflate it now. The rope slipped and he tried again, holding the skeleton close to him in the ooze to make sure it didn’t slip away. Again and again he thought of the yards of mud above his head, the whirlpool of silt above that, the viscous water through which sunlight never penetrated …

  The rope pulled tight at last and he gave a mental whimper of thanks. He’d just make sure it was secure, then give three tugs on the line, signaling he’d found something. And then he’d climb up the line and out of this black horror, onto the boat and onto dry land, and maybe then he’d shower for ninety minutes, get drunk, and think about getting his old job back. Dive boat season was just a month away. He checked the rope, feeling it tight around the corpse’s long bones. His hands moved up, probing for the ribs, the sternum, threading more rope through the bones, ensuring the fit was snug and that the rope would not slip off when they hauled it topside. His fingers continued to travel upward, only to find that the spinal column tapered off into nothing but black muck.

  No head. Instinctively Snow jerked his hand away, then realized in a surge of panic that he had let go of the guide rope. He windmilled his arms and bumped against something: the skeleton again. He grabbed at it desperately, almost hugging it with relief. He quickly felt downward for the rope, grasping and feeling along the long bones, trying to remember just where he’d tied it.

  The rope wasn’t there. Had it come loose? No, that was impossible. He tried to shove it, to turn it, looking for the rope, and suddenly felt his air hose catch on something. He jerked back, disoriented again, and felt the seal on his mask loosening. Something warm and thick began trickling underneath. He tried to shake loose and felt his mask pulled aside, a surge of mud flooding his eyes, oozing into his nose, sucking across his left ear. With escalating horror he realized that he was tangled in a macabre embrace with a second skeleton. And then came blind, mindless, screaming panic.

  On the deck of the police launch, Lieutenant D’Agosta watched with detached interest as the novice diver was hauled to the surface. He was a remarkable sight: thrashing around, bubbling yells partly muffled by mud, streams of the ochre-colored stuff bleeding away from his dry suit and staining the water chocolate. The diver must’ve lost his hold on the rope at some point; he was lucky, very lucky, to have found his way back to the surface. D’Agosta waited patiently while the hysterical diver was brought on board, unsuited, rinsed off, and calmed down. He watched the man vomit over the side—not on deck, D’Agosta noted approvingly. He’d found a skeleton. Two of them, apparently. Not what he’d been sent down for, of course, but not bad, for a virgin dive. He would write the poor guy a commendation. The kid would probably be okay if he hadn’t breathed in any of that shit that clung to his nose and mouth. If he had … well, it was miraculous what they could do with antibiotics these days.

  The first skeleton, when it appeared at the churning surface, was still coated with sludge. A sidestroking diver dragged it to the side of D’Agosta’s launch, eased a net around it, and clambered onto the deck. It was hoisted up the side, scraping and dribbling, sliding onto a tarp at D’Agosta’s feet like some grisly catch.

  “Jesus, you could have rinsed it off a bit,” D’Agosta said, wincing at the smell of ammonia. Above the surface the skeleton became his jurisdiction, and he fervently wished it could simply go back from whence it came. He could see that where the skull should have been there was nothing.

  “Shall I hose it down, sir?” the diver asked, reaching for the pump.

  “Hose yourself down first.” The diver looked ridiculous, an unraveled condom plastered to the side of his head, filth dribbling from his legs. Two divers climbed aboard and began gingerly hauling in another rope while a third diver brought up the other skeleton, buoying it with a free hand. When it landed on the deck and those aboard saw that it, too, had no head, an awful silence fell. D’Agosta glanced over at the huge brick of heroin, also recovered and safely sealed in a rubber evidence bag. Suddenly, the brick had grown a lot less interesting.

  He drew thoughtfully on his cigar and looked away, scanning the Cloaca. His eyes came to rest on the ancient mouth of the West Side Lateral Drain. A few stalactites dripped from the ceiling, like small teeth. The West Side Lateral was one of the biggest in the city, draining practically the entire Upper West Side. Every time Manhattan got a hard rain, the Lower Hudson Sewage Treatment Plant hit capacity and shunted thousands of gallons of raw sewage out the West Side Lateral. Right into the Cloaca.

  He tossed the remains of his cigar over the side. “You guys are gonna have to get wet again,” he said, exhaling loudly. “I want those skulls.”

  2

  Louie Padelsky, Assistant Medical Examiner for the City of New York, glanced at the clock, feeling his gut rumble. He was, quite literally, starving. He’d had nothing but SlimCurve shakes for three days, and today was his day for a real lunch. Popeye’s fried chicken. He ran his hand over his ample gut, probing and pinching, thinking that there might be less there. Yup, definitely less there.

  He took a gulp from his fifth cup of black coffee and glanced at the ref sheet. Ah—at last, something interesting. Not just another shooting, stabbing, or OD.

  The stainless steel doors at the end of the autopsy suite banged open, and the ME nurse, Sheila Rocco, rolled in a brown corpse and laid it out on a gurney. Padelsky glanced at it, looked away, glanced back again. Corpse was the wrong word, he decided. The thing on the gurney was little more than a skeleton, covered with shreds of flesh. Padelsky wrinkled his nose.

  Rocco positioned the gurney under the lights and began hooking up the drainage tube.

  “Don’t bother,” Padelsky said. The only thing that needed draining around here was his coffee cup. He took a large swallow, tossed it into the wastebasket, checked the corpse’s tag against the ref sheet and initialed it, then pulled on a pair of green latex gloves.

  “What have you bro
ught for me now, Sheila?” he asked. “Piltdown Man?”

  Rocco frowned and adjusted the lights above the gurney.

  “This one must’ve been buried for a couple of centuries, at least. Buried in shit, too, from the smell of it. Perhaps it’s King Shitankhamen himself.”

  Rocco pursed her lips and waited while Padelsky roared with laughter. When he was finished, she silently handed him a clipboard.

  Padelsky scanned the sheet, lips moving as he read the typed sentences. Suddenly, he straightened up. “Dredged out of Humboldt Kill,” he muttered. “Christ almighty.” He eyed the nearby glove dispenser, considered putting on an extra pair of gloves, decided against it. “Hmm. Decapitated, head still missing … no clothing, but found with a metal belt around its waist.” He glanced over at the cadaver and spied the ID bag hanging from the gurney.

  “Let’s have a look,” he said, taking up the bag. Inside was a thin gold belt with an Uffizi buckle, set with a topaz. It had already been run through the lab, he knew, but he still wasn’t allowed to touch it. He noticed the belt had a number on its back plate.

  “Expensive,” Padelsky said, nodding toward the belt. “Maybe it’s Piltdown Woman. Or a transvestite.” And he roared again.

  Rocco frowned. “May we show the dead a little more respect, Dr. Padelsky?”

  “Of course, of course.” He hung the clipboard on a hook and adjusted the microphone that hung above the gurney. “Switch on the tape recorder, will you, Sheila darling?”

  As the machine snapped on, his voice suddenly became clipped and professional. “This is Dr. Louis Padelsky. It’s August 2, 12:05 P.M. I am assisted by Sheila Rocco, and we’re commencing examination of”—he glanced at the tag—“Number A-1430. We have here a headless corpse, virtually skeletonized—Sheila, will you straighten it out?—perhaps four feet eight inches in length. Add the missing skull and you probably got someone five foot six, seven. Let’s sex the skeleton. Pelvic rim’s a little wide. Yup, it’s gynecoid; we’ve got a woman here. No lipping of the lumbar vertebrae, so she’s under forty. Hard to say how long she’s been submerged. There is a distinct smell of, er, sewage. The bones are a brownish orange color and look like they’ve been in mud for a long time. On the other hand, there is sufficient connective tissue to hold the corpse together, and there are ragged ends of muscle tissue around the medial and lateral condyles of the femur and more clinging to the sacrum and ischium. Plenty of material for blood typing and DNA analysis. Scissors, please.”

  He snipped off a piece of tissue and slipped it into a bag. “Sheila, could you turn the pelvis over on its side? Now, let’s see … the skeleton is still mostly articulated, except of course for the missing skull. Looks like the axis is also missing … six cervical vertebrae remaining … missing the two floating ribs and the entire left foot.”

  He continued describing the skeleton. Finally he moved away from the microphone. “Sheila, the rongeur, please.”

  Rocco handed him a small instrument, which Padelsky used to separate the humerus from the ulna.

  “Periosteum elevator.” He dug into the vertebrae, removing a few samples of connective tissue, cutting away at the bone. Then he pulled a pair of disposable plastic goggles over his head.

  “Saw, please.”

  She handed him a small nitrogen-driven saw and he switched it on, waiting a moment while the tachometer reached the correct rpm. When the diamond blade touched the bone, a high-pitched whine, like an enraged mosquito, filled the small room. Along with it came the sudden smell of bone dust, sewage, rotten marrow, and death.

  Padelsky took sections at various points, which Rocco sealed in bags.

  “I want SEM and stereozoom pictures of each microsection,” Padelsky said, stepping away from the gurney and turning off the recorder. Rocco wrote the requests on the Ziploc bags with a large black marker.

  A knock sounded at the door. Sheila went to answer, stepped outside for a moment, then poked her head back in.

  “They have a tentative ID from the belt, Doctor,” she said. “It’s Pamela Wisher.”

  “Pamela Wisher, the society girl?” asked Padelsky, taking off the goggles and backing off a little. “Jeez.”

  “And there’s a second skeleton,” she continued. “From the same place.”

  Padelsky had moved to a deep metal sink, preparing to remove his gloves and wash up. “A second one?” he asked irritably. “Why the hell didn’t they bring it in with the first? I should have been looking at them side by side.” He glanced at the clock: one-fifteen already. Goddammit, that meant no lunch until at least three. He felt faint with hunger.

  The doors banged open and the second skeleton was wheeled under the bright light. Padelsky turned the tape recorder back on and went to pour himself yet another cup of coffee while the nurse did the prep work.

  “This one’s headless, too,” Rocco said.

  “You’re kidding, right?” Padelsky replied. He walked forward, glanced at the skeleton, then froze, coffee cup to his lips.

  “What the—?” He lowered the cup and stared, open-mouthed. Laying the cup aside, he stepped up quickly to the gurney and bent over the skeleton, running the tips of his gloved fingers lightly over one of the ribs.

  “Dr. Padelsky?” Rocco asked.

  He straightened, went back to the tape recorder, and brusquely switched it off. “Cover it up and get Dr. Brambell. And don’t breathe a word about this”—he nodded at the skeleton—“to anyone.”

  She hesitated, looking at the skeleton with a puzzled expression, her eyes gradually widening.

  “I mean now, Sheila darling.”

  3

  The phone rang abruptly, shattering the stillness of the small museum office. Margo Green, face mere inches from her computer terminal, sat back guiltily in her chair, a shock of short brown hair falling across her eyes.

  The phone rang again, and she moved to answer it, then hesitated. No doubt it was one of the computer jocks in data processing, calling to complain about the enormous amount of CPU time her cladistic regression program was soaking up. She settled back and waited for the phone to stop ringing, the muscles of her back and legs pleasantly sore from the previous night’s workout. Picking up the hand trainer from her desk, she began squeezing it in a routine so familiar it had grown almost instinctive. Another five minutes and her program would be finished. Then they could complain all they wanted.

  She knew about the new cost-cutting policy requiring that large batch jobs be submitted for approval. But that would have meant a flurry of e-mail before she could run the program. And she needed the results right away.

  At least Columbia, where she’d been an instructor until accepting the assistant curatorship at the New York Museum of Natural History, wasn’t always in the midst of some new round of budget cutting. And the more the Museum got into financial trouble these days, the more it seemed to rely on show instead of substance. Already, Margo had noticed the early buildup for next year’s blockbuster exhibition, 21st Century Plagues.

  She glanced up at the screen to check the progress of her regression program, then put down the hand trainer, reached into her bag and drew out the New York Post. The Post and a cup of black Kilimanjaro coffee had become her weekday morning ritual. There was something refreshing about the Post’s truculent attitude, like that of the Fat Boy in The Pickwick Papers. Besides, she knew she’d catch hell from her old friend Bill Smithback if he ever found out she’d missed a single homicide article carrying his byline.

  She smoothed the tabloid on her knees, grinning at the headline despite herself. It was vintage Postern, a screaming 96-point banner that covered three-quarters of the front page:

  SEWAGE CORPSE IDENTIFIED AS MISSING DEB

  She glanced down at the opening paragraph. Sure enough, it was Smithback’s work. Second front-page article this month, she thought; on the strength of this, Smithback would be strutting and primping, even more impossible to be around than usual.

  She quickly skimmed the article.
It was quintessential Smithback: sensationalist and macabre, full of loving attention to the gruesome details. In the opening paragraphs, he quickly summarized the facts that were by now well known to all New Yorkers. The “beautiful trust-funder” Pamela Wisher, known for her marathon late-night carousings, had disappeared two months earlier from a basement club on Central Park South. Ever since, her “smiling face with its dazzling teeth, vacant blue eyes, and expensive blond hair” had been plastered at every street corner from 57th to 96th. Margo had often seen the color photocopies of Wisher as she jogged to the Museum from her apartment on West End Avenue.

  Now, the article breathlessly announced, the remains found the previous day—“buried in raw sewage” in Humboldt Kill and “locked in a bony embrace” with another skeleton—had been identified as Pamela Wisher’s. The second skeleton remained unidentified. An accompanying photo showed Wisher’s boyfriend, the young Viscount Adair, sitting on the curb in front of the Platypus Lounge with his head in his hands, minutes after learning of her grisly death. The police were, of course, “taking vigorous action.” Smithback closed with several man-on-the-street quotations of the “I-hope-they-fry-the-bastard-who-did-this” variety.

  She lowered the paper, thinking of the grainy face of Pamela Wisher staring out at her from the numerous posters. She deserved a better fate than becoming New York’s big story of the summer.

  The shrill sound of the phone again interrupted Margo’s thoughts. She glanced over at her terminal, pleased to see that the program had finished at last. Might as well answer it, she thought; she’d have to get this lecture over with sooner or later.

  “This is Margo Green,” she said.

  “Dr. Green?” came the voice. “About time.”

  The thick Queens accent was distantly familiar, like a half-forgotten dream. Gruff, authoritarian. Margo searched her memory for the face belonging to the voice on the other end of the phone.