Cemetery Dance Page 8

  “Mr. Radcliffe didn’t tell me anything. He never tells me anything.” The man’s voice rose in querulous complaint.

  “That’s too bad,” said D’Agosta, the foul mood he had been in since the murder surfacing again. “Let’s get this over with.”

  The man was clearly frightened. He seemed to sway in place. “We’ve… we’ve never had this sort of thing happen before.”

  “Always a first time, Mr.—?”

  “Lille. Maurice Lille.”

  Now the M.E.’s much-abused van came rattling down the drive, laying down a cloud of blue smoke. It swung around the curve too fast—D’Agosta wondered why they always drove like maniacs—and came to a halt with a little screech, the vehicle rocking back and forth on a bad suspension. A couple of med techs in white overalls got out, walked to the back, threw open the doors, and slid out a gurney on which lay an empty body bag. Then they approached across the parking lot, pushing the gurney in front.

  “Where’s the mort?” bawled the thinner of the two, a freckle-faced kid with carroty hair.

  Silence.

  “Mr. Lille?” D’Agosta asked after a moment.

  “The… mort?”

  “You know,” said the tech. “The stiff. We don’t got all day.”

  Lille shook himself out of his shock. “Yes. Yes, of course. Please, follow me into the mausoleum.”

  He led the way to the front door, punched a code into a keypad, and the faux-bronze door clicked open, revealing a high, white space with crypts rising from floor to ceiling on all four walls. Two enormous bunches of plastic flowers spilled out of a pair of gigantic Italianate plaster urns. Only a few of the crypts were marked with black, incised lettering giving names and dates. D’Agosta couldn’t help but test the air for that smell he knew so well, but it was clean, fresh, perfumed. Definitely perfumed. Place like this, he thought, must have one hell of a forced-air system.

  “I’m sorry. You did say it was Colin Fearing?” Despite the excessive air-conditioning, Lille was sweating.

  “That’s right.” D’Agosta glanced with irritation at Pendergast, who had gone off on a stroll, hands behind his back, lips pursed, looking around the place. He always seemed to disappear at the wrong time.

  “Just a moment, please.” Lille went through a glass door that led to his office and came back out clutching a clipboard, looking up at the vast wall of crypts, his lips moving as if counting. After a moment, he stopped.

  “There it is. Colin Fearing.” He pointed at one of the marked crypts, then stepped back, the grimace of an attempted smile on his face.

  “Mr. Lille?” said D’Agosta. “The key?”

  “Key?” A look of panic took hold. “You want me to open it?”

  “That’s what an exhumation is all about, right?” said D’Agosta.

  “But, you see, I’m not authorized. I’m just a salesman.”

  D’Agosta exhaled. “You’ll find all the paperwork in that envelope. All you have to do is sign the top page—and get us the key.”

  Lille looked down and discovered, as if for the first time, the manila envelope he was clutching in his hand.

  “But I’m not authorized. I’ll have to call Mr. Radcliffe.”

  D’Agosta rolled his eyes.

  Lille went back into his office, leaving the door open. D’Agosta listened. The conversation started off low, but soon Lille’s shrill voice was echoing through the mausoleum like the cries of a kicked dog. Mr. Radcliffe, apparently, was not interested in cooperation.

  Lille came back out. “Mr. Radcliffe is coming in.”

  “How long will that take?”

  “An hour.”

  “Forget it. I already explained this to Radcliffe. Open the crypt. Now.”

  Lille wrung his hands, his face contorted. “Oh dear. I just… can’t.”

  “That’s a court order in your hand, pal, not a permission request. If you don’t open that crypt, I’ll cite you for obstructing a police officer in the performance of his duty.”

  “But Mr. Racliffe will fire me!” Lille wailed.

  Pendergast swung back around from his self-guided tour, strolling casually up to the group. He approached the face of Fearing’s crypt and read aloud: “Colin Fearing, age thirty-eight. Sad when they die young, don’t you think, Mr. Lille?”

  Lille didn’t seem to hear. Pendergast laid a hand on the marble, as if caressing it. “You say no one came to the funeral?”

  “Just the sister.”

  “How sad. And who paid for it?”

  “I’m… I’m not sure. The sister paid the bill, I think from the mother’s estate.”

  “But the mother is non compos mentis.” The agent turned to D’Agosta. “I wonder if the sister had a power of attorney? Worth looking into.”

  “Good idea.”

  Pendergast’s white fingers continued to stroke the marble, drawing back a small, hidden plate, exposing a lock. His other hand dipped into his breast pocket and emerged with a small object, like a comb with only a few short teeth at one end. He inserted it into the lock, gave it a wiggle.

  “Excuse me, what do you think you’re…?” Lille began, his voice dying away as the crypt door swung open noiselessly on oiled hinges. “No, wait, you mustn’t do this—”

  The med techs pushed the gurney forward, raising it with a little shake to the level of the crypt. A small flashlight appeared in Pendergast’s hand, and he aimed it into the darkness, peering inside.

  There was a short silence. Then Pendergast said: “I don’t think we’ll be needing the gurney.”

  The two med techs paused, uncertain.

  Pendergast straightened up and turned to Lille. “Pray tell, who keeps the keys to these crypts?”

  “The keys?” The man was shaking. “I do.”

  “Where?”

  “I keep them locked up in my office.”

  “And the second set?”

  “Mr. Radcliffe keeps them off site. I don’t know where.”

  “Vincent?” Pendergast stepped back, motioned toward the open crypt.

  D’Agosta stepped up and peered in the dark cavity, his eye following the narrow beam of the flashlight.

  “The damn thing’s empty!” he said.

  “Impossible,” quavered Lille. “I saw the body put in there with my own eyes…” His voice choked off and he clutched at his tie.

  The carroty-haired med tech peered in, to see for himself. “Well fuck me twice on Sunday,” he said, staring.

  “Not quite empty, Vincent.” Pendergast snapped on a latex glove and reached inside, gingerly withdrawing an object and displaying it to the others in the palm of his hand. It was a tiny coffin, crudely fashioned from papier-mâché and bits of cloth, its folded-paper lid ajar. Inside lay a grinning skeleton composed of tiny, white-painted toothpicks.

  “There is an interment in here—of sorts,” he said in his mellifluous voice.

  There was a gasp, followed by a soft, collapsing sound. D’Agosta turned. Maurice Lille had fainted.

  16

  Midnight. Nora Kelly walked briskly through the dark heart of the museum’s basement, her heels tapping softly against the polished stone floor. The corridors were on after-hours lighting, and shadows yawned from open doorways. There was nobody around: even the most hard-core curator had left for home hours ago, and most of the guards’ rounds were through the museum’s public spaces.

  She came to a halt at a stainless-steel door labeled PCR LAB. As she’d hoped, the door’s wire-covered window was dark. She turned to the keypad lock, typed in a sequence of numbers. An LED set into the pad turned from red to green.

  She pushed open the door, ducked inside, and turned on the light, stopping to look around. She had been in the lab only a few times on casual visits, on the occasions she’d dropped off samples for testing. The thermal cycler for the PCR stood on a spotless stainless-steel table, shrouded in plastic. She stepped up, pulled away the plastic, folded it and laid it aside. The machine—an Eppendorf Master-cycler
5330—was made of white plastic, its ugly, low-tech appearance belying its sophisticated innards. She rummaged in her bag and removed a printed document she had downloaded from the Internet with directions on how to use it.

  The door had locked behind her automatically. She took a deep breath, then hunted around behind the machine with one hand, at last locating the power switch and turning it on. The manual stated it would take a full fifteen minutes to warm up.

  Laying her bag on the table, she removed a Styrofoam container, took off the lid, and began carefully withdrawing pencil-thin test tubes and racking them. One tube contained a bit of hair, another a fiber, another a piece of Kleenex, still another freeze-dried fragments of blood, all of which Pendergast had given her.

  She passed a hand over her brow, noticing as she did so that her fingertips were trembling slightly. She tried not to think of anything beyond the lab work. She had to be finished and long gone by dawn. Her head pounded; she was dead tired; she hadn’t slept since returning home two days before. But her anger and her grief gave her energy, fed her, kept her going. Pendergast needed the DNA results as soon as possible. She was grateful for the chance to be of use—any use—if it would help catch Bill’s murderer.

  From a lab refrigerator, she took out a strip of eight PCR tubes: tiny, bullet-shaped sealed plastic containers pre-filled with buffer solution, Taq polymerase, dNTPs, and other reagents. With exquisite care, she used a pair of sterilized tweezers to transfer minuscule samples of the biological material from her test tubes to the PCR tubes, quickly resealing each one as she did so. By the time the machine trilled its readiness, she had filled thirty-two: the maximum the PCR cycler could hold in a single run.

  She slipped a few extra tubes into her pocket for later use, then went over the instructions for the third time. She opened the cycler, slotted in the reaction tubes, then closed and locked it down. Setting the controls, she gingerly pressed the start button.

  It would take forty thermal cycles, each lasting three minutes, to complete the PCR reaction. Two hours. Then, she knew, she would have to submit the results to gel electrophoresis in order to identify the DNA.

  The machine issued another soft chime, and a screen indicated that the first thermal cycle was in progress. Nora sat back, waiting. Only now did she realize how deathly silent it was in the lab. There wasn’t even the usual sound of air moving through the circulation system. The room smelled of dust, mold, and the faint sweetness of para-dichlorobenzene from the nearby storage areas.

  She glanced up at the clock: twelve twenty-five. She should have brought a book. In the silent lab, she found herself alone with her thoughts—and they were terrible thoughts.

  She got up and paced across the lab, returned to the table, sat down, got up once again. She hunted through cupboards for something to read, finding only manuals. She thought of going up to her office, but there was always the danger of running into someone and having to explain why she was in the museum at such a late hour. She had no clearance to be in the PCR lab. She hadn’t signed up for it, she hadn’t recorded her presence in the log. Even if she had, she wasn’t authorized to use the machine…

  Suddenly she halted, listening. She had heard a noise, or thought she had. Outside the door.

  She glanced over to the little window, but there was nothing to see except the dim hallway beyond, illuminated by a lightbulb in a metal cage. The LED in the door’s keypad glowed red: it was still locked.

  With a groan, she clenched her fists together. It was hopeless: horrible images kept coming, unbidden, sweeping into her consciousness without warning. She squeezed her eyes closed, tightened her fists still further, trying to think of anything but that first glimpse… anything…

  Her eyes popped open again. There was that noise again, and this time she identified it: a soft scraping against the lab door. Glancing up quickly, she just caught a shape moving beyond the window. She had the distinct feeling that someone had just looked in on her.

  One of the night watchmen? It was possible. With a stab of anxiety, she wondered if they would report her unauthorized presence. Then she shook her head. If they’d suspected anything, they would have come in and confronted her. How would they know she wasn’t supposed to be there? After all, she had her ID and was clearly a curator. It was her mind, playing tricks on her again. It had been doing that ever since… She turned her eyes away from the window. Maybe she was going crazy.

  The sound came again, and her eyes shot back toward the window. This time, she saw a dark silhouette of a head bobbing in the hallway beyond, swaying a little, backlit and indistinct. It loomed in the little window—and then, as it pressed up against the glass, the light from the lab revealed its features.

  She caught her breath, blinked, and stared again.

  It was Colin Fearing.

  17

  Nora jumped back with a cry. The face vanished.

  She felt her heart accelerate, thudding in her chest. There was no question this time. This was no dream.

  She scrambled backward, looking around wildly for a place to hide, and ducked behind a lab table, gasping for breath.

  There was no sound. The lab, and the hallway beyond, were utterly silent. She thought: This is stupid. The door’s locked. He can’t get in. A minute passed. As she crouched there, breathing fast, a strange thing happened. The fear that had instinctively gripped her melted away. Rage began to take its place.

  Slowly, she stood up. The window remained empty.

  Her hand moved across the tabletop, grasped a Pyrex graduated cylinder, and lifted it from its stand. Then, with a sharp rap, she knocked it against the edge of the stand, shattering its end. More quickly now, she moved to the door, shaking fingers trying to punch in the code. On the third try she got it, threw open the door, and stepped into the hall.

  From around the far bend of the hall came the sound of a door closing.

  “Fearing!” she cried.

  She broke into a run, charging at top speed down the hall and around the corner. The hall was lined with doors, but only one was near the intersection. She seized its handle, found it unlocked, jerked it open.

  She fumbled along the wall, felt the banks of light switches, and in two swipes of her hand turned them all on.

  Ahead lay a room she had heard of but never seen, one of the museum’s most legendary storage areas. It had once been the old power plant; now, the vast space contained the museum’s collection of whale skeletons. The enormous bones and skulls, some as large as city buses, hung on chains from the ceiling; had they been set on the floor, their own weight would have caused them to deform and break. Each of the suspended skeletons was draped in plastic sheets that hung, shroud-like, almost to the floor, a seascape of draped bones. Despite the banks of fluorescent bulbs overhead, there were still too few for such a large room, and the lighting had a gauzy, almost submarine quality.

  She glanced around, makeshift weapon at the ready. To the left, a few of the sheets were swaying, as if recently disturbed.

  “Fearing!”

  Her voice echoed weirdly in the cavernous vault. She ran toward the nearest shrouds, then slipped between them. The great skeletons cast strange shadows in the indistinct light, and the plastic sheets, dirty and stiff, formed a maze-like set of curtains that prevented her from seeing more than a few feet in any direction. She was almost gasping with mingled tension and rage.

  She reached out and jerked aside a curtain of plastic. Nothing.

  She stepped forward, pulled aside another, and then another. Now the plastic shrouds that surrounded her were swaying crazily, as if the giant skeletons within had come to restless life.

  “Bastard! Show yourself!”

  A rustle—and then she saw a shadow move swiftly against the plastic. She lunged forward, slashing with the cylinder.

  Nothing.

  Suddenly she could take it no longer and ran forward with a cry, batting aside curtain after curtain, sweeping the broken glass tube before her in wild arcs, un
til she became tangled in the heavy plastic and had to struggle to free herself. The fit passing, she took a few more steps, listening. At first all she heard were her own gasps of breath. But then she made out, quite distinctly, a shuffling sound to her right. She rushed toward it, slashing and lunging, preparing to call out again.

  Then, abruptly, she stopped. A voice of reason began to penetrate her red haze of fury. This was stupid—very stupid. She had allowed her anger to cloud her judgment.

  She stopped to listen again. A scrape, a flitting shadow, more swaying sheets. She spun toward it. Then she paused, licking lips that had suddenly gone dry. In the dim light, surrounded by countless hulking, shrouded skeletons, she asked herself a question: who was hunting… and who was the hunted?

  Her anger dissipated abruptly, replaced by mounting anxiety as she realized what had happened. Fearing had been unable to get into her locked lab. Instead, he had drawn her out. And now she’d allowed herself to be lured into this maze.

  Suddenly, a knife slashed through a nearby plastic curtain, creating a huge rend. A figure began coming through the gap. Nora whirled toward it, slashed at it with the jagged end of the cylinder, made glancing contact. But the figure struck her makeshift weapon away with his knife, sending the glass tube crashing to the floor.

  She backed up, staring at him.

  Fearing’s clothes were tattered, stinking, stiff with old blood. One livid eye stared at her; the other was whitish, dead looking. The mouth yawned open, exposing a mouth packed with black, carious teeth. His hair was full of dirt and leaves. His skin was sallow and smelled of the grave. With a wet snoring sound, he took a step forward and slashed at her, the knife—a knife she recognized too well—moving in a glittering arc.

  Nora twisted aside as the weapon swept past, losing her balance and falling to the ground. The figure advanced as she took up a large piece of broken glass and scrambled backward.

  The mouth yawned wide, making a horrible, gurgling sound.

  “Get away from me!” she screamed, brandishing the shard of glass and rising to her feet.