Blue Labyrinth (4 page)

O
bserving an autopsy ranked low on the list of Lieutenant Peter Angler’s favorite activities. It wasn’t that he had a problem with the sight of blood. In his fifteen years on the force, he’d seen more than his share of dead bodies—shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, run over, poisoned, pancaked on the sidewalk, cut in pieces on the subway tracks. Not to mention his own injuries. And he was no shrinking violet: he’d drawn his gun in the line of duty a dozen times and used it twice. He could deal with violent death. What made him uneasy was the cold, clinical way in which a corpse was systematically taken apart, organ by organ, handled, photographed, commented on, even joked about. That and, of course, the smell. But over the years he’d learned to live with the task, and he approached it with stoic resignation.

There was something about this autopsy, however, that gave it a particularly macabre cast. Angler had seen a lot of autopsies—but he’d never seen one that was being keenly observed by the victim’s own father.

There were five people in the room—living people, anyway: Angler; one of his detectives, Millikin; the forensic pathologist in charge of the autopsy; the assisting diener, short and shriveled and hunched like Quasimodo—and Special Agent Aloysius Pendergast.

Of course, Pendergast had no official status here. When Pendergast made his bizarre request, Angler had considered denying him
access. After all, the agent had been uncooperative in the investigation to date. But Angler had done some checking up on Pendergast and learned that—while he was known in the Bureau for his unorthodox methods—he was also held in awe for his remarkable success rate. Angler had never seen a dossier so full of both commendations and censures. So in the end he decided it simply wasn’t worth trying to bar the man from the autopsy. After all, it
was
his son. And besides, he had a pretty good sense that Pendergast would have found a way to be present, no matter what he said.

The pathologist, Dr. Constantinescu, also seemed to know of Pendergast. Constantinescu looked more like a kindly old country doctor than a medical examiner, and the presence of the special agent had thrown him for a loop. He was as tense and nervous as a cat in a new house. Time and again, as he’d murmured his medical observations into the hanging mike, he’d paused, glanced over his shoulder at Pendergast, then cleared his throat and begun again. It had taken him almost an hour to complete the external examination alone—which was remarkable, given the almost total absence of evidence to discover, collect, and label. The removal of the clothing, photography, X-rays, weighing, toxicity tests, noting of distinguishing marks, and the rest of it had gone on forever. It was as if the pathologist was afraid of making the slightest mistake, or had a strange reluctance to get on with the work. The diener, who didn’t seem to be in on the story, was impatient, rocking from one foot to the other, arranging and rearranging instruments. Throughout it all Pendergast stood motionless, somewhat back from the others, the gown like a shroud around him, eyes moving from Constantinescu to the body of his son and back again, saying nothing, expressing nothing.

“No obvious external bruises, hematomas, puncture wounds, or other injuries,” the pathologist was saying into the microphone. “Initial external examination, along with X-ray evidence, indicates that death resulted from a crushing injury to the cervical vertebrae C3 and C4, along with possible lateral rotation of the skull, transecting the spinal column and inducing spinal shock.”

Dr. Constantinescu stepped back from the mike, cleared his
throat yet again. “We, ah, we’re about to commence with the internal examination, Agent Pendergast.”

Still Pendergast remained motionless, save perhaps for the slightest inclination of his head. He was very pale; his features were as set as any Angler had seen on a man. The more he got to know this Pendergast, the less he liked him. The man was a kind of freak.

Angler turned his attention back to the body lying on the gurney. The young man had been in excellent physical condition. Staring at the corpse’s sleek musculature and lines graceful even in death, he was reminded of certain depictions of Hektor and Achilles in Black Figure pottery paintings attributed to the Antiope Group.

We’re about to commence with the internal examination
. The body wasn’t going to be beautiful much longer.

At a nod from Constantinescu, the diener brought over the Stryker saw. Firing it up, the pathologist moved it around Alban’s skull—as it cut bone, the saw made a distinct, grinding whine that Angler hated—and removed the top of the head. This was unusual: in Angler’s experience, usually the brain was the last of the organs to be removed. Most autopsies began with the standard Y-incision. Perhaps it had something to do with the cause of death being a broken neck. But Angler felt a more likely cause was the other observer in the room. He stole a glance toward Pendergast. The man looked, if anything, even paler, his face more closed than ever.

Constantinescu examined the brain, carefully removed it, placed it on a scale, and murmured some more observations into the mike. He took a few tissue samples, handed them to the diener, and then—without looking over this time—spoke to Pendergast. “Agent Pendergast… are you planning on an open casket viewing?”

For a moment, silence. And then Pendergast replied. “There will be no viewing—or funeral. When the body is released I’ll make the necessary arrangements to have it cremated.” His voice sounded like a knife blade scraping against ice.

“I see.” Constantinescu replaced the brain in the skull cavity, and hesitated. “Before continuing, I should like to ask a question. The X-rays appeared to show a rounded object in the… deceased’s
stomach. And yet there are no scars on the body to indicate old gunshot wounds or surgical procedures. Are you aware of any implants the body might have contained?”

“I am not,” Pendergast said.

“Very well.” Constantinescu nodded slowly. “I will make the Y-incision now.”

When nobody spoke, the pathologist took up the Stryker saw again, making cuts in the left and right shoulders and angling them down so they met at the sternum, then completing the incision in a single line to the pubis with a scalpel. The diener handed him a set of shears and Constantinescu completed the opening of the chest cavity, lifting away the severed ribs and flesh and exposing the heart and lungs.

Behind Angler’s shoulder, Pendergast remained rigid. A certain odor began to spread through the room—an odor that always stayed with Angler, much like the whine of the Stryker.

One after the other, Constantinescu removed the heart and the lungs, examined them, weighed them on the scale, took tissue samples, murmured his observations into the mike, and placed the organs in plastic bags for returning to the body during the final, reconstitution phase of the autopsy. The liver, kidneys, and other major organs were given the same treatment. Then the pathologist turned his attention to the central arteries, severing them and making quick inspections. The man was working rapidly now, the polar opposite of his dawdling with the preliminaries.

Next came the stomach. After inspection and weighing, photographing and tissue sampling, Constantinescu reached for a large scalpel. This was the part Angler really hated: examination of the stomach contents. He moved a little farther away from the gurney.

The pathologist hovered over the metal basin in which the stomach lay, working on it with gloved hands, now and then using the scalpel or a pair of forceps, the diener leaning in close. The smell in the room grew worse.

Suddenly there came a noise: a loud clink of something hard in the steel container. The pathologist audibly caught his breath. He
murmured to the diener, who handed him a fresh pair of forceps. Reaching into the metal basin that held the stomach and its contents, Constantinescu lifted something with the forceps—something roundish, slick with opaque fluids—and turned to a sink, where he carefully rinsed it off. When he turned back, Angler saw to his vast surprise that what lay between the forceps was a stone, irregular in shape and just a little larger than a marble. A deep-blue stone—a precious stone.

In his peripheral vision, he saw that Pendergast had, finally, reacted.

Constantinescu held the stone up in the forceps, staring at it, turning it this way and that. “Well, well,” he murmured.

He put it into an evidence bag and proceeded to seal it. As he did so, Angler found that Pendergast had stepped to his side, staring at the stone. Gone was the remote, unreadable expression, the distant eyes. There was now a sudden hunger in them, a need, that almost pushed Angler back.

“That stone,” Pendergast said. “I must have it.”

Angler wasn’t quite sure he’d heard correctly. “
Have
it? That stone is the first piece of hard evidence we’ve come across.”

“Exactly. Which is why I must be given access to it.”

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.

T
he 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 grinned. “In the old days, sometimes. You know, donations to medical science. Now it’s all animals. The larger specimens are placed in these maceration vats. They’re full of warm water. Not sterile. Leave a specimen in a vat long enough, it liquefies, and when you pull the plug all you have left are the bones.” Sandoval pointed to the nearest soup-filled vat. “There’s a gorilla macerating in that one at the moment.”

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.”

“Which are?”

“Burials, mummies, and ‘prepared skeletons’—dead bodies collected by anthropologists, often from battlefields during the Indian wars—and brought back to the Museum. Something of a lost art. We’ve been forced to return a lot of these to the tribes in recent years.”

D’Agosta glanced into an open doorway. He could make out row after row of wooden cabinets with rippled glass doors, within which lay innumerable sliding trays, each with a label affixed to it.

After passing another dozen or so storage rooms, Sandoval
showed D’Agosta into a lab full of workbenches and soapstone-topped tables. The stench was fainter here. Skeletons of various animals sat on metal frames atop the benches, in various stages of completion. A few desks were pushed up against the far wall, computers and a variety of tools sitting on them.

“That was Marsala’s desk,” Sandoval said, pointing at one.

“Did he have a girlfriend?” D’Agosta asked.

“Not that I know of.”

“What did he do in his off hours?”

Sandoval shrugged. “He didn’t talk about it. He more or less kept to himself. This lab was practically his home—he worked long hours. Didn’t have much of an outside life, it seemed to me.”

“You say he was a prickly guy, hard to work with. Was there anyone in particular that he clashed with?”

“He was always getting into spats.”

“Anything that really stood out?”

Sandoval hesitated. D’Agosta waited, notebook in hand.

“There was one thing,” Sandoval said at last. “About two months back, a curator of mammalogy came in with a suite of extremely rare, almost extinct bats he’d collected in the Himalayas. Marsala put them in some of the dermestid beetle trays. Then he… messed up. He didn’t check them as frequently as he should have, left them too long. That wasn’t like Marsala at all, but at the time he seemed to have something on his mind. Anyway, if you don’t take the specimens out of the trays in time, they can be ruined. The hungry beetles chew through the cartilage and the bones get disarticulated and then they eat the bones themselves. That happened to the bat specimens. The bat scientist—he’s a little crazy, like a lot of curators—went nuts. Said some terrible things to Marsala in front of the whole Osteology staff. Really pissed Marsala off, but he couldn’t do anything about it, because he was the one at fault.”

“What was the name of this mammalogy curator?”

“Brixton. Richard Brixton.”

D’Agosta wrote down the name. “You said Marsala had something else on his mind. Any idea what it was?”

Sandoval thought a moment. “Well, around that time he’d started working with a visiting scientist on some research.”

“Is that uncommon?”

“On the contrary—it’s very common.” Sandoval pointed out the door toward a room across the hall. “That’s where visiting scientists examine bones. They’re coming in and out all the time. We get scientists from all over the world. Marsala didn’t usually work with them, though—his attitude problem and all that. In fact, this was the first scientist he’d worked for in almost a year.”

“Did Marsala say what kind of research it was?”

“No. But at the time, he’d seemed pretty pleased with himself. As if he anticipated a feather in his cap or something.”

“You recall this scientist’s name?”

Sandoval scratched his head. “I think it was Walton. But it might have been Waldron. They have to sign in and out, get credentialed. Frisby keeps a list. You could find out that way.”

D’Agosta looked around the room. “Anything else I should know about Marsala? Anything unusual, or odd, out of character?”

“No.” Sandoval blew his nose with a mighty honk.

“His body was found in the Gastropod Alcove off the Hall of Marine Life. Can you think of any reason why he should have been in that section of the Museum?”

“He never went there. Bones—this lab—was all he cared about. That’s not even on the way out.”

D’Agosta made another notation.

“Any other questions?” Sandoval asked.

D’Agosta glanced at his watch. “Where can I find Frisby?”

“I’ll take you there.” And Sandoval led the way out of the lab and up the corridor—heading back into the foulest section of the department.