Blue Labyrinth (8 page)

T
he Evidence and Property Storage Room of the NYPD’s Twenty-Sixth Precinct was not really a room in the conventional sense at all, but rather a rambling warren of nooks, cubbyholes, and niches, sealed off from the rest of the precinct basement by thick wire mesh. The building was old, and the basement smelled strongly of mold and niter. Lieutenant Peter Angler sometimes felt that, were they to institute a search, they would find behind some wall the bricked-up skeleton that had inspired Poe to write “The Cask of Amontillado.”

He stood now, waiting, at the large window set into the wire mesh labeled
EVIDENCE DEPOSIT
. He could hear faint, invisible bangings and scrapings from the spaces beyond. Another minute, and Sergeant Mulvahill emerged from the dimness, a small evidence container held in both hands.

“This is it, sir,” he said.

Angler nodded, then walked a few steps down the corridor and entered the Report Writing Room. Closing the door behind him, he waited for Mulvahill to place the container in the pass-through locker set into the common wall. He signed the chit and sent it back through. Then he took the evidence container to the nearest table, sat down with the container before him, removed its top, and looked inside.

Nothing.

Actually,
nothing
was a slight exaggeration. There were some samples of Alban Pendergast’s clothing; a bit of dirt from the heel of one shoe, enclosed in a tiny ziplock bag. There were also several badly mangled rounds that had been pried out of car frames, but these were still being analyzed by ballistics.

Yet the only real evidence—the piece of turquoise—was not there. Just a small, empty plastic container that had held it… until Pendergast checked it out.

In his bones, Angler had known the stone would not be there. But he’d hoped against hope Pendergast would have returned it. Staring into the evidence container, he felt a slow burn coming on. Pendergast had promised to return it within twenty-four hours… which had lapsed two days before. Angler had been unable to reach the man; his numerous calls remained unreturned.

But as upset as he was with Pendergast, Angler was even more upset with himself. The FBI agent had practically pleaded for the turquoise—at the autopsy of his own son, no less—and in a moment of weakness, against his better judgment, Angler had relented. And the result? Pendergast had betrayed his trust.

What the hell was he doing with the stone?

A faint blur of black registered in the corner of his vision, and Angler turned to see Pendergast himself—as if conjured into life by his own thoughts—standing in the doorway of the Report Writing Room. Wordlessly, as Angler watched, the FBI agent came forward, reached into his pocket, and handed him the turquoise.

Angler stared at it closely. It was the same piece—at least, it appeared to be. He opened the plastic container, put the deep blue stone in it, closed it again, and placed it in the evidence box. And then he looked back at Pendergast.

“What am I supposed to say about this?” he asked.

Pendergast returned the stare with a pleasant expression. “I was hoping you might thank me.”

“
Thank
you? You kept this forty-eight hours longer than I stipulated.
You didn’t return my calls. Agent Pendergast, the chain-of-custody rules are in place for a reason, and this is highly unprofessional.”

“I’m well aware of the chain-of-custody rules,” Pendergast said. “As are you—and you allowed me to borrow that stone in spite, not because, of them.”

Angler took a deep breath. He prided himself on not losing his cool, and he’d be damned if this marble-like apparition dressed in black, this Sphinx, was going to goad him into it. “Tell me why you kept it as long as you did.”

“I was trying to locate its source.”

“And did you?”

“The results are not yet conclusive.”

Not yet conclusive
. Answers didn’t come any vaguer than that. Angler paused a moment. Then he decided to try a different tack. “We’re taking a new direction in our hunt for your son’s killer,” he said.

“Indeed?”

“We’re going to track, as best we can, Alban’s movements in the days and weeks leading up to the murder.”

Pendergast listened silently to this. And then, with a faint shrug, he turned to leave.

Despite himself, Angler found his irritation spilling over. “That’s your reaction? A shrug?”

“I’m rather in a hurry, Lieutenant. Again, you have my gratitude for indulging me with the turquoise. And now, if you don’t mind, I must be going.”

Angler wasn’t done with him. He followed him toward the door. “I’d like to know what the hell is going on inside your head. How can you be so damned…
uninterested
? Don’t you want to know who killed your son?”

But Pendergast had disappeared around the corner of the Report Writing Room. Angler stared at the empty doorway with narrowed eyes. He could hear Pendergast’s light, rapid footsteps echoing down the stone hallway toward the staircase that led up to the first floor.
Finally—once the footsteps had retreated beyond audibility—he turned around, closed the evidence container, knocked on the common wall of the Evidence Storage Room to alert Mulvahill, then placed the container back in the pass-through locker.

And then once again, almost despite himself, his gaze drifted back to the empty doorway.

T
he attractive thirtyish woman with the glossy, shoulder-length brown hair separated herself from the crowd milling around the Museum’s Great Rotunda, trotted up the broad central stairway to the second floor, then walked down the echoing marble corridor toward a door flanked by painted images of Anasazi petroglyphs, tastefully illuminated. She paused, took a deep breath, then stepped through the doorway. Beyond, a maître d’ standing behind a small wooden podium looked up expectantly.

“I have a lunch reservation for two,” the woman said. “Name of Green. Margo Green.”

The man consulted his screen. “Ah yes, Dr. Green. Welcome back. Your party’s already here.”

Margo followed the man as he threaded a path between linen-covered tables. She glanced around. The room, she knew, had a curious history. Originally, it had been the Anasazi Burial Hall, full of dozens of Native American mummies, still in their original flexed positions, along with countless blankets, pots, and arrowheads, snagged from Arizona’s Mummy Cave and other prehistoric graveyards in the late nineteenth century. Over time the hall became controversial, and in the early 1970s a large group of Navajos journeyed to New York to picket the Museum, protesting what they considered tomb desecration. The hall was quietly closed and the mummies
removed. And so it had remained for decades until just two years before, when some forward-thinking staffer realized the space was perfect for an upscale restaurant catering to donors, Museum members, and curators with important guests. It was named Chaco, and it retained the charming old murals that had decorated the original hall, painted to resemble the inside of a kiva of an ancient Anasazi pueblo, sans the mummified remains. One ersatz adobe partition that had made up the far wall had been removed, however, revealing huge windows overlooking Museum Drive, now aglow in brilliant sunlight.

Margo glanced toward the windows gratefully.

Lieutenant Vincent D’Agosta was rising from a table directly before her. He looked almost the same as when she’d last seen him—a little thinner, fitter, even less hair. The way his present image kept faithful to her memory touched her with a strange mixture of gratitude and melancholy.

“Margo,” he said, giving her a handshake that turned into a slightly awkward embrace. “Great to see you.”

“Likewise.”

“You’re looking wonderful. I’m really glad you could make it on short notice.”

They sat down. D’Agosta had called her out of the blue just the day before, asking if they could meet somewhere in the Museum. She’d suggested Chaco.

D’Agosta looked around. “The place sure has changed since you and I first met. How many years ago was that, anyway?”

“The time of the Museum killings?” Margo thought a moment. “Eleven years. No, twelve.”

“Unbelievable.”

A waiter brought them menus, the covers emblazoned with a silhouette of Kokopelli. D’Agosta ordered an iced tea, and she did likewise. “So. What have you been up to all this time?”

“I’m now working at a nonprofit medical foundation on the East Side. The Pearson Institute.”

“Oh yeah? Doing what?”

“I’m their ethnopharmacologist. I evaluate indigenous botanical remedies, looking for potential drugs.”

“Sounds fascinating.”

“It is.”

“Still teaching?”

“I got burned out on that. There’s a potential here to help thousands, instead of one classroom.”

D’Agosta picked up the menu again, perused it. “Found any wonder drugs?”

“The biggest thing I’ve worked on so far is a compound in the bark of the ceiba tree that might help with epilepsy and Parkinson’s. The Maya use it for treating dementia in old people. Problem is, it takes forever to develop a new drug.”

The waiter returned, and they gave their orders. D’Agosta looked back at her. “On the phone, you mentioned you visit the Museum regularly.”

“Two or three times a month, at least.”

“Why is that?”

“The sad fact is that the natural habitats of these botanicals I study are being logged, burned, or plowed under at a terrifying rate. God knows how many potential cures for cancer have already gone extinct. The Museum has the finest ethnobotanical collection in the world. Of course, they didn’t have me in mind when they assembled it—they were simply gathering up local medicines and magical remedies from tribes around the world. But it’s perfectly geared to my research. There are plants in the Museum’s collections that simply can’t be found in nature anymore.” She stopped, reminding herself that not everyone shared her passion for the work.

D’Agosta folded his hands together. “Well, as it happens, your being a regular here works out perfectly for me.”

“How so?”

He leaned forward slightly. “You heard about the recent homicide here, right?”

“You mean Vic Marsala? I used to work with him when I was a graduate student in the Anthro Department. I was one of the few
people he actually got along with.” Margo shook her head. “I can’t believe anyone would kill him.”

“Well, I’m in charge of the investigation. And I need your help.”

Margo didn’t reply.

“It seems Marsala was working with a visiting scientist not long before his death. Marsala helped this scientist locate and examine a specimen in the anthropology collections—the skeleton of a Hottentot male. Agent Pendergast’s been helping me with the case, and he seemed to be interested in the skeleton.”

“Go on,” Margo said.

D’Agosta hesitated. “It’s just that… well… Pendergast vanished. Left town night before last, leaving no word where he can be reached. You know how he is. On top of that, we discovered just yesterday that the credentials of the visiting scientist working with Marsala were fake.”

“Fake?”

“Yeah. False accreditation. Claimed to be Dr. Jonathan Waldron, a physical anthropologist with a university outside Philly, but the real Waldron knows nothing about it. I interviewed him myself. He’s never even been to the Museum.”

“How do you know he isn’t the killer, and is just claiming to know nothing about it?”

“I showed his photograph to the Anthropology staff. Totally different person. He’s a foot shorter and twenty years older.”

“Bizarre.”

“Yeah. Why would somebody pretend to be somebody else just to look at a skeleton?”

“You think this phony scientist killed Marsala?”

“I don’t think anything yet. But it’s a damned good lead, first one I’ve got. So…” He hesitated. “I was wondering if you’d be willing to have a look at the skeleton yourself.”

“Me?” Margo asked. “Why?”

“You’re an anthropologist.”

“Yes, but my specialty is ethnopharmacology. I haven’t done any physical anthropology since graduate school.”

“I’ll bet you can still run circles around most of the anthropologists here. Besides, I can trust you. You’re here, you know the Museum—but you’re not on staff.”

“My research keeps me pretty busy.”

“Just a look. On the side. I’d really appreciate your opinion.”

“I really can’t see what an old Hottentot skeleton would have to do with a murder.”

“I don’t know, either. But it’s my only lead so far. Look, Margo, do this for me. You knew Marsala. Please help me solve his murder.”

Margo sighed. “If you put it that way, how can I say no?”

“Thank you.” D’Agosta smiled. “Oh, and lunch is on me.”