Bestiary (58 page)
Authors: Robert Masello
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #United States, #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Thrillers
“What the hell are you doing here?” Hector said. “The museum’s closed. And Mr. Gunderson, he gave me special instructions about you.” Then he noticed the dog. “And are you crazy? You can’t bring a dog in here.”
“I had to,” Carter said.
“Why? Why you need to bring a dog into the museum, at night?”
Carter recognized that he was going to have to do some fast, and persuasive, talking, if he hoped to get Hector’s cooperation. “I need him to help me find something.”
Hector waited, unimpressed. “Find what?”
Carter knew that this was an important moment—if he let Hector know what was missing, and Hector shared his secret with Gunderson, all hell would break loose. But if he didn’t tell him, it would be impossible to do what he had to do.
“Some bones are missing, from the collection downstairs. Some very important bones.”
Now Hector started to look concerned. Anything that went missing, especially if it could be tracked to his watch, potentially spelled trouble. “You report this?” he asked, hitching his belt back up over his belly.
“Not yet,” Carter confessed. “I was hoping I could find them first. Or at least figure out what happened.” And then, in a low blow that he regretted giving, he said, “You’ve been so helpful about granting me access downstairs, even after hours, that I was hoping we could solve the problem before either one of us had to answer any questions from Gunderson, or the police.”
Hector wasn’t stupid, and he immediately surmised where Carter was going with this. Cooperate, and maybe the problem could be made to go away, or stick to the rules and risk all kinds of shit coming down. Why, he wondered, had he ever let Carter, and that friend of his with the long white hair, slide? He didn’t even like Big Macs that much.
“What do you need to do?” he said, and Carter inwardly exulted.
“Not much. I just need you to take us downstairs again, to the lower level, for a few minutes.”
Hector hesitated, wondering if this was in fact a way of getting himself into even deeper trouble, then turned toward the elevators with his keys in hand. He would stick right by this guy—and his dog—and make damn sure nothing else went wrong.
Carter and Champ followed him into the elevator, and Carter, afraid of saying the wrong thing, kept his mouth shut all the way down. When the doors opened, he said, “You can just wait here, if you want,” but Hector wasn’t going to chance anything else going wrong.
“I’m coming with you,” he said. “And that dog better not do anything—and you know what I’m talking about—down here.”
“He’s completely museum-trained,” Carter said, though the small joke got no response at all.
Hector turned on the overhead lights, which flickered to life, row after row, like waves receding into the distance. The light they threw off was pale and ghostly and caught a million dust motes drifting through the air. Even Champ, normally an avid adventurer, waited sheepishly by the elevator.
“Come on, boy,” Carter said. “We’ve got work to do.”
Carter set off down the center aisle, with Champ staying close by his side. Hector followed right behind them. They walked past seemingly endless rows of identical cabinets with shallow drawers, all containing countless artifacts and fossilized remains gathered over the decades that the La Brea Tar Pits had been excavated and explored. The bones gave off a dry and arid aroma, and Hector coughed once or twice as they passed them by.
As they approached the makeshift lab that Carter and Del had set up at the farthest reach of the floor, Champ tried to trot ahead. Clearly, he smelled something different here—maybe the scent of Del, or the tarry bones of the La Brea Man that had, until just a short time before, lain exposed on the worktable. Now those remains were secretly stashed on another floor, in a locked closet used for chemicals and solvents.
But it was what remained in the burgled drawer that Carter was after. The broken padlock still hung from the hasp, and as Carter slid the drawer open, he saw the crumpled handkerchief that he had used to conceal and transport the mysterious object that the La Brea Man had once held in his hand. The cloth was all that was left there, but it was still encrusted with bits of the tar and tiny flakes of bone or stone from the object itself. It wasn’t much, Carter realized, but it was all that he had to work with.
“Wasn’t that where the woman’s bones were?” Hector said, concerned.
“Yes.”
“And those, aren’t they the oldest bones in the whole museum?”
Hector seemed to be appreciating the gravity of the situation by the second.
“Not the oldest,” Carter replied, “but the most significant.”
Hector whistled under his breath, as Carter delicately lifted the handkerchief out of the drawer—he didn’t want to disturb or taint its odor in any way—and then held it down to Champ’s nose. At first, the dog tried to turn away, as if uninterested, but when Carter put a finger through his collar and pulled his head back to the cloth, Champ took a good whiff.
Then he looked up again at Carter, as if to say,
Yeah?
Yeah?
“I want you to follow that scent,” Carter said, knowing of course that the dog couldn’t understand a word. But that’s what people did, wasn’t it? You spoke to the dog as if he could be made to comprehend your meaning . . . and damned if it didn’t work sometimes.
Champ turned and looked around, as if wondering exactly what to do. Carter led him a few feet back down the aisle—the only way any thief could have gone—and then pressed the handkerchief to his nose again. Champ took another strong sniff and trotted a few feet ahead, dragging out the length of his Extendo leash. Carter reeled him in, gave him another shot at the wadded-up cloth, then let him go again—and this time Champ seemed to be fully involved in the game. He put his head down to the cold linoleum tiles, then up in the air, then back down to the floor. Occasionally he would stop and sniff at another cabinet; how different could any of these artifacts and fossils really smell? Carter wondered. He could only count on the freshness of the sample to help Champ distinguish it from all the others resting in their silent graves all around them.
“This is the stupidest thing I have ever done,” Hector muttered. “This I will lose my job over for sure.”
“Maybe not,” Carter said as he followed along in Champ’s wake. “Maybe not.”
But when the dog started to retrace their steps directly to the elevator, Carter, too, began to wonder. Was Champ just leading them back out the way they came? Was that all he thought he was being asked to do?
But then the dog stopped, turned, and, with his head close to the floor, moved to the left, past the elevator bank and around the corner. “What’s back there?” Carter asked over his shoulder.
“Not much,” Hector said. “A storage unit, some machinery, a stairwell.”
Champ had wrapped his long leash around a steel column, and Carter had to hurry up to catch him. The dog was standing in front of a sealed metal door with a red slash painted on it warning that an alarm would go off if the door was opened.
“Where’s this lead to?” Carter asked.
Hector had to think for a second, and looked up as if to see what they might be under. “The garden,” he said.
“You mean the one in the middle of the museum?”
“Yes.”
Champ put his nose to the bottom of the door, and pawed at the metal.
“Can you open it?”
Hector stepped around him, using a passkey to disable the alarm—to Carter, it looked like the alarm hadn’t been in operation, anyway—then pried the door open with a resounding screech. It sounded as if the door hadn’t worked in ages, either. Inside, it was pitch black and a cobweb brushed across Carter’s face. Hector played his flashlight beam over the interior until he found the light switch. A bare bulb hung down from the ceiling, illuminating a rusted lawnmower, several gardening tools, some rubber boots, a stack of dented paint cans. It looked as if no one had been down there, much less passed through with a pile of stolen bones, in a very long time. But Champ was eager to go.
“Okay, boy, I’ll take your word for it,” Carter said, though he wasn’t really so sure.
Champ neatly threaded his way through the detritus, and he was halfway up the first flight of stairs before Hector had managed to close the door behind them. Carter was looking at the dust on the steps to see if there was any sign of a footprint, or anything at all to suggest a recent intruder, but in the dim light from the overhead bulbs—not to mention the haste with which he was trying to keep up with Champ—it was all he could do to see the steps themselves.
Champ stopped on the landing to make sure he had his pack in tow, then trotted up the next flight of steps, which culminated in another sealed door. At this one he whined, as if anxious to capture his prey just beyond. Hector, huffing and puffing, climbed the last steps, released the alarm, then yanked the door back with a loud screech. Carter was instantly overwhelmed by the smell of wet leaves and thick foliage, and by the sound of swishing sprinklers.
Champ leapt out into the garden so fast that the leash came out of Carter’s hand. There were modest lamp poles with amber lights every few yards along the pathways, but otherwise the garden was lighted by the moon, which shone down through the open, unobstructed roof. Carter could hear the plastic leash handle clattering after Champ as he dragged it down the cement walkway, then over the little footbridge that crossed the meandering, koi-filled stream. Though it was not as strictly planned as the Pleistocene Garden on the grounds outside, where nothing but plants indigenous to the area during the last ice age were grown, here—in this secluded atrium, surrounded by the curving glass walls of the museum all around it—visitors still had a sense of the quiet, natural landscape that this place had once possessed. A gnarled gingko tree rose up in one corner, slender palms rustled in the night wind, the furtive splashing of turtles—who enjoyed their own little nesting ground—joined with the constant rushing of the waterfall toward the back of the garden. And it was there that Carter spotted Champ, trying to drag his leash up a small escarpment overgrown with ferns.
“Okay, hang on,” Carter said, but Champ didn’t turn. It was as if he were trying to enter the streambed from the miniature waterfall.
Carter unhooked the leash from his collar—there was no way the dog could escape from the enclosed atrium—and Champ instantly ran down the path to a spot that afforded easier access, then went up the slight rise to the source of the waterfall again. For a second, Carter thought he might just be thirsty, but then he saw it—lying there, atop a larger, flatter stone in the center of the stream.
The object from the La Brea Man’s grasp.
But now, perhaps because it had been partially cleansed by the running water, it gleamed, like the mano—or grinding stone—it had clearly once been. On its surface there were long diagonal scratches, made with another, possibly redder stone. Champ, unable to reach it, was hovering over the small pool from which the waterfall descended. Carter, not quite able to see everything from the pathway, stepped off the cement and, wrapping his arm around the base of a slim pine spruce, hauled himself up. He had to nudge Champ to one side just to make room for himself; this was an ornamental garden, and it wasn’t designed for off-road adventures. But the ground around his feet didn’t look as ornamental and undisturbed as the rest of the garden. Carter could see that some brush had been cleared to one side, and the dirt here looked freshly turned.
Champ barked, as if confirming his discovery, and Carter, suddenly realizing what he was standing on, instinctively stepped back.
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