Dead as a Dinosaur (24 page)

Stalked!
Pam North thought. That's what it is. The way these—all these awful things in the past used to stalk whatever—whatever they wanted to destroy! And it was not Steck who stalked her.

There was only one thing for it. Pam North opened, with something like violence, the door at which she stood. Pam crossed the corridor, bounding—as some small and succulent creature might once have bounded from the pursuit of Teddy the Tyrannosaurus, who was not, like some of his kind, a vegetarian. Pam made the door directly across the corridor. She went through it, like a flicker of light.

Now what? Wayne Preson wondered. He had just turned into the corridor at the far end, already worried. He was in time to see Pam dart across the hall from one office into another, certainly as if something were after her. But that, to Wayne, did not fit in with anything. Who would be pursuing Mrs. North? He had himself come back from the Great Hall, where he had been unable to find any of those he wanted to find, because he had wanted to talk to the Norths—to Mrs. North, particularly. But he was not, certainly, chasing her.

It occurred to him then that she might be the pursuer, not the pursued. Perhaps, having found something out, or thought something out, she was hurrying, intently, to tell it to someone. Women were like that—at any rate, Emily was like that, and in a sense Marie was too. They got hold of something they thought important, and nothing could stop them until they had got to the bottom of—well, often, things which were apt to get them into trouble.

Wayne Preson walked briskly up the long corridor. He had better talk to Mrs. North. Perhaps he could reassure her. Quieten her down.

Pam, Mullins had assured Jerry North, had merely gone off on an expedition of her own. They both knew she did that. She always came out all right.

“You mean,” Jerry said, “she has so far.” His voice was worried. “I told her to stay here,” he said.

Mullins had not commented on this. It was, he decided, no time to point out that that, also, had happened before. What had not happened before, in his experience, was that he had in so short a time lost track of so many of the people he was delegated to keep track of. He had lost the Presons, brother and sister, who were his special charge. He had lost Wayne Preson, who wasn't. He had lost Dr. Agee, when just on the point of finding him. Now he and Jerry had lost Pam. It was true, Mullins thought, that he had found Jerry North, but that did not seem to be getting him anywhere.

“The Presons were in here,” Jerry said. “Did you know that?”

“Yeah,” Mullins said. “Followed them here.”

“They could have come back,” Jerry said. “Found Pam here and—” He stopped. “Damn it to hell,” he said.

“Now, Mrs. North'll be all right,” Mullins said. “Take more than those two to stop her. You know that, Mr. North.”

“Well,” Jerry said, “they're up to something, aren't they? Or why were you following them?”

“To see,” Mullins told him. “They came straight here. To this office. Didn't seem to be anybody else around then. Went in the office, stayed—oh, a coupla minutes, maybe. Then they went and I was about to go after them. But Wayne shows up and then you and Mrs. North show up. Then this guy Agee.” He considered. “You know,” he said, “this place is getting filled up. Why?”

Jerry didn't know. He listened with half his mind; worried about Pam with the rest of it.

“She must have gone somewhere,” he told Mullins.

They had had the lights on in the office, by then. It was obvious that Pam must have gone somewhere, since she obviously was not there.

“Yeah,” Mullins said. “That's right, Mr. North.”

“Emily Preson's here too,” Jerry said, reverting momentarily to the filling up of the Institute. “And Steck. Wayne said so, anyway. Said he followed them.”

“Jeeze,” said Mullins, simply. “I wish the Loot'd get here.”

He was looking around the office. He could not see that Homer Preson and his sister had left any evidence of their visit. The trouble was, of course, he did not know what evidence to look for. Abstractedly, he opened the central drawer of the desk. There were oddments there—expected oddments. There were pencils, a scratch pad, a ruler and a slide rule, two erasers, a collection of loose paper clips, a pen with a rusted nib, a spectacle case with glasses in it. It did not appear to be a place in which anyone would have kept valuables which the Presons would have come down from Riverdale to abstract. Mullins closed the drawer and began to open others. Jerry was prowling the office. He found the doors, one in either wall.

Jerry tried the one on his left and it opened. He started through it.

“Hey,” Mullins said, “wait a—”

“You go the other way,” Jerry said. “Damn it, sergeant, Pam's lost!”

“Now—” Mullins began, but talked to nobody. He sighed and tried the other door. It was unlocked and he went through it.

Jerry hurried into a dim room, avoiding a table on which something appeared to have happened to the skeleton of some small and ugly creature; went in and through another room and just managed not to knock over the skeleton of what appeared to be a prehistoric bird; in a third room avoided a large and uninteresting boulder (which contained fossil imprints of potentially staggering importance) and in a fourth did not, by moving with slow care, destroy any prehistoric reptiles. He opened the door of the next office and stopped because he heard a sound beyond.

“Pam?” he said, hopefully, yet in a low tone. “Pam—that you?”

The sound he heard then was unmistakable. It was of a door opened; then of a door closed.

“Pam!” Jerry North said, more loudly, and hurried into the next office.

It was filled with glass cases. Pam was not in it. Jerry wasted several seconds discovering that the wall ahead of him was doorless. He did not waste much time, then, in emerging into the central corridor. It was empty.

Then it was not empty. Sergeant Mullins emerged from an office at the far end of the corridor. Sergeant Mullins shook his head.

Jerry North moved down the corridor toward him and they rejoined forces. Jerry was, by then, really worried. He was almost certain that Pam had been in the last office; that she had fled it—or been dragged from it? forced from it?—at his approach.

“We've
got
to find her!” he told Mullins, and told Mullins that he almost had. This time Mullins agreed.

Bill Weigand waited in his car near the side entrance of the Broadly Institute. When the prowl car he had called for slid up behind him, arriving without fanfare, without red lights, as per instructions, he told the sergeant and the patrolman what he wanted. Then he went to the staff door, expecting it to be unlocked. He found it unlocked and stepped inside.

He was just in time to see, momentarily, the closing of the door in front. He crossed the small foyer in two strides and yanked the door open. In the dim vastness of the Great Hall he at first saw nothing; then, hurrying among the shadows, he saw two figures—two short and wiry figures. He could, he decided, guess who the two were. He could guess that they had been about to leave the building and that his arrival had stopped them. He hoped they would try to leave again. He wished he knew what had brought them there—wished he knew specifically; he could, in general, guess. Plots have a tendency to come unraveled; often it seems necessary to ravel them up again. This was, Bill reflected, usually very helpful to the police.

He got into the elevator and started it up. He hoped, as the small car climbed slowly, that enough people would do enough things to give him the proof of what was, he had decided on the trip uptown, sufficiently evident—sufficiently evident, in any case, with the underbrush cleared away. There were still, of course, a good many wrong trees which had, dutifully, to be barked up.

“You watch the hall,” Jerry said, and Mullins said, “O.K., Mr. North.”

Jerry went into the first of the offices on the opposite side of the corridor. He turned on the lights. Someone had been making, out of clay, what looked like a section of layer cake. Pamela North was not in the office. Jerry turned out the lights and went through the connecting door into the next office in this series. Pam apparently had, of her own will or under compulsion, gone from one to another of the offices across the hall. If she had gone up one side, she might be going down the other. With Mullins to watch the hall, he ought, in time, to flush her out. Unless he found—

Jerry resolutely refused to think of what he might find. So far as he knew, Pam knew nothing it was dangerous to know. So far as he knew.

The second office was empty too—empty, at any rate, of Pamela North. There was an interesting display of fossilized starfish, if one were interested in fossilized starfish. The third office did no better. Jerry hurried. But at each new door he stopped to listen.

Pam hurried, too. Although now she heard no sounds of pursuit, she still fled. She would reach the office into which Jerry had followed Dr. Agee; she would find Jerry there. Together they could turn on the pursuer, find out—

Pam could not think, as she trotted across office after office, opened door after door, what it was they would find out. Before, when there had been trouble toward the end, she had known why there was trouble, if not always how it was to be avoided. But now, Pam North thought, I don't really know anything. Not anything at all. If somebody thinks I know something, it's just too bad for—Pam's thoughts jerked suddenly. For me, she thought. It would be terrible to be—be
hurt
—for something you didn't know. Because if it isn't Dr. Steck who's after me, then it can be anybody. Then she thought, perhaps it isn't anybody any more.

She paused on the far side of the last door she had passed through and listened for a moment. At first she heard nothing. Then she was certain that, back somewhere along the course she fled, she did hear someone in pursuit—someone not running, making no more noise than was needful, coming resolutely on. If only I could lock this door, thought Pam, without hope, since she had long before discovered that the doors, although supplied with locks, were keyless. But in a moment more, Pam thought, I'll find Jerry. She crossed this other office, opened the next door. Then, with a sudden coldness, she realized that she had reached Dr. Steck's office, into which Jerry had gone, and that the office was empty.

It was empty, familiar; because of its emptiness, frightening. The desk was there, the book-lined walls, the long table under the windows with the bone collection on it—the collection of bones still unlabeled, with the box of Dennison's labels waiting neatly to be used, with—

But then she remembered. She did not need to look, although, as she passed—and now more quickly than ever—she did look briefly. There was no box of Dennison's labels; there had not been when she and Jerry had stood there, looking at Wayne Preson, who was looking down at the bones. That, rather than the absence of used labels—or together with the absence of used labels—had caused her earlier to feel something wrong with the way the table looked.

But that could not mean anything, Pam thought, as she fled on. Because if the labels had been the poisoned ones—poisoned labels Dr. Preson had not reached—the police would have found them. And if they were not, then what good would they be to anyone? You could buy unpoisoned labels for a few cents anywhere; it would turn out that Dr. Steck had bought these to go on with Preson's interrupted job; it would turn out—

Pam felt suddenly that she was on the verge of something. It was as if the pull cord of a light dangled in the darkness, as if her fingers touched it and it swayed away before it could be grasped. If she could only stop a moment and think!

Involuntarily, with her fingers on the next doorknob, she did stop. The labels wouldn't have been left—the poisoned ones wouldn't. But there would have had to be some labels left. Because everyone was supposed to think the phenobarbital had been in the milk and that the labels had nothing to do with it. So—

She heard a sound at the door behind her—the sound of a knob turning, a catch releasing. She sought the knob of her own door, but for an instant could not find it. Then she did; then she tugged. But she could hear the other door opening.

She did not look around. She did not stop. A low, heavy voice said, “Wait. I want to talk to you,” but she did not wait. She ran, now. And now, diagonally across the next office, she ran for the corridor door.

Sergeant Mullins waited until Dr. Steck came out again. Mullins, hearing footsteps, had had a few seconds to get behind an office door, and he had used them. Now, as Steck returned up the corridor from the office of the late curator of Fossil Mammals, Mullins stepped out behind him.

“Well,” Mullins said, “what are you doing here, Dr. Steck?”

Steck turned suddenly; Mullins was a tall enough man, but Steck was appreciably taller. Steck frowned.

“Police,” Mullins said.

“Prove it,” Steck said.

Mullins proved it.

“Then come on,” Steck said. “You may as well be in on this.”

He started off abruptly and Mullins went with him. It was, Mullins felt, high time he was in on something, preferably something that made sense. They went up the corridor, turned left, and Steck opened a door which had lettered on the glass, “Paul Agee, Director.”

“Now we'll—” Steck began, starting in. But then he stopped. There was nobody in the office. Steck turned, abruptly, and made as if to come out again. Mullins blocked his way.

“What goes on?” Mullins asked him.

“Agee and Miss Preson,” Steck said, and spoke quickly, biting the words. “They were here. I went to—”

“Went to what, doctor?” Bill Weigand asked, from behind Mullins.

“To get Preson's spare glasses,” Steck said, as if it were the most reasonable of statements. “What did you think?”

“I didn't think anything,” Bill said. “Just got here. Let's go on in, shall we? You can explain it to me. Go ahead, Mullins.”