Reliquary (26 page)

She paused for a moment, breathing in the mingled scents of burnt electrical insulation and the saline breeze off the Hudson. Then she turned her attention to the melted machinery. It was expensive stuff, judging from the brushed stainless-steel cabinetry and the remains of flat panel and vacuum fluorescent displays.

Margo tackled the largest machine first. Its metal casing had slumped in the heat, the innards detached. She gave it a light kick, shrinking back as it fell with a loud crash. She suddenly felt aware of how alone they were. Beyond the railyards and across the river, the sun hung low over the New Jersey Palisades. She could hear the cry of seagulls as they wheeled over the rotting stumps of old piers rising from the Hudson’s shore. Beyond the railyards, a cheerful summer afternoon was ending. Yet here, in this sunken, abandoned place, no cheer came. She glanced at D’Agosta, who had collected his samples and was standing in the late sun, arms crossed, staring out at the Hudson. Now she was glad he’d insisted on staying.

She bent over the machine, smiling inwardly at her nervousness. Turning over the pieces of scorched and discolored metal, she eventually found the faceplate she was searching for. Rubbing it free of soot, she made out the words
WESTERLY GENETICS EQUIPMENT,
along with a WGE logo. Beneath, on the bezel, was a stamped serial number and the words
WGE
INTEGRATED
DNA
ANALYZER-SEQUENCER.
She jotted the information down on her sketchpad.

In a far corner was heaped a small pile of shattered, melted machinery that looked different from the rest. Margo examined it, carefully turning over each piece and laying it out, trying to figure out what it was. It seemed to be a rather complex organic chem synthesis setup, complete with fractionation and distillation apparatus, diffusion gradients, and low-voltage electrical nodes. Toward the bottom, where things were less damaged by the heat, she found the broken pieces of several Erlenmeyer flasks. Judging by the words on their frosted labels, most were normal lab chemicals. One fragmentary label, however, she did not immediately recognize:
ACTIVATED 7-DEHYDROCHOLE
...

She turned the piece over. Damn, the chemical name had a familiar ring to it. At last, she dropped the piece into her carryall. No doubt it would be listed in the organic chem encyclopedia back at the lab.

Beside the machine were the remains of a thin notebook, burned through except for a few carbonized pages. As she picked it up curiously, it began to crumble in her hands. Carefully, she picked up the charred pieces, slid them carefully into a Ziploc bag, and stowed it in her carryall.

Within fifteen minutes, she had managed to identify enough of the other machines to be certain of one thing: this had once been a world-class genetics laboratory. Margo worked with similar machines on a daily basis, and she knew enough to estimate the cost of this ruined lab at over half a million dollars.

She stepped back.
Where had Kawakita gotten the money to fund this kind of lab? And what the hell could he have been up to?

As she moved across the cement pad, making notations in her sketchbook, something odd caught her eye. Among the piles of rubble and melted glass, she made out what looked like five large puddles of mud, baked to a cementlike consistency by the fire. Around them were sprinkles of gravel.

Curious, she bent over to examine the rubble more closely. There was a small metal object, about the size of her fist, embedded in the nearest puddle. Pulling a penknife from her carryall, she pried out the object and scraped off the crust that clung to it like cement. Beneath the mud she could make out
MINNE       ARIUM SUPPL
. Turning the object over and over in her hands, she realized what it was: an aquarium pump.

She stood up, looking down at the five similar heaps of rubble lined up beneath the remaining skeleton of a wall. The gravel, the broken glass ... these must have been aquaria. Huge, too, judging by the size of the puddles. But aquaria filled with mud? It didn’t make sense.

Kneeling, she took her penknife and worked it into the closest dried mass. It came away in pieces, like concrete. Picking up one of the larger pieces and turning it over, Margo was surprised to see what looked like the roots and partial stem of a plant, preserved from burning by the protective mud coating. Cursing the clumsiness of the penknife, she carefully worked the plant loose from the mud and held it up to the fading light.

Suddenly, she dropped the plant and jerked her hand back, as if burned. After a moment, she picked it up again and examined it more closely, her heart suddenly racing.
It’s not possible,
she thought.

She knew this plant--knew it well. The tough, fibrous stem, the bizarrely knotted roots, brought back searing memories: sitting in the deserted Genetics lab at the Museum, face glued to the eyepiece of a microscope, mere hours before the disastrous opening of the
Superstition
exhibition. It was the rare Amazonian plant that the Mbwun creature had craved so desperately. The same plant Whittlesey had inadvertently used as packing material in the fateful crate of relics sent to the Museum from the Upper Xingu almost a decade before. The plant was now supposed to be extinct: its original habitat had been wiped out, and all remaining vestiges of it at the Museum had been destroyed by the authorities after the Mbwun creature--the Museum Beast--was finally killed.

Margo stood up again, brushing soot from her knees. Greg Kawakita had somehow gotten his hands on this plant and had been growing it in these massive aquaria.

But why?

A
sudden, horrible thought struck her. As quickly as it had come, she brushed it aside. Surely, there was no second Mbwun creature that Greg had been feeding.

Or was there?

“Lieutenant?” she asked. “Do you know what this is?”

He came over. “Not a clue,” he replied.

“
Liliceae mbwunensis
. The Mbwun plant.”

“You’re shitting me, right?”

Margo shook her head slowly. “I wish I were.”

They stood, unmoving, as the sun sank below the Palisades, gilding the distant buildings across the river in a halo of oblique light. She looked again at the plant in her hand, preparing to place it in her carryall, and noticed something that she had missed before.

At the end of the root base, she could make out a small graft scar along the xylem, a long double-V in the dim light. A graft scar like that, she knew, meant one of only two things. A common hybrid experiment.

Or a very sophisticated genetic engineering experiment.

= 30 =

Hayward pushed the door open brusquely, her cheeks still full of lunch.

“Captain Waxie just called,” she said, swallowing the tuna fish. “Wants you down in the IU right away. They got him.”

D’Agosta looked up from placing the final pins in a missing-persons map that replaced the one taken by Waxie. “Got who?”

“
Him.
The copycat killer, of course.” She raised her eyebrows.

“No shit.” D’Agosta was at the door in a second, pulling his suit jacket off the hanger and shrugging into it.

“Caught him in the Ramble,” Hayward said as they walked through the office pool toward the elevator bank. “Somebody on stakeout heard a commotion, went to check it out. The guy had just knifed a vagrant and was preparing to cut off his head.”

“How’d they know that?”

Hayward shrugged. “Ask Captain Waxie.”

“And the knife?”

“Homemade job. Real rough. Just what they were looking for.” She didn’t sound convinced.

The elevator doors opened to reveal Pendergast. Seeing D’Agosta and Hayward about to step in, he raised his eyebrows quizzically.

“The killer’s in the IU,” D’Agosta said. “Waxie wants me down there.”

“Indeed?” The FBI agent stepped back and pressed the button for the second floor. “Well, let’s head down there by all means. I’m curious to see exactly what kind of fish angler Waxie has landed.”

The Interrogation Unit of One Police Plaza was a grim series of gray-colored rooms with cinder-block walls and heavy metal doors. The cop on desk duty buzzed them through, directing them to the observation area of room nine. Inside, Waxie was lounging in a chair, looking through the one-way glass into the interrogation cell. He glanced up when he heard them enter, frowned when he saw Pendergast, grunted at D’Agosta, and ignored Hayward.

“Is he talking?” D’Agosta said.

Waxie grunted again. “Oh, yeah. Talking is all he’s doing. But so far we’ve only heard a load of shit. Calls himself Jeffrey; won’t give anything else. We’ll get the real story out of him soon, though. Meanwhile, thought you might like to ask him a few questions.” In his triumph, Waxie was generous, brimming with smug self-confidence.

Looking through the glass, D’Agosta could see an unkempt, wild-eyed man. The rapid, silent movements of the suspect’s mouth were in almost humorous contrast with his stiff, unmoving body.

“This is the guy?” D’Agosta said in disbelief.

“That’s him.”

D’Agosta kept looking through the glass. “Looks kind of small to have done so much damage.”

Waxie’s mouth set in a defensive frown. “Maybe he got sand kicked in his face one too many times.”

D’Agosta leaned forward and pressed the mike button. Instantly, a torrent of curses spewed from the speaker above the one-way window. D’Agosta listened for a moment, then snapped the mike button off.

“What about the murder weapon?” he asked.

Waxie shrugged. “It’s a handmade thing, a piece of steel sunk into a wooden shank. The handle’s been wrapped in cloth, gauze, something like that. Too bloody to tell; we’ll have to wait until forensics gets done with it.”

“Steel,” Pendergast said.

“Steel,” Waxie replied.

“Not stone.”

“I said, it was steel. Take a look for yourself.”

“We will,” D’Agosta said, stepping away from the window. “But for now, let’s see what this guy has to say.” He headed for the door, Pendergast gliding behind him like a silent spirit.

Number nine looked like countless interrogation rooms in countless police stations across the country. A scarred wooden table sat in the middle of the stark space. On the far side of the table, the prisoner sat in a straight-backed chair, arms cuffed behind his back. A single detective sat in one of several chairs on the table’s near side, enduring the verbal abuse with complete disinterest as he manned the tape recorder. Police officers, armed and in uniform, faced each other from across the room. Two huge black-and-white blowups hung on the side walls. One showed the torn and broken body of Nicholas Bitterman, lying on the men’s room floor inside Belvedere Castle. The other was the now-famous
Post
photo of Pamela Wisher. A video camera was fixed in one corner of the ceiling, dispassionately recording the proceedings.

D’Agosta took a seat at the table, inhaling the familiar blend of sweat, damp socks, and fear. Waxie followed him in, settling his bulk carefully into an adjoining chair. Hayward stood next to the closest uniformed officer. Pendergast closed the door, then leaned against it, the crisp black arms of his suit folded casually, one over the other.

The prisoner had stopped shouting when the door opened. Now he glared at the new arrivals through a greasy lock of hair. His eyes lighted on Hayward, lingered for a moment, then moved on.

“What the hell you looking at?” he said at last to D’Agosta.

“Don’t know,” D’Agosta replied. “You want to tell me about it?”

“Piss off.”

D’Agosta sighed. “You understand your rights?”

The prisoner grinned, exposing small, filthy teeth. “That fat mother next to you read them to me. I don’t need no lawyer to hold my hand.”

“You watch your mouth,” Waxie snapped, flushing an angry crimson.

“No, fat boy, you watch yours.
And
your fat ass.” He cackled with laughter. Hayward didn’t bother to suppress a smirk.

D’Agosta wondered if this was how they had been carrying on before he got there. “So what happened in the park?” he asked.

“You want a list? For firstly, he was in my sleeping spot. For secondly, he hissed at me, like a snake out of Egypt. For thirdly, he lacked the blessings of God. For fourthly, he--”

Waxie waved his hand. “We get the picture. Tell us about the others.”

Jeffrey said nothing.

“Come on,” Waxie pushed. “Who else?”

“Plenty,” came the reply at last. “Nobody disses me and gets away with it.” He leaned forward. “Better watch out, fat boy, case I carve a piece of blubber off
you
.”

D’Agosta placed a restraining hand on Waxie. “So who else you done?” he asked quickly.

“Oh, they know me. They know Jeffrey, the cherub cat. I’m on my way.”

“What about Pamela Wisher?” Waxie broke in. “Don’t deny it, Jeffrey.”

The seams at the corners of the prisoner’s muddy eyes thickened. “I don’t deny it. The scumbags disrespected me, all of them. They deserved it.”

“And what’d you do with the heads?” Waxie asked breathlessly.

“Heads?” Jeffrey asked. To D’Agosta, he seemed to falter slightly.

“You’re in too deep now; don’t start denying.”

“Heads? I ate their heads is what I did.”

Waxie cast a triumphant gaze toward D’Agosta. “What about the guy at Belvedere Castle, Nick Bitterman? Tell me about him.”

“That was a good one. That mother had no respect. Hypocrite, miser. He was the adversary.” He rocked back and forth.

“Adversary?” D’Agosta asked, frowning.

“The prince of adversaries.”

“Yes,” said Pendergast sympathetically. “You must counteract the powers of darkness.” They were the first words he’d spoken since entering.

The prisoner rocked more vigorously. “Yes, yes.”

“With your electrical skin.”

Suddenly, the rocking stopped.

“And your glaring eyes,” Pendergast continued. Then he pushed himself away from the door and came forward slowly, looking directly at the suspect.