The Cabinet of Curiosities (Pendergast #3)(122)

“Running away from the police never did anyone any good, Dr. Kelly! Give yourself up now and we’ll go easy on you!”

She shrank behind a giant turtle almost the size of a studio apartment, trying to reconstruct the layout of the vault in her head. She couldn’t remember seeing a rear door in previous visits. Most storage vaults, for security purposes, had only one. There was only one way out, and they were blocking it. She had to get them to move.

“Dr. Kelly, I’m sure we can work something out! Please!”

Nora smiled to herself. What a pair of blunderers. Smithback would have had fun with them.

Her smile faded at the thought of Smithback. She was certain now of what he’d done. Smithback had gone to Leng’s house. Perhaps he had heard Pendergast’s theory—that Leng was alive and still living in his old house. Perhaps he’d wheedled it out of O’Shaughnessy. The guy could have made Helen Keller talk.

On top of that, he was a good researcher. He knew the Museum’s files. While she and Pendergast were going through deeds, he’d gone straight to the Museum and hit paydirt. And knowing Smithback, he’d have run right up to Leng’s house. That’s why he’d rented a car, driven it up Riverside Drive. Just to check out the house. But Smithback could never merely check something out. The fool, the damned fool…

Cautiously, Nora tried dialing Smithback on her cell phone, muffling the sound with the leather of her purse. But the phone was dead: she was surrounded by several thousand tons of steel shelves and dinosaur bones, not to mention the Museum overhead. At least it probably meant the radios of the cops would be equally useless. If her plan worked, that would prove useful.

“Dr. Kelly!” The voices were coming from her left now, away from the door.

She crept forward between the shelves, strained to catch a glimpse of them, but she could see nothing but the beam of a flashlight stabbing through the dark piles of bone.

There was no more time: she had to get out.

She listened closely to the footsteps of the cops. Good: they seemed to still be together. In their joint eagerness to take credit for the collar, they’d been too stupid to leave one to guard the door.

“All right!” she called. “I give up! Sorry, I guess I just lost my head.”

There was a brief flurry of whispers.

“We’re coming!” O’Grady shouted. “Don’t go anywhere!”

She heard them moving in her direction, more quickly now, the flashlight beam wobbling and weaving as they ran. Watching the direction of the beam, she scooted away, keeping low, angling back toward the front of the storage room, moving as quickly and silently as she could.

“Where are you?” she heard a voice cry, fainter now, several aisles away. “Dr. Kelly?”

“She was over there, O’Grady.”

“Damn it, Finester, you know she was much farther—”

In a flash Nora was out the door. She turned, slammed it shut, turned her key in the lock. In another five minutes she was out on Museum Drive.

Panting hard, she slipped her cell phone out of her purse again and dialed.





SEVEN




THE SILVER WRAITH GLIDED NOISELESSLY UP TO THE SEVENTY-SECOND Street curb. Pendergast slid out and stood for a moment in the shadow of the Dakota, deep in thought, while the car idled.

The interview with his great-aunt had left him with an unfamiliar feeling of dread. Yet it was a dread that had been growing within him since he first heard of the discovery of the charnel pit beneath Catherine Street.

For many years he had kept a silent vigil, scanning the FBI and Interpol services, on the lookout for a specific modus operandi. He’d hoped it would never surface—but always, in the back of his mind, had feared it would.

“Good evening, Mr. Pendergast,” the guard said at his approach, stepping out of the sentry box. An envelope lay in his white-gloved hand. The sight of the envelope sent Pendergast’s dread soaring.

“Thank you, Johnson,” Pendergast replied, without taking the envelope. “Did Sergeant O’Shaughnessy come by, as I mentioned he would?”

“No sir. He hasn’t been by all evening.”

Pendergast grew more pensive, and there was a long moment of silence. “I see. Did you take delivery of this envelope?”

“Yes, sir.”

“From whom, may I ask?”

“A nice, old-fashioned sort of gent, sir.”

“In a derby hat?”

“Precisely, sir.”

Pendergast scanned the crisp copperplate on the front of the envelope: For A. X. L. Pendergast, Esq., D. Phil., The Dakota. Personal and Confidential. The envelope was handmade from a heavy, old-fashioned laid paper, with a deckle edge. It was precisely the sort of paper made by the Pendergast family’s private stationer. Although the envelope was yellow with age, the writing on it was fresh.

Pendergast turned to the guard. “Johnson, may I borrow your gloves?”

The doorman was too well trained to show surprise. Donning the gloves, Pendergast slipped into the halo of light around the sentry box and broke the envelope’s seal with the back of his hand. Very gingerly, he bowed it open, looking inside. There was a single sheet of paper, folded once. In the crease lay a single small, grayish fiber. To the untrained eye, it looked like a bit of fishing line. Pendergast recognized it as a human nerve strand, undoubtedly from the cauda equina at the base of the spinal cord.