The Cabinet of Curiosities (Pendergast #3)(16)

“May I perform a test?” Pendergast asked.

“What kind?”

Pendergast slipped out a small stoppered test tube. “It will involve removing a tiny sample of the ink on this note with a solvent.”

“What is that stuff?”

“Antihuman rabbit serum.”

“Be my guest.” Strange that Pendergast carried forensic chemicals around in his pockets. What did the agent not have hidden inside that bottomless black suit of his?

Pendergast unstoppered the test tube, revealing a tiny swab. Using the stereozoom, he applied it to a corner of a letter, then placed it back in its tube. He gave it a little shake and held it to the window. After a moment, the liquid turned blue. He turned to face her.

“So?” she asked, but she had already read the results in his face.

“The note, Dr. Kelly, was written in human blood. No doubt the very blood of the young woman herself.”





EIGHT




SILENCE DESCENDED IN THE MUSEUM OFFICE. NORA FOUND SHE HAD TO sit down. For some time nothing was said; Nora could vaguely hear traffic sounds from below, the distant ringing of a phone, footsteps in the hall. The full dimension of the discovery began to sink in: the tunnel, the thirty-six dismembered bodies, the ghastly note from a century ago.

“What do you think it means?” she asked.

“There can be only one explanation. The girl must have known she would never leave that basement alive. She didn’t want to die an unknown. Hence she deliberately wrote down her name, age, and home address, and then concealed it. A self-chosen epitaph. The only one available to her.”

Nora shuddered. “How horrible.”

Pendergast moved slowly toward her bookshelf. She followed him with her eyes.

“What are we dealing with?” she asked. “A serial killer?”

Pendergast did not answer. The same troubled look that had come over him at the digsite had returned to his face. He continued to stand in front of the bookshelf.

“May I ask you a question?”

Pendergast nodded again.

“Why are you involved in this? Hundred-and-thirty-year-old serial killings are not exactly within the purview of the FBI.”

Pendergast plucked a small Anasazi bowl from the shelf and examined it. “Lovely Kayenta black-on-white.” He looked up. “How is your research on the Utah Anasazi survey going?”

“Not well. The Museum won’t give me money for the carbon-14 dates I need. What does that have to—”

“Good.”

“Good?”

“Dr. Kelly, are you familiar with the term, ‘cabinet of curiosities’?”

Nora wondered at the man’s ability to pile on non sequiturs. “Wasn’t it a kind of natural history collection?”

“Precisely. It was the precursor to the natural history museum. Many educated gentlemen of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries collected strange artifacts while roaming the globe—fossils, bones, shrunken heads, stuffed birds, that sort of thing. Originally, they simply displayed these artifacts in cabinets, for the amusement of their friends. Later—when it became clear people would pay money to visit them—some of these cabinets of curiosities grew into commercial enterprises. They still called them ‘cabinets of curiosities’ even though the collections filled many rooms.”

“What does this have to do with the murders?”

“In 1848, a wealthy young gentleman from New York, Alexander Marysas, went on a hunting and collecting expedition around the world, from the South Pacific to Tierra del Fuego. He died in Madagascar, but his collections—most extraordinary collections they were—came back in the hold of his ship. They were purchased by an entrepreneur, John Canaday Shottum, who opened J. C. Shottum’s Cabinet of Natural Productions and Curiosities in 1852.”

“So?”

“Shottum’s Cabinet was the building that once stood above the tunnel where the skeletons were found.”

“How did you find all this out?”

“Half an hour with a good friend of mine who works in the New York Public Library. The tunnel you explored was, in fact, the coal tunnel that serviced the building’s original boiler. It was a three-story brick building in the Gothic Revival style popular in the 1850s. The first floor held the cabinet and something called a ‘Cyclorama,’ the second floor was Shottum’s office, and the third floor was rented out. The cabinet seems to have been quite successful, though the Five Points neighborhood around it was at the time one of Manhattan’s worst slums. The building burned in 1881. Shottum died in the fire. The police report suspected arson, but no perpetrator was ever found. It remained a vacant lot until the row of tenements was built in 1897.”

“What was on the site before Shottum’s Cabinet?”

“A small hog farm.”

“So all those people must have been murdered while the building was Shottum’s Cabinet.”

“Exactly.”

“Do you think Shottum did it?”

“Impossible to know as of yet. Those glass fragments I found in the tunnel were mostly broken test tubes and distillation apparatus. On them, I found traces of a variety of chemicals that I have yet to analyze. We need to learn a great deal more about J. C. Shottum and his cabinet of curiosities. I wonder if you would be so kind as to accompany me?”