The Cabinet of Curiosities (Pendergast #3)(8)
“Who the devil are you, barging in like this?” he cried, his voice echoing down the barrow. “I was not to be disturbed!”
“FBI,” rapped out Pendergast. His voice was now totally different: sharp, stern, officious. With a snap of leather, he shoved his badge toward the man’s face.
“Oh,” the man said, faltering. “I see.”
Nora looked from one to the other, surprised at Pendergast’s apparent ability to read people instantly, then manipulate them accordingly.
“May I ask you to please vacate the site while my colleague, Dr. Kelly, and I make an examination?”
“Look here, I’m in the middle of my work.”
“Have you touched anything?” It came out as a threat.
“No… not really. Of course, I’ve handled some of the bones—”
“You handled some of the bones?”
“Consistent with my responsibility to determine cause of death—”
“You handled some of the bones?” Pendergast pulled a thin pad and a gold pen from his jacket pocket and made a note, shaking his head in disgust. “Your name, Doctor?”
“Van Bronck.”
“I’ll make a note of it for the hearing. And now, Dr. Van Bronck, if you’ll kindly let us proceed.”
“Yes, sir.”
Pendergast watched as the ME and the photographer climbed laboriously out of the tunnel. Then he turned to Nora and spoke in a low, rapid voice. “It’s your site now. I’ve bought us an hour, maybe less, so make the best of it.”
“The best of what?” Nora asked in a panic. “Just what am I supposed to be doing? I’ve never—”
“You’re trained in ways that I’m not. Survey the site. I want to know what happened here. Help me understand it.”
“In an hour? I don’t have any tools, anything to store samples—”
“We’re almost too late as it is. Did you notice they had the precinct captain on the site? As I said, Moegen-Fairhaven pulls an enormous amount of weight. This will be our only chance. I need the maximum amount of information in the minimum amount of time. It’s extremely important.” He handed her the pen and pad, then withdrew two slender penlights from his coat and passed one to her.
Nora switched it on. For its size, the penlight was very powerful. She looked around, taking note of her surroundings for the first time. It was cool and silent. Motes drifted in the single banner of light streaming through the broken hole. The air smelled corrupt, a mixture of fungus, old meat, and mold. She breathed it in deeply nevertheless, trying to focus. Archaeology was a slow, methodical business. Here, faced with a ticking clock, she barely knew where to begin.
She hesitated another moment. Then she began to sketch the tunnel. It was about eighty feet long, ten feet high at the arch, bricked up at the ends. The ceiling was filmed with cracks. The dust covering the floor had been recently disturbed, more so than could be explained by the presence of a single medical examiner: Nora wondered how many construction workers and policemen had already wandered through here.
Half a dozen niches ran along both walls. She walked along the wet floor of the tunnel, sketching, trying to get an overall sense of the space. The niches, too, had once been bricked up, but now the bricks had been removed and were stacked beside each alcove. As she turned the flashlight into each niche, she saw essentially the same thing: a jumble of skulls and bones, shreds of clothing, bits of old flesh, gristle, and hair.
She glanced over her shoulder. At the far end, Pendergast was making his own examination, profile sharp in the shaft of light, quick eyes darting everywhere. Suddenly he knelt, peering intently not at the bones, but at the floor, plucking something out of the dust.
Completing her circuit, Nora turned to examine the first niche more closely. She knelt in front of the alcove and scanned it quickly, trying to make sense of the charnel heap, doing her best to ignore the smell.
There were three skulls in this niche. The skulls were not connected to the backbones—they had been decapitated—but the rib cages were complete, and the leg bones, some flexed, were also articulated. Several vertebrae seemed to have been damaged in an unusual way, cut open as if to expose the spinal cord. A snarled clump of hair lay nearby. Short. A boy’s. Clearly, the corpses had been cut into pieces and piled in the niche, which made sense, considering the dimensions of the alcove. It would have been inconvenient to fit a whole body in the cramped space, but one severed into parts…
Swallowing hard, she glanced at the clothing. It appeared to have been thrown in separately from the body parts. She reached out a hand, paused with an archaeologist’s habitual restraint, then remembered what Pendergast had said. Carefully, she began lifting out the clothing and bones, making a mental list as she did so. Three skulls, three pairs of shoes, three articulated rib cages, numerous vertebrae, and assorted small bones. Only one of the skulls showed marks similar to the skull Pendergast had originally shown her. But many of the vertebrae had been cut open in the same way, from the first lumbar vertebra all the way to the sacrum. She kept sorting. Three pairs of pants; buttons, a comb, bits of gristle and desiccated flesh; six sets of leg bones, feet out of their shoes. The shoes had been tossed in separately. If only I had sample bags, she thought. She pulled some hair out of a clump—part of the scalp still attached—and shoved it in her pocket. This was crazy: she hated working without proper equipment. All her professional instincts rebelled against such hasty, careless work.