Blue Labyrinth (10 page)

D
’Agosta perched on a desk in the central laboratory of the Osteology Department, Margo Green standing beside him, arms folded, drumming the fingers of one hand restlessly against her elbow. D’Agosta was watching with suppressed irritation as the technician, Sandoval, worked at his terminal, alternately tapping on his keyboard and peering at the screen. Everything in the Museum happened so damn slowly, he wondered how they ever got anything done.

“I threw away the scrap of paper with that accession number,” Sandoval said. “I didn’t think you’d need to see it again.” He seemed put out having to go through the process again—or perhaps it was just the thought of Frisby walking in and seeing the NYPD taking up more of his time.

“I wanted Dr. Green to have a look at the specimen as well,” D’Agosta said, giving the slightest emphasis to the word
doctor
.

“Got it.” Another few taps and, with a low whine, a piece of paper spooled out from the nearby printer. Sandoval handed it to D’Agosta, who shared it with Margo. She scanned it.

“This is the summary,” she said. “Can I see the details, as well?”

Sandoval blinked at her a minute. Then he turned back to the keyboard, in no hurry, and resumed his tapping. Several more sheets emerged from the printer, and he handed them to Margo. She looked them over.

The room was chilly—like the rest of the Museum—but D’Agosta noticed that a few beads of sweat had sprung out on her forehead and she seemed pale. “Are you feeling all right, Margo?”

Margo gave him a dismissive wave, a fleeting smile. “And this is the only specimen that Vic showed the fake scientist?”

Sandoval nodded as Margo continued to glance through the accession record. “Hottentot, male, approximately thirty-five years of age. Complete. Preparator: Dr. E. N. Padgett.”

At this, Sandoval chuckled. “Oh.
Him
.”

Margo glanced at him briefly and returned her attention to the sheets.

“See anything interesting?” D’Agosta asked.

“Not really. I see it was acquired in the usual way—the usual way back then, that is.” More flipping of pages. “It seems the Museum contracted with an explorer in South America to supply skeletons for their Osteological collections. The field notes of the explorer—a man named Hutchins—are included here.” Silence while Margo read a little farther. “My guess is this Hutchins was little better than a grave robber. He probably learned about a Hottentot funeral ceremony, spied on it, and then in the dead of night robbed the grave, prepared and shipped the skeleton back to the Museum. This supposed cause of death—dysentery, contracted during the Seventh Frontier War—was likely a ruse to make the transaction palatable to the Museum.”

“You don’t know that,” Sandoval said.

“You’re right. I don’t. But I’ve examined enough anthropological accession records to know how to read between the lines.” She put the paperwork down.

D’Agosta turned to Sandoval. “Would you mind getting the skeleton now?”

Sandoval sighed. “Right.” He got up from the desk, picked up the sheet containing the accession record number, and made for the hallway. Halfway to the open door, he glanced over his shoulder. “You want to come?”

D’Agosta made a move to follow him, but Margo put a restraining
hand on his forearm. “We’ll wait in the examination room across the hall.”

Sandoval shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He disappeared around the corner.

D’Agosta followed Margo down the hallway to the room where specimens were examined by visiting scientists. He was beginning to wish that he’d taken Singleton up on his offer of the jogger case. It was damn annoying that Pendergast vanished the way he did, without even saying why he thought the skeleton was important. It hadn’t occurred to D’Agosta until it was too late how much he’d been banking on the FBI agent’s assistance. And to top it off, he was starting to drown in reams of interview transcripts, evidence reports, and logs. All cases were full of useless paperwork, but this one—thanks to the size of the Museum and the number of its employees—was unique. Already, the empty office next to his at police headquarters was piling up with the spillover paperwork.

He watched as Margo put on a pair of latex gloves, glanced at her watch, and proceeded to pace back and forth. She gave every appearance of being agitated.

“Margo,” he said, “if this is a bad time, we can always come back later. I told you, it’s more a hunch than anything else.”

“No,” she replied. “It’s true, I’m due back at the institute soon—but that isn’t the problem.” She paced a moment longer, then—seeming to come to some decision—stopped and turned toward him. Her green eyes, so clear and intent, looked into his, and for a minute D’Agosta felt himself transported back, all those many years, to when he’d first questioned her about the Museum murders.

She held his gaze a long moment. Then she sank into one of the chairs surrounding an examination table. D’Agosta did the same.

Margo cleared her throat, swallowed. “I’d appreciate your not telling anyone this.”

D’Agosta nodded.

“You know what happened to me, back then.”

“Yeah. The Museum killings, the subway murders. It was a bad time.”

Margo looked down. “It’s not that. It’s what… what happened to me… afterward.”

For a moment, D’Agosta didn’t understand. And then it hit him like a load of bricks.
Oh Christ
, he thought. He’d totally forgotten about what had happened to Margo when she returned to the Museum to edit their scientific journal,
Museology
. How she’d been stalked like an animal in the darkened halls, terrorized, ultimately stabbed and nearly killed by a vicious and maniacal serial killer. It had taken her many months in a clinic to regain her health. He hadn’t considered how that might have affected her.

Margo remained silent for a moment. Then she began to speak again, a little haltingly. “Since then, it’s been… difficult for me to be in the Museum. Ironic, isn’t it, since my research can only be done here?” She shook her head. “I was always so brave. Such a tomboy. Remember how I insisted on accompanying you and Pendergast down into the subway tunnels—and beneath? But everything’s different now. There are only a few places I can go inside the Museum… without a panic attack. I can’t go too far into the collection areas. Stuff has to be brought out to me. I’ve memorized all the closest exits, how to get out in a hurry if I have to. I need people around me when I work. And I never stay past closing time—after dark. Just being here, on an upper floor, is difficult.”

As he listened, D’Agosta felt even worse for asking her help—he felt like a complete fool. “What you’re going through is normal.”

“It’s worse. I can’t stand dark places. Or the dark at all. I keep the lights in my apartment burning all night. You should see my electric bill.” She gave a sour laugh. “I’m a mess. I think I’ve got a new syndrome:
museumophobia
.”

“Listen,” D’Agosta interrupted, taking her hand. “Maybe we should forget about this damn skeleton. I’ll find somebody else who can—”

“No way. I may be psycho, but I’m not a coward. I’ll do this. Just don’t ask me to go down there.” She pointed down the hall, deeper into the collections, where Sandoval had retreated. “And don’t
ever
ask me—” she tried to keep her voice light, but a quaver of fear underscored it—“to go into the basement.”

“Thank you,” said D’Agosta.

At that moment footsteps sounded in the hallway. Sandoval reappeared, the familiar-looking collection tray held in both hands. He carefully laid it on the table between them.

“I’ll be at my desk,” he said. “Let me know when you’re finished.”

He left, closing the door behind him. D’Agosta watched as Margo pulled the gloves tighter onto her hands, then took a folded sheet of cotton from a nearby drawer, smoothed it out on the table’s surface, and began plucking bones from the tray and placing them on the cloth. A procession of bones emerged: ribs, vertebrae, arm and leg bones, skull, jaws, and many small bones he couldn’t identify. He remembered how Margo had bounced back from the trauma of the Museum murders, how she’d begun working out, gotten a handgun license, learned how to use a weapon. She seemed so together. But he’d seen the same thing happen to cops, and he hoped to hell this wasn’t making things worse…

He forgot his train of thought as he looked at Margo. She was sitting beside him, having suddenly gone still, a pelvis held in both gloved hands. The look on her face had changed. The distant, preoccupied expression was gone, replaced by puzzlement.

“What is it?” he asked.

Instead of answering, she turned the pelvis around in her hands, peering close. Then she carefully laid it on the cotton, picked up the lower jaw, and examined it intently, viewing it from one angle and another. At last she put it down and glanced over at D’Agosta.

“A Hottentot male, age thirty-five?”

“Yeah.”

Margo licked her lips. “Interesting. I’ll need to come back when I have more time, but I can tell you one thing already: this skeleton is about as much a Hottentot male as I am.”

T
he sun had been burning in the noonday sky when Pendergast drove away from Salton Palms in his pearl-colored Cadillac. When he returned again, it was after midnight.

He stopped three miles short of the ghost town. Turning off the headlights, he drove well off the road and hid the car behind a stand of stunted Joshua trees. He shut off the motor and sat motionless in the driver’s seat, considering the situation.

Most aspects remained shrouded in mystery. However, he now knew two particulars. Alban’s death had been an elaborate device to lure him to this place—the Golden Spider Mine. And the mine itself had been carefully prepared for him. Pendergast had no doubt that the mine entrance, even now, was under close observation. They were waiting for him.

Pendergast retrieved two rolled-up pieces of paper, which he smoothed open on his lap. One was the map of the Golden Spider Mine he had purchased from Cayute. The other contained old construction blueprints of the Salton Fontainebleau.

Pulling a hooded flashlight from the glove compartment, he first turned his attention to the map of the mine. It was a relatively small mine, with a central passage that appeared to slope downward at a shallow angle, heading southwestward away from the lake. About half a dozen smaller passages angled off from the central one, some straight,
others crooked, following the veins of turquoise. Some ended in deep shafts. Pendergast had already committed all this to memory.

He moved the beam of his flashlight to the far edge of the map. At the back end of the mine, a corkscrew passage led off from the main works, narrowing as it went, finally terminating half a mile away in a steep, almost vertical climb: an air shaft, perhaps, or more likely a back entrance that had gone unused. Its lines were faded and worn, as if even the cartographer had forgotten about it by the time the map was complete.

Now Pendergast overlaid the diagram of the mine with the blueprints of the old hotel. He looked back and forth between one and the other, trying to set in his mind the relative positions of the Golden Spider and the Salton Fontainebleau. The blueprints were arranged by floor, and clearly showed the guest suites, capacious lobby, dining rooms, kitchen, casino, spas, ballrooms—and a curious circular construction between the cocktail lounge and the rear promenade labeled
ANM. GRDN
.

Animal garden
, Cayute had said.
Built it up out of a natural hole in the ground beneath the hotel. Had real live lions and black panthers and Siberian tigers down there
.

Once again, Pendergast compared the blueprints with the map with extreme care. The resort’s animal garden was situated precisely over the back entrance to the Golden Spider Mine.

Pendergast turned off the flashlight and sat back. It made perfect sense: what better place to construct a subterranean animal garden than in a forgotten, disused section of a long-abandoned mine?

His mysterious hosts had busily prepared the mine for his arrival and taken pains to conceal their tracks. The mine was, without doubt, a trap—but a trap
with a back door
.

While the cooling engine ticked quietly, Pendergast considered how to proceed. Under cover of darkness, he would reconnoiter and enter the resort, locate the back entrance to the mine, and approach the trap from the rear. He would learn the nature of the trap and, if necessary, retask it for his own purposes or disable it. Then, the following day, he would drive up to the main entrance of the mine,
without any attempt at disguise, seemingly unaware of the trap inside. And in this way, he would lay his hands on his host or hosts. Once they were in his power, he had no doubt he could encourage them to reveal what lay behind this expensive and absurdly elaborate scheme… and who had killed his son to set it in motion.

Of course, he had to admit to the possibility that there might be something he had overlooked; some unknown complication that would force him to revise his plans. But he had been very careful in his surveillance and his preparations, and this strategy seemed to offer the greatest chance of success by far.

He spent another fifteen minutes poring over the hotel blueprints, committing every last hallway and closet and staircase to memory. The animal garden itself was in the basement, its beasts kept at a safe distance from the spectators above. It was accessible through a small suite of rooms comprising a grooming area and several handling and veterinary rooms. Pendergast would have to pass through these rooms to access the garden itself—and thereby reach the back entrance to the mine.

Taking his Les Baer .45 from the glove compartment, Pendergast checked it and snugged it into his waistband. Blueprints in hand, he exited the car, quietly closed the door, and waited in the darkness, all his senses on alert. The half-moon was partially obscured by wispy clouds, providing just enough light for his preternaturally sharpened senses to see by. Gone were the jeans, denim shirt, and cowboy boots: he now wore black pants, black rubber-soled shoes, and a black turtleneck under a black utility vest.

All was utterly still. He waited another moment, carefully scanning the landscape. Then he stuffed the blueprints into his vest and began moving silently northward, in the concealing shadow of the Scarrit Hills.

After fifteen minutes, he veered eastward and climbed up the rearward side of the hill. From the rocks at the summit he examined the lines of the Salton Fontainebleau, its gables and minarets looking even more spectral in the faint moonlight. Beyond lay the dark, dank, motionless surface of the Salton Sea.

Pulling the binoculars from his utility vest, Pendergast surveyed the area, from south to north, with extreme care. All was silent and still, the landscape as dead as the sea that it surrounded. To the north, he could just make out the small black declivity that led into the main entrance of the mine. Even now, unseen eyes, hidden somewhere in the ruins of Salton Palms, were probably surveilling it, awaiting his arrival.

He spent another ten minutes, concealed in the rocks, binoculars constantly roaming. Then, as clouds thickened before the moon, he crept over the crest of the hill and made his way down the far side, careful to remain in the darkness behind the ruins of the Fontainebleau, where he could not be seen by anyone watching the mine entrance. As he inched forward, black against the night-dark sand, the huge resort loomed up until it blotted out the sky.

A broad veranda ran along the rear of the resort. Pendergast flitted up to it, paused, and carefully climbed its stairs to the quiet protest of desiccated wood. With each step he took, blooms of fine dust rose in small mushroom clouds. It was like walking on the lunar surface. From the vantage point of the veranda, he glanced left and right along its length, back at the short set of stairs he had climbed, down at the railing. There was nothing to see but his own footprints. The Fontainebleau slept in undisturbed silence.

Now he approached a set of double doors leading into the resort. He trod as lightly as a cat, testing the floorboards with each step. The doors were closed, and had once been locked, but long-ago vandals had ripped one door from its hinges, and it hung open.

Beyond lay a large common room of some kind, perhaps used for afternoon tea. It was very dark. Pendergast stood motionless just within the doorway, giving his eyes time to adjust. There was a strong smell of dry rot, salt, and rat urine. A huge stone fireplace dominated one wall. Wing chairs and skeletonized sofas were arranged around the room, springs protruding from their rotten fabric. Leather banquettes with their tables ran along the far edge of the room, the once-soft seats now cracked, split, and spewing cotton. A few broken and
faded photographs of the Salton Sea in its 1950s heyday—motorboats, water-skiers, fishermen in waders—adorned the walls among many empty, pale rectangles, the rest having long been stolen. Everything was covered in a fine mantle of dust.

Pendergast crossed the room, stepped beneath an archway, and emerged into a central passage. There was a huge staircase here that swept up to the floors above, where the guest rooms and suites were located. Ahead lay the dim outlines of the main lobby, with its thick wooden columns and seaside murals only partially visible. He stood for a moment in the silence, getting his bearings. The resort’s blueprints were tucked into his vest, but he did not need them—the layout was imprinted on his mind. A spacious corridor led down to the left, presumably to the spa and the ballrooms. To his right was a low archway leading into the cocktail lounge.

Set into a nearby wall was a broken glass display case, containing a single sheet of mimeographed paper, curled and faded. Pendergast approached it and—peering close in the faint moonlight—scanned its contents.

Pendergast turned toward the arch leading into the lounge. The windows of the lounge were shuttered, and although several slats were drooping or had fallen away, the glass shattered, the room was still very dark. Pendergast reached into a pocket of his vest, pulled out a pair of night-vision goggles with a third-generation image intensifier, fitted them to his head, and turned them on. Instantly his surroundings bloomed into clarity, chairs and walls and chandeliers all outlined in ghostly green. Pendergast turned a dial on the goggles, adjusting the brightness of the image tube, then moved across the lounge.

It was large, with a stage in one corner and a long, semicircular bar dominating the far wall. Round tables were arranged around the rest of the room. Broken cocktail glasses lay on the floor and on the tables, their contents long since evaporated into tarry deposits. The bar itself, although the liquor was gone, displayed neatly arranged rows of napkins and jars full of swizzle sticks, all covered with a fine layer of dust. The marbled mirror behind the bar had shattered, dully glittering shards lying on the bar and floor. It was a testament to the remote bleakness of the Salton Fontainebleau—or, perhaps, the vague sense of restless unease, such as a haunted house might exude—that vandals, or scavengers like Cayute, had not completely preyed upon it. Instead the old hotel remained for the most part a time capsule of the Rat Pack generation, abandoned to the vagaries of the elements.

One wall of the lounge was supplied with a picture window, which had survived the passage of time with only a few cracks in it, but so covered with a hoarfrost of salt that it was almost opaque. Pendergast walked over to it, wiped a spot clear with a paper napkin, and peered through. Beyond lay a circular enclosure, lounge chairs arranged around its circumference, as around an indoor swimming pool, except that where the pool would normally be was a yawning black hole lined with brick, surrounded by a protective iron railing. It was about fifteen feet across and looked like the maw of an oversize well. Peering closely with the night-vision goggles, Pendergast thought he could make out, within the blackness of the hole, the plastic, warped upper leaves of several fake palm trees.

The animal garden. It was not hard to imagine high rollers and Hollywood stars rubbing shoulders here half a century earlier, under the starry night, highballs in hand, laughter and the clinking of glasses mingling with the roar of wild beasts as they sipped their drinks and looked down at the animals roaming below.

Pendergast mentally reviewed the hotel blueprints and the map of the Golden Spider Mine. The animal garden was situated directly over the rear entrance to the mine, utilizing the tunnel as a place for the animals to roam under the sight of the guests.

Turning away from the window, he lifted up the hinged bar and stepped into the bartender’s station. He walked past the empty shelves that had once held innumerable bottles of fine cognac and vintage champagne, being careful not to tread on broken glass, until he reached a cobwebbed door with a single round window set into it. He pressed against the door and it opened with a soft creak, the cobwebs parting softly. He heard the faintest skittering of rodents. A smell of stuffiness, rancid grease, and droppings reached his nostrils.

Beyond lay a warren of kitchens, storage rooms, and food preparation areas. Pendergast moved silently through them, looking this way and that with the goggles, until he located the door that opened onto a concrete stairway leading down.

The service spaces of the resort’s basement were spare and functional, like the lower decks of a passenger ship. Pendergast made his way past a boiler room and several storage areas—one full of rotting deck chairs and beach umbrellas, another with rack after rack of moth-eaten maids’ uniforms—until he reached a door of solid metal.