Blue Labyrinth (14 page)

T
he Microforms Reading Room on the first floor of the New York Public Library’s main building was brightly lit, packed with machines for reading microfilm and microfiche, and too warm for comfort. As he took a seat beside Margo, D’Agosta loosened his tie and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt. He watched as she loaded a reel of microfilm onto their machine and threaded it through the mechanism and onto the takeup spindle.

“Christ,” D’Agosta said. “You’d think they would have digitized all this by now. So what are we looking at?”

“The
New-York Evening Independent
. It was quite comprehensive for its time, but verged toward more sensationalist stories than the
Times
.” She glanced at the microfilm box. “This spool covers the years 1888 to 1892. Where do you suggest we start?”

“The skeleton entered the collection in ’89. Let’s start there.” D’Agosta tugged his tie down a little farther. Damn, it was hot in here. “If this guy got rid of his wife, he wouldn’t wait around to dispose of her body.”

“Right.” Margo nudged the big dial on the front of the microfilm machine into forward. Old newspaper pages scrolled up the screen, first slowly, then more quickly. The machine made a whirring noise. D’Agosta glanced over at Margo. She seemed a different person when outside the Museum—more at ease.

He couldn’t shake the feeling that, while this might be an interesting exercise, in the end it wouldn’t move his own case forward—even if Padgett had killed his wife and stuffed her bones in the collection. He found himself freshly annoyed at Pendergast for the way he’d stopped by the Museum, asked just enough questions to raise D’Agosta’s own hopes for the case—and then disappeared without a word. That had been five days ago. D’Agosta had begun to leave increasingly testy messages for Pendergast, but so far they had borne no fruit.

Margo slowed the machine again as they reached 1889. Page after page passed: stories about New York politics, colorful or lurid foreign events, gossip and crime and all the attendant hustle and bustle of a city still growing at flank speed. And then, in late summer, something of interest appeared:

“My God,” Margo murmured. “So he
did
kill his wife.”

“It’s just an arrest,” D’Agosta told her. “Let’s keep going.”

Margo moved through the next several issues. About a week later, another related notice appeared. It had become more important now and was given its own story.

D’Agosta scoffed. “Even back then, the Museum was more concerned with protecting its reputation than helping solve a crime.” He paused. “Wonder what this patent medicine was. Probably loaded with cocaine or opium.”

“The condition doesn’t sound like your standard drug addiction. Wasting… that was nineteenth-century-speak for terminal. Now, that’s interesting…” She paused.

“What?”

“It’s just that one of the tests I conducted on the skeleton did show some anomalous mineralization. Perhaps Ophelia Padgett was suffering from a bone disorder or other degenerative condition.”

D’Agosta watched as she moved forward through the newspaper’s later issues. There were one or two brief mentions of the upcoming trial; another brief dispatch stating the trial was under way. And then, on November 14, 1889:

“No
corpus delicti
,” D’Agosta said. “Of course there was no body. The old guy had it macerated in the Osteology vats and then stuck the bones into the collection, labeling them Hottentot!”

“The science of forensic anthropology wasn’t very advanced in 1889. Once she was reduced to a skeleton, they’d never have been able to identify her. The perfect crime.”

D’Agosta slumped in his chair. He felt a lot more tired now than when he’d entered the room. “But what the hell does it mean? And why would this phony scientist steal one of her bones?”

Margo shrugged. “It’s a mystery.”

“Great. Instead of solving a week-old murder, we’ve uncovered a century-old one.”

W
here did we come from? How did our lives begin? How did we end up on this speck of dust called Earth, surrounded by the countless other specks of dust that make up the universe? In order to answer these questions, we have to go back billions of years, to a time before that universe existed. To a time when there was nothing—nothing but darkness…

D’Agosta turned from the gentle curve of the one-way glass and rubbed his bleary eyes. He’d heard the presentation five times already and could probably recite the damn thing by heart.

Stifling a yawn, he looked around the dim confines of the Museum’s video security room. Actually, it wasn’t really the video security room—the actual name of the room was Planetarium Support. It housed the computers, software, and banks of NAS drives and image servers that drove the fulldome video at the heart of the Museum’s planetarium. The room was tucked into a corner of the sixth floor, hard by the upper section of the planetarium’s dome—hence the curved glass in the far wall. As far as D’Agosta could make out, while the Museum had been quite proactive in installing security cameras, it hadn’t occurred to anyone that they might actually need to be viewed at some later date. Hence, the monitors for viewing archival security images had been retrofitted into Planetarium Support, and the technology for playing back those images was borrowed from the
planetarium computers—no doubt some bean counter’s idea of economizing resources.

The problem was, during visiting hours the room’s lights had to be dimmed to a point where they were almost completely off—otherwise, the glow would bleed out through the one-way glass in the planetarium’s dome and spoil the illusion for the tourists in their seats below. The video monitors for examining the security footage all faced away from that single window. And it was cramped: D’Agosta and two of his detectives, Jimenez and Conklin, had to sit practically in each other’s laps while working the three available security playback workstations. D’Agosta had been sitting here in the dark for hours now, staring at the grainy little screen, and a nasty headache was beginning to form just behind his eyeballs. But something drove him on: a tickle of fear that, unless the videotapes scored a hit, the case was going to go cold again.

All of a sudden the dark room filled with a brilliant explosion of light: in the planetarium beyond and below the window, the Big Bang had just taken place. D’Agosta should have remembered this—after all, he’d heard the intro start up just the minute before—but once again it took him by surprise and he jumped. He shut his eyes, but it was too late: already, he could see stars dancing crazily behind his shut eyelids.

“God
damn
it!” he heard Conklin say.

Now thunderous music intruded into the cramped space. He sat motionless, eyes closed, until the stars went away and the music decreased slightly in volume. Then he opened his eyes again, blinked, and tried to focus on the screen before him.

“Anything?” he asked.

“No,” said Conklin.

“Nada,” said Jimenez.

He’d known it was a silly question even as he asked it—the moment they saw something, they’d sing out. But he’d asked anyway, in the crazy hope that simply by articulating it he might force something to happen.

The tape he was watching—a view of the main entrance to the Hall of Marine Life, five
PM
to six
PM
, Saturday, June 19, the day Marsala had been murdered—came to an end without showing anything of interest. He moused the window closed, rubbed his eyes again, drew a line through the corresponding entry on a clipboard that sat between him and Jimenez, then pulled up the security program’s main menu to select another, as-yet-unwatched video. With a distinct lack of enthusiasm, he chose the next video in the series: Hall of Marine Life, main entrance camera, six
PM
to seven
PM
, once again from June 12. He began running through the video stream, first at true speed, then at double speed, then—as the hall became completely empty—at eight times speed.

Nothing.

Crossing out this video entry in turn, he selected, for a change of pace, a camera that covered the southern half of the Great Rotunda, four
PM
to five
PM
. With a practiced hand he cued the digital feedback to its beginning, switched the display to full-screen mode, then started the playback at normal speed. A bird’s-eye view of the Rotunda flickered into life, streams of people moving from right to left across the screen. Closing time was drawing near, and they were heading for the exits in droves. He rubbed his eyes and peered closer, determined to concentrate despite the lousy conditions. He could make out the guards at their stations, the docents with their flags-on-a-stick weaving their way through the crowds, the volunteers at the information desk beginning to put away maps and flyers and donation requests for the night.

A thunderous roar from the planetarium beyond the far wall. Shouts and applause arose from the audience: the formation of the earth was taking place, all jets of flame and coronas of color and balls of fire. Deep-bass organ notes vibrated D’Agosta’s chair to a point where he almost fell out of it.

Shit
. He shoved himself away from the screen with a brutal push. Enough was enough. Tomorrow morning, he’d go back to Singleton, eat crow, kiss ass, grovel, do whatever he had to do in order to be reassigned to that Upper East Side slasher murder.

Suddenly he froze. And then he scrambled back to the video screen, staring at it intently. He watched for perhaps thirty seconds. Then, fingers almost trembling with eagerness, he clicked the
REWIND
button, then watched the video play back, eyes just inches from the screen. Then he played it back again. And again.

“Mother of God,” he whispered.

There he was—the fake scientist.

He glanced at the printout of Bonomo’s facial reconstruction—taped to the side of Jimenez’s monitor—and then back to the screen. It was unmistakably him. He was wearing a lightweight trench coat, dark slacks, and slip-on rubber sneakers: the kind that made no noise when you walked. Not exactly standard attire for a scientist. D’Agosta watched as he came through the entrance doors, glanced around—apparently noting the location of the cameras—paid admission, then made his way through the security station and strolled across the Rotunda—against the exiting traffic—before disappearing out of view. D’Agosta played it back yet again, marveling at the man’s coolness, the almost insolent slowness of his walk.

Christ. This is it
. He turned in excitement to announce his discovery when he noticed a dark figure standing behind him.

“Pendergast!” he said in surprise.

“Vincent. I understand from Mrs. Trask that you, ah, have been asking after me. Urgently.” Pendergast looked around, his pale eyes taking in the room. “Box seats to the cosmos—how stimulating. What, pray tell, is going on?”

In his exhilaration, D’Agosta forgot his earlier annoyance at the agent.

“We found him!”

“God?”

“No, no—the fake Dr. Waldron! Right here!”

A look of what might have been impatience flitted across Pendergast’s face. “The fake who? I’m lost.”

Jimenez and Conklin crowded around the monitor as D’Agosta explained. “Remember, the last time you were here, you wondered about the visiting scientist Victor Marsala worked with? Well, his
credentials were false. And now look: I’ve got eyes on him, entering the Museum at four twenty
PM
, on the very afternoon of the day Marsala was murdered!”

“How interesting,” said Pendergast, in a bored voice, already edging toward the door. He seemed to have lost all interest in the case.

“We did a facial composite,” said D’Agosta, “and here he is. Compare this guy on screen to the composite.” D’Agosta plucked the composite from the side of Jimenez’s monitor and held it toward him. “It’s a match. Take a look!”

“Delighted to hear the case is proceeding well,” said Pendergast, moving closer to the door. “I’m afraid my attention is now fully occupied on something else, but I’m sure things are in excellent hands—”

He paused as his eye fell on the portrait D’Agosta held out toward him. His voice died away, and he froze. A great stillness took hold while the agent’s features went as pale as death. He reached out, took the sheet, and stared at it, the paper making a rattling sound. Then he sank into an empty chair set against the wall, still clutching the paper and staring at it with great intensity.

“Bonomo did a damn good job,” D’Agosta said. “Now all we have to do is track down the son of a bitch.”

For a moment, Pendergast did not reply. When he did, his voice was low, sepulchral, as if emanating from the grave. “Remarkable indeed,” he said. “But there is no need to track him down.”

This stopped D’Agosta. “What do you mean?”

“I made this gentleman’s acquaintance recently. Quite recently, in fact.” And the hand holding the facial composite dropped very slowly as the sheet of paper slid to the dusty floor.