Petrified (27 page)

‘Oh, yes?'

‘A taxi driver said he was passing through West Mount Airy around nine thirty yesterday evening when he saw something fly into the second story of a private house. He says he only caught a glimpse of it and at first he thought it was a guy on a hang-glider who had gotten out of control.'

Jenna put down her coffee cup. ‘A guy on a hang-glider? Are you serious? Where the hell could anybody have hang-glid from, in West Mount Airy? Is that the word? Or is it “hang-glided”?'

‘I don't think it matters, because our taxi driver soon realized that he couldn't have been a guy on a hang-glider because he circled around and collided with the house a second time. I mean like really smashed into it. Then he flew off.'

Jenna took the note and studied it with a frown. ‘Did they send out any officers to check this out?'

‘Yes, they did, because they'd had several calls from neighbors, too. They all reported two loud crashes, and severe damage to one of the windows at the front of the property. It seems like somebody in the property got badly hurt, too, because the residents called for an ambulance. Officer Dolan at the Fourteenth promised to call me back when he had further information on that, but so far he hasn't.'

‘Did any of the neighbors see this mystery out-of-control hang-glider who couldn't have been an out-of-control hang-glider?'

‘Nope. The only eyewitness was our taxi driver. His name and his number's at the bottom of the page, works for Victory Taxis.'

‘Do we know whose property this was?'

‘No. But I can call Dolan and ask him.'

‘It's OK,' said Jenna. ‘I'll do it. Thanks for taking the message.'

‘You're welcome,' said Detective Brubaker. ‘That'll cost you a donut. In fact, that'll cost you two donuts.'

Jenna opened the box and he helped himself. She picked one out, too, and took a large bite. She punched out the number of the Fourteenth District and they answered so promptly that she still had her mouth full and a drip of raspberry jelly on her chin.

Officer Dolan was just about to end his shift, but she caught him at the front desk.

‘Thanks for calling about that flying thing,' she told him. ‘I appreciate anybody who does real joined-up police work.'

‘To be honest, it was my partner, more than me. He said it reminded him of all that wacky stuff about statues falling out of the sky, and I remembered seeing that interview you did on the TV.'

‘Have you found out yet if anybody was hurt?'

‘Yeah. I had a call from the ER at Albert Einstein Medical Center about ten minutes ago. Hold on, let me check my notes. Yes, here. The casualty was a seventeen-year-old male name of Stuart Wintergreen. He was hit by flying glass when the window of the property was smashed in, and he suffered a severed femoral artery.'

‘What's his condition now?'

‘He bled out before they could get him to hospital. He died.'

‘Jesus,' said Jenna. ‘Do you have any idea what it was that hit that house?'

‘None at all.'

‘Do you have an address?'

‘Sure. Six-oh-five, West Mount Airy Avenue. Home of Professor Nathan Underhill and Doctor Grace Underhill.'

‘You're kidding me.'

‘Excuse me?'

‘No, no – I'm sorry. You just took me by surprise, that's all. Professor Underhill seems to be involved in every single case I've been investigating lately.'

‘Yeah. I get people like that. They turn up at every crime scene and every fire and every traffic accident. You look through the photographs and there they are, in every single picture, standing in the background. My partner reckons they're aliens.'

‘I think your partner may be right.'

Jenna gulped down the rest of her coffee and left her desk with a donut gripped in her mouth like a giant teething ring. Dan was waiting for her in the parking lot outside, with his engine running. It was starting to rain.

‘Suits you,' he said, nodding at the donut.

Jenna took it out of her mouth. ‘You want some?'

Dan bit into it and then handed it back. ‘This Professor Underhill . . . maybe it's just a series of coincidences, you know – him being around when that guy from Schiller got burned, and that hospital orderly got torn to pieces, and this kid got killed.'

‘Oh, you think? I don't believe it for a moment. There's a connection between all of these fatalities, and it's my hunch that Professor Underhill knows what it is.'

‘If he knows what it is, why hasn't he told you? There's no circumstantial evidence so far that he was responsible. I don't know about this kid.'

‘Stuart Wintergreen,' said Jenna, checking her notebook. ‘Seventeen years old, attended West Airy High School. Model student, apparently. Loved dogs. Wanted to go to Penn Vet when he graduated to study veterinary medicine.'

They had only just reached Pennsylvania Avenue when Jenna's cellphone played. It was raining harder now, and the rubbery squeaking of the windshield wipers made it difficult for her to hear.

‘Jenna? It's Ed Freiburg. I've identified that statue that we found in the wetlands at Bartram's Gardens. You want to come over to Arch Street and take a look?'

‘Maybe later, Ed,' said Jenna, but then she thought,
if there
is
a connection between Professor Underhill and these falling statues, the more I know about them
before I go to question him, the better
. ‘No – change of plan. I'll come on over right now.'

‘What's up?' asked Dan.

‘Turn around. Ed Freiburg has something to show us.'

‘Nothing disgusting, I hope. I just ate breakfast.'

They met Ed in the large chilly garage at the rear of the CSI building on Arch Street. It was mostly used for the forensic examination of vehicles that had been involved in crimes or suicides or suspicious accidents, and there were two SUVs parked side by side, one burned out and the other with its driver's door riddled with bullet holes. The garage was high-ceilinged and neon-lit, and it echoed with the banging of hammers and the persistent nagging of circular saws.

The statue that had been retrieved from the wetlands at Bartram's Gardens was standing at the far end. Ed came over to greet them, wearing a noisy blue Tyvek suit and a baseball cap. He was carrying a large Manila folder in one hand and a hotdog in the other.

‘Breakfast,' he remarked, holding up the hotdog. Then he nodded at the statue and said, ‘He's a real beauty, ain't he? America's Next Top Gargoyle.'

The statue scowled back down at them – over ten feet tall, carved out of grayish-white limestone, with horns and bulbous eyes and a distinctive beak with sharp teeth protruding from either side. It had curved claws like scimitars and it looked no less threatening for having been damaged. Its broken wing lay on the floor close beside it.

‘Its eyes are open,' said Jenna.

Ed stared at her. ‘It's made out of limestone, Jenna. It couldn't close its eyes if it wanted to. Not that it could ever want to do anything, because it's an inanimate object.'

‘OK . . . so you've found out what it is.'

‘Yes, I think I have.' He opened his folder and leafed through the first two or three pages. ‘It took me some time, because it's a really
rare
inanimate object. But I was able to track it down because it has a very distinctive chemical composition. It's made out of limestone from a quarry south of Kraków, in Poland. The quarry's flooded now, and they call it Zakrówek Lake, but back in the fourteenth century, it was the source of building materials for several of the early churches in Kraków, including Saint Catherine's, in the old Kazimierz quarter, which is where
this
baby came from.'

Dan approached the statue and looked up at it, wrinkling up his nose. ‘Ugly looking dude, isn't he?'

‘He's a gargoyle, Dan. Gargoyles are ugly by nature. I believe that this particular one is called a
draghignazzo
, which means “nasty dragon”. It's mentioned in Dante's Inferno as one of the demons who guarded the Fifth Pit of Hell.'

‘How did it get here, to Philly?' asked Jenna. She couldn't take her eyes away from it. It seemed to be staring at
her
directly, and she had the irrational feeling that if she broke eye contact, it would instantly come to life and attack her. She had interviewed dozens of sociopathic criminals who had the same unblinking look in their eyes, and she knew from experience that you never turned your back on them, ever, not even for a moment.

‘I checked it out on the Internet. Saint Catherine's was plagued with bad luck right from the moment it was built. In the fifteenth century, even before it was finished, there was an earthquake in Kraków and half of it collapsed. There was another earthquake in seventeen eighty-six, when Saint Catherine's was the only building in the entire city that was damaged.

‘This particular gargoyle toppled off the south porch and killed a young priest who had something of a reputation as an exorcist. Because of that, it was never put back up again when the church was restored. The priests kept it in the vaults, and they actually chained it up with heavy iron chains to prevent it from escaping. Superstitious, or what?'

Jenna blinked, and for a split second she thought that the gargoyle blinked, too.
I dare you
, she thought
. I dare you to close your eyes and show me that you're really alive.

Ed said, ‘When the architect John Haviland was building the Eastern State Penitentiary in the 1920s, he wanted to have gargoyles placed all along the parapets, each one of them representing a different sin, to frighten the inmates into mending their wicked ways. He got to hear about our pal the
draghignazzo
here – after all, it was quite a legend in gargoyle circles – and had it shipped over to the USA. I think the priests at Saint Catherine's were pleased to get rid of it, especially since Haviland paid them five hundred dollars for it.'

‘I never saw any gargoyles on top of the Eastern State Penitentiary,' said Jenna.

‘That's because they never put any up. Haviland gathered together dozens of them, all from different parts of Europe, but they ended up being stored in the cellars underneath cell-block fourteen.'

‘And that's where they are now?'

Ed took a last bite of hotdog and shook his head. ‘Not any more they're not. Earlier this year, the penitentiary's directors sold them all off.'

‘Do we know who bought them?'

‘A company called A-One Chemicals, with a registered office in Delaware. I tried to track them down, but they don't have a website and they don't appear in any business directories. There's an A-One Chemicals in Deer Park, Texas, but they make cleaning solvents and they wouldn't have any use for more than a hundred gargoyles.'

Jenna said, ‘Dan – you want to follow that up? Go talk to the accountants at the penitentiary. They must have a record of who paid them for the gargoyles, and how. And somebody must have hoisted them out of that vault, and trucked them someplace.'

‘Sure. I'll get right on it.'

‘So how about it, Ed?' Jenna asked him, although she didn't take her eyes away from the
draghignazzo.
‘How did it end up in Bartram's Gardens? Was it floated there, or dragged there? Or was it dropped there?'

‘All the indications are that it fell, and from pretty high up. That's how its wing got broke. You can see for yourself that it has no abrasions or chips or vegetation stains on it, which you would have expected if it had been dragged.'

‘So we're back to your theory about flying creatures who turn to stone in mid-air?'

‘That's about the size of it.'

‘I can't go back to the captain and tell him that. He'll send me off on psych leave.'

‘In that case, Jenna, you'll have to do what you said before. Go back to square one and find some new evidence.'

Jenna said, ‘Yes. And I know where to start. When something wacky happens, you need to go looking for the wackjobs.'

TWENTY-NINE

Saturday, 10:43 a.m.

S
ukie was sitting up in bed eating a bowl of Cheerios when Nathan and Aarif and Kavita came in to see her. Her face was still flushed but all of the blisters and the scarlet searing had melted away. She looked as if she were suffering from nothing worse than a bad case of sunburn.

Braydon was sitting beside her. He had shaved and showered and changed into a clean blue button-down shirt and he was so delighted that he couldn't keep still.

‘How are you feeling, Sukie?' asked Nathan, sitting down on the opposite side of the bed.

Sukie smiled and said, ‘Great, thanks.'

Braydon said, ‘Doctor Berman told me what you did, Professor Underhill.'

‘Well, maybe he shouldn't have. We used your daughter as a guinea pig and we didn't ask your permission.'

‘I might have said no,' Braydon told him. ‘In fact, I probably
would
have said no. But look at her now. I don't know how to thank you. I mean, bless you – all of you, from the bottom of my heart.'

Kavita said, ‘You should know that Professor Underhill tested the procedure on himself, before he tried it on your daughter. He deliberately burned his own hand, very badly, but when we injected him with the stem cells from the phoenix, his hand was healed in only twenty-four hours. In fact, in less than that. That was what persuaded us that it was probably safe to go ahead.'

‘So far as I'm concerned, it's a miracle,' said Braydon. ‘But I've learned something else, too. Every kid needs two parents, their father and their mother, and no matter how much their parents might have grown to hate each other, they need to talk, even if they talk with clenched teeth. A child's happiness is worth infinitely more than any of that adult-bickering shit.'

He turned around and took hold of Sukie's hand. ‘Do you know something, sweetheart? You're more to me than all of the treasure in the world. And look at you now. These people have saved your life. You'll never have to hide your face or put up with people staring at you like you're some kind of freak.'