Vespers (12 page)

The detective asked Henry to make exact measurements of the gouges and to beep him when he had the figures. Then he hung up.

A mountain lion,he thought. What the hell did that have to do with bats? Nothing. It made no sense. Gentry was about to call Nancy at the museum when the phone rang.

It was Nancy.

“You’re back,” she said. “I’m glad you’re all right.”

Her enthusiasm sounded a little on the light side. Or maybe that was just his own guilty interpretation.

“Thanks,” he said. “I got in a few minutes ago. I was just about to call you.”

“Did you find anything in the room that I should know about?”

“As a matter of fact, I did,” he said. “The bats were definitely there-”

“Were they still there?”

“No. But there were fifteen victims. All dead.”

She was silent.

“Most of them looked like they’d been sleeping. They were badly lacerated and covered with guano.”

“How fresh did the guano look?”

“Exactly like the stuff in the tunnel,”Gentry said. “I’m waiting for lab results. Although there was one thing-my forensics guy said that one of the victims looked like she’d been attacked by a lion.”

“Was he serious?”

“It wasn’t a scientific judgment, if that’s what you mean. Just an off-the-cuff observation. Nancy, can we talk about this face to face?”

“Why?”

“Because I want to brief you and I want to apologize for what happened down in the tunnel. I’m also sorry about the way it happened. I told you, it wasn’t personal. It was just-the way it had to be.”

“Had to be?”

“Yeah. It’s a long story.”

Joyce was silent again. Then she asked, “Can you come up to the museum?”

“I can.”

“All right. When the professor and I are finished, we’ll talk. We’re on the fifth floor, Professor Lowery’s lab. There’s a private elevator-ask one of the security people.”

“Thanks. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

Gentry hung up, then sped through the eight messages on his voicemail. He forwarded a few to Detectives Anthony and Malcolm, saved the rest, then hurried downstairs. Anyone who needed to reach him could get his pager number off the voicemail message. He stopped in Captain Sheehy’s office and informed him that he’d like to spend time on the Grand Central killings. The precinct commander was surprised by Gentry’s interest in a hardcore case but okayed the request, as long as the detective didn’t step on the toes of the homicide team that was also investigating the deaths. Sheehy said he didn’t want an IDPS-an intradepartmental political shitstorm. Gentry said he didn’t anticipate the two investigations overlapping. Then he bummed a ride from a patrol car heading uptown.

While he was in the car, his pager beeped. He looked down, expecting it to be Chris Henry. It wasn’t.

It was Ari Moreaux.

The Christopher Street subway station serves west Greenwich Village and New York University. To the south, it allows riders access to the World Trade Center, the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island ferry, and a transferride into Brooklyn. To the north, it’s a short hop to Times Square, Lincoln Center, Columbia University, and Grant’s Tomb.

The morning rush hour over, the crowd on the downtown platform built slowly. It consisted of a handful of tourists who were double-checking maps in guidebooks and a pair of slouching students wearing baggy clothes and blank expressions. A guitarist performed near the turnstiles, his instrument case open at his feet for donations. A businessman with a Walkman and a crisply foldedWall StreetJournal stood alone at the end of the platform.

Save for the guitarist’s unplugged sounds of Oingo Boingo, it was quiet on the platform. Then the first of the little brown bats flew in. It scratched a jagged course high over the tracks and snared the attention of one of the students.

“Hey, cool,” he droned. His sullen eyes opened slightly as he raised a pale finger and pointed.

The girl had her back to the tracks. She turned and looked as the bat zigzagged toward them. It landed on the boy’s black wool cap, and he suddenly came to life. He backed away, swinging his gangly arms at the creature as the talons pierced his scalp.

“Fuck, man!”

The girl stepped forward and swatted at the bat. The boy turned circles blindly as four more bats suddenly raced from the tunnel to the platform. Two of them descended on the girl from above and snatched at her long black-and-green hair while the other two dug at the back of a boy’s neck. She screamed in pain as the bats pulled her head back.

The tourists finally looked over, and the guitarist stopped playing. Shouting for help, they all ran toward the kids. The businessman standing one hundred feet away saw and heard nothing. His eyes were on his newspaper and his ears were full of opera.

Sitting in her bulletproof booth and counting out five-dollar bills, subway clerk Meg Ricci heard the cries of the people on the platform. She looked up over her reading glasses and saw the tourists and students dancing and flailing. She saw the musician swinging his guitar around him. Then she saw the flapping wings and the dark little bats attacking their faces and hands. She snatched up the phone and called for police assistance.

As Meg told the dispatcher what was going on, something else happened. A well-dressed man at the end of the platform had removed his earphones and looked over. As he turned toward the others, a large shadow enveloped him. It came over the man from above, like poured paint, and then spilled quickly to the left. When the inky blackness was gone, so was the man.

Meg reported exactly what she saw before she realized how insane it must sound. The dispatcher matter-of-factly asked her to repeat it. Meg did. That was what had happened.

A few seconds later the bats suddenly stopped attacking the people on the platform. They fluttered around for a moment, circling just under the ceiling like leaves in an eddy. Then they darted back over the tracks and took off down the tunnel, following the inky shape.

While the dispatcher put out a call, Meg broke the rules. Pulling a first aid kit from under the counter, she left her booth and hopped the turnstile. She turned back long enough to tell new arrivals not to come in, then went to help the riders who had fallen.

Two patrolmen from the sixth precinct arrived moments later. While one of them called for an ambulance from St. Vincent’s and kept other people from entering the station, the second officer went to help Meg.

She was extremely calm as she applied disinfectant and bandages to the students’ scratches and told the officer about the bats and about the well-dressed man who must have fallen from the platform. What she saw, she decided, had been his jacket flying up. Or maybe it was the reflection of her own dark hair on the glass of the booth.

The officer went to the end of the platform to have a look. He hopped down onto the tracks. When he came back he was holding headphones from a Walkman. The foam ends were wet with blood.

He called for backup from the transit police and recommended that the station be closed.

Still calm, Meg went back to her booth and called her supervisor for instructions. He told her to lock the money drawer and the booth and to do whatever the police told her.

Transit police arrived. They took Meg’s name, address, and phone number, and told her she could go.

She took the next bus back to Queens.

The American Museum of Natural History was built in 1874. Located along Central Park West between Seventy-seventh and Eighty-first streets, it is best known today for its unparalleled collection of prehistoric fossils and dinosaur skeletons. However, it was originally designed to be a showcase for contemporary nature and archaeological displays.The dioramas of modern-day animal life, from birds to bison to fish, remain among its most popular attractions.

But the galleries and spacious display halls are not the museum’s only service. Research, exploration, and education are also important functions, and the fifth floor of the museum-closed to the public-has long been a haven for scientists and scholars. There, in hundred-year-old cabinets and drawers as well as in modern cryogenic chambers, the museum stores countless animal, vegetal, and fossil specimens for study.

Given what had happened in the tunnel, Gentry was in as good a mood as he could be. He was guardedly optimistic for a reconciliation. He liked Nancy Joyce, he admired her courage and determination, and he felt bad about what he’d done. He didn’t feel repentant, for he’d do it again. Just bad. And all he wanted was the chance, at some point, to tell her everything-except the fact that he wouldn’t have done anything differently.

Gentry got off the elevator at the fifth floor. A skinny young man was passing. The kid held a small plastic tray full of tiny bones, stringy sinew, and what looked like blood. The detective asked him for directions to Professor Lowery’s laboratory. The young man pointed ahead and told him to hang a left and then a right.

Gentry thanked him then looked at the dish. “Mind if I ask what that is?” he asked.

“Lunch,” the young man replied. “Chicken cacciatore.”

The man continued down the corridor. Gentry followed him. There were framed portraits and photographs of various expeditions, going back to the Gobi expedition in the 1920s. The men and women portrayed reeked of scholarship and trailblazing. The detective made a point of not looking at them. He didn’t want to start feeling inadequate between here and the laboratory.

Gentry had never been at ease in academic settings. He spent one semester at City College before bagging it for the NYPD. He liked finding things out for himself, not being lectured to. That was one of the many things he loved about his typesetter father. The man never talked at him. He talked to him and with him, as though it were always man-to-man. Even when it was man-to-seven-year-old.

Part of Gentry’s discomfort also probably had to do with his mother having worked as a secretary for an intellectual snob of a college dean, Dr. Horst Acker. “Boss Tweed,” he and his dad used to call him. His mother ended up leaving Gentry’s father for him. The seven-year-old Gentry hated the red-cheeked, pipe-smoking creep with all the energy in his body, and after three months he ran away from his mother to live with his dad. His mother let him go, which was fine: Gentry wasn’t crazy about her, either.

Before Gentry reached the laboratory, his beeper sounded again. He checked the number; this time it was Chris Henry. Give that dog a bone and there was no one who could chew it up faster. He kept walking.

At Lowery’s laboratory, Gentry rapped on the frosted glass. His heart was thumping hard, harder than when he went into the hole in the service tunnel. He heard a Swiss-sounding voice and saw Joyce’s shadow move toward the door. She hesitated a moment, then turned and opened it.

“Hi there,” he said.

“Come in,” she replied. There was a hint of distance in her voice, in the set of her mouth. But there was curiosity in her eyes, and Gentry latched onto it.

Gentry entered a room that was about three times the size of his office at the police station. Joyce walked the door shut so it wouldn’t slam. Gentry glanced to the right. Along the wall was a wide black table. It was roughly half as wide and fully as long as a pool table, and it sat under a series of low, bright lights. A tall, elderly man in a white lab coat was bent over it, his back to Gentry. The man didn’t turn when the detective entered.

“We’ve been working on the mold from the gouge in the deer bone,” Joyce said. “We were waiting for a specimen to come up from storage. Now that it’s here we’re just finishing the scans.”

“I see. I got paged on the way over. Is there a phone I can use?”

“Over here,” she said, pointing to a desk.

The phone was nestled between a stuffed and mounted gerbil and chipmunk. Gentry called Ari first. The line was busy. Then he called the crime lab. Chris Henry came on and said he’d just finished measuring the trauma. He rattled off the dimensions and Gentry wrote them down. When Henry hung up, Gentry handed the page to Joyce.

“What’s this?”

“The lab results I said I was waiting for. Fourteen of the bodies I found in the subway belonged to homeless people. They were pretty torn up. But not as badly as a fifteenth. That one belonged to a bicyclist who disappeared from way up on Riverside Drive early this morning.”

“The one who had the strange bites.”

“Right,” Gentry said. “And two things I didn’t tell you: She was gutted, just like the deer. And there were large, bloody hatch marks on the grate overhead.”

Joyce’s expression darkened.

Gentry pointed to the paper. “These are the dimensions of marks that were found on a rib belonging to the bicyclist.”

Joyce read them. “They’re the same as the deer,” she said. “Professor?”

“I heard,” he said. He still didn’t turn. “Are you certain of their accuracy, Mr. Gentry?”

“It’s Detective Gentry, and absolutely.”

“Then input them, please, Nannie.”

Joyce nodded and sat down at her computer. As she typed, Gentry walked over to the lab table. In the back of the room, to Gentry’s left, was an industrial-size sink. Bookcases and shelves covered every other free foot of wall space. Books, magazines, papers, jars with floating things, and other taxidermic specimens were jammed into every available space. The room smelled faintly of mildew and formaldehyde.

Gentry stopped beside the professor. Kane Lowery had a long, priestly soft, white face, eyes the color of gunmetal, and thinning, slicked-back gray hair. There were three square aluminum pans lined up in front of him. The pan on the left contained what was obviously the cast of the wounds made from the deer bone. The second pan had a small dead bat about six inches from wingtip to wingtip. Lowery was holding a large, humming penlike instrument directly above the second pan; a cable ran from the back end to the computer, and he was moving a laser beam slowly from left to right.