Текст книги "The Cabinet of Curiosities"

Автор книги: Lincoln Child

Соавторы: Douglas Preston
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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 29 страниц)

Earth. The damp smell rose toward her nostrils. She poked her finger into it: cool, moist, a little slimy. She probed with the penknife, found it compact but yielding, with little gravel or rocks. Perfect.

She straightened up, looked around. O’Shaughnessy was standing behind her, looking down curiously.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Checking the subflooring.”

“And?”

“It’s old fill, not cement.”

“Is that good?”

“It’s outstanding.”

“If you say so.”

She tapped the brick back into place, then stood. She checked her watch. Three o’clock, Friday afternoon. The Museum would close in two hours.

She turned to O’Shaughnessy. “Look, Patrick, I need you to get up to my office at the Museum, plunder my field locker for some tools and equipment I’ll need.”

O’Shaughnessy shook his head. “Nothing doing. Pendergast said I was to stay with you.”

“I remember. But I’m here now, safe. There must be five locks on that door, I won’t be going anywhere. I’ll be a lot safer here than walking the streets. Besides, the killer knows where I work. Would you rather Iwent uptown and youwaited here?”

“Why go anywhere? What’s the hurry? Can’t we wait until Pendergast is out of the hospital?”

She stared at him. “The clock’s ticking, Patrick. There’s a killer out there.”

O’Shaughnessy looked at her. Hesitated.

“We can’t afford to just sit around. I hope you’re not going to give me a hard time. I need those tools, and I need them now.”

Still, hesitation.

Nora felt her anger rise. “Just do it. Okay?”

O’Shaughnessy sighed. “Double-lock the door behind me, and don’t open it for anybody. Not the landlord, not the fire department, not Santa Claus. Only me. Promise?”

Nora nodded. “I promise.”

“Good, I’ll be back ASAP.”

She drew up a quick list of items, gave O’Shaughnessy directions, and locked the door carefully behind him, shutting out the sound of the growing storm. Slowly, she stepped away from the door, her eyes swiveling around the room, coming to rest at last on the brickwork beneath her feet. One hundred years before, Leng, for all his genius, could not have anticipated the reach of modern archaeology. She would excavate this site with the greatest care, sifting through his old laboratory layer by layer, bringing all her skills to bear in order to capture even the smallest piece of evidence. And there wouldbe evidence, she knew that. There was no such thing as a barren archaeological site. People—wherever they went, whatever they did—always left a record.

Taking out her penknife, she knelt and, once again, began easing the blade between the old bricks. There was a sudden peal of thunder, louder than any that had come before; she paused, heart beating wildly with terror. She forced her feelings back under control, shaking her head ruefully. No killer was going to stop her from finding out what was beneath this floor. She wondered briefly what Brisbane would say to this work. The hell with him,she thought.

She turned the penknife over in her hands, closed it with a sigh. All her professional life, she had unearthed and catalogued human bones without emotion—with no connection to the ancient skeletons beyond a shared humanity. But Mary Greene had proven utterly different. There, outside the girl’s house, Pendergast had thrown Mary Greene’s short life and awful death into sharp relief. For the first time, Nora realized she had excavated, handled,the bones of someone that she could understand, grieve for. More and more, Pendergast’s tale of Mary Greene was sinking in, despite her attempts to keep a professional distance. And now, she had almost become another Mary Greene.

That made it personal. Very personal.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the rattle of wind at the door, and another, fainter, rumble of thunder. Nora rose to her knees, opened the penknife again, and began scraping vigorously at the brickwork beneath her feet. It was going to be a long night.

FOUR

THE WIND SHOOK the barred door, and occasional flickers of lightning and grumblings of thunder penetrated the room. Now that O’Shaughnessy had returned, the two worked together, the policeman moving the dirt, Nora focusing on uncovering the details. They labored by the light of a single yellow bulb. The room smelled strongly of decaying earth. The air was close, humid, and stifling.

She had opened a four-square-meter dig in the living room floor. It had been carefully gridded off, and she had stepped down the excavation, each meter grid to a different level, allowing her to climb in and out of the deepening hole. The floor bricks were neatly piled against the far wall. The door leading to the kitchen was open, and through it a large pile of brown dirt was visible, piled in the center of the room atop a sheet of heavy plastic. Beside it was a smaller sheet of plastic, containing bagged items recovered from the digsite.

At last Nora paused, putting her trowel aside to take stock. She removed her safety helmet, drew the back of her hand across her brow, replaced the helmet on her head. It was well past midnight, and she felt exhausted. The excavation at its deepest point had gone down more than four feet below grade: a lot of work. It was difficult, also, to work this rapidly while maintaining a professional excavation.

She turned to O’Shaughnessy. “Take five. I’d like to examine this soil profile.”

“About time.” He straightened up, resting on his shovel. His brow was streaming with sweat.

Nora shone her flashlight along the carefully exposed wall of dirt, reading it as one might read a book. Occasionally she would shave off a little with a trowel to get a clearer view.

There was a layer of clean fill on the top going down six inches—laid, no doubt, as a base for the more recent brick floor. Below was about three feet of coarser fill, laced with bits of post-1910 crockery and china. But she could see nothing from Leng’s laboratory—at least, nothing obvious. Still, she had flagged and bagged everything, by the book.

Beneath the coarse fell, they had struck a layer containing bits of trash, rotting weeds, pieces of mold-blown bottles, soup bones, and the skeleton of a dog: ground debris from the days when the site had been a vacant lot. Under that was a layer of bricks.

O’Shaughnessy stretched, rubbed his back. “Why do we have to dig so far down?”

“In most old cities, the ground level rises at a fixed rate over time: in New York it’s about three quarters of a meter every hundred years.” She pointed toward the bottom of the hole. “Back then, that wasground level.”

“So these old bricks below are the original basement flooring?”

“I think so. The floor of the laboratory.” Leng’s laboratory.

And yet it had yielded few clues. There was a remarkable lack of debris, as if the floor had been swept clean. She had found some broken glassware wedged into the cracks of the brick; an old fire grate with some coal; a button; a rotten trolley ticket, a few other odds and ends. It seemed that Leng had wanted to leave nothing behind.

Outside, a fresh flash of lightning penetrated the coat Nora had hung over the window. A second later, thunder rumbled. The single bulb flickered, browned, then brightened once again.

She continued staring thoughtfully at the floor. At last, she spoke. “First, we need to widen the excavation. And then, I think we’ll have to go deeper.”

“Deeper?” said O’Shaughnessy, a note of incredulity in his voice.

Nora nodded. “Leng left nothing onthe floor. But that doesn’t mean he left nothing beneathit.”

There was a short, chilly silence.

Outside, Doyers Street lay prostrate under a heavy rain. Water ran down the gutters and disappeared into the storm drains, carrying with it trash, dog turds, drowned rats, rotting vegetables, the guts of fish from the market down the street. The occasional flash of lightning illuminated the darkened facades, shooting darts of light into the curling fogs that licked and eddied about the pavement.

A stooped figure in a derby hat, almost obscured beneath a black umbrella, made its way down the narrow street. The figure moved slowly, painfully, leaning on a cane as it approached. It paused, ever so briefly, before Number 99 Doyers Street; then it drifted on into the miasma of fog, a shadow merging with shadows until one could hardly say that it had been there at all.

FIVE

CUSTER LEANED BACK in his oversized Mediterranean office chair with a sigh. It was a quarter to twelve on Saturday morning, and by rights he should have been out with the bowling club, drinking beer with his buddies. He was a precinct commander, for chrissakes, not a homicide detective. Why did they want him in on a frigging Saturday? Goddamn pointless public relations bullshit. He’d done nothing but sit on his ass all morning, listening to the asbestos rattle in the heating ducts. A waste of a perfectly good weekend.

At least Pendergast was out of action for the time being. But what, exactly, had he been up to? When he’d asked O’Shaughnessy about it, the man was damned evasive. You’d think a cop with a record like his would do himself a favor, learn what to kiss and when. Well, Custer had had enough. Come Monday, he was going to tighten the leash on that puppy, but good.

The buzzer on his desk rang, and Custer poked at it angrily. “What the hell is it now? I was not to be disturbed.”

“Commissioner Rocker is on line one, Captain,” came Noyes’s voice, carefully neutral.

Omigod holy shit sonofabitch,thought Custer. His shaking hand hovered over the blinking light on his telephone. What the hell did the commissioner want with him? Hadn’t he done everything they’d asked him to do, the mayor, the chief, everybody? Whatever it was, it wasn’t his fault . . .

A fat, trembling finger depressed the button.

“Custer?” The commissioner’s desiccated voice filled his ear.

“What is it, sir?” Custer squeaked, making a belated effort to lower the pitch of his voice.

“Your man. O’Shaughnessy.”

“Yes sir? What about O’Shaughnessy?”

“I’m a little curious here. Why, exactly,did he request a copy of the forensic report from the ME’s office on the remains found down on Catherine Street? Did you authorize this?” The voice was slow, weary.

What the hell was O’Shaughnessy up to?Custer’s mind raced. He could tell the truth, say that O’Shaughnessy must have been disobeying his orders. But that would make him look like a fool, a man who couldn’t control his own. On the other hand, he could lie.

He chose the latter, more habitual course.

“Commissioner?” he managed to bring his voice down to a relatively masculine pitch. “I authorized it. You see, we didn’t have a copy down here for our files. It’s just a formality, you know, dotting every t and crossing every i. We do things by the book, sir.”

There was a silence. “Custer, since you are so nimble with aphorisms, you surely know the expression ‘Let sleeping dogs lie’?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I thought the mayormade it clear we were going to let that particularsleeping dog lie.” Rocker didn’t sound like he had the greatest faith in the mayor’s judgment.

“Yes, sir.”

“O’Shaughnessy isn’t freelancing, is he, Custer? He’s not, by any chance, helping that FBI agent while he’s laid up—is he?”

“He’s a solid officer, loyal and obedient. I asked him to get the report.”

“In that case, I’m surprised at you, Custer. Surely you know that once the report is down at the precinct, every cop there will have access to it. Which is one step from laying it on the doorstep of the New York Times.”

“I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t think of that.”

“I want that report– everycopy of that report—sent back up to me. Personally. By courier. You understand? No copy is to remain at precinct.”

“Yes, sir.” Christ, how was he going to do that? He would have to get it from O’Shaughnessy, the son of a bitch.

“I get the funny feeling, Custer, that you don’t quite appreciate the full situation here. This Catherine Street business has nothing to do with any criminal investigation. It is a historical matter. That forensic report belongsto Moegen-Fairhaven. It’s private property. They paid for it and the remains were found on their land. Those remains have been given a respectful but anonymous burial in a private cemetery, with the appropriate religious ceremonies, all arranged by Moegen-Fairhaven. The matter is closed. Follow me so far?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now, Moegen-Fairhaven is a good friend of the mayor—as the mayor has taken pains to point out to me—and Mr. Fairhaven himself is working very hard to see that he is re-elected. But if this situation gets any more botched up, Fairhaven might not be so enthusiastic in his support. He might decide to sit this one out. He might even decide to throw his weight behind the other fellow who’s running.”

“I understand, sir.”

“Good. Now we’ve got a psychopath out there, this so-called Surgeon, carving people up. If you’d focus your talents on that, Custer, I’d appreciate it. Good day.”

There was a click as the line went abruptly dead.

Custer sat up in his chair, gripping the phone, his porcine frame trembling. He swallowed, brought his shaking voice under control, and pressed the buzzer on his desk. “Get O’Shaughnessy on the line. Try whatever you need, radio, emergency frequency, cell, home number, whatever.”

“He’s off duty, Captain,” Noyes said.

“I don’t give a rat’s ass what he is. Get him.”

“Yes, sir.” And the speaker crackled back into silence.

SIX

NORA TOOK HER trowel, knelt, and began prying up one of the old bricks that made up the ancient floor. It was rotten and waterlogged, and it crumbled under the trowel. She quickly plucked out the pieces, then began prying up its neighbors, one after the other. O’Shaughnessy stood above her, watching. They had worked through the night, and past noon of the following day, widening the excavation to eight square meters. She felt weary beyond description. But this was still one task she wanted to do herself.

Once he’d gotten wind of their progress, Pendergast had forced himself out of his hospital bed—despite the fearful protests of the doctors and nurses—and made the journey down to Doyers Street himself. Now he lay near the digsite on an orthopedic mattress, newly delivered from Duxiana. He remained there, arms across his chest, eyes closed, moving infrequently. With his black suit and pallid face, he looked alarmingly like a corpse. At Pendergast’s request Proctor, his chauffeur, had delivered a variety of items from the Dakota apartment: a small table, a Tiffany lamp, and an array of medicines, unguents, and French chocolates, along with a stack of obscure books and maps.

The soil beneath the floor of Leng’s old laboratory was waterlogged and foul-smelling. Nora cleared a one-meter square of the floor bricks, then began digging a diagonal test trench with her trowel. Anything under the floor would not be deep. There wasn’t much farther to go. She was almost in the water table.

She struck something. A deft bit of brushwork revealed a rusted, rotten nineteenth-century umbrella, only its whalebone skeleton intact. She carefully cleared around it, photographed it in situ, then removed it and laid its rotting pieces on a sheet of acid-free specimen paper.

“You’ve found something?” Pendergast asked, eyes still closed. A long white hand removed a chocolate from a box and placed it in his mouth.

“The remains of an umbrella.” She worked more quickly. The dirt was looser, muddier.

Fourteen inches down, in the left-hand corner of the grid, her trowel struck heavily against something. She began clearing away the sodden dirt around it. Then her brush hand jerked aside reflexively. It was a circlet of hair about a smooth dome of brown bone.

A distant rumble of thunder pierced the silence. The storm was still upon them.

She heard a faint intake of breath from O’Shaughnessy.

“Yes?” Pendergast’s voice came instantly.

“We’ve got a skull here.”

“Keep digging, if you please.” Pendergast didn’t sound surprised.

Working carefully with the brush, heart pounding uncomfortably in her chest, Nora cleared away more dirt. The frontal bone came slowly into view, then two eye sockets, slimy, sticky matter still clinging inside. A foul smell rose and she gagged involuntarily. This was no clean Anasazi skeleton that had been buried a thousand years in dry sand.

Plucking her T-shirt up over her nose and mouth, she continued. A bit of nasal bone became exposed, the opening cradling a twisted piece of cartilage. Then, as the maxilla was exposed, came a flash of metal.

“Please describe.” Again Pendergast’s weak voice broke the silence of the room.

“Give me another minute.”

Nora brushed, working down the craniofacial bones. When the face was exposed, she sat back on her heels.

“All right. We have a skull of an older adult male, with some hair and soft matter remaining, probably due to the anaerobic environment of the site. Just below the maxilla there are two silver teeth, partly fallen from the upper jaw, attached to some old bridgework. Below that, just inside the jaws, I see a pair of gold spectacles, one lens of which has black opaque glass.”

“Ah. You have found Tinbury McFadden.” There was a pause and Pendergast added, “We must keep going. Still to be found are James Henry Perceval and Dumont Burleigh, members of the Lyceum and colleagues of our Dr. Leng. Two people unlucky enough to have also received J. C. Shottum’s confidences. The little circle is complete.”

“That reminds me,” Nora said. “I remembered something, while I was digging last night. The first time I asked Puck to show me the Shottum material, he said in passing that Shottum was quite popular these days. I didn’t pay much attention to it then. But after what happened, I began to wonder who had—” She stopped.

“Who had made that particular journey ahead of us,” Pendergast finished the thought for her.

Suddenly there was the rattle of the doorknob.

All eyes turned.

The knob rattled, turned, turned again.

There was a series of concussive raps on the door, which reverberated through the small apartment. A pause followed; then a second volley of frantic pounding.

O’Shaughnessy looked up, hand dropping to his automatic. “Who’s that?”

A shrill female voice sounded outside the door. “What go on here? What that smell? What you do in there? Open up!”

“It’s Mrs. Lee,” Nora said as she rose to her feet. “The landlady.”

Pendergast lay still. His pale cat’s eyes flitted open for a moment, then closed again. He looked as if he was settling in for a nap.

“Open up! What go on in there?”

Nora climbed out of the trench, moved to the door. “What’s the problem?” she said, keeping her voice steady. O’Shaughnessy joined her.

“Problem with smell! Open up!”

“There’s no smell in here,” said Nora. “It must be coming from somewhere else.”

“It come from here, up through floor! I smell all night, it much worse now when I come out of apartment. Open up!”

“I’m just cooking, that’s all. I’ve been taking a cooking class, but I guess I’m not very good yet, and—”

“That no cooking smell! Smell like shit! This nice apartment building! I call police!” Another furious volley of pounding.

Nora looked at Pendergast, who lay still, wraith-like, eyes closed. She turned to O’Shaughnessy.

“She wants the police,” he said with a shrug.

“But you’re not in uniform.”

“I’ve got my shield.”

“What are you going to say?”

The pounding continued.

“The truth, of course.” O’Shaughnessy slid toward the door, undid the locks, and let the door fall open.

The squat, heavyset landlady stood in the door. Her eyes darted past O’Shaughnessy, saw the gigantic hole in the living room floor, the piles of dirt and bricks beyond, the exposed upper half of a skeleton. A look of profound horror blossomed across her face.

O’Shaughnessy opened his wallet to display his shield, but the woman seemed not to notice. She was transfixed by the hole in the floor, the skeleton grinning up at her from the bottom.

“Mrs.—Lee, was it? I’m Sergeant O’Shaughessy of the New York Police Department.”

Still the lady stared, slack-jawed.

“There’s been a murder in this apartment,” O’Shaughnessy said matter-of-factly. “The body was buried under the floor. We’re investigating. I know it’s a shock. I’m sorry, Mrs. Lee.”

Finally, the woman seemed to take notice of him. She turned slowly, looking first at his face, then at his badge, then at his gun. “Wha—?”

“A murder, Mrs. Lee. In your apartment.”

She looked back at the huge hole. Within it, the skeleton lay peacefully, wrapped in its mantle of earth. Above, in the bed, Pendergast lay still, arms crossed over his chest, in a similar attitude of repose.

“Now, Mrs. Lee, I’m going to ask you to go back quietly to your apartment. Tell no one about this. Callno one. Lock and bolt your door. Do not let anyone in unless they show you one of these.” O’Shaughnessy shoved the badge closer to her face.

“Do you understand, Mrs. Lee?”

She nodded dumbly, eyes wide.

“Now go on upstairs. We need twenty-four hours of absolute quiet. Then of course there will be a large group of police arriving. Medical examiners, forensic experts—it will be a mess. Thenyou can talk. But for now—” He lifted a finger to his lips and pantomimed an exaggerated shhhhhh.

Mrs. Lee turned and shuffled up the stairs. Her movements were slow, like a sleepwalker’s. Nora heard the upstairs door open, then close. And then all was quiet once again.

In the silence, Pendergast opened one eye. It swiveled around to O’Shaughnessy, then to Nora.

“Well done, you two,” he said in a weak voice. And the faintest of smiles played about his lips.

SEVEN

AS THE SQUAD CAR carrying Captain Sherwood Custer turned the corner onto Doyers Street, the captain stared through the windshield, tensing at the noisy group of reporters. It was a smallish group, but he could see they were the worst of the lot.

Noyes angled the car into the curb and Custer opened his door, heaving his frame out onto the street. As he approached the brownstone, the reporters began calling to him. And there was the worst of all, that man—Smithbutt, or whatever—arguing with the uniformed officer standing on the front steps. “It isn’t fair!” he was crying in an outraged tone, oversized cowlick jiggling atop his head. “You let himin, so you’ve got to let mein!”

The officer ignored this, stepping aside to let Custer pass the yellow crime scene tape.

“Captain Custer!” the reporter cried, turning to him: “Commissioner Rocker has refused to speak with the press. Will you comment on the case, please?”

Custer did not respond. The commissioner,he thought. The commissioner himself was here. He was going to be chewed out but good. Let this particular sleeping dog lie,the man had said. Custer had not only wakened the dog, but it had bitten him in the ass. Thanks to O’Shaughnessy.

They signed him in at the door and Custer stepped through, Noyes following at his heels. They made their way quickly down to the basement apartment. Outside, the reporter could still be heard, voice raised in protest.

The first thing Custer noticed when he stepped into the apartment was a big hole, lots of dirt. There were the usual photographers, lights, forensics, an ME, the SOC people. And there was the commissioner.

The commissioner glanced up and spotted him. A spasm of displeasure went across his face. “Custer!” he called, nodding him over.

“Yes, sir.” Custer swallowed, gritted his teeth. This was it.

“Congratulations.”

Custer froze. Rocker’s sarcasm was a bad sign. And right in front of everybody, too.

He stiffened. “I’m sorry, sir, this was completely unauthorized from beginning to end, and I’m personally going to—”

He felt the commissioner’s arm snake around his shoulder, pull him closer. Custer could smell stale coffee on his breath. “Custer?”

“Yes sir?”

“Please, just listen,” the commissioner muttered. “Don’t speak. I’m not here to attend to excuses. I’m here to put you in charge of this investigation.”

This was a reallybad sign. He’d been victimized by the commissioner’s sarcasm before, but not like this. Never like this.

Custer blinked. “I’m truly sorry, sir—”

“You’re not listening to me, Captain.” Arm still around his shoulder, the commissioner steered Custer away from the press of officials, back into the rear of the narrow apartment. “I understand your man O’Shaughnessy had something to do with uncovering this site.”

“Yes, and I am going to severely reprimand—”

“Captain, will you let me finish?”

“Yes, sir.”

“The mayor has called me twice this morning. He’s delighted.”

“Delighted?” Custer wasn’t sure if this was more sarcasm, or something even worse.

“Delighted. The more attention that gets deflected from the new copycat murders, the happier he is. New murders are very bad for approval ratings. Thanks to this discovery, you’re the cop of the hour. For the mayor, at least.”

Silence. It was clear to Custer that Rocker didn’t fully share the mayor’s good opinion.

“So are we crystal-clear, Captain? This is now officially your case.”

“What case?” Custer was momentarily confused. Were they opening an official investigation into these old killings, too?

“The Surgeoncase.” Rocker waved his hand dismissively at the huge hole with their skeletons. “This is nothing. This is archaeology. This is not a case.”

“Right. Thank you, sir,” Custer said.

“Don’t thank me. Thank the mayor. It was his, ah, suggestionthat you handle it.”

Rocker let his arm slip from Custer’s shoulder. Then he stood back and looked at the captain: a long, appraising glance. “Feel you can do this, Captain?”

Custer nodded. The numbness was beginning to fade.

“The first order of business is damage control. These old murders will give you a day, maybe two, before the public’s attention returns to the Surgeon. The mayor may like seeing these old murders getting the attention, but frankly I don’t. It’ll give the copycat killer ideas, egg him on.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “I brought in Bryce Harriman. You know him?”

“No.”

“He’s the one who first put a finger on the copycat angle. We need to keep him where we can see him. We’ll give him an exclusive, but we’ll control the information he gets. Understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. He’s a nice sort, eager to please. He’s waiting out front. Remember to keep the conversation on the oldbones and on thissite. Not on the Surgeon or the new killings. The public may be confounding the two, but we’re sure as hell not.”

Custer turned back toward the living room. But Rocker put out a hand to stop him.

“And, Captain? Once you’re done with Harriman, I’d suggest you get to work on this new case of yours. Get rightto work. Catch that killer. You don’t want another, fresher stiff turning up on your watch—do you? Like I said, you’ve got a little breathing space here. Make use of it.”

“Yes, sir.”

Rocker continued to peer at him from beneath lowered brows. Then he grunted, nodded, and gestured Custer on ahead of him.

The living room was, if possible, even more crowded than it had been moments before. At the commissioner’s signal, a tall, slender man stepped out of the shadows: horn-rimmed glasses, slicked-back hair, tweed jacket, blue oxford shirt, tasseled loafers.

“Mr. Harriman?” Rocker said. “This is Captain Custer.”

Harriman gave Custer’s hand a manly shake. “Nice to meet you in person, sir.”

Custer returned the handshake. Despite his instinctive distrust of the press, he found himself approving of the man’s deferential attitude. Sir.When was the last time a reporter had called him sir?

The commissioner glanced gravely from one man to the other. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, Captain? I have to get back to One Police Plaza.”

Custer nodded. “Of course, sir.”

He watched the man’s broad back as it disappeared through the door.

Noyes was suddenly there, in front of Custer, hand extended. “Allow me to be the first to congratulate you, sir.”

Custer shook the limp hand. Then he turned back to Harriman, who was smiling beneath the horn-rims, impeccably knotted repp tie snugged against a buttoned-down collar. A dweeb, without doubt. But a very useful dweeb. It occurred to Custer that giving Harriman an exclusive would take that other pesky reporter—the one whose voice was still clamoring out in the street—down a few notches. Slow him down, get him off their asses for a while. It was bracing how quickly he was adjusting to his new responsibility.

“Captain Custer?” the man said, notebook poised.

“Yeah?”

“May I ask you a few questions?”

Custer gestured magnanimously. “Shoot.”

EIGHT

O’SHAUGHNESSY STEPPED INTO the captain’s outer office, automatically looking around for Noyes. He had a pretty good idea why Custer wanted to see him. He wondered if the subject of the prostitute’s two hundred bucks would come up, as it sometimes did when he got a little too independent for some ass-kisser’s taste. Normally he wouldn’t care; he’d had years to practice letting it all roll off his back. Ironic,he thought, that the shit was about to come down now—now, just when he’d gotten on an investigation he found himself caring about.

Noyes came around the corner, chewing gum, his arms full of papers, his perpetually wet lower lip hanging loose from a row of brown teeth. “Oh,” he said. “It’s you.” He dropped the pile on his desk, took his sweet time sitting down, then leaned toward a speaker.

“He’s here,” he called into it.

O’Shaughnessy sat down, watching Noyes. The man always chewed that nasty, old-fashioned, violet-scented gum favored by dowagers and alcoholics. The outer office reeked of it.

Ten minutes later the captain appeared in the door, hiking up his pants and tucking in his shirt. He jerked his chin at O’Shaughnessy to indicate he was ready for him.

O’Shaughnessy followed him back into the office. The captain sank heavily into his chair. He rolled his eyes toward O’Shaughnessy with a stare that was meant to be tough but only looked baleful.

“Jesus Christ, O’Shaughnessy.” He wagged his head from side to side, jowls flapping like a beagle. “Jesus H.Christ.”

There was a silence.

“Gimme the report.”

O’Shaughnessy took a long breath. “No.”

“Whaddya mean, no?”

“I don’t have it anymore. I gave it to Special Agent Pendergast.”

The captain stared at O’Shaughnessy for at least a minute. “You gaveit to that prick?”