Paul Christopher: Michelangelo_s Notebook

Then she tasted cinnamon Tic Tacs and realized he’d somehow popped one into his mouth a little while back, already planning his attack. His hand went up to her breast and she gently removed it. She broke the kiss.

“Not tonight, Pete. Really. I’m too tired.”

“At least let me see you to the door of your apartment.” He turned on the grin again. The grin and the Tic Tac seemed to go together.

“You don’t need to do that.”

“But I want to.” He shrugged. “God knows what might be waiting for you in the elevator.”

“The elevator monster,” said Finn. “And you’re it.”

“Then I’ll protect you from myself,” he said. She laughed and turned the key and the two of them went inside.

Peter started kissing her again on the way up in the elevator and by the time the long jerky ride to the fifth floor was over she knew she was probably going to make a mistake and invite him in after all.

She also knew that she was just looking for comfort and distraction from the events of the day and Peter would try to turn it into much more than that, but right now she really didn’t care. She wanted his taste and his smell and the feel of him. Maybe it was time she allowed herself to be the selfish one. After all, it wasn’t her job to protect him from the realities of life. She wasn’t his mother, for God’s sake! She giggled at the Freudian implications of that thought and turned her door key in the lock.

“What’s so funny?” asked Peter.

“Nothing, just a stupid thought. You might as well come in if you want.” She stepped into the darkened apartment and Peter followed her.

“Gee, sound a little less enthusiastic, why don’t you?” Peter muttered.

A man appeared out of nowhere like a soundless black shadow. A light flashed briefly in Finn’s face and she lifted one arm to cover her eyes, her heart pounding in her chest as fear clutched at her throat.

“What the hell?” was all Peter had time to say.

There was a brief rustling sound from directly in front of them and Finn caught a quick scent of cheap aftershave before something hit her on the side of the head hard enough to take her to her knees. The flashlight? Maybe, because everything was dark now.

She heard Peter rush forward to help her, and in the last split second before the blackness swallowed her, she heard a distant terrible cry cut short by a drawn-out gurgling sigh and she wondered who it was making that awful noise.

The man looked as though he was in his middle sixties. He was on the short side, five eight or nine, maybe, and reasonably fit. He had gray crinkly-curly hair fading back to midskull from a widow’s peak that made his forehead look abnormally large. The eyes behind his round, steel-framed glasses were a very dark brown, almost black. He was wearing a nicely tailored navy pinstripe three-piece suit that was probably something safe, like Brooks Brothers, a simple, no-name, crisply starched white shirt and a Turnbull amp; Asser tie with thin, dark blue stripes. The shoes were Bally wing tips. The watch on his right wrist was a gold Bulgari that was a little garish but it matched the Yale ring on the index finger of his left hand. There was no wedding ring. He smelled faintly of Lagerfeld.

Someone had taken a nine-inch-long, curved-blade, Moroccan koummya dagger and jammed it into the man’s mouth, slicing up through the soft palette and into the man’s brain, the exposed end of the weapon sticking out between his lips like some sort of nasty silver-and-black tongue, the long, tooled-metal escutcheon keeping the head lifted slightly off the green leather-and-felt blotter that covered the antique desk. There was very little blood; that was the kind of detail Lieutenant Vincent Delaney of the chief’s Special Action Squad was paid to look out for.

According to the title on the office door, the dead man with a dagger in his mouth was Alexander Crawley, director of the Parker-Hale Museum at Sixty-fifth Street and Fifth Avenue, directly across from the Central Park Zoo. Delaney glanced out the tall windows at the opposite end of the office. The old-fashioned green velvet drapes were pulled back and tied off with matching velvet ropes. Maybe a baboon in the zoo had seen something but Delaney doubted it. He never had that kind of luck. Actually, he’d never been to the Central Park Zoo and he wasn’t even sure if they had baboons there.

There were four other people in the room: Singh from the M.E.’s office, Don Putkin, the crime scene specialist, Yance the photographer and Sergeant William Boyd, his overweight and badly dressed partner. Billy was watching the dead man’s mouth while Singh turned the neck slightly to check for rigor. There wasn’t any. Downstairs at the cocktail party in the main reception hall there were nine hundred elegantly dressed suspects drinking martinis and wondering what the hell was holding up the hors d’oeuvres. Bigwigs, one and all, from the governor and the mayor on down. Delaney sighed. It was going to be a stinker.

“What’s the word, Singh?”

The man from the medical examiner’s office looked up and shrugged. “Dead maybe an hour, a bit more. No rigor yet. Strangled, probably with a piece of nylon rope. I’ve picked up a few fibers so far. Basically someone got in behind him and garroted him.”

“Any ideas about the dagger?”

“It’s not Pakistani or Indian. I can tell you that much. Too long. Probably Berber. Arabic of some kind, by the look of the design work.”

“You said he was garroted,” said Billy, still staring at the dagger. “He wasn’t stabbed?”

“Maybe some kind of ritual thing. The victim was already dead when the dagger was inserted.”

“Some kind of freak,” said Delaney.

“Not for me to say.” Singh shrugged again. “Who knows, maybe he just didn’t like art.”

Delaney’s cell phone twinkled at him, playing the Simpsons theme. His teenage daughter had programmed it in as a joke, and he kept seeing Bart skateboarding through Springfield every time it rang. He popped open the phone, listened for a moment, grunted once or twice and then clapped the phone shut.

Delaney looked across at Billy. “Go find out if they’ve got an intern here named Ryan, would you? First name Finn.”

The man sat in full uniform in the empty room. It was nothing more than a cell, really, with bare white concrete walls, a gray-painted wooden chair and a single small opening for ventilation in the far wall, always closed, always covered, even in the heat of summer. The only furniture in the room was an army cot and blanket in one corner, a chair and a long table for his work, a combination draftsman’s lamp and magnifying lens clamped to one corner. It was the only light in the room-the only one necessary. He did not read there, or eat there or do anything else there except sleep and sit in his chair, working. Sometimes he thought for long periods at a time, but any thinking he did could be done in the dark. There was no sound except the hollow thunder in the distance and the rustling noises of small animals and mad things that could just as easily be in his overburdened mind.

He stood and went to the heavy steel door in his room. First he made sure all the locking mechanisms were in place and then he undressed slowly, hanging each piece of his uniform on the brass hook on his door. His boots he took and placed neatly at the end of his army cot. When he was completely naked he returned to his chair and sat down again. He saw that he was hard but he ignored it. He’d had no one to share his passion with for many years, so it was better to simply disregard it.

He reached out, picked a fresh pair of surgical gloves out of the box on his table and ran his fingers over the thick, carved leather cover of the immense, heavy book that sat in the absolute perfect center of the table.