Douglas Preston - Relic

“He wants backup.” There was the sound of muffled laughter. “Fred, we don’t have any backup. Everyone’s busy.”

“Listen,” said Beauregard, losing his temper. “Who’s that with you? Why don’t you send him down?”

“McNitt. He’s on a coffee break. Right, McNitt?”

Beauregard heard some more laughter.

Beauregard switched off the radio. Fuck those guys , he thought. Some professionalism . He just hoped the Lieutenant was listening in on that frequency.

He waited in the dark hallway. Five more minutes and I’m history .

“TDN calling Beauregard. You read?”

“Ten-four,” said Beauregard.

“McNitt there yet?”

“No,” said Beauregard. “He finally finish his coffee break?”

[152] “Hey, I was just kidding around,” TDN said a little nervously. “I sent him right up.”

“Well, he’s lost, then,” said Beauregard. “And my duty ends in five minutes. I’m off the next forty-eight, and nothing’s going to interfere with that. You better radio him.”

“He isn’t reading,” said TDN.

An idea suddenly occurred to Beauregard. “How did McNitt go? Did he take the Section 17 elevator, the one behind the sit room?”

“Yep, that’s what I told him. Section 17 elevator. I got this map, same one you have.”

“So in order to get here he has to go through the exhibition. That was real smart. You should have sent him up through food services.”

“Hey, don’t talk to me about smart, Freddy boy. He’s the one who’s lost. Call me when he arrives.”

“One way or another, I’m outta here in five minutes,” said Beauregard. “It’ll be Effinger’s headache then. Over and out.”

That was when Beauregard heard a sudden commotion from the exhibition. There was a sound like a muffled thud. Jesus , he thought, McNitt . He unlocked the doors and went in, unsnapping the holster of his .38.

TDN placed another doughnut in his mouth and chewed, swallowing it with a mouthful of coffee. The radio hissed.

“McNitt to Ops. Come in, TDN.”

“Ten-four. Where the hell are you?”

“I’m at the rear entrance. Beauregard ain’t here. I can’t raise him or anything.”

“Lemme try.” He punched the transmitter. “TDN calling Beauregard. Fred, come in. TDN calling Beauregard ... Hey, McNitt, I think he got pissed off and went home. His shift just ended. How did you get up there, anyway?”

“I went the way you said, but when I got to the front [153] end of the exhibition it was locked, so I had to go around. Didn’t have my keys. Got a little lost.”

“Stay tight, all right? His relief should arrive any minute. Effinger, it says here. Radio me when he arrives and then come on back.”

“Here comes Effinger now. You gonna report Beauregard?” McNitt asked.

“You kidding? I’m no damn baby-sitter.”

= 23 =

D’Agosta looked over at Pendergast, reclining in the shabby backseat of the Buick. Jesus , he thought, a guy like Pendergast ought to pull at least a late model Town Car . Instead, they gave him a four-year-old Buick and a driver who could barely speak English.

Pendergast’s eyes were half closed.

“Turn on Eighty-sixth and take the Central Park transverse,” shouted D’Agosta.

The driver swerved across two lanes of Central Park West and roared into the transverse.

“Take Fifth to Sixty-fifth and go across,” said D’Agosta. “Then go one block north on Third and take a right at Sixty-sixth.”

“Fifty-nine faster,” said the driver, in a thick Middle Eastern accent.

“Not in the evening rush hour,” called D’Agosta. Christ, they couldn’t even find a driver who knew his way around the city.

[155] As the car swerved and rattled down the avenue, the driver flew on past Sixty-fifth Street.

“What the hell are you doing?” said D’Agosta. “You just missed Sixty-fifth.”

“Apology,” said the driver, turning down Sixty-first into a massive traffic jam.

“I can’t believe this,” D’Agosta said to Pendergast. “You ought to have this joker fired.”

Pendergast smiled, his eyes still half closed. “He was, shall we say, a gift of the New York office. But the delay will give us a chance to talk.” He settled back into the torn seat.

Pendergast had spent the last half of the afternoon at Jolley’s autopsy. D’Agosta had declined the invitation.

“This lab found several kinds of DNA in our sample,” Pendergast continued. “One was human, the other, from a gecko.”

D’Agosta looked at him. “Gecko? What’s a gecko?” he asked.

“A kind of lizard. Harmless enough. They like to sit on walls and bask in the sun. When I was a child, we rented a villa overlooking the Mediterranean one summer, and the walls were covered with them. At any rate, the results were so surprising to the lab technician that he thought it was a joke.”

He opened his briefcase. “Here’s the autopsy report on Jolley. There’s nothing much new, I’m afraid. Same MO, body horrifically mauled, thalamoid region of the brain removed. The coroner’s office has estimated that to create such deep lacerations in a single stroke, the required force would exceed—” he consulted a typewritten sheet “—twice what a strong human male can achieve. Needless to say, it’s an estimation.”

Pendergast turned some pages. “Also, they’ve now run salivase enzyme tests on brain sections from the older boy and from Jolley.”

“And—?”

[156] “Both brains tested positive for the presence of saliva.”

“Jesus. You mean the killer’s eating the fucking brain?”

“Not only eating, Lieutenant, but slobbering over the food as well. Clearly, he, she, or it has no manners. You have the SOC report? May I see it?”

D’Agosta handed it over. “You won’t find any surprises there. The blood on the painting was Jolley’s. They found traces of blood leading past the Secure Area and down into a stairwell to the subbasement. But last night’s rain flushed all traces out of there, of course.”

Pendergast scanned the document. “And here’s the report on the door to the vault. Someone did quite a lot of pounding and banging, possibly with a blunt instrument. There were also three-pronged scratches consistent with those found on the victims. Once again, the force used was considerable.”

Pendergast handed over the files. “It sounds as if we’ll need to devote more attention to the subbasement. Basically, Vincent, this DNA business is our best chance for now. If we can trace the origin of that claw fragment, we’ll have our first solid lead. That’s why I’ve asked for this meeting.”

The car pulled up in front of a warren of ivy-covered redbrick buildings overlooking the East River. A guard ushered them into a side entrance.

Once inside the lab, Pendergast took up a position against a table in the center of the room and chatted with the scientists, Buchholtz and Turow. D’Agosta admired how easily the Southerner could take charge of a scene.

“My colleague and I would like to understand the DNA sequencing process,” Pendergast was saying. “We need to know how you arrived at these results, and whether any further analysis might be called for. I’m sure you understand.”

“Certainly,” said Buchholtz. He was busy and small [157] and as bald as Mount Monadnock. “My assistant, Dr. Turow here, did the analysis.”

Turow stepped forward nervously. “When we were given the sample,” he said, “we were asked to identify whether it had come from a large carnivorous mammal. Specifically, a big cat. What we do in such a case is compare the DNA in the sample to the DNA of, say, five or six species that are likely matches. But we would also select an animal that was definitely not of the sample, and we call this the outgroup. It’s a kind of control. Am I making sense?”