Cemetery Dance p-9 Page 8

  She pushed open the door, ducked inside, and turned on the light, stopping to look around. She had been in the lab only a few times on casual visits, on the occasions she'd dropped off samples for testing. The thermal cycler for the PCR stood on a spotless stainless — steel table, shrouded in plastic. She stepped up, pulled away the plastic, folded it and laid it aside. The machine — an Eppendorf Master — cycler 5330—was made of white plastic, its ugly, low — tech appearance belying its sophisticated innards. She rummaged in her bag and removed a printed document she had downloaded from the Internet with directions on how to use it.

  The door had locked behind her automatically. She took a deep breath, then hunted around behind the machine with one hand, at last locating the power switch and turning it on. The manual stated it would take a full fifteen minutes to warm up.

  Laying her bag on the table, she removed a Styrofoam container, took off the lid, and began carefully withdrawing pencil — thin test tubes and racking them. One tube contained a bit of hair, another a fiber, another a piece of Kleenex, still another freeze — dried fragments of blood, all of which Pendergast had given her.

  She passed a hand over her brow, noticing as she did so that her fingertips were trembling slightly. She tried not to think of anything beyond the lab work. She had to be finished and long gone by dawn. Her head pounded; she was dead tired; she hadn't slept since returning home two days before. But her anger and her grief gave her energy, fed her, kept her going. Pendergast needed the DNA results as soon as possible. She was grateful for the chance to be of use — any use — if it would help catch Bill's murderer.

  From a lab refrigerator, she took out a strip of eight PCR tubes: tiny, bullet — shaped sealed plastic containers pre — filled with buffer solution, Taq polymerase, dNTPs, and other reagents. With exquisite care, she used a pair of sterilized tweezers to transfer minuscule samples of the biological material from her test tubes to the PCR tubes, quickly resealing each one as she did so. By the time the machine trilled its readiness, she had filled thirty — two: the maximum the PCR cycler could hold in a single run.

  She slipped a few extra tubes into her pocket for later use, then went over the instructions for the third time. She opened the cycler, slotted in the reaction tubes, then closed and locked it down. Setting the controls, she gingerly pressed the start button.

  It would take forty thermal cycles, each lasting three minutes, to complete the PCR reaction. Two hours. Then, she knew, she would have to submit the results to gel electrophoresis in order to identify the DNA.

  The machine issued another soft chime, and a screen indicated that the first thermal cycle was in progress. Nora sat back, waiting. Only now did she realize how deathly silent it was in the lab. There wasn't even the usual sound of air moving through the circulation system. The room smelled of dust, mold, and the faint sweetness of para — dichlorobenzene from the nearby storage areas.

  She glanced up at the clock: twelve twenty — five. She should have brought a book. In the silent lab, she found herself alone with her thoughts — and they were terrible thoughts.

  She got up and paced across the lab, returned to the table, sat down, got up once again. She hunted through cupboards for something to read, finding only manuals. She thought of going up to her office, but there was always the danger of running into someone and having to explain why she was in the museum at such a late hour. She had no clearance to be in the PCR lab. She hadn't signed up for it, she hadn't recorded her presence in the log. Even if she had, she wasn't authorized to use the machine… Suddenly she halted, listening. She had heard a noise, or thought she had. Outside the door.

  She glanced over to the little window, but there was nothing to see except the dim hallway beyond, illuminated by a lightbulb in a metal cage. The LED in the door's keypad glowed red: it was still locked.

  With a groan, she clenched her fists together. It was hopeless: horrible images kept coming, unbidden, sweeping into her consciousness without warning. She squeezed her eyes closed, tightened her fists still further, trying to think of anything but that first glimpse…anything …

  Her eyes popped open again. There was that noise again, and this time she identified it: a soft scraping against the lab door. Glancing up quickly, she just caught a shape moving beyond the window. She had the distinct feeling that someone had just looked in on her.

  One of the night watchmen? It was possible. With a stab of anxiety, she wondered if they would report her unauthorized presence. Then she shook her head. If they'd suspected anything, they would have come in and confronted her. How would they know she wasn't supposed to be there? After all, she had her ID and was clearly a curator. It was her mind, playing tricks on her again. It had been doing that ever since… She turned her eyes away from the window. Maybe shewas going crazy.

  The sound came again, and her eyes shot back toward the window. This time, she saw a dark silhouette of a head bobbing in the hallway beyond, swaying a little, backlit and indistinct. It loomed in the little window — and then, as it pressed up against the glass, the light from the lab revealed its features.

  She caught her breath, blinked, and stared again.

  It was Colin Fearing.

  Chapter 17

  Nora jumped back with a cry. The face vanished. She felt her heart accelerate, thudding in her chest. There was no question this time.

  This was no dream.

  She scrambled backward, looking around wildly for a place to hide, and ducked behind a lab table, gasping for breath.

  There was no sound. The lab, and the hallway beyond, were utterly silent. She thought: This is stupid. The door's locked. He can't get in. A minute passed. As she crouched there, breathing fast, a strange thing happened. The fear that had instinctively gripped her melted away. Rage began to take its place.

  Slowly, she stood up. The window remained empty.

  Her hand moved across the tabletop, grasped a Pyrex graduated cylinder, and lifted it from its stand. Then, with a sharp rap, she knocked it against the edge of the stand, shattering its end. More quickly now, she moved to the door, shaking fingers trying to punch in the code. On the third try she got it, threw open the door, and stepped into the hall.

  From around the far bend of the hall came the sound of a door closing. "Fearing!" she cried.

  She broke into a run, charging at top speed down the hall and around the corner. The hall was lined with doors, but only one was near the intersection. She seized its handle, found it unlocked, jerked it open.

  She fumbled along the wall, felt the banks of light switches, and in two swipes of her hand turned them all on.

  Ahead lay a room she had heard of but never seen, one of the museum's most legendary storage areas. It had once been the old power plant; now, the vast space contained the museum's collection of whale skeletons. The enormous bones and skulls, some as large as city buses, hung on chains from the ceiling; had they been set on the floor, their own weight would have caused them to deform and break. Each of the suspended skeletons was draped in plastic sheets that hung, shroud — like, almost to the floor, a seascape of draped bones. Despite the banks of fluorescent bulbs overhead, there were still too few for such a large room, and the lighting had a gauzy, almost submarine quality.

  She glanced around, makeshift weapon at the ready. To the left, a few of the sheets were swaying, as if recently disturbed.

  "Fearing!"

  Her voice echoed weirdly in the cavernous vault. She ran toward the nearest shrouds, then slipped between them. The great skeletons cast strange shadows in the indistinct light, and the plastic sheets, dirty and stiff, formed a maze — like set of curtains that prevented her from seeing more than a few feet in any direction. She was almost gasping with mingled tension and rage.

  She reached out and jerked aside a curtain of plastic. Nothing.

  She stepped forward, pulled aside another, and then another. Now the plastic shrouds that surrounded her were swaying crazily, as if the giant skeletons with
in had come to restless life.

  "Bastard! Show yourself!"

  A rustle — and then she saw a shadow move swiftly against the plastic. She lunged forward, slashing with the cylinder.

  Nothing.

  Suddenly she could take it no longer and ran forward with a cry, batting aside curtain after curtain, sweeping the broken glass tube before her in wild arcs, until she became tangled in the heavy plastic and had to struggle to free herself. The fit passing, she took a few more steps, listening. At first all she heard were her own gasps of breath. But then she made out, quite distinctly, a shuffling sound to her right. She rushed toward it, slashing and lunging, preparing to call out again.

  Then, abruptly, she stopped. A voice of reason began to penetrate her red haze of fury. This was stupid — very stupid. She had allowed her anger to cloud her judgment.

  She stopped to listen again. A scrape, a flitting shadow, more swaying sheets. She spun toward it. Then she paused, licking lips that had suddenly gone dry. In the dim light, surrounded by countless hulking, shrouded skeletons, she asked herself a question: who was hunting… and who was the hunted? Her anger dissipated abruptly, replaced by mounting anxiety as she realized what had happened. Fearing had been unable to get into her locked lab. Instead, he had drawn her out. And now she'd allowed herself to be lured into this maze.

  Suddenly, a knife slashed through a nearby plastic curtain, creating a huge rend. A figure began coming through the gap. Nora whirled toward it, slashed at it with the jagged end of the cylinder, made glancing contact. But the figure struck her makeshift weapon away with his knife, sending the glass tube crashing to the floor.

  She backed up, staring at him.

  Fearing's clothes were tattered, stinking, stiff with old blood. One livid eye stared at her; the other was whitish, dead looking. The mouth yawned open, exposing a mouth packed with black, carious teeth. His hair was full of dirt and leaves. His skin was sallow and smelled of the grave. With a wet snoring sound, he took a step forward and slashed at her, the knife — a knife she recognized too well — moving in a glittering arc.

  Nora twisted aside as the weapon swept past, losing her balance and falling to the ground. The figure advanced as she took up a large piece of broken glass and scrambled backward.

  The mouth yawned wide, making a horrible, gurgling sound.

  "Get away from me!" she screamed, brandishing the shard of glass and rising to her feet.

  The figure shambled forward, slashing clumsily at her. Nora backed up, then turned and ran, thrashing through the curtains of plastic as she tried to fight her way to the rear of the room. Surely she would find a back door. Behind her, she could hear the figure cutting through the plastic, the knife almost shrieking as it nicked hanging bones.

  Shhchrroooggggnnn.

  The figure made horrible sounds as it drew in ragged breaths through a wet windpipe. She cried out in fear and dismay, her voice echoing crazily in the cavernous gloom.

  She was disoriented now, unsure she was going in the right direction. She fought against the plastic, struggling for breath, getting entangled again, finally throwing herself to the ground and crawling frantically under the rustling, swinging shrouds. She had become completely lost.

  Sssshrrooogggnnn, came the awful, sucking noise behind her.

  In desperation, she stood up underneath the plastic drape of a low — hanging skeleton, reached up and seized a whale's rib bone, then swung herself up, crawling into the rib cage as if it were some monstrous piece of playground equipment. She climbed frantically, the desiccated bones swaying and clacking together, until she had reached the top of the rib cage. Here a slot between two ribs was big enough to squeeze through. She slashed a hole in the covering plastic with the piece of glass, then hauled herself between the bones and through the plastic, clambering onto the back of the skeleton. For a moment, despite everything, she paused, frozen by the bizarre sight: a sea of whale skeletons, large and small, hanging in all directions beneath her, arranged so close together they were touching.

  The skeleton beneath her feet began to sway again. She looked down. Fearing was below her, climbing up into the jungle gym of bones.

  With a groan of fear, she ran as quickly as she dared along the top of the skeleton, crouched, then jumped to the next, grabbing on tight as it swayed crazily beneath her. She ran along the second backbone, jumping to a third skeleton. From here, she could just make out a door at the far end of the hall.

  Please let it be unlocked.

  The hideous figure appeared on top of a skeleton, rearing out of the rend in the plastic. It scuttled forward, leaping from one skeleton to the next, and Nora realized that despite its shambling movements it was more agile than she had realized. All she had accomplished by climbing atop the skeletons was to give it an advantage.

  Slashing another hole in the plastic beneath her, she climbed back down, then dropped to the floor, crawling as fast as she could toward the rear of the vault. Behind, she could hear Fearing thrashing his way after her, the horrifying sucking sounds growing louder.

  Suddenly she broke free of the mass of bones. There, no more than ten feet ahead of her, was the door: heavy and old — fashioned, without a security keypad. She ran for it, grasped the handle.

  Locked.

  With a sob of dismay she turned, setting her back against the door and clutching the sliver of glass, ready to make a last stand.

  The skeletons swayed and creaked on their chains, the agitated curtains of plastic restlessly scraping the ground. She waited, preparing herself as best she could for the final struggle.

  A minute went by, then another. Fearing did not appear. Gradually, the rustling and swaying of the skeletons settled down. Silence returned to the storage room.

  She took one shuddering breath after another. Had he broken off the chase? Had he gone?

  From the far side of the storage room, she heard the creak of a door, shuffling footsteps, and then silence.

  No, no. He hadn't gone.

  "Who's in here?" a voice rang out, quavering slightly with ill — suppressed anxiety. "Show yourself!"

  It was a night guard. Nora almost sobbed with relief. Fearing must have heard approaching footsteps and been frightened off. But she held her breath. She couldn't reveal herself now; not while her DNA analysis was in process.

  "Anybody here?" the guard called out, clearly reluctant to advance into that forest of whale skeletons. The feeble beam of a light played about the dimly lit room.

  "Last call, I'm locking the door."

  Nora didn't care. As a curator, she had the security code to the front door.

  "All right, you asked for it." A shuffling, the lights went out, and then the slamming of a door.

  Slowly, Nora got her breathing under control. She dropped to her knees and peered forward in the dim light trickling in from the small window set into the door.

  Was he, like her, still in the room? Was he waiting, ready to ambush? What did he want — to finish the job he'd failed to finish in the apartment?

  Dropping to her hands and knees, she crawled under the now — still plastic, moving slowly, as quietly as possible, heading for the front door. Every few minutes, she stopped to peer around and listen. But there were no sounds, no shadows — just the great hanging whale bones in their shrouds.

  As she reached the middle of the skeletons, she paused in her journey. She could see the faint glimmer of a scattering of broken glass. The rest of her makeshift weapon, broken to pieces. In the gloom, she made out a faint dark streak along the glistening edge of one large shard. So shehad struck Fearing with the glass — and cut him. That was blood…his blood.

  She drew in a breath, then another, trying to think as clearly as possible. Then, with shaking fingers, she withdrew one of the spare reaction tubes she'd shoved into her pocket. Carefully breaking the sterile seal, she picked up the glass, dipped it into the liquid, and resealed the tube. Pendergast had already given her DNA samples from Fearing's mother, and mo
ther — son mitochondrial DNA were always identical. Now she could test his DNA and compare it directly with the unknown DNA recovered from the crime scene.

  She slipped the tube back in her pocket and made her way — quietly and carefully — to the door. It responded to the code and opened. She closed and locked it quickly behind her, then walked on shaky legs down the corridor and back to the PCR lab. There was no sign of Fearing. Entering the code into the keypad, she slipped into the lab, shut the door behind her, and turned off the overhead light. She'd finish her work by the glow of the instrumentation.

  The thermal cycler was halfway done with its pass. Her heart still thumping, Nora racked the tube with her attacker's blood next to the others, ready for the next run.

  By tomorrow night, she would know for sure whether or not it was really Fearing who had killed her husband — and tried to kill her twice.

  Chapter 18

  D'Agosta entered the waiting room for the morgue annex, careful to breathe through his mouth. Pendergast followed, taking in the room with a quick glance, then slipping cat — like into one of the ugly plastic chairs that lined the wall, flanking a table heaped with dog — eared magazines. The agent picked up the one with the lightest wear, flipped through the pages, then began to read.

  D'Agosta made a circuit of the room, then another. The New York City morgue was a place full of horrible memories for him, and he knew he was about to undergo an experience that would lodge another in his head — perhaps the worst one of all. Pendergast's preternatural coolness irritated him. How could he remain so nonchalant? He glanced over and saw the agent was reading Mademoiselle with evident interest.

  "What are you reading that for?" D'Agosta asked irritably.

  "There is an instructive article on bad first dates. It reminds me of a case I once had: a particularly untoward first date that ended in murder — suicide." Pendergast shook his head at the memory and continued reading.