Bestiary

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Carter hated secrets, and right now his house felt like it was filled with them. Beth was in the shower, and he was putting Joey back in his crib. But his thoughts kept returning to the same secret things — the bizarre job that he had undertaken on the al-Kalli estate, the astonishing bestiary that he now supervised there, the bones that had gone missing from his basement lab at the museum. Normally, Beth would be the first person he’d turn to; she’d be the first — and possibly the only — one in whom he’d confide. There was nobody he relied on more, nobody whose judgment he valued more highly, nobody to whom he poured out his doubts and fears and quandaries more trustingly. But now he couldn’t. Al-Kalli had sworn him to secrecy — and Carter even had the feeling that to tell Beth anything might be to endanger her somehow. As for the stolen bones, well, he felt as though he had made some colossal blunder, and that it was his responsibility to figure out what to do next. That, plus he was embarrassed. He couldn’t imagine anything under Beth’s supervision — especially something so irreplaceable — ever getting lost or damaged.

Joey looked up at him with those clear gray-blue eyes, his feet kicking merrily in the air, and Carter couldn’t help but think of all the secrets and mysteries that would always attend him, too. The doctors had told Carter, in no uncertain terms, that he would not be able to father a child, but here was Joey. And though Carter and Beth had thought that by leaving New York, they could also leave behind the terrible ordeal with Arius, who had stalked them for months, he now suspected (or knew? did he know and was he just denying it to himself?) that he had been wrong about that, too. He wondered if that was what life was like — that everything you ever did, everything that ever happened to you, every decision you ever made haunted you the rest of your days? Los Angeles was supposed to be a fresh start, but were fresh starts even possible?

Joey burbled something that sounded suspiciously like “Dada,” and Carter laughed. “You talkin’ to me?” he said, in his best De Niro. “You talkin’ to me?”

Joey laughed and batted his arms against the mattress. But he didn’t repeat the experiment.

Carter leaned down into the crib and, with his eyes closed, kissed him on his smooth, untroubled brow. The skin was cool and dry and fragrant, and for a few seconds Carter just stayed as he was, bent down like a crane fishing in a pool of water, feeling Joey’s little mitts pull at his hair and his earlobes. This, he told himself, is all that matters. This… and Beth. He focused entirely on the moment, banishing all other thoughts. This… and Beth. This… and Beth, until, for one split second, he suddenly flashed on a green forest, fragrant with rain.

“Did you have to change him?” Beth asked from the doorway.

Carter opened his eyes and turned around. Beth was in her blue robe, toweling her hair dry. “Change him?” Carter said, the image of the forest fading fast. “No. He’s fine.”

Beth came to his side and gazed down into the crib. “He is, isn’t he?” she said.

But something in her tone didn’t sound right. “You say that like you’re not completely sure.”

Beth shook her head — was she just shaking her hair dry? — and said, “Of course I’m sure. What a thing to say!”

Carter, chastised, remained silent. But he still thought he’d heard a discordant note. And neither he nor Beth moved for a few seconds, as if by standing there they could dispel any doubt.

Finally, Carter said, “Where’s Champ?” Outside, the long summer day was finally drawing to a close and it was nearly dark.

“I think he’s in the yard,” Beth said. “Maybe you should bring him in.” She didn’t have to say anything about the coyotes for Carter to know what was in her mind.

He nodded and left the room. He went down the stairs of the house where he felt, despite the many months that they’d been there, a bit like an intruder. Everything was nice — well appointed, freshly painted, plushly carpeted — but it wasn’t his, and it wasn’t even decorated with his stuff. His old rocking chair, his scarred coffee table, his cinder-block bookcases — they’d all, quite reasonably, been left behind. It was hardly worth the cost of shipping them, much less to a fully furnished place. And that, too, had been part of their plan for a fresh start. Get rid of the old stuff, with all its scratches and dents and memories, and begin again with new and foreign and unencumbered belongings.

A hot, dry wind was blowing again, and the short grass in the yard crackled under Carter’s feet. The canyon below was bathed in moonlight, the far slope of the Santa Monica Mountains outlined against a starry sky. New York has nothing like this, Carter reflected, though that didn’t mean he missed his view of the Washington Square Arch any less. He sometimes wondered if it had something to do with his work — spending so much of his time in the study and contemplation of long-dead things, did he need the fix of human activity at the end of the day? Did he need to rub elbows with the crowd, to feel the pulse of life around him? To exchange the dry bones (the question of what he was going to do about the missing bones of La Brea Woman coursed through his mind for the zillionth time) for warm flesh?

Off in the distance, he could hear the sudden burst of backyard fireworks, one day early. He knew that the police and fire departments were on high alert; there had been nothing but warnings all week about the drought-dry tinder, and the dangers of setting off a wildfire. Carter had never been anywhere near such a blaze, but he’d seen the news footage of previous blazes on CNN. And the sad interviews afterward, with people who had struggled to save whatever they could — their pets, their photo albums, their family silver — from the devouring flames. One guy had narrowly escaped on a bicycle, clutching, of all things, a massive bowling trophy.

He looked around the small, fenced yard, and heard Champ before he spotted him. Most of his body was under a bush, apparently trying to root something out. All Carter could see was his bushy blond tail.

“Champ!”

The dog’s tail wagged, but he was still intent on what he was doing.

“Come on, Champ. Time to go inside.”

Carter went closer, but all he could see was the dog’s arched back and wagging tail. “What are you doing?”

Carter put his hands on Champ’s haunches and gently dragged the dog out of the brush. Champ didn’t resist, but he didn’t cooperate, either. He just allowed himself to be pulled, like a statue, backward on the patchy grass. In his jaws, Carter could now see his prize — it looked like the bones and carcass of a recently deceased squirrel — and Champ was clearly not planning to let go.

“Oh, man, what do you want that for?” Carter said. “Don’t we feed you better than that?”

Champ glanced at him, but appeared to be utterly unpersuaded.

“Come on, boy, let go,” Carter said, squatting down and trying to dislodge the remains. But Champ growled, and Carter let go, wiping his fingers in the dirt.

What was the best way to win this war? Carter wondered. Should he go inside, get something the dog liked — maybe a big wad of peanut butter? — and get him to drop this treat for an even more appealing one?

Champ shook the desiccated carcass, as if making sure there wasn’t any life left in it, and that’s when it suddenly occurred to Carter — Champ might be the answer to at least one of his problems. Why didn’t he think of it sooner?

He jumped to his feet, ran into the kitchen, got the peanut butter — he just brought the whole jar outside — and let Champ bury his face in it. With the toe of his sneaker, Carter kicked the now neglected squirrel over the edge of the yard and down into the ravine below.

“You want to go for a ride?” Carter said to Champ, who was too busy with the Skippy to pay any attention. When the dog took a break, Carter put the leash on him and went back inside. He bounded up the stairs to the bedroom, where he found Beth propped up against a stack of pillows, with her nose in a sheaf of papers. “I’m going to go out for a little while,” he said.

“Out?” she said. “Now?”

“There’s something I forgot at work.”

“At the Page? Why can’t it wait till tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow it’s closed, for the Fourth.”

“It’ll be closed now, for the night.”

“I know the guard; he’ll let me in.”

“This really can’t wait?” Beth said, though she knew her husband well enough to know that whatever it was, it couldn’t.

“Be back in no time,” he said, before adding, “and, by the way, I’m taking Champ with me.”

He was thumping back down the stairs before she could even think to ask why he’d want the dog along.

Fortunately, Champ loved going for a ride; Carter had only to open the side door of his Jeep and Champ leapt up onto the front seat, ready for anything.

And would he be ready for what Carter wanted him to do? Carter put the car into gear, backed out of the driveway, and hoped that this wasn’t the craziest idea he’d had yet.

At the museum, the parking lots were closed, so he had to leave the car on Wilshire. He had a plastic passkey to the employee entrance, and he led Champ inside. He knew Hector would be on duty somewhere, and he didn’t want to give the poor guy a heart attack by coming upon him unexpectedly.

“Hector?” he called out. “It’s Carter. Carter Cox.”

There was no answer.

“Hector? You here?”

Champ was fascinated by all the smells from all the feet that had trampled over the museum floor that day, and Carter was encouraged to see his head down, nose fixed. Maybe this would work, after all.

He led the dog toward the rear elevators, past the lighted display of the dire wolf skulls, past the open lab, past the entrance to the lush atrium garden where Geronimo used to like to wander, and tried calling out again. “Hector? You around?”

He heard the jangling of a key ring, and a tentative voice saying “Who’s there? Don’t move!”

“Hector, it’s me — Carter. Don’t freak out.”

Hector, breathing a sigh of relief, emerged from behind the life-size replica of the giant sloth being attacked by a saber-toothed cat.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Hector said. “The museum’s closed. And Mr. Gunderson, he gave me special instructions about you.” Then he noticed the dog. “And are you crazy? You can’t bring a dog in here.”

“I had to,” Carter said.

“Why? Why you need to bring a dog into the museum, at night?”

Carter recognized that he was going to have to do some fast, and persuasive, talking, if he hoped to get Hector’s cooperation. “I need him to help me find something.”

Hector waited, unimpressed. “Find what?”

Carter knew that this was an important moment — if he let Hector know what was missing, and Hector shared his secret with Gunderson, all hell would break loose. But if he didn’t tell him, it would be impossible to do what he had to do.

“Some bones are missing, from the collection downstairs. Some very important bones.”

Now Hector started to look concerned. Anything that went missing, especially if it could be tracked to his watch, potentially spelled trouble. “You report this?” he asked, hitching his belt back up over his belly.

“Not yet,” Carter confessed. “I was hoping I could find them first. Or at least figure out what happened.” And then, in a low blow that he regretted giving, he said, “You’ve been so helpful about granting me access downstairs, even after hours, that I was hoping we could solve the problem before either one of us had to answer any questions from Gunderson, or the police.”

Hector wasn’t stupid, and he immediately surmised where Carter was going with this. Cooperate, and maybe the problem could be made to go away, or stick to the rules and risk all kinds of shit coming down. Why, he wondered, had he ever let Carter, and that friend of his with the long white hair, slide? He didn’t even like Big Macs that much.

“What do you need to do?” he said, and Carter inwardly exulted.

“Not much. I just need you to take us downstairs again, to the lower level, for a few minutes.”

Hector hesitated, wondering if this was in fact a way of getting himself into even deeper trouble, then turned toward the elevators with his keys in hand. He would stick right by this guy — and his dog — and make damn sure nothing else went wrong.

Carter and Champ followed him into the elevator, and Carter, afraid of saying the wrong thing, kept his mouth shut all the way down. When the doors opened, he said, “You can just wait here, if you want,” but Hector wasn’t going to chance anything else going wrong.

“I’m coming with you,” he said. “And that dog better not do anything — and you know what I’m talking about — down here.”

“He’s completely museum-trained,” Carter said, though the small joke got no response at all.

Hector turned on the overhead lights, which flickered to life, row after row, like waves receding into the distance. The light they threw off was pale and ghostly and caught a million dust motes drifting through the air. Even Champ, normally an avid adventurer, waited sheepishly by the elevator.

“Come on, boy,” Carter said. “We’ve got work to do.”

Carter set off down the center aisle, with Champ staying close by his side. Hector followed right behind them. They walked past seemingly endless rows of identical cabinets with shallow drawers, all containing countless artifacts and fossilized remains gathered over the decades that the La Brea Tar Pits had been excavated and explored. The bones gave off a dry and arid aroma, and Hector coughed once or twice as they passed them by.

As they approached the makeshift lab that Carter and Del had set up at the farthest reach of the floor, Champ tried to trot ahead. Clearly, he smelled something different here — maybe the scent of Del, or the tarry bones of the La Brea Man that had, until just a short time before, lain exposed on the worktable. Now those remains were secretly stashed on another floor, in a locked closet used for chemicals and solvents.

But it was what remained in the burgled drawer that Carter was after. The broken padlock still hung from the hasp, and as Carter slid the drawer open, he saw the crumpled handkerchief that he had used to conceal and transport the mysterious object that the La Brea Man had once held in his hand. The cloth was all that was left there, but it was still encrusted with bits of the tar and tiny flakes of bone or stone from the object itself. It wasn’t much, Carter realized, but it was all that he had to work with.

“Wasn’t that where the woman’s bones were?” Hector said, concerned.

“Yes.”

“And those, aren’t they the oldest bones in the whole museum?”

Hector seemed to be appreciating the gravity of the situation by the second.

“Not the oldest,” Carter replied, “but the most significant.”

Hector whistled under his breath, as Carter delicately lifted the handkerchief out of the drawer — he didn’t want to disturb or taint its odor in any way — and then held it down to Champ’s nose. At first, the dog tried to turn away, as if uninterested, but when Carter put a finger through his collar and pulled his head back to the cloth, Champ took a good whiff.

Then he looked up again at Carter, as if to say, Yeah?

“I want you to follow that scent,” Carter said, knowing of course that the dog couldn’t understand a word. But that’s what people did, wasn’t it? You spoke to the dog as if he could be made to comprehend your meaning… and damned if it didn’t work sometimes.

Champ turned and looked around, as if wondering exactly what to do. Carter led him a few feet back down the aisle — the only way any thief could have gone — and then pressed the handkerchief to his nose again. Champ took another strong sniff and trotted a few feet ahead, dragging out the length of his Extendo leash. Carter reeled him in, gave him another shot at the wadded-up cloth, then let him go again — and this time Champ seemed to be fully involved in the game. He put his head down to the cold linoleum tiles, then up in the air, then back down to the floor. Occasionally he would stop and sniff at another cabinet; how different could any of these artifacts and fossils really smell? Carter wondered. He could only count on the freshness of the sample to help Champ distinguish it from all the others resting in their silent graves all around them.

“This is the stupidest thing I have ever done,” Hector muttered. “This I will lose my job over for sure.”

“Maybe not,” Carter said as he followed along in Champ’s wake. “Maybe not.”

But when the dog started to retrace their steps directly to the elevator, Carter, too, began to wonder. Was Champ just leading them back out the way they came? Was that all he thought he was being asked to do?

But then the dog stopped, turned, and, with his head close to the floor, moved to the left, past the elevator bank and around the corner. “What’s back there?” Carter asked over his shoulder.

“Not much,” Hector said. “A storage unit, some machinery, a stairwell.”

Champ had wrapped his long leash around a steel column, and Carter had to hurry up to catch him. The dog was standing in front of a sealed metal door with a red slash painted on it warning that an alarm would go off if the door was opened.

“Where’s this lead to?” Carter asked.

Hector had to think for a second, and looked up as if to see what they might be under. “The garden,” he said.

“You mean the one in the middle of the museum?”

“Yes.”

Champ put his nose to the bottom of the door, and pawed at the metal.

“Can you open it?”

Hector stepped around him, using a passkey to disable the alarm — to Carter, it looked like the alarm hadn’t been in operation, anyway — then pried the door open with a resounding screech. It sounded as if the door hadn’t worked in ages, either. Inside, it was pitch black and a cobweb brushed across Carter’s face. Hector played his flashlight beam over the interior until he found the light switch. A bare bulb hung down from the ceiling, illuminating a rusted lawnmower, several gardening tools, some rubber boots, a stack of dented paint cans. It looked as if no one had been down there, much less passed through with a pile of stolen bones, in a very long time. But Champ was eager to go.

“Okay, boy, I’ll take your word for it,” Carter said, though he wasn’t really so sure.

Champ neatly threaded his way through the detritus, and he was halfway up the first flight of stairs before Hector had managed to close the door behind them. Carter was looking at the dust on the steps to see if there was any sign of a footprint, or anything at all to suggest a recent intruder, but in the dim light from the overhead bulbs — not to mention the haste with which he was trying to keep up with Champ — it was all he could do to see the steps themselves.

Champ stopped on the landing to make sure he had his pack in tow, then trotted up the next flight of steps, which culminated in another sealed door. At this one he whined, as if anxious to capture his prey just beyond. Hector, huffing and puffing, climbed the last steps, released the alarm, then yanked the door back with a loud screech. Carter was instantly overwhelmed by the smell of wet leaves and thick foliage, and by the sound of swishing sprinklers.

Champ leapt out into the garden so fast that the leash came out of Carter’s hand. There were modest lamp poles with amber lights every few yards along the pathways, but otherwise the garden was lighted by the moon, which shone down through the open, unobstructed roof. Carter could hear the plastic leash handle clattering after Champ as he dragged it down the cement walkway, then over the little footbridge that crossed the meandering, koi-filled stream. Though it was not as strictly planned as the Pleistocene Garden on the grounds outside, where nothing but plants indigenous to the area during the last ice age were grown, here — in this secluded atrium, surrounded by the curving glass walls of the museum all around it — visitors still had a sense of the quiet, natural landscape that this place had once possessed. A gnarled gingko tree rose up in one corner, slender palms rustled in the night wind, the furtive splashing of turtles — who enjoyed their own little nesting ground — joined with the constant rushing of the waterfall toward the back of the garden. And it was there that Carter spotted Champ, trying to drag his leash up a small escarpment overgrown with ferns.

“Okay, hang on,” Carter said, but Champ didn’t turn. It was as if he were trying to enter the streambed from the miniature waterfall.

Carter unhooked the leash from his collar — there was no way the dog could escape from the enclosed atrium — and Champ instantly ran down the path to a spot that afforded easier access, then went up the slight rise to the source of the waterfall again. For a second, Carter thought he might just be thirsty, but then he saw it — lying there, atop a larger, flatter stone in the center of the stream.

The object from the La Brea Man’s grasp.

But now, perhaps because it had been partially cleansed by the running water, it gleamed, like the mano — or grinding stone — it had clearly once been. On its surface there were long diagonal scratches, made with another, possibly redder stone. Champ, unable to reach it, was hovering over the small pool from which the waterfall descended. Carter, not quite able to see everything from the pathway, stepped off the cement and, wrapping his arm around the base of a slim pine spruce, hauled himself up. He had to nudge Champ to one side just to make room for himself; this was an ornamental garden, and it wasn’t designed for off-road adventures. But the ground around his feet didn’t look as ornamental and undisturbed as the rest of the garden. Carter could see that some brush had been cleared to one side, and the dirt here looked freshly turned.

Champ barked, as if confirming his discovery, and Carter, suddenly realizing what he was standing on, instinctively stepped back.

“What’s there?” Hector asked from the walkway below.

Carter wasn’t sure how to answer that. But then he said, “A grave, I think.”

Hector crossed himself.

Carter looked again at the mano stone, sitting in the stream like a kind of marker, and then at the turned earth on the bank where he stood. It was as if he had stumbled upon a prehistoric burial site.

“What do you mean, a grave?” Hector said. “Whose?”

That much, Carter knew. It was the grave of the La Brea Woman, who had died just a few hundred yards away, over nine thousand years ago — though who had dug it here, and how, he couldn’t even guess.

“Damn,” Hector muttered, “this is something we got to report.”

“Not yet,” Carter replied. First he needed to know more about how it had happened. And then, he would need some time to think through its consequences. “Just let me handle it. Okay?”

Hector looked dubious, but at the same time glad to be off the hook. “You’ll say that it isn’t my fault? You’ll say that I did my job?”

“Yes,” Carter said, reaching down to ruffle Champ’s fur in gratitude, “I’ll keep you out of it entirely.”

Hector’s mind appeared at rest.

But Carter’s was not. As he surveyed the marking stone, the last and most precious thing in the world to the La Brea Man, and then the earth that still bore the trace of bony fingertips, his own mind was decidedly in turmoil.