Bestiary

CHAPTER ONE

Carter Cox didn’t have to be down in the bottom of Pit 91. As a visiting fellow to the George C. Page Museum of Natural History, and head of its paleontology field research department, he could have been sitting in his comfortable, air-conditioned office overlooking Wilshire Boulevard. Instead of wearing overalls and a Green Day T-shirt, he could have been in a suit and tie — well, maybe not a tie, not many men wore ties in L.A., Carter had noticed — and his hands could be clean and his hair combed and his shoes shined.

But then he wouldn’t have been half this happy.

Right now, at the bottom of the tar pit, the temperature hovered in the high eighties, his hair was gathered under a sweaty headband, and his hiking boots were covered with a viscous coating of warm, black tar. Asphalt, actually. Even though these were called the La Brea Tar Pits, it was asphalt, the lowest grade of crude oil, that had been bubbling up under this ground for the past thirty or forty thousand years; those were methane bubbles that still rose lazily to the surface of the pit, swelling up like bullfrogs, before popping without a sound. And those were prehistoric bones, miraculously preserved in this thick, black goo, that he was still able to excavate with a chisel, a brush, and a lot of elbow grease.

The pit itself was about fifty feet square, with wooden boards propping up the walls on all sides (in case of a cave-in or an earthquake), and rusty iron girders supporting the boards. It was open-air, about twenty-five feet deep, with a slanted plastic roof overhead to keep off the sun (or the rain, though in May in Los Angeles rain wasn’t much of a problem), and that was about it. Rows of heavy black buckets were stacked on the north wall for glopping out the bottom of the pit, and a thick red chain hung down from the pulley above.

Today, Carter had a crew of three working for him. These were all volunteers who’d been trained by the museum. Claude, a retired engineer, was working on a three-foot grid in the east quadrant; Rosalie, a middle-aged teacher taking a year off, was working beside him; and next to Carter — where he usually seemed to find her — was Miranda. Miranda had just graduated from UCLA with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology, and she was trying to decide if this kind of work was what she really wanted to do.

At the moment, it didn’t look that way.

“I think,” she said, “I’m stuck again.” She was kneeling on the boards that crisscrossed the floor of the pit, just above the area she was excavating, with her hands deep into the muck. Too deep, Carter knew. When you reached down to pull out the tar — and yeah, he had to concede that he called it that, too — you had to be careful not to dig down too far or to try to take out too much at one time. The stuff had been trapping animals of all kinds — from woolly mammoths to saber-toothed cats — for thousands of years, and it wasn’t done yet.

“Just relax,” Claude called out. “Pull slowly.”

“I am,” she said nervously, glancing up at Carter, who sat back on his haunches and wiped the sweat from his brow.

“You’re pushing down with one hand while you’re trying to pull out the other,” he said. He inched along the board until he was shoulder to shoulder with her. “That means you’re getting one hand trapped after the other.” He put his hands on her forearms, then began to pull them up, slowly, with equal force. The tar was especially warm today, which made it even more resistant than ever. Their faces were just inches apart, so close he could smell that she’d recently popped a couple of Tic Tacs into her mouth.

“There’s something down there,” she said. “Something big. I can feel it.”

“There’s always something down there,” Carter said, as her arms slowly emerged from the hole. “So far, they’ve got about two million finds catalogued in the museum.”

“How many from this particular pit?”

“A lot,” he said as her hands emerged, black and glistening with goo; the stuff was too thick to drip. “That’s why we keep digging here.”

She leaned back with a sigh. “Thanks. You’re a lifesaver.”

“Not a problem,” Carter said. “I had to promise the museum I wouldn’t let any of my crew get swallowed in the pit.”

“What happens if one of us does?” Claude asked.

“There’s a ten-dollar fine,” Carter replied, “and I lose my parking privileges for a week.”

“Good thing we signed up for your shift,” Rosalie said, as she plopped a handful of wet tar into a waiting bucket, and they all laughed.

Gettlng the stuff off your hands and out of your hair always took at least half an hour. There were showers installed in a trailer parked right next to the pit, equipped with loofahs, pumice stones, sponges, long-handled brushes, shampoo, and enough skin scrub to clean a battleship.

Your work clothes you left hanging on a wooden peg. You were never going to wear them for anything else as long as you lived.

Carter got into a fresh pair of jeans, a blue Polo shirt, and white sneakers. Although he’d never been what you’d call formal, this was still a far cry from the way he’d dressed when he held the Kingsley Chair in Paleontology and Vertebrate Biology at New York University. There, he’d at least have worn a shirt with long sleeves. But everything in L.A. was more casual, and it was one of the things, he had to admit, that made the city appealing.

So did the weather. It was late afternoon now, and even though the pit tended to trap the heat, the air outside it, in the surrounding park, was mild. A breeze was stirring the tops of the palm trees, and squirrels were scampering up the trunk of a California oak. Carter hadn’t ever planned on living in L.A. — he’d always nursed the standard-issue Eastern prejudices against the glitz and superficiality of the place — but when he looked at it objectively, as the scientist he was trained to be, he had to concede that the climate was advantageous, too.

As were the job opportunities, if it came to that.

After the lab disaster at NYU, he’d become pretty much persona non grata in the department. He had tenure and an endowed chair, but he didn’t have anybody’s faith or loyalty. In fact, people hardly knew where to look when they passed him in the halls. So when his wife, Beth, got the call from the Getty art museum, inviting her to come and work for them in L.A., the two of them only had to think about it overnight before deciding she should take it.

The only question had been what Carter would do. But with his scholarly credentials still as impressive and unchallenged as they’d been before the accident, it hadn’t been hard for him to find a post on the West Coast himself. The tough part, in fact, had been sorting through all the offers.

But their lifestyle here couldn’t be more different. In New York, they’d lived in a cramped apartment on Washington Square Park; here they rented, from a museum trustee who was generous enough to take a loss, a fully furnished house in a private, gated community called Summit View. To get there you took a main artery, Sepulveda Boulevard, which wound along beside the San Diego Freeway. It was a looping, dipping, four-lane highway with brushy hills on one side, and the freeway up above on the other, and while most people preferred the freeway because you could move a lot faster (when it wasn’t slowed to a crawl), Carter liked the Sepulveda route because it felt more like a road to him. It wasn’t predictable, it wasn’t jammed with traffic, it had character (including a tunnel through the Santa Monica Mountains that you had to pass through to get to the San Fernando Valley). Today, for a Friday afternoon, the traffic wasn’t bad, and he’d only had time to listen to maybe forty-five minutes of a taped lecture on the Galápagos Islands before he was pulling into the Summit View drive.

The minute you hit the drive, it was like entering another world. It was a broad, empty concourse that swept up into the hills, past neatly cropped lawns and a pristine community center. Halfway up, as always, Carter spotted the private patrol car parked on the right. Carter gave the cop a wave — at this time on a weekday, it’d be Al Burns — then continued on toward the top of the rise.

Their house was on the left, with a flagstone drive in front of the garage. It was a modern house, white, with a sloping red-tile roof, and coming home to it was still a new enough experience to Carter that he felt out of place parking in its driveway.

But it wasn’t just the unfamiliarity of the place that struck him every time; it was the silence. All the houses that lined both sides of the wide, winding street were neat and orderly and silent as the grave. Not a kid playing in the street, not a lawn mower growling, not a light on in any of the windows, not a stereo blaring anywhere. And not a soul on the immaculate, new sidewalks.

To be honest, it felt a little creepy. But he told himself he’d get used to it.

“I’m home,” he called out, coming through the door. He dropped his backpack, heavy with books and papers, on the parquet floor of the foyer. “Hello?”

No answer. He’d expected to hear from Robin, the nanny they’d hired to help out with the baby.

“Robin? You here?”

He climbed the stairs — thickly carpeted by the owner when he learned that Carter and Beth had a one-year-old — and headed for the nursery. Beth was in the corner rocking chair, her sweatshirt hiked up, nursing little Joey. “I didn’t want to shout,” she whispered.

“Where’s Robin?”

“I didn’t go in today, so I gave her the day off.”

“Still got that cold?”

“I can’t seem to shake this one.”

“The prince looks happy.”

“Oh yeah — nothing bothers this guy.” It was something they joked about — Joey had yet to have a cold, an ear infection, colic, you name it. They’d been prepared by all the baby books for a litany of problems and complaints, but so far… nada. This kid was made of steel.

“You want me to make some dinner?” Carter asked.

“I’m not hungry. But there’s still some of that salmon from last night.”

“That’s fine,” Carter said. “I’ll leave you to it,” he said, nodding at the busy Joey.

Downstairs, he took a Heineken out of the fridge and, as there wouldn’t be any witnesses, drank it straight from the bottle. The mail was on the counter — some bills, a couple of catalogues — but what looked like a more interesting pile of papers lay scattered on the butcher-block table in the breakfast nook. Carter pushed out two of the chairs, rested his long legs across one, and turned some of the papers around so he could read them.

The cover letter, addressed to Beth, was from Berenice Cabot, an important administrator at the Getty, asking her to examine the contents enclosed and prepare for a meeting with the owner of the work of art displayed there, a man whose anonymity Mrs. Cabot had been asked at this point to maintain. That wasn’t so unusual, Carter knew; museums often dealt with wealthy donors who didn’t want their names made public until they chose to do so themselves.

By now Carter felt he should probably stop snooping. This was between Beth and the Getty, he thought as he took another swig from the bottle. But then, she had left it all out in plain view. In a court of law, wasn’t that justification enough? And what harm could it do just to take a little peek at some of the photos enclosed? Even a quick glance told him they were pretty unusual.

He put the letter aside and looked at the glossy eight-by-ten that lay on top of the pile. It showed a massive old book, with what looked like an ivory cover, studded with jewels. A ruler, laid beside it in the shot to offer scale, indicated that its pages were large — perhaps two feet long and almost as wide. Although Carter was no expert in this sort of thing, it reminded him of ancient books he’d seen in Europe, most notably the Book of Kells at Trinity College, Dublin. That volume dated from the eighth century, and this book looked, to his unpracticed eye, to be in the same league.

The other photos, their colors muted by what Carter guessed to be insufficient light, were of the book’s contents. And most appeared to be of fanciful creatures, mythological beasts made up of strange composites — the heads of lions on the bodies of snakes, a chicken’s beak on a lumbering bear, a towering giraffe with eight legs and a prominently displayed set of curving tusks. They were all rendered in the primitive, but forceful, medieval style Carter had seen in some of Beth’s textbooks from her days as a student at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.

“Snoop,” she said as she padded into the kitchen in her stocking feet.

“You caught me.”

She plopped onto his lap and leaned her back against the edge of the table.

“Looks like they’ve got you working from home.”

“Mrs. Cabot messengered those over this morning.” She was wearing matching sweatpants, too, and had her black hair tied up hastily in a ponytail.

“What’s she want you to do?” Carter asked innocently.

She smiled. “Didn’t you read the cover letter first?”

Carter laughed. “So when are you supposed to meet with Mr. Mysterious? It failed to specify that.”

“Who knows? Whenever he chooses to come forward.”

“Looks like a very interesting project.”

She snuggled closer. “I think so, too. It looks like one of the earliest and most complete bestiaries ever found. I can’t wait to get my hands on it.”

“And I can’t wait to get my hands on you,” Carter said, wrapping his arms around her; she smelled of Dove, Prell, and milk, a combination he would never have thought could be so heady. “You know, with the prince asleep…,” he said suggestively, running his hand up the front of her sweatshirt.

“And the queen so sore,” she said, taking his hand away but kissing the knuckles. She laid her head on his shoulder, and as he held her, Carter’s eye fell on a photo lying upside down on the table. He reached out and turned it around, to see what at first he took to be a beautiful illuminated picture of a peacock. Its head was turned to one side, its tail feathers were fanned out in a wide display, but unlike any peacock he’d ever seen, this one was bright red and had an unmistakable aura of menace. Its eyes glowed like rubies, and its talons looked as sharp and gnarled as thorns. It reminded him less of an ornamental creature than a prehistoric bird of prey.