Blue Labyrinth

40

D’Agosta entered the Museum’s video security room at exactly quarter to two in the afternoon. Jimenez had asked to see him, and D’Agosta hoped the meeting wouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes: he’d timed it so he arrived between planetarium shows, and he wasn’t sure he could take yet another eighty-decibel tour of the cosmos.

Jimenez and Conklin were sitting at a small table, tapping on laptops. D’Agosta walked over to them, navigating through the racks of equipment in semi-darkness.

“What’s up?” he asked.

Jimenez straightened up. “We’re done.”

“Yeah?”

“We’ve run through all the security tapes covering the Museum’s entrance from June twelfth, the day of Marsala’s murder, back to April sixth. That’s a week before any eyewitnesses recall seeing the murderer in the Museum, but we went the extra week, just to be safe.” He gestured toward his laptop. “We have the sighting of him that you found initially, entering the Museum late on the afternoon of June twelfth. We have tapes of him entering and exiting the Museum on April twentieth, and another entrance and exit set on April fourteenth.”

D’Agosta nodded. The April 20 date matched with the date the Padgett skeleton had been most recently accessed. And no doubt April 14 was the date that the murderer, under the guise of a visiting scientist, first met with Marsala to arrange for the examination. June 12 was the day of the murder.

He sank into a chair beside them. “Good job,” he said. And he meant it. It was a boring slog, peering at video after grainy video, feeling your eyes slowly going dry and bleary, to the sound of the Big Bang. They’d found two prior dates on which the murderer had visited the Museum and his entrance on the day of the murder. But they still hadn’t found him leaving the Museum after the murder.

A part of him wondered why he’d even bothered having his men complete this exercise. The suspected murderer was dead — a suicide. It wasn’t like they were gathering evidence in preparation for a trial. It was the old-fashioned cop in him, he supposed: dotting every i and crossing every t.

Suicide. The image of the killer, there at the Indio Holding Facility, had stayed with him. The way he’d rambled on about the stink of rotting flowers, his agitation and incoherence. Not to mention the way he’d jumped so homicidally at Pendergast. Those weren’t easy things to forget. And Christ almighty, killing yourself by biting off your own toe and choking on it? A man would really have to want to check out to do something like that. It didn’t seem consistent with the ersatz Professor Waldron, a man who’d clearly been calm and intelligent and rational enough to fool Victor Marsala and other Museum staff into believing he was a scientist.

D’Agosta sighed. Whatever had happened to the man since Marsala’s murder, one fact remained: on June 12, the day of the murder, he’d definitely been in his right mind. He’d been clever enough to lure Marsala into an out-of-the-way location, kill him quickly and efficiently, and disguise the murder as a piece-of-shit robbery gone bad. And most of all, he’d somehow managed to get out of the Museum afterward without being seen by any of the cameras.

Maybe it didn’t matter, but how the hell had he done that?

Mentally, D’Agosta reviewed his tour of the murder scene with Whittaker, the security guard. It had been in the Gastropod Alcove, at the far end of the Hall of Marine Life, near a basement exit and not far from the South American gold hall…

Suddenly D’Agosta sat up in the chair.

Of course.

He couldn’t believe how stupid he’d been. He stood up, pacing back and forth, then wheeled toward Jimenez.

“Marsala was murdered on a Saturday night. What time does the Museum open on Sundays?”

Jimenez rooted through some papers on the desk, found a folded guide to the Museum. “Eleven o’clock.”

D’Agosta moved over to one of the security playback workstations and sat down. Beyond and below, the three o’clock planetarium show was starting up, but he paid it no attention. He moused through a series of menus on the workstation screen, consulted a long list of files, then selected the one he was interested in: the video feed of the Great Rotunda, southern perspective, eleven AM to noon, Sunday, June 13.

The familiar bird’s-eye view swam into life on the screen. As Jimenez and Conklin came up behind him, D’Agosta began playing the video stream at normal speed, then — once his eyes had accustomed themselves to the blurry images — at double speed, then four times speed. As the hour progressed at an accelerated pace before them, the streams of people entering the Museum and passing through the security stations thickened and swelled, moving left to right across the little screen.

There. A lone figure, heading right to left, in the opposite direction, like a swimmer fighting the tide. D’Agosta paused the security feed, noted the timestamp: eleven thirty-four AM. Half an hour before D’Agosta had entered the Museum to open the case. He zoomed in on the figure, then began running the video again, once more at normal speed. There could be no mistake: the face, the clothing, the insolently slow walk — it was the murderer.

“Damn,” Conklin murmured over D’Agosta’s shoulder.

“There was an exit leading to the basement, just beyond the Gastropod Alcove,” D’Agosta explained. “That basement is a maze of levels and tunnels and storage areas. Video coverage would be spotty, at best. He hid there overnight, waited for the Museum to open the next morning, and then just blended in with the crowd on his way out.”

He sat back from the workstation. So they’d tied off this particular loose end, at least. The murderer’s ingress and egress of the Museum were now documented.

D’Agosta’s cell phone began to ring. He plucked it from his pocket and glanced at it. It was a number he didn’t know, Southern California area code. He pressed the ANSWER button.

“Lieutenant D’Agosta,” he said.

“Lieutenant?” came the voice from the other end of the country. “My name’s Dr. Samuels. I’m the pathologist with the Department of Corrections here at Indio. We’ve been doing the autopsy on the recent John Doe suicide, and we’ve come across something of interest. Officer Spandau thought I ought to give you a call.”

“Go on,” he said.

Normally, D’Agosta prided himself on his professionalism as a police officer. He didn’t lose his temper; he kept his weapon holstered; he didn’t use profanity with civilians. But as the coroner continued, D’Agosta forgot this last personal maxim.

“Son of a fucking bitch,” he muttered, phone still pressed to his ear.