Blue Labyrinth

67

Margo threw herself sideways as the buckthorn darted toward her, slicing her jacket and nicking her shoulder. She landed on the floor, jammed up against a stack of shelving, trapped, her headlamp spinning off into darkness. Slade took a step forward. She was now lying on the ground, with the policeman calmly standing over her.

“You’re just making things more difficult,” Slade said.

Her arm was wedged behind her back and it was making contact with something cold. She realized it was a specimen jar, part of a row of them along the bottom level of shelving.

“Look, all I want is the plant you’ve got.” The man tried to make his voice sound reasonable. “We don’t need things to end this way. Give it to me and I’ll let you go.”

Margo said nothing. The man was a liar. Although her mind was going a mile a minute, she could see no way out.

“There’s no chance of your getting away from me, so you might as well cooperate.”

She glanced past him, in the direction of the distant door of the botanical collection through which she’d come.

“Don’t even think about making a run for it,” Slade said. “When I came into Building Six storage, I locked the entryway and jammed the lock with a broken penknife so no one else could enter. We’re alone in here — just you and me.” An odd smile formed on his thin face.

Margo choked down her fear and thought hard. She vaguely remembered that there was another exit at the far end of the Building Six basement. She racked her brains, trying to recall the corridors that would lead her to it. If she could only get past him, she could head for that back exit and lose him. After all, she knew the byways of the Museum and he did not—

“And don’t think about trying for the back exit, either. The truth is, I know these underground corridors almost as well as you do.”

She was shocked that he seemed to have divined what was in her mind. But this had to be another lie, his claiming to know the Museum’s basements.

“Oh, I know this Museum like the back of my hand,” the man said. “I wish to God I didn’t — the Museum ruined my life. I wasn’t always with the NYPD, you see. I was once an FBI agent. Graduated second in my class from the Academy. My very first assignment as a field agent was to take charge of a forward command post, right here at this Museum, to help make sure the opening of a certain blockbuster exhibition went off without a hitch. Do you know what exhibition that was, Margo? You should — you were there.”

Margo stared. Slade… Slade… she vaguely remembered hearing that name during the mopping up of that dreadful night twelve years ago, when the Museum had become a slaughterhouse. She’d never seen his face. Could this really be the same man?

“You’re… that Slade?”

Slade looked gratified. “That’s right. The Superstition exhibition. It was my bad luck that one SAC Spencer Coffey was in charge of the FBI contingent. That exhibition didn’t go off too well, did it? How many died — twenty-six? It was one of the biggest screwups in the Bureau’s history. So big that they made an example of not just Coffey, but all of us. Coffey was transferred to Waco, and I was cashiered from the FBI with the rest of his team. I was a branded man after that, lucky to get a job with the NYPD as a beat cop. And the brand stayed with me. Why do you think a man with my seniority and experience is still a sergeant?”

This bitter little speech had given Margo time to gather her wits. She tried to keep him talking. “So the answer for you was to go on the take?” she asked. “Is that how it worked?”

“I had nothing to do with that disaster — I didn’t even arrive on the scene until the dust was settling — and yet they threw me to the wolves without a second thought. Things like that can make a man receptive to — shall we say—better offers. In time, I got a better offer — and here I am.”

Slade leaned forward, gripping the buckthorn, and she realized he was bracing himself to try once again to stab her in the neck with it. Her fingers closed around the specimen jar behind her. As he prepared to stick her, she kicked out hard, striking the inside of his ankle and knocking him off balance. Slade veered sideways momentarily to regain his balance and she swung the bottle up and around, smashing it against the side of his head. It shattered, spraying ethyl alcohol everywhere and knocking Slade to his knees. She scrambled up and leapt over him, running down the aisle, her bag held tight under her arm. Behind her, Slade rose with a howl of anger.

Panic gave Margo strength and clarity of mind. She raced down the aisles, burst out the door of the botanical collection, and took a left down the corridor, heading toward the back exit of Building Six. Because of the ancient layout of the Museum’s basement, it wasn’t a straight shot. She would have to go through a string of storage rooms in order to reach it. She could hear Slade running behind her now, his breath rasping, his shoes pounding on the cement floor — and growing closer, ever closer.