Blue Labyrinth

9

After three wrong turns and two stops to ask directions, Lieutenant D’Agosta finally managed to find his way out of the maze of the Osteology Department and down to the ground floor. He crossed the Great Rotunda toward the entrance, walking slowly, deep in thought. His meeting with the chief curator, Morris Frisby, had been a waste of time. None of the other interviews had shed much light on the murder. And he had no idea how the perp effected egress from the Museum.

He’d been wandering the Museum since early that morning, and now both his feet and the small of his back ached. This was looking more and more like a typical piece-of-shit New York City murder case, random and brainless — and as such, a pain in the ass to clear. None of the day’s leads had panned out. The consensus was that Victor Marsala had been an unpleasant person but a good worker. Nobody at the Museum had reason to kill him. The only possible suspect — Brixton, the bat scientist, who’d had a row with Marsala two months before — had been out of the country at the time of the murder. And besides, a weenie like that just wasn’t the type. Members of D’Agosta’s team had already interviewed Marsala’s neighbors in Sunnyside, Queens. They all labeled him as quiet, a loner who kept to himself. No girlfriend. No parties. No drugs. And quite possibly no friends, except perhaps the Osteology technician, Sandoval. Parents lived in Missouri, hadn’t seen their son in years. The body had been found in an obscure, rarely visited section of the Museum, missing wallet, watch, and pocket change. There was little doubt in D’Agosta’s mind: this was just another robbery gone bad. Marsala resisted and the dumb-ass perp panicked, killed him, and dragged him into the alcove.

To make matters worse, there was no lack of evidence — if anything, D’Agosta and his team were already drowning in it. The crime scene was awash in hair, fiber, and prints. Thousands of people had tramped through the hall since it was last mopped and the cases wiped down, leaving their greasy traces everywhere. He had a brace of detectives reviewing the Museum’s security videos, but so far they’d found nothing suspicious. Two hundred employees had worked late last night — so much for taking weekends off. D’Agosta could see it now, all too plainly: he’d beat his head against the case for another week or two, wasting his time in vain dead-end investigations. Then the case would be filed and slowly grow cold, another squalid unsolved homicide, with its megabytes of interview transcripts, digitized photos, and SOC analyses washing around the NYPD’s database like dirty water at the base of a pier, serving no purpose other than dragging down his clearance rate.

As he turned toward the exit and quickened his step, he spied a familiar figure: the tall form of Agent Pendergast, striding across the polished marble floor, black suit flapping behind him.

D’Agosta was startled to see him — particularly here, in the Museum. He hadn’t seen Pendergast since the private dinner party the FBI agent had hosted the month before in celebration of his impending wedding. The meal, and the wines, had been out of this world. Pendergast had prepared it himself with the help of his Japanese housekeeper. The food was unbelievable… At least until Laura, his wife, had deconstructed the printed menu the following day, and they realized they had eaten, among other things, fish lips and intestine soup (Sup Bibir Ikan) and cow’s stomach simmered with bacon, cognac, and white wine (Tripes à la Mode de Caen). But perhaps the best part of the dinner party was Pendergast himself. He had recovered from the tragedy that had befallen him eighteen months before, and returned from a subsequent visit to a ski resort in Colorado having lost his pallor and skeletal gauntness, and now he looked fit both physically and emotionally, if still his usual cool, reserved self.

“Hey, Pendergast!” D’Agosta hurried across the Rotunda and seized his hand.

“Vincent.” Pendergast’s pale eyes lingered on D’Agosta for a moment. “How good to see you.”

“I wanted to thank you again for that dinner. You really went out of your way, and it meant a lot to us. Both of us.”

Pendergast nodded absently, his eyes drifting across the Rotunda. He seemed to have something on his mind.

“What are you doing here?” D’Agosta asked.

“I was… consulting with a curator.”

“Funny. I was just doing the same thing.” D’Agosta laughed. “Like old times, eh?”

Pendergast didn’t seem to be amused.

“Look, I wonder if I could ask you a favor.”

A vague, noncommittal look greeted the question.

D’Agosta plowed ahead gamely. “No sooner do I get back from my honeymoon than Singleton dumps this murder case on me. A technician in the Osteology Department here was found last night, head bashed in and stuffed into an out-of-the-way exhibit hall. Looks like a robbery that escalated into homicide. You’ve got such a great nose for these things that I wonder if I could just share a few details, get your take…”

During the course of this mini-speech, Pendergast had grown increasingly restive. Now he looked at D’Agosta with an expression that stopped him in midsentence. “I’m sorry, my dear Vincent, but I fear that at present I have neither the time nor the interest to discuss a case with you. Good day.” And with the shortest of nods, he turned on his heel and strode briskly in the direction of the Museum’s exit.