Vespers

Thirteen

Gentry went back to the main tunnel to call for assistance. Captain Moreaux told the detective that they’d get a team down as soon as possible.

Gentry asked if he knew where Nancy Joyce was. Ari told him that she’d gone up to the Museum of Natural History.

That made sense. It was where her assistant had taken the mold from the deer bone.

Feeling guilty again, the detective went back to the walled-off sublevel. He sat on the landing and looked into the room. The only sound was the occasional distant thunder of a subway train.

It was difficult for him to process the horror of what had happened down here. The pain. The speed-these people were slaughtered where they lay. But it also underscored what he had always believed,despite the years his father had made him go to church. That human beings are animals. Not just the perpetrators but the victims. The reverential funerals and talk about immortal souls notwithstanding, people inevitably bear an unnerving resemblance to beef.

Captain Moreaux arrived nearly half an hour later, with Arvids and four other officers from Metro North. Two of the men got sick. In the heat, the smell was becoming intolerable. The officers were joined by three transit police-under whose jurisdiction the subways typically fell-and five officers from the police Emergency Service Unit. This mobile force of 350 elite officers is not attached to any one precinct. They’re divided into ten regional squads and are called in to assist precinct police in extreme situations ranging from hostage standoffs to river rescues.LieutenantGary Holmes of ESU, City South, was at the end of his two-to-ten shift when he arrived with his team.

Gentry stayed for a while in what was already being referred to as “the butcher shop.” Police were always quick to assign lighthearted nicknames to places of violence or danger. This was done not out of disrespect but, Gentry believed, to give them a way of denying the extreme horror until the situation could be dealt with and processed.

A Metro North police officer photographed the scene before ESU officers began placing the bodies in bags. While Gentry watched from the landing, two officers gently searched the outside woman’s body for identification. They found a blood-soaked pouch beneath the body, attached to her leather belt. Her wallet was inside, along with a can of mace, a Swiss army knife, and an I Love New York key ring. No money had been taken. Arvids looked at her driver’s license. The woman’s name was Barbara Mathis and she lived on Riverside Drive. She was smiling in the photograph and attractively made up. She was twenty-eight years old. About the same age as Dr. Joyce.

Most of the bodies would be taken to the city medical examiner. Before they were removed, Gentry went over to Captain Moreaux.

“Ari, I need you to do me a favor. I want you to take Ms. Mathis’s remains to the Scientific Research Division.”

“Chris Henry?”

Gentry nodded.

Moreaux winced. “Ouch. The medical examiner will not be pleased if I do that.”

“I know. But the medical examiner is going to have his hands full with the tunnel people. This lady came from someplace else.”

“Obviously-”

“I need to know where and I need to know it soon. Chris’ll do this fast and right.”

Moreaux thought for a moment. “Okay. I’ll go set it up.”

Gentry thanked him. Moreaux looked pale as he took the wallet and went back to his office. The captain was the one who was going to have to call the young woman’s family.

Before leaving, Gentry went over to Arvids and thanked him for his help. Then he started up the stairs.

“Detective,” Arvids said.

Gentry stopped and looked back.

“I just thought you should know that Dr. Joyce was still pretty steamed when she left.”

“I’m not surprised. And I don’t blame her.”

“What I’m saying is, maybe you should talk to her. Keep her in the loop. She wants to help. And this”-he gestured behind him-“is gonna take some explaining.”

“Don’t worry, Arvids. I’m going to involve her.”

Arvids thanked him. Gentry wondered what the hell that was really about.

It was much easier getting out of the tunnel than it had been getting in. In order to accommodate the evacuation team, subway traffic had been rerouted along the tracks leading to the underground rooms. The detective was surprised at how cool and clean the air tasted and how bright the daylight seemed when he reentered the terminal. The concourse was much less crowded than it had been before.

Gentry stopped at a pay phone and called Chris Henry. He told him to expect Barbara Mathis’s body within the hour and to front-burner the autopsy. He wanted to know as soon as possible whether the woman had been sexually assaulted and if there was anything on her that would place her whereabouts at the time of her death-dust particles in the lungs or eyes, muffin crumbs in her mouth, anything. Henry thanked him and said he’d be back to him as soon as possible.

As he left Grand Central, Gentry’s mind was on the bats. As he walked west toward the station house, he wondered whether the attack and possible infestation were going to be a small problem or a big one; or whether it was a small problem that would become a big one when the media got their teeth into it. Nancy had been right about one thing. He wished he knew more about bats. Unlike human perps, he had no way of knowing what, if anything, they were going to do next. That was frustrating.

People were ambling along Forty-second Street, self-absorbed or talking to whomever they were with. Some were looking at Bryant Park or toward Times Square or the Chrysler Building. They were oblivious to the hidden worlds of the city, to the hidden dangers behind walls or beneath their feet. Which was how it should be. The job of the city’s forty thousand police officers was to give them that luxury. He was proud of the way they handled that responsibility even when, as now, the problem was moving faster than he was.

After the silence of the underground world, the Midtown South station house seemed unusually raucous. Gentry got himself coffee, shut the door to his office, opened the window, and stared at the street for several minutes before starting through the folders on his desk.

The phone beeped. He snapped it up.

“This is Detective-”

“What’s going on in the subway, Robert?”

“Kathy. How are you?”

“Not good.”

“Sorry to hear that…”

“Come on, Robert, talk to me. What’s going down?”

“Nothing.”

“Bullshit,” she snapped. “Subway service has been disrupted, and I got a solid tip that there was a dismembered bicyclist down there and that you found her among a bunch of dead homeless people. True?”

“If the tip’s solid, why are you asking me?”

“Because I need two sources, and that’s all my other source would tell me.”

“Which source was that?”

“Don’t do that,” Kathy warned.

And then it hit him. “I saw you on TV last night withKathy.” Not Kathy Leung, just Kathy. Officer Arvids Stiebris, you dumb, beauty-struck, horse’s ass of a rookie. He’d been sticking up for Nancy, too, the Romeo.

“I’ll tell you what, Kathy,” Gentry said. “I’ll tell you what we found if you promise to do me a favor.”

“That depends. What kind of favor?”

“I want you to spin it as an aberration, a one-time event. You go tabloid on me, give me a subway system under siege, and I’ll make sure Arvids Stiebris is transferred to a place where he’ll do you absolutely no good in the future.”

“You’ve got a deal,” Kathy said quickly.

“We found the body of a young woman in a bicycle helmet down there. We also found several dead homeless persons. We have no idea who the woman was,” he lied to protect the privacy of the family, “but it looked like all of them were killed by animals.”

“What kind of animals?”

“We’re not sure.”

“Dogs? Rats?”

“We’re not sure.”

“How old was the woman?”

“Our guess is late twenties.”

“How’d she get down in the subway?”

“We don’t know. Maybe she was some kind of outreach worker-we just don’t know.”

“How long will subway service be disrupted?”

“Until the bodies have been removed.”

“Good,” she said. “Now that you’ve told me not very much, how about the truth?”

“Sorry?”

“You’re playing me. I want to know about the bat guano that was found on the tracks.”

What did that dopey bastard Arvids do? Tell her everything?

“Kathy, there’s nothing unusual about bat guano on subway tracks,” he said. “Ask Al Doyle over at health.”

“I will. In the meantime, what really went on down there?”

“I told you, we don’t know.”

“What do youthink? Is there any connection between the dead people in the subway and bats? Could this be related to what happened in Westchester?”

“We don’t know that either.”

“Whatdo you know?”

“Nothing other than what I’ve told you,” Gentry said. “Maybe your source can tell you more. Why don’t you go back to him?”

“I will. But frankly I’d rather talk to you. I’d rather that you help me-that we help each other.”

“I know. Wasn’t that the real reason you agreed to date me after the Mizuno bust?”

“Not entirely-”

“That didn’t do a lot for my ego.”

“Look,” she said, “I went from Connecticut to Westchester, which isn’t exactly a step up. I want off the fucking beat. If these incidents are connected, the story’s still mine. That puts me in the big city with a big breaking headline. Help me and I can help you in the future. Promote the work you’re doing.”

“I don’t need help, thanks.”

“Maybe not now. But one day you will.”

Gentry said nothing. The idea of cooperating with Kathy was not an option. When he worked undercover his policy was to trust only those people who were with him in the trenches. He paid for help or information in cash, not trust.

“Kathy, I’m sorry. No.”

“Detective, I’mgoing to get this story.”

“I know.”

“I can call Dr. Joyce. She went on the consultant payroll last night.”

“Fine.”

Kathy hung up.

Gentry placed the receiver in the cradle. He looked out at the street. He smelled hot tar from a roof across the street.

Part of him actually wished he could have helped Kathy. He admired independence and tenacity, and she had a lot of both. And he still liked her. But until he knew exactly what had happened in the subway, he wasn’t going to say anything.

Gentry put in a call to Moreaux to find out whether he’d discovered anything about where Barbara Mathis had been before they found her. Captain Moreaux said that a patrol car had found her abandoned bicycle and makeup kits on Riverside Drive near 120th Street at 5:22A.M. There were traces of blood on the seat. They found the address inside one of the kits, went to her apartment building, and contacted her husband at work. He gave them her destination and they confirmed that she never arrived.

“What was the condition of the bicycle?”Gentry asked.

“Absolutely intact,” Moreaux told him. “Spokes, paint job, everything. It was just lying near the curb. A little later in the day, with more traffic, it probably would’ve been ripped off.”

Gentry thanked him. He got on the computer and asked the interlinked citywide Stat Unit for a list of any reported carjackings or parked-auto thefts the night before, anywhere from the Bronx down to the Upper West Side. Nothing had been reported. Often, joyriders will stop and grab a “snack” for the road. A lone woman on a bicycle would have been a perfect target, bumped and abducted. Sometimes the kidnappers will kill them and dump them when they’re finished; that was what had happened to the dead woman Gentry had pulled from the Hudson River. But joyriders don’t typically stop, crawl into a subway tunnel, gut a body, then leave it underground. Besides, a good nudge from a car usually leaves a mark on a bicycle.

Gentry went down the hall and refilled his coffee cup. Then he turned to accident reports that had been filed last night and early this morning by personnel in his unit. A horse-drawn carriage colliding with a bicycle deliveryman. A window box falling onto a woman walking her daughter to school. Nineteen others. He signed all but one and left them to be filed. Then-leaving his door open in case the phone rang-Gentry went over to the squad pit with the unsigned report, an investigation into an early morning fire at a Times Square movie theater. Apparently, a broken wire had shorted inside the wall of the projection booth. There was a little bit of smoke and no one was injured.

“Do you have any idea what caused the wire to break?” Gentry asked.

“Looks like a nail might’ve gone through it during renovation,” the officer said. “The Fire Department’s bureau of investigation has that one.”

“Did you make it to the booth?”

“Yes.”

“Was there any kind of unusual smell up there?”

“Just the burning insulation.”

“What’d it smell like?”

The officer shrugged. “It smelled like burning rubber, Detective.”

“Not ammonia?”

“No.”

“Any cockroaches running around?”

“Not that I noticed.”

“Thanks,” Gentry said.

“Can I ask what this is about?” the officer said.

“Yeah. I was thinking some bats might’ve gotten into the wall and chewed through the wire. Their guano smells like burning leaves and they scare the hell out of bugs.”

Gentry went back to his office and signed the report. He turned to the computer and input the keywordbats. He restricted the search to the past two days but asked it to include all of New York State. The database would provide any instances where local or state police had been called regarding bats.

There were four. In addition to the incident at the Central Park Zoo and the assault in Westchester, a motorist fixing a tire on Interstate 87 in Kingston, New York, had been bitten by “a group” of bats. He managed to get back in his car and drive himself to a hospital. That happened two nights ago. One night ago a woman leaving work at the South Hills Mall in Poughkeepsie was attacked in the parking lot. A security guard who was on patrol heard her cries and pulled her into his car. In both cases the bats left when the people did.

The phone beeped and Gentry jumped. He picked it up just as he realized that Kingston to Poughkeepsie to Westchester to NewYork was a straight line down the Hudson.

“Detective Gentry here-”

“Robert, it’s Chris Henry.”

“Hi. You get everything okay?”

“I did,” Henry said. “I appreciate it, I think. It’s a nasty one. What about the missing organs?”

“The Metro North police are going to keep looking. If they find them, you’ll get them.”

“Good. I also wanted to make sure you don’t need a full rundown right away. This one’s gonna take time.”

“I figured.”

“I will tell you what you probably already know: Whoever did this is some fucked-up piece of work. I took a quick look for signs of sexual attack. There’s nothing. But there is one thing I noticed. Some very strange marks on a couple of the rib fragments.”

“Strange?”

“Yeah. Deep gouges, like knife wounds. Only they’re fatter and rounder than a knife blade. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Any guesses what made them?”

“A lion,” he snickered. “If it wasn’t that, you got me.”

Gentry felt his stomach burn a little. Nancy had said something about big cat teeth too.

The detective asked Henry to make exact measurements of the gouges and to beep him when he had the figures. Then he hung up.

A mountain lion,he thought. What the hell did that have to do with bats? Nothing. It made no sense. Gentry was about to call Nancy at the museum when the phone rang.

It was Nancy.

“You’re back,” she said. “I’m glad you’re all right.”

Her enthusiasm sounded a little on the light side. Or maybe that was just his own guilty interpretation.

“Thanks,” he said. “I got in a few minutes ago. I was just about to call you.”

“Did you find anything in the room that I should know about?”

“As a matter of fact, I did,” he said. “The bats were definitely there-”

“Were they still there?”

“No. But there were fifteen victims. All dead.”

She was silent.

“Most of them looked like they’d been sleeping. They were badly lacerated and covered with guano.”

“How fresh did the guano look?”

“Exactly like the stuff in the tunnel,”Gentry said. “I’m waiting for lab results. Although there was one thing-my forensics guy said that one of the victims looked like she’d been attacked by a lion.”

“Was he serious?”

“It wasn’t a scientific judgment, if that’s what you mean. Just an off-the-cuff observation. Nancy, can we talk about this face to face?”

“Why?”

“Because I want to brief you and I want to apologize for what happened down in the tunnel. I’m also sorry about the way it happened. I told you, it wasn’t personal. It was just-the way it had to be.”

“Had to be?”

“Yeah. It’s a long story.”

Joyce was silent again. Then she asked, “Can you come up to the museum?”

“I can.”

“All right. When the professor and I are finished, we’ll talk. We’re on the fifth floor, Professor Lowery’s lab. There’s a private elevator-ask one of the security people.”

“Thanks. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

Gentry hung up, then sped through the eight messages on his voicemail. He forwarded a few to Detectives Anthony and Malcolm, saved the rest, then hurried downstairs. Anyone who needed to reach him could get his pager number off the voicemail message. He stopped in Captain Sheehy’s office and informed him that he’d like to spend time on the Grand Central killings. The precinct commander was surprised by Gentry’s interest in a hardcore case but okayed the request, as long as the detective didn’t step on the toes of the homicide team that was also investigating the deaths. Sheehy said he didn’t want an IDPS-an intradepartmental political shitstorm. Gentry said he didn’t anticipate the two investigations overlapping. Then he bummed a ride from a patrol car heading uptown.

While he was in the car, his pager beeped. He looked down, expecting it to be Chris Henry. It wasn’t.

It was Ari Moreaux.