custom-made glass himself. Thick and unbreakable, it allowed a view and let the sunshine in, but on the outside it simply looked like a mirrored solar panel for heat. It provided an excellent work environment—sunny and cheerful, yet private and quiet, protecting his specimens.
She looked up at him. This time her hand didn’t move, though he could see the red welts on her wrists where she must have fought the leather restraints again. And then he saw the scratches and grooves in the chair’s arm. She had ruined the wood. She had done it on purpose. His mother’s chair, a Duncan Phyfe he had reupholstered himself, and she had ruined it by rubbing the buckles of the leather restraints into the wood.
He felt the anger rising but it came with bile, threatening to back up from his stomach. He could taste it. No, no. He couldn’t be sick. He wouldn’t. He mustn’t think about the chair. No anger. He couldn’t afford to make himself sick.
He placed the tray on the table next to her and avoided looking at the scarred chair arm.
“You must be hungry,” he said, as he pulled up a stool from his workbench.
“I don’t feel so good, Sonny,” she mumbled. “Why are you doing this?”
“Why? Why? Because you must be hungry,” he said in a singsong voice, a fake happy voice he had learned so well from his mother. “You ate all of your sandwich but that was hours ago.”
“Can’t we just talk for a while?” she insisted. And he thought her voice sounded whiny. He hadn’t noticed before how whiny her voice was.
He scooped up a spoonful of soup and held it in front of her, waiting for her to open her mouth. She only stared at him.
“Open wide,” he instructed.
She continued to stare.
He brought the spoon to her lips and began to wedge it in, but she kept her lips pursed tight. Suddenly she jerked her head away to the side, so abruptly that she almost knocked the spoon out of his hand and did end up spilling it on his shirtsleeve.
He tasted the bile again. Oh, God! He couldn’t be sick. He felt his face grow hot. But he scooped up another spoonful and held it in front of her again.
“Come on, now, you have to eat.”
She turned her head slowly to look at him, this time the glaze clearing a bit, revealing her defiance.
“Not until we talk.”
“Look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way,” he told her, continuing to keep his happy voice, despite the turmoil brewing in his stomach. “Now, open up.”
He brought the spoon to her lips again, but this time she raised her restrained hand just enough to knock his elbow. It spilled all over his trousers. He’d have to change before work.
He rose slowly to his feet, taking his time to roll up the soiled sleeves of his shirt. A difficult task when his hands were shaking and his fingers were balling up into fists. He could feel the transformation, a lead-hot iron stabbing into his guts. And he could see the transformation in the way she looked at him. Whatever drugged courage had possessed her was gone now. She struggled against the restraints, kicking at the chair legs and smacking the ankle shackles against the wood, leaving more grooves in the precious wood.
“I guess you’ve chosen to do this the hard way,” he said through gritted teeth. This time he left the spoon on the tray, and he picked up the bowl of soup.
CHAPTER 40
Maggie wasn’t sure what she was doing here. There were other places she needed to check out, coincidences she needed to follow up on. Like Jacob Marley Jr. and whether or not anyone called him Sonny. Or if Wally Hobbs’s contract to dig graves for the funeral home had anything to do with Steve Earlman not staying buried. Not to mention the address she had found imprinted on Joan Begley’s hotel notepad, and whether or not it was the meeting place for a rendezvous that may have been her last. There were plenty of places where she needed to look for answers and she wasn’t sure this was one of them. Yet, here she was at the University of New Haven.
The aroma filled the classroom laboratory. Maggie thought it smelled like beef broth. And annoyingly good. Professor Adam Bonzado stood over the industrial-size stove, lifting the lids of several steaming pots, stirring one with a wooden spoon before replacing the lids and turning down the gas flame. Today he wore a purple-and-yellow Hawaiian shirt with blue jeans and high-top sneakers. His plastic goggles were down around his neck, sharing swing space with a paper surgical mask. He glanced at her over his shoulder. Then did a double take, surprised to see her.
“You’re early,” he said.
“I didn’t have as much trouble finding the campus as I thought I might. Would you rather I go wander and come back?”
“No, no, not at all. I’ve got lots to show you.” He checked the pots one more time and turned to give her his attention. “Welcome to our humble lab.” He waved a hand over the area. “Come take a look.”
Maggie let her eyes take in the shelves of specimen jars and vials, odd assortments and sizes, some makeshift baby-food jars alongside bell jars and pickle jars with scientific labels covering the name brands. From a corner came the soft whirr of a dehumidifier. The room felt cool, and beneath the aroma of soup broth there was a trace of cleaning supplies, perhaps a hint of ammonia. The countertops were filled with microscopes and a scattered, strange collection of tools, from an impressive jawlike clamp without teeth to small forceps and an array of every sized brush imaginable.
In another corner were two huge plastic bubbles. Maggie guessed they were odor hoods. She could hear the quiet wheezing of ventilation fans from inside the contraptions that reminded her of old-fashioned beauty parlor dryers. The contents below, however, quickly dispelled that image. In the double sink underneath the two hoods Maggie could see skeletal remains, soaking in what appeared to be a sudsy solution. A hand stuck up out of the foam as if waving to her, most of the flesh gone.
And then there were the tables, six-foot-long tables, three of them between the aisles, a fleshless village of skulls and bones. Several skulls stared back at her. Others, too wounded to sit up, lay with hollow sockets staring at the wall or gazing at the ceiling. The bones were a variety of sizes and shapes and pieces, as well as colors. Some were sooty black, others creamy white, some dirty gray and still others a buttery yellow—butterscotch came to Maggie’s mind. Some were laid out carefully as if reconstructing a puzzle. Others were tangled in cardboard boxes at the edge of the tables, waiting to be sorted, waiting to tell their story.
“Let me finish this, okay? Then I want to show you a few interesting things I’ve discovered.”
Bonzado put on a pair of latex gloves, then put another pair over the first. He pulled the plastic goggles and mask in place, then grabbed what looked like an oven mitt and lifted the lid off one of the pots. He waited for the steam to clear, then took an oversize wooden spoon and began fishing out what looked like chunks of boiled meat and fat and carefully placed them into an open, waiting plastic bag.
“We save as much of the tissue as we can,” he explained, raising his voice to get through the mask in what sounded like a practiced tone, perhaps his teaching voice. “These bags are great. They’re like 4.5 mil thick so we can heat-seal them, make them airtight and throw them in the freezer. Plus, they can go directly from the freezer to a boiling pot or the microwave.”
Maggie couldn’t help thinking he sounded like a chef on one of those cable cooking shows.
“The periosteum is what takes the longest to remove,” he said, holding up a long thin piece of what looked like gristle. “I’m sorry—” he looked at her over his goggles “—I hope I’m not being condescending. You probably know all this stuff.”
“No, no. Go on. I’m quite sure there’s a thing or two I don’t know.” The truth was, despite all the time she’d spent hanging around the FBI’s crime lab to pester Keith Ganza, she had never been to an anthropological lab, least of all, a teaching one. The surroundings fascinated her. And Bonzado’s enthusiasm and style were far from condescending. He simply seemed excited to share. His excitement could be contagious.
“We try to get all the way down to the bone,” he continued while he filled one plastic bag and then another.
