can you?” She gave him an uncompromising look.
Gideon felt sheepish and defeated. She was right, of course. But the box cutter was burning a hole in his pocket; the X-rays were doing the same in his shopping bag; and he couldn’t stop thinking of Nodding Crane and what he might be doing right now, whether he was around, whether he had staked out the morgue. The longer he had to wait, the more time he was giving Nodding Crane.
“How much longer?” Gideon asked.
The red nails went back to clacking and moving paper. “I’ll let you know when someone’s free.”
He sat back down and stared moodily at the motto again. He could hear faint sounds coming from behind the stainless-steel double doors, well dented by the incessant pounding of stretchers. Something was going on in there — the homicide, no doubt. Now he felt sure it was the one at Saint Bart’s. That would be big: someone murdered in one of the oldest and most venerable churches in New York, with one of the wealthiest congregations, to boot.
“What’s through those doors?” Gideon asked.
The woman looked up again. “Autopsy, coolers, offices.”
There was more noise from beyond the double doors, a vague murmur of excitement and activity. He glanced at the clock. Almost two thirty now.
The intercom on the receptionist’s desk squawked. She answered it in a hushed voice, then looked over at him. “Someone’s coming to help you now.”
“
A man, dressed in none-too-clean whites, bumped out through the doors. He was badly shaven, little dots and pimples of blood on his neck. He raised a clipboard, read from it. “George Crew?”
“That’s Gideon. Gideon Crew.”
Without another word he turned, and Gideon followed him through the doors. “I’d like to have a moment with him — alone,” he said to the man’s back.
No reply.
They walked down a long, bright, linoleum corridor that ended in another set of doors leading, it seemed, into the autopsy room itself. Through the door windows he had a glimpse of a row of stainless-steel and porcelain tables, several orange medical-waste bins, stacks of Tupperware containers. He could see a group around one of the tables, including detectives and cops. Must be the murder victim.
“This way, please.”
Gideon turned to follow the man through another door, down another corridor, and finally into a long room, lined on either side with metal drawers. A company logo identified them as SO-LOW, INC. equipment. The “coolers.”
The aide consulted his clipboard, his lips moving silently, and then, lips still moving, looked down the rows of drawers until he found the right one. He unlocked it with a key on a spiral cord held around his waist and slid the drawer out. A gray plastic body bag appeared, zipped up tight. The bitter-cherry smell of formaldehyde bit into Gideon’s nostrils, not even coming close to covering the smell of dead human meat.
“Um. You sure this is Mark Wu?” Gideon found himself unaccountably nervous.
“What it says here.” The man compared his clipboard with a number on a tag clipped to the bag.
Gideon could feel the hard plastic handle of the box cutter in his pocket. Despite the chill air of the morgue, the handle was slick from his sweaty hand. This was going to be an ordeal. He swallowed, tried to steel himself for it.
“I want a moment alone with him,” Gideon said, ending the request with a quick little fake sob. It didn’t come off well, sounding more like a hiccup.
This time, a nod. It seemed the aide was no more eager to stay in here than Gideon was. “Five minutes?”
“Um, how about ten?” Another sob, this one better.
A grunt of approval. “I’ll wait in the hall.”
“Thank you.”
The man went out and the door swung shut behind him. The fluorescent lights buzzed faintly; the forced-air system hissed; the smell in the room was so strong, Gideon felt like it was coating him.
Ten minutes. He’d better get his ass moving. Pulling out the X-rays, he rechecked the location of the wire. It was on the inside of the left thigh, where Wu could have gotten to it readily. For the same reason, it wouldn’t be deep. With luck, the mark or scab of its insertion would still show—?assuming the skin hadn’t deteriorated that badly over the last five days. He took a deep breath, then reached over and grabbed the zipper. It felt like a little cold worm between his thumb and finger. He hesitated, took another breath. And then he drew down the zipper, exposing the face, the naked hairless chest, its Y-incision crudely sewn back together after the autopsy. The body had been sponged off badly, leaving behind streaks and bits of clotted blood, various strings of one thing or another. There were numerous cuts and lacerations that had been sewn up more carefully, obviously during the time Wu was still alive.
The smell was overpowering.
With his left hand he pulled the box cutter from his pocket, wiped it dry, thumbed open the blade. It was time. With a final jerk he pulled the zipper all the way down — and stared. Shocked. Speechless.
“The legs!” he cried. “What the hell?
55
A few blocks north of the Port Authority Bus Terminal and hard by the Hudson River stood a massive, nearly windowless ten-story structure of brown limestone, covering an entire city block. It had originally been the mill and headquarters of the New Amsterdam Blanket and Woolen Goods Corporation. Later, when the company went out of business, an enterprising firm purchased the building and retrofitted it into self-storage facilities. When this failed and was seized for nonpayment of taxes, the city converted the storage units, with few modifications, into “temporary” shelters for homeless persons. Known officially as the Abram S. Hewitt Transitional Housing Facility, unofficially as the Ant Farm, it was a vast cliff dwelling for thousands of the disillusioned and disenfranchised.
Nodding Crane’s own storage-unit-
At two forty-five AM, he walked along the narrow corridor of the seventh floor, past unit after unit, each just a closed roll-down door with a stenciled number, his guitar case knocking gently against his legs. From behind the metal doors, he could hear coughing; snores; other, less identifiable noises. Reaching his own at last, he opened its padlock with a key, raised the curtain wall, ducked in, lowered it again, and barred it shut with a police brace. He reached up, pulled the cord to turn on the bare bulb, then glanced around. The slit of a window peeped into the blackness of an airshaft.
He knew the tiny room had not been burgled: he had replaced the supplied padlock with a much better one he’d purchased, with a five-pin tumbler and a stainless-steel shackle, and it had not been disturbed. And yet with him such an examination was as instinctive as breathing. There was little to take in: a futon, neatly made; a battered leather suitcase; a rice-paper mat; a case of liter-size bottles of springwater; a few rolls of paper towels. In one corner was a portable music player and a stack of well-used Blues CDs; in another, a small neat row of popular paperback books. Nodding Crane favored Hemingway, Twain, and the martial arts literature of the Tang dynasty:
There was only one item in the little space that could be considered decorative: a photograph, badly creased and faded, of a brown and desolate-looking mountain range — the Pamir Plateau in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region. Putting his guitar carefully aside and hanging his coat and hat on a metal hook, Nodding Crane sat on the rice-paper mat and gazed at the photograph with an intense concentration, for five minutes exactly.
He had been born on that plateau, in the shadow of those mountains, far from any village. His father had been a poor herder and smallhold farmer who died when Nodding Crane was less than a year old. His mother had tried to carry on with the farm. One day, when Nodding Crane was six, a man stopped by. He looked very different
