“Periosteum elevator.” He dug into the vertebrae, removing a few samples of connective tissue, cutting away at the bone. Then he pulled a pair of disposable plastic goggles over his head.
“Saw, please.”
She handed him a small nitrogen-driven saw and he switched it on, waiting a moment while the tachometer reached the correct rpm. When the diamond blade touched the bone, a high-pitched whine, like an enraged mosquito, filled the small room. Along with it came the sudden smell of bone dust, sewage, rotten marrow, and death.
Padelsky took sections at various points, which Rocco sealed in bags.
“I want SEM and stereozoom pictures of each microsection,” Padelsky said, stepping away from the gurney and turning off the recorder. Rocco wrote the requests on the Ziploc bags with a large black marker.
A knock sounded at the door. Sheila went to answer, stepped outside for a moment, then poked her head back in.
“They have a tentative ID from the belt, Doctor,” she said. “It’s Pamela Wisher.”
“Pamela Wisher, the society girl?” asked Padelsky, taking off the goggles and backing off a little. “Jeez.”
“And there’s a second skeleton,” she continued. “From the same place.”
Padelsky had moved to a deep metal sink, preparing to remove his gloves and wash up. “A second one?” he asked irritably. “Why the hell didn’t they bring it in with the first? I should have been looking at them side by side.” He glanced at the clock: one-fifteen already. Goddammit, that meant no lunch until at least three. He felt faint with hunger.
The doors banged open and the second skeleton was wheeled under the bright light. Padelsky turned the tape recorder back on and went to pour himself yet another cup of coffee while the nurse did the prep work.
“This one’s headless, too,” Rocco said.
“You’re kidding, right?” Padelsky replied. He walked forward, glanced at the skeleton, then froze, coffee cup to his lips.
“What the—?” He lowered the cup and stared, open-mouthed. Laying the cup aside, he stepped up quickly to the gurney and bent over the skeleton, running the tips of his gloved fingers lightly over one of the ribs.
“Dr. Padelsky?” Rocco asked.
He straightened, went back to the tape recorder, and brusquely switched it off. “Cover it up and get Dr. Brambell. And don’t breathe a word about this”—he nodded at the skeleton—“to anyone.”
She hesitated, looking at the skeleton with a puzzled expression, her eyes gradually widening.
“I mean
THE PHONE RANG abruptly, shattering the stillness of the small museum office. Margo Green, face mere inches from her computer terminal, sat back guiltily in her chair, a shock of short brown hair falling across her eyes.
The phone rang again, and she moved to answer it, then hesitated. No doubt it was one of the computer jocks in data processing, calling to complain about the enormous amount of CPU time her cladistic regression program was soaking up. She settled back and waited for the phone to stop ringing, the muscles of her back and legs pleasantly sore from the previous night’s workout. Picking up the hand trainer from her desk, she began squeezing it in a routine so familiar it had grown almost instinctive. Another five minutes and her program would be finished. Then they could complain all they wanted.
She knew about the new cost-cutting policy requiring that large batch jobs be submitted for approval. But that would have meant a flurry of e-mail before she could run the program. And she needed the results right away.
At least Columbia, where she’d been an instructor until accepting the assistant curatorship at the New York Museum of Natural History, wasn’t always in the midst of some new round of budget cutting. And the more the Museum got into financial trouble these days, the more it seemed to rely on show instead of substance. Already, Margo had noticed the early buildup for next year’s blockbuster exhibition,
She glanced up at the screen to check the progress of her regression program, then put down the hand trainer, reached into her bag and drew out the
She smoothed the tabloid on her knees, grinning at the headline despite herself. It was vintage
SEWAGE CORPSE
IDENTIFIED AS MISSING DEB
She glanced down at the opening paragraph. Sure enough, it was Smithback’s work.
She quickly skimmed the article. It was quintessential Smithback: sensationalist and macabre, full of loving attention to the gruesome details. In the opening paragraphs, he quickly summarized the facts that were by now well known to all New Yorkers. The “beautiful trust-funder” Pamela Wisher, known for her marathon late-night carousings, had disappeared two months earlier from a basement club on Central Park South. Ever since, her “smiling face with its dazzling teeth, vacant blue eyes, and expensive blond hair” had been plastered at every street corner from 57th to 96th. Margo had often seen the color photocopies of Wisher as she jogged to the Museum from her apartment on West End Avenue.
