Pendergast indicated a chair with the flashlight. “Have a seat, Ms. Green,” he said.
“Thank you,” said Margo, the miner’s light on her forehead bobbing upward. “Such a gentleman.”
Pendergast seated himself. “Does anyone have a handkerchief?” he asked.
Allen came forward, pulling one from his pocket.
Pendergast handed it to Margo, who wiped the blood from her face and handed it back. Pendergast carefully wiped his face and hands. “Much obliged, Mr.-—?”
“Allen. Tom Allen.”
“Mr. Allen.” Pendergast handed the blood-soaked handkerchief to Allen, who started to return it to his pocket, froze, then dropped it quickly. He stared at Pendergast. “Is it dead?”
“Yes, Mr. Allen. It’s quite dead.”
“You killed it?”
“We killed it. Rather, Ms. Green here killed it.”
“Call me Margo. And it was Mr. Pendergast who fired the shot.”
“Ah, but Margo, you told me where to place the shot. I never would have thought of it. All big game—lion, water buffalo, elephant—have eyes on the sidesof their head. If they’re charging, you’d never consider the eye. It’s just not a viable shot.”
“But the creature,” Margo explained to Allen, “had a primate’s face. Eyes rotated to the front for stereoscopic vision. A direct path to the brain. And with that incredibly thick skull, once you put a bullet inside the [442] brain, it would simply bounce around until it was spent.”
“You killed the creature with a shot through the eye?” Garcia asked, incredulously.
“I’d hit it several times,” Pendergast said, “but it was simply too strong and too angry. I haven’t had a good look at the creature—I think I’ll leave that until much later—but it’s safe to say that no other shot could have stopped it in time.”
Pendergast adjusted his tie knot with two slender fingers—unusually fastidious, Margo thought, considering the blood and bits of gray matter covering his white shirt. She would never forget the sight of the creature’s brain exploding out of the ruined eye socket, at once a horrifying and beautiful sight. In fact, it was the eyes—the horrible, angry eyes—that had given her a sudden, desperate flash of an idea, even as she’d scrambled backward, away from the rotting stench and slaughterhouse breath.
Suddenly, she was clutching her sides, shivering.
In a moment, Pendergast had motioned to Garcia to give up his uniform jacket. He draped it over her shoulders. “Calm down, Margo,” he said, kneeling at her side. “It’s all over.”
“We have to get Dr. Frock,” she stammered through blue lips.
“In a minute, in a minute,” Pendergast said soothingly.
“Shall we make a report?” Garcia asked. “This radio has just about enough juice left for one more broadcast.”
“Yes, and we have to send a relief party for Lieutenant D’Agosta,” Pendergast said. Then he frowned. “I suppose this means talking to Coffey.”
“I don’t think so,” Garcia said. “Apparently, there’s been a change of command.”
Pendergast’s eyebrows raised. “Indeed?”
“Indeed.” Garcia handed the radio to Pendergast. [443] “An agent named Slade is claiming to be in charge. Why don’t you do the honors?”
“If you wish,” Pendergast said. “I’m glad it’s not Special Agent Coffey. Had it been, I’m afraid I would have taken him to task. I respond sharply to insults.” He shook his head. “It’s a very bad habit, but one I find hard to break.”
= 62 =
Four Weeks Later
When Margo arrived, Pendergast and D’Agosta were already in Frock’s office. Pendergast was examining something on a low table while Frock talked animatedly next to him. D’Agosta was walking restlessly around the office, looking bored, picking things up and putting them down again. The latex cast of the claw sat in the middle of Frock’s desk like a nightmare paperweight. A large cake, purchased by Frock in celebration of Pendergast’s imminent departure, sat in the middle of the warm sunlit room, the white icing already beginning to droop.
“Last time I was there, I had a crayfish gumbo that was truly magnificent,” Frock was saying, gripping Pendergast’s elbow. “Ah, Margo,” he said, wheeling around. “Come in and take a look.”
Margo crossed the room. Spring had finally taken hold of the city, and through the great bow windows she could see the blue expanse of the Hudson River flowing southward, sparkling in the sunlight. On the promenade below, joggers filed past in steady ranks.
[445] A large re-creation of the creature’s feet lay on the low table, next to the Cretaceous plaque of fossil footprints. Frock traced the tracks lovingly. “If not the same family, certainly the same order,” he said. “And the creature did indeed have five toes on the hind feet. Yet another link to the Mbwun figurine.”
Margo, looking closely, thought the two didn’t seem all that similar.
“Fractal evolution?” she suggested.
Frock looked at her. “It’s possible. But it would take extensive cladistic analysis to know for sure.” He grimaced. “Of course, that won’t be possible, now that the government has whisked the remains away for God only knows what purpose.”
In the month since the opening night disaster, public sentiment had gone from shock and incredulity, to fascination, to ultimate acceptance. For the first two weeks, the press had been abuzz with stories of the beast, but the conflicting accounts of the survivors created confusion and uncertainty. The only item that could settle the controversy—the corpse—was immediately removed from the scene in a large white van with government plates, never to be seen again. Even Pendergast claimed to be ignorant of its whereabouts. Publicity soon turned to the human cost of the disaster, and to the lawsuits that threatened the manufacturers of the security system and, to a lesser degree, the police department and the Museum itself. Timemagazine had run a lead story entitled “How Safe Are Our National Institutions?” Now, weeks later, people had begun to view the creature as a one-of-a-kind phenomenon: a freak throwback, like the dinosaur fishes that occasionally showed up in the nets of deep-sea fishermen. Interest had started to wane: the opening-night survivors were no longer interviewed on talk shows, the projected Saturday morning cartoon series had been cancelled, and “Museum Beast” action figures were going unsold in toy stores.
[446] Frock glanced around. “Forgive my lack of hospitality. Sherry, anyone?”
There were murmurs of “No, thanks.”
“Not unless you’ve got a 7-Up chaser,” D’Agosta said. Pendergast blanched and looked in his direction.
D’Agosta took the latex cast of the claw from Frock’s desk and held it up. “Nasty,” he said.
“Exceptionally nasty,” Frock agreed. “It truly was part reptile, part primate. I won’t go into the technical details—I’ll leave that to Gregory Kawakita, who I’ve put to work analyzing what data we do have—but it appears that the reptilian genes are what gave the creature its strength, speed, and muscle mass. The primate genes contributed the intelligence and possibly made it endothermic. Warm-blooded. A formidable combination.
“Yeah, sure,” D’Agosta said, laying the cast down. “But what the hell wasit?”
Frock chuckled. “My dear fellow, we simply don’t have enough data yet to say exactlywhat it was. And since it appears to have been the last of its kind, we may never know. We’ve just received an official survey of the tepuithis creature came from. The devastation there has been complete. The plant this creature lived on, which by the way we have posthumously named Liliceae mbwunensis, appears to be totally extinct. Mining has poisoned the entire swamp surrounding the tepui. Not to mention the fact that the entire area was initially torched with napalm, to help clear the area for mining. There were no traces of any other similar creatures wandering about the forest anywhere. While I am normally horrified by such environmental destruction, in this case it appears to have rid the earth of a terrible menace.” He sighed. “As a safety precaution—and against my advice, I might add—the FBI has destroyed all the packing fibers and plant specimens here in the Museum. So the plant, too, is truly extinct.”