D’Agosta looked at her curiously. “Any idea why? It doesn’t seem like you two were exactly friends.”
“Not close friends. But we were colleagues. If he was in some kind of trouble—” A shadow crossed her face. “Maybe I could have done something about it. Instead of just ignoring the call.”
“Guess you’ll never know. But anyway, if you’d take the time to poke around, try to get some ideas of what he was doing here, I’d appreciate it.”
Margo hesitated, and D’Agosta gave her a closer look. “Who knows?” he said in a quieter tone. “Maybe it’ll help lay some of those inner demons to rest.”
Nice choice of words, Margo thought. Still, she knew he meant well. Lieutenant D’Agosta, pop psychologist. Next thing you know, he’ll be telling me that looking over this site will help give meclosure.
She glanced over the ruined site for a long minute. “Okay, Lieutenant,” she said at last.
“Want me to get a photographer down here, take some pictures?”
“Maybe later. For now, I’d rather just make a few sketches.”
“Sure thing.” D’Agosta seemed restless.
“You go on,” Margo said. “You don’t need to hang around.”
“No way,” D’Agosta said. “Not after Brambell.”
“Lieutenant—”
“I’ve got to collect some of the ashes anyway, to test for trace accelerants. I’ll stay out of your way.” He stood truculently, unmoving.
Margo sighed, pulled a sketchbook out of her carryall, and once again turned her attention to the ruined lab. It was a dreary place, surrounding her in silent accusation. You could have done something. Greg tried to reach you. Perhaps it didn’t have to end like this.
She shook her head, scattering the guilty thoughts. They wouldn’t be of any help. Besides, if any place held the clues to explain what happened to Greg, this place would. And maybe the only way to get out of this nightmare was for her just to lower her head and go straight through. Anyway, it got her out of the Forensic Anthropology lab, which had started to look like a charnel house. The Bitterman corpse had arrived from NYME Wednesday afternoon, bringing a fresh set of questions along with it. The scoring on the neck bones of the still-fleshed corpse pointed to decapitation by some kind of rough, primitive knife. The killer—or killers—had been rushed in their grisly task.
She quickly mapped out the rough outlines of the lab, sketching in the dimensions of the walls, the location of the tables, and the placement of the slaglike heaps of ruined equipment. Every laboratory had a flow to it, depending on what kind of work was being done. While the equipment might indicate the general kind of research, the flow itself would give clues to the specific application.
The rough outlines completed, Margo moved to the tables themselves. Being metal, they had withstood the heat of the fire relatively well. She sketched out a rectangle to indicate each tabletop, then began noting the melted beakers, titration tubes, volumetric flasks, and other items still unidentifiable. It was a complex, multilayered setup: clearly, some kind of high-level biochemistry had been going on. But what?
She paused for a moment, breathing in the mingled scents of burnt electrical insulation and the saline breeze off the Hudson. Then she turned her attention to the melted machinery. It was expensive stuff, judging from the brushed stainless-steel cabinetry and the remains of flat panel and vacuum fluorescent displays.
Margo tackled the largest machine first. Its metal casing had slumped in the heat, the innards detached. She gave it a light kick, shrinking back as it fell with a loud crash. She suddenly felt aware of how alone they were. Beyond the railyards and across the river, the sun hung low over the New Jersey Palisades. She could hear the cry of seagulls as they wheeled over the rotting stumps of old piers rising from the Hudson’s shore. Beyond the railyards, a cheerful summer afternoon was ending. Yet here, in this sunken, abandoned place, no cheer came. She glanced at D’Agosta, who had collected his samples and was standing in the late sun, arms crossed, staring out at the Hudson. Now she was glad he’d insisted on staying.
She bent over the machine, smiling inwardly at her nervousness. Turning over the pieces of scorched and discolored metal, she eventually found the faceplate she was searching for. Rubbing it free of soot, she made out the words WESTERLY GENETICS EQUIPMENT,along with a WGE logo. Beneath, on the bezel, was a stamped serial number and the words WGE INTEGRATED DNA ANALYZER-SEQUENCER.She jotted the information down on her sketchpad.
In a far corner was heaped a small pile of shattered, melted machinery that looked different from the rest. Margo examined it, carefully turning over each piece and laying it out, trying to figure out what it was. It seemed to be a rather complex organic chem synthesis setup, complete with fractionation and distillation apparatus, diffusion gradients, and low-voltage electrical nodes. Toward the bottom, where things were less damaged by the heat, she found the broken pieces of several Erlenmeyer flasks. Judging by the words on their frosted labels, most were normal lab chemicals. One fragmentary label, however, she did not immediately recognize: ACTIVATED 7-DEHYDROCHOLE…
She turned the piece over. Damn, the chemical name had a familiar ring to it. At last, she dropped the piece into her carryall. No doubt it would be listed in the organic chem encyclopedia back at the lab.
Beside the machine were the remains of a thin notebook, burned through except for a few carbonized pages. As she picked it up curiously, it began to crumble in her hands. Carefully, she picked up the charred pieces, slid them carefully into a Ziploc bag, and stowed it in her carryall.
Within fifteen minutes, she had managed to identify enough of the other machines to be certain of one thing: this had once been a world-class genetics laboratory. Margo worked with similar machines on a daily basis, and she knew enough to estimate the cost of this ruined lab at over half a million dollars.
She stepped back. Where had Kawakita gotten the money to fund this kind of lab? And what the hell could he have been up to?
As she moved across the cement pad, making notations in her sketchbook, something odd caught her eye. Among the piles of rubble and melted glass, she made out what looked like five large puddles of mud, baked to a cementlike consistency by the fire. Around them were sprinkles of gravel.
Curious, she bent over to examine the rubble more closely. There was a small metal object, about the size of her fist, embedded in the nearest puddle. Pulling a penknife from her carryall, she pried out the object and scraped off the crust that clung to it like cement. Beneath the mud she could make out MINNE ARIUM SUPPL. Turning the object over and over in her hands, she realized what it was: an aquarium pump.
She stood up, looking down at the five similar heaps of rubble lined up beneath the remaining skeleton of a wall. The gravel, the broken glass… these must have been aquaria. Huge, too, judging by the size of the puddles. But aquaria filled with mud? It didn’t make sense.
Kneeling, she took her penknife and worked it into the closest dried mass. It came away in pieces, like concrete. Picking up one of the larger pieces and turning it over, Margo was surprised to see what looked like the roots and partial stem of a plant, preserved from burning by the protective mud coating. Cursing the clumsiness of the penknife, she carefully worked the plant loose from the mud and held it up to the fading light.
Suddenly, she dropped the plant and jerked her hand back, as if burned. After a moment, she picked it up again and examined it more closely, her heart suddenly racing. It’s not possible,she thought.
She knew this plant—knew it well. The tough, fibrous stem, the bizarrely knotted roots, brought back searing memories: sitting in the deserted Genetics lab at the Museum, face glued to the eyepiece of a microscope, mere hours before the disastrous opening of the Superstitionexhibition. It was the rare Amazonian plant that the Mbwun creature had craved so desperately. The same plant Whittlesey had inadvertently used as packing material in the fateful crate of relics sent to the Museum from the Upper Xingu almost a decade before. The plant was now supposed to be extinct: its original habitat had been wiped out, and all remaining vestiges of it at the Museum had been destroyed by the authorities after the Mbwun creature—the Museum Beast—was finally killed.