"But they were able to analyze it?! The dirt can tell us something?!"
"It can tell us something, all right-but I'm not sure it's going to do us any good. For one thing, that soil is teeming with all sorts of microbes which, according to the technicians, are quite exotic."
"So what?!" I snapped, making no effort to hide my impatience. "Could they tell you where it came from?"
"Oh, yes," Garth replied dryly, rolling the empty tumbler between his palms. "Finally. According to the experts we talked to over those phone and computer linkups, there's only one place on the face of the earth where you'd find that particular variety of soil, and that place is the floor of the Amazon rain forest."
2
The New York Botanical Garden, located next to the Bronx Zoo, occupies two hundred and fifty acres along the banks of the Bronx River. That was where we were headed, hoping that our cabdriver could find a way through and around the traffic tieup on the Harlem River Drive so that we'd be on time for our two o'clock appointment with one Dr. Samuel Zelaskowich, the Botanical Garden's top expert on tropical soils and plants.
It had taken the better part of the morning to take care of our business-which in our case had meant giving it away, assigning some to our staff and farming out the rest to people in other agencies with whom we had worked well in the past, and whom we trusted to do a good job. None of our clients had been too pleased to have anyone but Frederickson and Frederickson handling their account, but all had eventually agreed to the arrangement after we'd explained the situation. Three of the corporations had offered money or services to help us in our search for Vicky Brown; we'd declined the money, told them we'd be in touch if there was any other way they could help. We were leaving in our wake clean desks and a number of very happy competitors.
Driving us on were the haunting images of a little girl being repeatedly brutalized and sodomized in some "secret place" which we had to find, a secret place where a child played in dirt from the floor of the Amazon rain forest.
It was rough going all through upper Manhattan, but our driver made some fancy detours once we reached the Bronx, and we arrived at the Botanical Garden with minutes to spare. We paid the driver, gave him a fat tip, then made our way through an eerie, improbable, snow-covered jungle of shrubbery and trees to the main administration building.
We found Dr. Zelaskowich in his office-a cramped cubicle not much bigger than a walk-in closet-with his broad back and shoulders hunched forward as he bent over and peered at a computer terminal. The walls of the office were papered with an odd mixture of graphs and charts, family photographs and what appeared to be personal memorabilia. I had a sense that the big man did not feel comfortable here, and that his discomfort did not have anything to do with the confined space.
He was a big, rangy man with a high dome of a forehead which was particularly pronounced when viewed in profile. He had a receding hairline, and a wispy, light brown beard. The thick-lensed eyeglasses he had propped up on his forehead kept slipping down over the bridge of his nose, and he kept pushing them back up as he peered intently at the symbol-filled monitor above the computer keyboard. He wore a white lab coat covered with dirt smudges, and there was dirt under his thick fingernails. I put him in his early thirties, and I thought he looked rather young for the hotshot expert he was supposed to be-but then, I'd met more than my share of young-genius types during my aborted career as a university professor.
"Be right with you," Zelaskowich called over his shoulder when I knocked on his open office door. "Please find a place for yourselves to sit."
We stepped into the tiny office and, at my insistence, Garth sat down on the only chair in the room-a high metal stool which looked as if it might have been appropriated from some ice cream parlor. I leaned against the wall by the door and watched Zelaskowich punch a button on the computer keyboard with one of his thick fingers, activating a printer which began to clatter and spew out paper. The man punched a few more buttons, and a fresh set of symbols appeared on the screen of the monitor.
"I really hate these damn things," the man continued good-naturedly, darting us a quick glance and revealing a boyish grin. "Botanists aren't supposed to work on computers; we're supposed to be down on our hands and knees in the dirt. But a few months ago our board of directors got the bright idea that we should take a census of everything we have growing here, and put it all in a computer. It's a bear, let me tell you."
Garth and I glanced at each other. "You people don't know what you have growing here?" I asked Zelaskowich.
The botanist's glasses had once again slipped down over his nose. He pushed them back up, looked at me, and shrugged. "Oh, no, Dr. Frederickson," he said with great gravity. "I imagine you must find that surprising, since this is the New York Botanical Garden, but the problem of identifying everything that's here is much more complex than you might think. It's not a matter of simply looking in the records to see what's been planted over the years, but of determining precisely what's growing there now. This census is going to take years, with dozens of us working on our hands and knees-and then we may miss a lot. You see, sometimes an entirely new genus can spring up without anyone noticing. I mean, we have more than five hundred types of hemerocallis alone; we're not certain, but it's possible that we may have more than two hundred and fifty thousand varieties of plants here. You see the problem, of course."
"Uh. . I'm not sure we do, Doctor."
"Well, let's take an example. Let's say you plant a dryopteris clintoniana next to a dryopteris goldiana before you know it-maybe in a year or two-you may very well have an entirely new plant growing between them, a sterile hybrid we call a dryopteris clintoniana x goldiana. Now, this isn't a separate species, but for the purpose of our census it is considered a different type of plant from either of its parents. Multiply that example by the thousands of plants we have here, and you begin to see the problem we're up against."
"You're right," Garth said dryly. "It does sound like a bear."
Zelaskowich tapped a key firmly with his index finger, and the printer ceased its clatter; another tap, and the monitor screen went blank. He spun around on his stool, a satisfied grin on his face. "There!" he exclaimed. "Now I can get back to where I belong-with my plants. At least for a little while." He rose, shook Garth's hand, then mine. "I'm sorry to have kept you waiting, but I really did have to finish that little bit of mechanical business while the mood was on me. I must say that it's quite a thrill to meet the famous Frederickson brothers, and I'm flattered that you should be coming to see me; botanists rarely get to meet real-life private detectives, especially such distinguished ones, and I must say that it's quite exciting. Now, how can I help you?"
"We appreciate your time, Dr. Zelaskowich," Garth said as he rose from the stool, reached into his jacket pocket, and drew out the police lab report. He handed the paper to the young botanist. "This is an analysis of a soil sample. Can you punch that up on your computer?"
Zelaskowich adjusted his glasses on the bridge of his nose, held the computer printout at arm's length as he studied the columns of chemical symbols, grunted. "I don't need the computer for this," he said. "This is incredibly rich soil, teeming with microbial life. It's certain that you didn't pick up this soil sample in New York-not the city, and not the state. In fact, I can't think offhand of any site in the United States where you'd find soil like this."