“Yes?”
“I found something.”
Gentry had had a feeling she would. She was like that, this lady. Had a sixth sense like a cop.
He walked quickly to where Joyce was standing. His pace wasn’t dictated by fear but sickness; the smell down here was a curious mixture of pine and rot. The sooner he got past the trash, the happier he’d be. He reached the scientist’s side and crouched beside her.
“What’ve you got?” he asked.
She pointed to a deep, damp rut cut by water. There was something dark lining the rut.
“Looks like diluted guano,” she said, rubbing some of the muddy black substance between her fingers and smelling it. She shined the light up the hill. “And up there is where it could have come from.”
Gentry looked.
Above them, maybe sixty feet, was a very large drain.
Twenty-Two
Gentry insisted on leading the way up the hillside.
Joyce didn’t argue. She wanted him to feel like he was contributing something other than the guns and the car. And she still felt bad about the Jupiter thing. She wasn’t a show-off and she hated coming off like one. Especially to someone who was every bit as professional in his way as she was in hers. Even when he’d kept her from going into the sublevels of Grand Central Station, he hadn’t insulted her intelligence or skill.
And Gentrywas contributing to this, though he probably didn’t realize it. He was making her feel like a member of a team, a partner in this search instead of an acolyte. Whenever she went on fieldtrips with Professor Lowery, he pushed her physically and intellectually. His prodding forced her to do things that established new high-water marks for where she could go and what she could accomplish. But they were always lonely experiences because he was looking down from his peak. He never pushed himself, made her feel like she was doing anything for him. That was why she’d allowed the professor to seduce her. It was an effort to bring him closer in a place and at a time of her life when she really needed it: her first year of grad school, her first time overseas. She did it to make him more accessible. Unfortunately, all it did was make her more “his.”
Gentry did not seem like that kind of man at all. Even with a gun in his hand, even when he’d been ordering her out of the subway tunnel, there was something gentle about him.
“So let’s work this forward from day one,” Gentry said as they climbed.
“All right,” she said.
“Mama bat gets away from Dr. Lipman. She makes her way to the river. She follows it and gives birth somewhere along the way.”
“Not in the open,” Joyce said.
“Why not?”
“Because hawks prowl the river. They’d have picked her pup off.”
“So the mother finds a quiet, enclosed place to give birth,” Gentry said.
“A place close to food and drink,” Joyce said.
“What would she have done next?”
“The routine would have been for the mother to look after her pup, then go out to feed. Then one day during the month she didn’t come back, probably succumbing to radiation poisoning. She’s found relatively soon thereafter, or else scavengers would have picked at her remains.”
“Could the baby bat have continued on its own after that?”
“Conceivably, as long as there was water and either insects or vegetation, depending on what kind of bat it was. Bats are pretty self-sufficient pretty early.”
“Would it have continued to live alone?”
“Probably not. When male or female bats are in heat they can be very aggressive.”
“How often does that happen?”
“In temperate regions that usually happens in the fall. That way they can give birth in the spring or summer when food is relatively populous. My guess is the bat would have tried to join an existing colony. If it was as big as we think, it could very well have taken over a colony.”
Gentry reached the drain and stopped. It was difficult to stand there because of the slope, and he was forced to hold on to a tree. He shined the light around the opening.
The drain was about four feet in diameter, and the concrete was nearly green from the minerals in the water.
“This is an old one,” Gentry said. “There’s a faded WPA logo here.”
“WPA?”
“Works Progress Administration. Government projects from the Depression. This was put in to give people work. They probably laid a whole lot of interconnected pipes through the town.”
“I see,” Joyce said. “So a bat that was born in one of the drains could get around quite a bit. It could listen at other openings, make sure that no one was near, then slip out unseen.”
“I suppose so,” Gentry said. “But would a bat be smart enough to do that?”
“Not an ordinary bat, no,” Joyce said.
“This isn’t an ordinary bat,” Gentry said. “So in addition to being bigger and stronger than other bats, it might also be smarter.”
“Very possibly,” Joyce said. “But it wouldn’t take intelligence to move around a system of pipes and listen until the coast was clear. That’s instinct. Survival. In any case, that could be one reason the bat was never seen.”
Cautiously, Gentry leaned across the mouth of the drain. He crinkled his nose. Even several feet below, Joyce could smell the odor coming from inside. It was definitely guano. The detective shined the light through the opening.
He screamed and jumped back.
“What’s wrong?” Joyce shouted.
“Cuh-rist!” he said.
She clambered up, grabbed the flashlight, and looked inside.
There was a face staring out at them, the face of a sheep. It was just the face; the rest of the body was broken bone and bloody sinew scattered along the length of the drain.
“I’m sorry,” Gentry said. “I wasn’t expecting that.”
“It’s okay. I like a guy who’s not afraid to scream.” She leaned her head into the drain and raised the flashlight. There were long, deep gnaw marks on the sheep bone that resembled those on the deer carcass. She didn’t move for several seconds.
“Anything wrong?” Gentry asked.
“It smells like there’s guano,” Joyce said. She crawled partway in. “There is. It’s stuck to the back limbs. Jesus!”
“What?”
“There are two more sheep in there-”
“Bon fucking appetit!”
“-and-oh God!”
“What’s wrong?”
“One of them is still alive.”
Joyce slid back from the opening and motioned for Gentry to back away. Then she stepped back herself, raised the handgun, and fired into the drain. The clap echoed through the landfill. The sheep hopped back in a splash of red. Joyce lowered the gun.
“Robert,” she said, “these animals were freshly killed. The blood is still pretty damp, and the guano is only about two hours old.”
“Which means what? The big bat is back?”
“I don’t think so,” she said ominously. “I think it means the big bat is not alone.”
Twenty-Three
One day,thought Adrienne Hart,the financial districtis going to have a night life.
The young investment banker hated the fact that after the stock market closed and the traders went to the bars and then home, the streets were empty. There were no movie theaters or museums or galleries, the apartments and most of the hotels were farther uptown, and every shop in and around Wall Street went into hibernation until morning. One day, when she had the money, she was going to open a comedy club that would draw people downtown. And she’d be the headliner. Give up the big bucks for the big yuks. After years in this male-dominated world, she had plenty of stories to tell.
Until then, the World Trade Center was a dead-lonely place after hours, and the smooth, swift elevator ride from the sixty-seventh floor was a quiet, eerie, cocoonlike experience.
She looked at her watch and immediately forgot what time it was. It didn’t matter. By the time she got her car from the garage, drove back to her town house in New Jersey, and went to bed, it would be midnight. Then she’d be up at five-thirty and on-line to the markets in Tokyo and Hong Kong and London. Except for weekends, when the twenty-six-year-old went down to Philadelphia to see her fiancé, that was her life.