Buchholtz clapped his hand on Turow’s back. “Let’s not second-guess Agent Pendergast. After all, the police are paying for it, and it is a very expensive procedure.”
Pendergast smiled more broadly. “I’m glad you mentioned that, Dr. Buchholtz. Just send the bill to Director of Special Operations, FBI.” He wrote down the address on his business card. “And please don’t worry. Cost is no consideration whatsoever.”
D’Agosta had to grin. He knew what Pendergast was doing: getting even for the lousy car. He shook his head. What a devil.
= 24 =
Thursday
At eleven-fifteen Thursday morning, a man claiming to be the living incarnation of the Egyptian pharaoh Toth ran amok in the Antiquities wing, knocking over two displays in the Temple of Azar-Nar, breaking a case and pulling a mummy out of its tomb. Three policemen were necessary to restrain him, and several curators worked the rest of the day replacing bandages and collecting ancient dust.
Less than an hour later, a woman ran screaming from the Hall of Great Apes, babbling about something she’d seen crouched in a dark bathroom corner. A television team, waiting on the south steps for a glimpse of Wright, got her entire hysterical exit on film.
Around lunchtime, a group calling itself the Alliance Against Racism had begun picketing outside the Museum, calling for a boycott of the Superstition exhibition.
Early that afternoon, Anthony McFarlane, a world-renowned philanthropist and big-game hunter, offered a reward of $500,000 for the capture and safe delivery of the Museum Beast. The Museum immediately disclaimed any connection with McFarlane.
All of these events were duly reported in the press. The following incidents, however, went undisclosed to the world outside the Museum.
By noon, four employees had quit without notice. Thirty-five others had taken unscheduled vacations, nearly three hundred had called in sick.
Shortly after lunch, a junior preparator in the vertebrate paleontology department collapsed at her laboratory table. She was taken to Medical, where she demanded extended leave and worker’s compensation, citing severe emotional and physical stress.
By three P.M., security had responded to seven requests for investigations of suspicious noises in various remote sections of the museum. By curfew, police from the Museum command post had responded to four suspected sightings, all of which remained unverified.
Later, the Museum switchboard would tabulate the number of creature-related calls it received that day: 107, including crank messages, bomb threats, and offers of assistance from exterminators to spiritualists.
= 25 =
Smithback eased open the grimy door and peered inside. This, he thought, had to be one of the more macabre places in the Museum: the storage area of the Physical Anthropology Laboratory, or, in Museum parlance, the Skeleton Room. The Museum had one of the largest collections of skeletons in the country, second only to the Smithsonian—twelve thousand in this room alone. Most were North and South American Indian or African, collected in the nineteenth century, during the heyday of physical anthropology. Tiers of large metal drawers rose in ordered ranks to the ceiling; each drawer contained at least a portion of a human skeleton. Yellowed labels were slotted into the front of each drawer; on these labels were numbers, names of tribes, sometimes a short history. Other, briefer labels carried the chill of anonymity.
Smithback had once spent an afternoon wandering among the boxes, opening them and reading the notes, almost all of which were written in faded, elegant scripts. He had jotted several down in his notebook:
Spec. No. 1880-1770
Walks in Cloud. Yankton Sioux. Killed in Battle of Medicine Bow Creek, 1880.
Spec. No. 1899-1206
Maggie Lost Horse. Northern Cheyenne.
Spec. No. 1933-43469
Anasazi. Canyon del Muerto. Thorpe-Carlson expedition, 1900.
Spec. No. 1912-695
Luo. Lake Victoria. Gift of Maj. Gen. Henry Throckmorton, Bart.
Spec. No. 1872-10
Aleut, provenance unknown.
It was a strange graveyard indeed.
Beyond the storage area lay the warren of rooms housing the Physical Anthropology Lab. In earlier days, physical anthropologists had spent most of their time in this laboratory measuring bones and trying to determine the relationship between the races, where humanity had originated, and similar studies. Now, much more complex biochemical and epidemiological research was being done in the Physical Anthro Lab.