by C. S. Poe
“What’s that mean, then?” Quinn asked quickly.
“It means, I suspect whoever did the cutting had a very sharp instrument and knew how to use it,” Asquith said.
I FELT like I’d been kicked in the chest.
It was hard to breathe—impossible to speak.
All of my sleuthing, researching, interviewing… in the blink of an eye, none of it mattered anymore. Because I couldn’t argue with scientific evidence. It was like telling Neil the fingerprint he lifted wasn’t actually a fingerprint. It didn’t work that way.
Life in a modern, industrialized, urban environment didn’t work that way.
Dr. Asquith had shown me forensic proof that the hand responsible for removing Daniel’s eye and teeth had gone to medical school. She explained, while showing us original photographs taken by Neil, that even the severing of the neck was precise and professional.
“They knew exactly what they were doing,” she’d said.
Which would mean the same for all the other body parts strewn across New York City.
And that… Rossi was not our guy and Dr. Gould was not his assistant.
I was left with a long-lost skull, no way in which to deliver it to the Collector, no suspect to punch in the fucking face, and a fiancé who, because of me, wasn’t going to see the sun rise tomorrow. I felt absolutely dead and rotting inside.
Crouching, I grabbed the handle on the woven metal gate of the Emporium and lifted it up and over my head. I took out my keys, unlocked the front door, and leaned inside to tap in the security code. I turned and stared at Quinn, who was standing a step back from the storefront.
“I’ll call Wainwright,” she said. “Tell him how much time is left…. Have him expedite information from Telecom on that burner number.”
I nodded.
“I’ll try the courier angle one more time,” Quinn continued. “No one was ever able to describe the courier beyond it being a woman… there were no receipts… but there’s still shady, cheap companies operating like that. Collector probably sought them out specifically.”
Again, I nodded. Had I not stopped nodding after acknowledging her first comment?
“It’s not over yet, Sebastian,” she said.
Yes, it was.
“Sure,” I said thickly.
Quinn pointed at the shop. “Stay here. I’ll call you soon.” She walked back to her car, parked on the side of the road.
I stepped into the shop, gently closing the door behind me. My dark, silent cave was a microcosm of serenity among a world of chaos. Maybe if I never left, if I isolated myself from all of humanity inside this time capsule, I’d survive. Heartbroken, lonely, devastated, and a shell of the man I’d become… but I’d survive.
I trudged through the congested aisles toward the counter.
But what sort of life was that?
What was the sense of existence without… existing?
It’s not that I couldn’t live without Calvin.
I could.
I had. For thirty-three years.
It was only… after he fit into that odd shape missing from my heart… I didn’t want to live without him.
I set my bag on the counter and methodically removed the contents: glasses case, laptop, keys, magnifying glass, extra sweater, skull. I emptied my pockets next. Phone and wallet. I stared at the items while absently unbuttoning my coat. I waited for something to jump out as a tool MacGyver would have used to save the day.
But nothing happened. I had lost every goddamn spoon to my name. I frowned and checked the bag’s front pocket. Ah. The rapidly written note of details from my call with Calvin.
God…. Calvin.
I brought the note closer and studied my shitty penmanship.
Machinery.
Five to seven stories.
Exposed brick and broken wooden floors.
Humming.
Bumpy road.
“Bumpy,” I murmured.
And like that, the most inconsequential clue flipped a switch in the deepest recesses of my brain.
If Calvin had been hauled from Midtown to north Brooklyn, he absolutely would have been incapacitated. Otherwise, whoever had tried to abduct him would be dead. Because good luck to anyone who single-handedly tried to take Calvin down in a physical fight. But what did that mean? Logically, whatever drug had Calvin so out of it on the phone probably would have been administered pretty quickly in the vehicle. And yet, the road had been bumpy enough that Calvin was able to acknowledge and retain that fact when he said he could remember nothing else.
So a really bad road? Like… potholes?
Or cobblestone.
“Son of a bitch!” I shouted. I grabbed my phone off the counter and dialed Neil. “He’s in Vinegar Hill,” I said before he had a chance to fully answer the call.
“What? How do you know?”
“Calvin said the road had been bumpy and he could hear humming. Neil. Vinegar Hill is a declared Historical District. The surviving roads are made out of Belgian block.”
“But humming?” Neil asked, wary but on high alert.
“ConEd’s power plant,” I answered.
He swore. “Where are you?”
“The Emporium.”
“I’ll be there soon,” he said, abruptly hanging up.
I shoved a few things into my pockets, grabbed Cope, and jumped off the steps. I ran along the aisles toward the door, only skidding to a stop when I saw the signed mystery novel Beth had brought me yesterday, left on a table. I set the skull on a nearby display case and picked up the Miss Butterwith title. The old gal always got the bad guy in the end, with the help of her feline companion, Mr. Pinkerton, as well as Inspector Appleby.
I felt a smile tug the corner of my mouth as I considered me, Neil, and Quinn to be a similar band of musketeers. If a geriatric sleuth could save the day, then one with bad eyesight and a quicksilver tongue should be capable too, right? Of course, Miss Butterwith was fictional and I was real, but still.
I opened the book and stared at the signature. It wasn’t worth what Beth’s account balance was, not by a long shot. But I knew I’d let it slide. Because Christopher Holmes’s signature was priceless to me, even when comparing it to the original editions of Max Brödel’s medical illustrations Beth had snagged from my shelves a few weeks ago.
I looked at Cope and dropped the mystery book back on the table. “Medical illustrations.”
Unsurprisingly, the skull did not respond.
I grabbed Cope. “What happens when you combine medical knowledge, Victorian America, Calvin, and me?” I asked him.
Cope didn’t appear to have the answer.
“Sensationalism, that’s what!” I ran out the front door, nearly slipped on the first step, caught myself, then remembered to lock the door before starting toward Good Books.
“Sebastian!”
I paused midstep and looked toward the road. Marc Winter was climbing out of a cab and walking toward me. “I don’t have the time,” I said.
“You need to make—is that—what is that?” Marc pointed at my skull as he stepped over the slush accumulating on the edge of the road.
I looked at Cope and then held him up to provide a better view. “Edward Drinker Cope, once famous paleontologist, now a museum artifact.”
Marc was bristly as he joined me on the sidewalk. His eyes darted to Cope a few times, sort of like he had just seen a car wreck and couldn’t quite pull himself away from the horror. “I had an extremely unpleasant meeting with a Detective Wainwright this morning,” he managed at length.
“My condolences.” I tucked Cope carefully into the fold of my arm.
“Wainwright was asking about my whereabouts the last few days. About my baby sister’s whereabouts.”
“Wow,” I said, mildly surprised. Wainwright not only listened to my harebrained ramblings yesterday but pursued the possibility in an official capacity. No doubt he was now comfortable in writing the Winters off as harmless, as I had been, but s
till. After suspending Quinn and Neil, the last thing I’d expected was Wainwright entertaining a word I’d said.
“He says Calvin has been abducted.” Marc took another step forward to loom over me.
“That’s correct,” I said calmly. Perhaps too much so. Or maybe it wasn’t calmness at all. Maybe I was simply adrift in a hazy space of sleep deprivation and a fuck-it-all attitude.
“I know you’re behind this,” Marc said accusingly.
“Behind the abduction? No. Behind the questioning? Yes. I did tell Wainwright to look into you both.”
“Ellen lives and works in Philly,” Marc declared.
“But do you understand why I even had to consider it?”
“Because you’re shit nuts?” Marc retaliated.
I sighed inwardly. “Sometimes. But mostly it was because I didn’t believe you had a sincere bone in your body regarding Calvin.”
“He’s my brother,” Marc said, his mouth a thin line. “You want to hear me say it? Fine. I screwed up.” The muscles in his jaw jumped much like Calvin’s did under stress. “I didn’t understand Calvin, and I didn’t want to try. And to be honest, I still don’t understand him. Or why the hell he’d want to marry a smartass like you.”
“Thank you,” I said dryly.
“But….” Marc struggled for a moment. A long moment at that. “Calvin was never happy growing up. Never. He didn’t have a good relationship with our father, and God knows I didn’t do much to ease the tension….” Marc stared at the road as a few taxis drove past, splashing dirty snow and slush on the sidewalk. “When he spoke your name last Christmas… all I could think was, his own family never made him smile like that.”
Marc cautiously put his hand out. I looked between his face and the offering several times, not rising to the bait.
“I can live with the two of us never being friends. And I’m sure you can too. But whatever it is you’re doing right now,” Marc whispered, words catching a bit, “bring my brother home.”
I waited, but the punch line never came. So I took Marc’s hand and shook it. “I will.”
Chapter Fifteen
“BETH!” I shouted, throwing the door open to her shop and stepping inside.
She jumped from where she stood hunched over the counter. Beth put her bejeweled glasses on and frowned at me. “You about gave me a heart attack, Sebby. And this is a bookstore! Keep your damn voice down,” she chastised at an equally loud volume.
I walked inside, letting the door fall shut as I approached the counter.
Beth’s eyebrows went up. “Are you—taking a human skull for a walk?”
I looked at Cope and set him on top of Beth’s crossword puzzle. “Max Brödel.”
“That’s not Max Brödel,” she said, pushing Cope away with the end of her pen.
“No, I mean Brödel of the medical illustration books I sold you. I want to take a look at them.”
“I’ve already sold one,” she said while walking around the counter to stand in front of me. “Sebby, what’s going on? Is Calvin still missing? No one’s told me anything.”
I held a hand up to stop her. “Which one did you sell?”
“Which Brödel book? Operative Gynecology,” Beth replied, perplexed.
“I want to see The Vermiform Appendix and Its Diseases.” I sidestepped Beth and went to her large glass case of rare and antique collectables. For a brief moment, a copy of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tamerlane had resided here last Christmas. That really did seem like ages ago. I moved around to the back side, opened the sliding door, and gently removed the big hardcover reference book.
“Hey. What are you, an amateur?” Beth tossed me a pair of cloth gloves.
I missed, picked them up from the case top, and tugged the gloves on before opening the book. I carefully flipped through the pages as Beth joined me. “Calvin was kidnapped by someone who has a fairly intimate understanding of both Victorian America and medicine.”
I could feel Beth staring at me. Gauging what to say—what was okay to say. “How do you know?” she inquired, voice uncharacteristically gentle.
“On each message I got, there were drawings of human body parts. And from the very start of all this, I was bothered by how… clinical they were. Not romanticism art of the time period, but medical art. Hand-drawn with a purposeful, antiquated appearance.” I kept flipping until I came upon an intense, lifelike drawing of a woman’s torso, complete with muscular structures and indicators for doctors on how to make incisions. I tapped the page. “Purposeful because the Collector was copying the work of Max Brödel, a pioneer in his field at Johns Hopkins University at the turn of the century, who would be a history lesson for the medical students of today!”
I shut the book and declared loudly, like a real-life game of Clue, “I accuse Dr. Asquith in Vinegar Hill with a benzodiazepine!”
I THANKED Pop, said goodbye, and hung up. Neil was driving over the Manhattan Bridge, the early-setting sun already dipping over the horizon with the promise of another cold, wintry night on its way. He reached with one hand to change the whispering radio station from metal to jazz. A concession to me without an argument.
“I hope your father got more information to work with than I did,” Neil remarked. “Dr. Asquith wasn’t at the ME’s office when I called. She never returned from her lunch break.”
“My dad had a meeting with an administrator at NYU,” I answered. “She’s an old friend of, and occasionally something more to, Benjamin Dover. She’s actually the one who filed a missing person report on him.”
I looked at Neil briefly. He had one hand draped casually over the wheel. The BMW—I’d been told—handled night and day compared to the CSU van he occasionally drove to scenes throughout the five boroughs. Whatever that meant. But anyway. Neil looked pretty cool in that seat, exuding a gentle, authentic confidence I’d never quite seen before. Dirty distortion cast by the overhead lights of the bridge reshaped his face as we passed under them.
Neil glanced sideways. “I’m listening.”
“While attempting to make a name for himself and get noticed by magazines like National Geographic, Dover apparently discovered the ideal subject for a project in a museum in Pennsylvania.”
“UPenn.”
“Bingo. This administrator claims the story goes: He checked out the skull, like a library book. And went on an adventure around the world, taking photos of Cope among modern paleontologists, at museum exhibits, dig sites—you get the idea.”
“Hmm.”
“Apparently a few better-known journalists thought it was a tacky project—called him out on it. Dover never returned Cope to UPenn, maybe out of fear they’d report his indiscretion to the cops or something. But I don’t think they even noticed its absence until AMNH requested the artifact.”
“How could they not?”
“It could have been overlooked during a catalog overhaul of manual to electronic. This was in like ’94—’95?”
“Even if they had caught on to Dover never having returned the artifact, the Art Crime Team didn’t exist with the FBI yet,” Neil continued thoughtfully.
“And local police tend to have better things to look into,” I concluded. “Anyway. I guess he figured enough time had passed that no one would remember the events that chased him out of his budding photojournalism career. So he signed what his sometimes bed-friend described as a ‘high-six-fucking-figure’ contract.”
“For pictures of a skull?” Neil asked, looking at me in disbelief.
“And the story. It’s a good story,” I admitted. “Plus, when Quinn and I—er—were in his apartment, I saw some of the photos. They’re impressive. He had a real eye, at least back then.”
Neil made a turn as we got off the bridge and entered Brooklyn. “How does Dr. Asquith tie into this? You’re really certain it’s not Rossi?”
“Unfortunately, yes,” I agreed. “I’m not sure how Dr. Asquith learned about the Cope skull. She doesn’t appear to have any sort of connection to eith
er museum. But I don’t think how is important to our case. I’d jump right to the why.”
“If the skull is worth whatever someone is willing to pay,” Neil said, “that might be good incentive for someone saddled with medical school student loans.”
“Could be.”
“But she’s five foot nothing,” he continued. “How does someone like her take down a tank like Calvin?”
“Feigned innocence. A true psychopath.” I looked at Neil again as we came to a red light. “He knows her. Has no reason not to trust her. Hell, he’d have willingly jumped into an ME’s van if she asked for assistance. One shot of something like diazepam to a major artery, and he’d be down, maybe unconscious, in under a minute. As long as she can keep him drugged enough not to escape but also not die, I’m at her mercy and this game of hers continues.”
Neil hit the accelerator again. “All this because the drawings were too anatomically correct?”
“She said ‘sensational.’”
“What?”
“At the ME’s office. She said she was so happy to finally meet me. And that the Emporium’s name was sensational.” I took in a slow, steady breath. “The Collector said that on the phone this morning… like… asking if I failed, would I promise to battle them until the very end and make it sensational.”
Neil snorted. “A modern war between intellectuals.”
“Marsh and Cope all over again, losing everything in an effort to destroy each other,” I said quietly.
Neil reached and turned the radio off.
The clock read 5:00 p.m.…. We barely had three hours left.
The transition to Vinegar Hill was understated, but the tiny little neighborhood made its historical mark known through the architecture of the homes and streets.
“A whole other sort of war was waged in Vinegar Hill,” I murmured, staring out the passenger window at the passing high-rises and converted warehouses.
“What’s that, Sherlock?”
I smiled absently. Neil had always refused to call me Sherlock when we were an item. It was nice to hear him say that now. A subtle apology between us.