The Book of the Dead

by Richard Preston

  “In five hundred feet, turn right on Glover’s Box Road.”

  “Very well.”

  “Turn right on Glover’s Box Road,” came the smooth response.

  “With a voice like that, you could make a fortune in the phone sex business, you know that?” Smithback was glad Lavinia was only a voice in his dashboard. The GPS navigation system couldn’t know just how nervous he felt.

  He now found himself on a broad sandy spit of land, beach houses on either side among scraggly pines, cattail marshes, and scrub. A gray sheet of water lay to his left: Gardiners Bay. On his right was a bedraggled harbor, shut up for the winter, the yachts gone into tender.

  “In three hundred feet, you will arrive at your destination.”

  Smithback slowed. Ahead, he could see a sandy driveway leading through a sparse scattering of oaks to end at a gray, shingled house. Police sawhorses had been placed across the driveway, but there was no sign of a police presence. The house was shut up and dark.

  The road curved past a few more houses, then ended in a loop where the spit came to an end. A sign to one side announced a public beach. Smithback pulled the car onto the side of the loop—he was the only one there—and stepped out, inhaling the fresh cold air. He zipped his jacket against the damp wind, shrugged his arms into a backpack, picked up a rock from the ground, placed it in his pocket, and strolled out onto the beach. The small waves slopped and hissed up the strand in a regular cadence. Strolling along, he picked up a few shells, tossed them back again, scuffed his sneakers along the sand, all the time making his way down the beach.

  The houses stood just beyond the beginning of the sawgrass and dunes: gray shingles and white trim, silent and boarded up for the winter. The house he wanted was easy to identify: pieces of yellow crime scene tape still fluttered from stakes driven into the unkempt yard. It was a large house from the twenties, weather-beaten, with pitched roofs, a deep sea-facing porch, and two gables. Smithback continued past the house, but still there was no sign of any official presence. Still kicking sand nonchalantly, he strolled up through the dunes and sawgrass, hopped over a split rail fence, ducked under the police tape, and scooted across the yard into the lee of the house.

  He pressed himself against the wall, hidden from sight behind a half-dead yew, and slipped on a pair of leather gloves. The house would be locked, of course. He edged around until he came to a side door, then peered inside. He made out a tidy, old-fashioned kitchen, devoid of the usual utensils.

  Smithback removed the rock from his pocket, along with a handkerchief. He wrapped the handkerchief around the rock, gave the window a smart rap.

  Nothing happened. He struck harder, this time making a fairly audible thump, but still it did not break.

  He took a closer look at the glass and noticed something unusual: it was thick and blue-green in color, and the light dividers were of painted metal, not wood.

  Bulletproof glass?

  Somehow, Smithback wasn’t surprised. Diogenes would have retrofitted the house to be impregnable from the outside as well as escape-proof from the inside.

  He paused, hoping he hadn’t just wasted a three-hour drive. Certainly Diogenes would have thought of everything—how could he have forgotten that? There was no point in probing for weaknesses: there would be none.

  On the other hand, the police might have left a door open.

  Keeping hidden in the shrubbery, he crept around to the front porch. The door had crime scene tape stretched across it. He hopped onto the porch, glanced up and down the road, then turned to examine the door. This was how the cops had broken in—the door frame had been bent by crowbars and the door itself was bowed, the lock shattered. It appeared as if a remarkable amount of force had been necessary. Having destroyed the door lock, the police had affixed a padlock of their own, and this Smithback examined carefully. It was of case-hardened steel, too thick to cut with bolt cutters; but the fasteners had been screwed into fresh holes drilled in the metal door.

  Smithback dipped into the leather backpack and pulled out a Phillips-head screwdriver. In five minutes, he had unscrewed one side. He pulled the fastener back and eased open the badly warped metal door. In a moment, he was inside, the door shut behind him.

  He paused for a moment, rubbing his hands together. It was warm in the house—the heat was still on. He was standing in a typical beach-house living room, with comfortable wicker furniture, braided and hooked rugs scattered about the floor, a gaming table set for chess, a grand piano in one corner, and a huge fireplace built from beach stones in the far wall. The light in the house was a curious green from the thick-glassed windows.

  What was he looking for? He wasn’t sure. Some clue to where Diogenes might be, perhaps, or under what other identity or identities he might be hiding. He had a moment’s feeling of dismay, wondering how he could possibly find something that the police had missed or that—even more improbably—Diogenes himself had overlooked. Of course, the man had left in a hurry, leaving behind a slew of equipment and material, enough for the police to positively identify him as the museum diamond thief. Even so, he had proved himself to be not only exceptionally intelligent but also exceptionally careful. Diogenes wasn’t the type to make mistakes.

  Walking noiselessly, Smithback moved through an archway into a dining room beautifully paneled in oak, with a heavy table and Chippendale chairs. Paintings and prints hung on the dark red walls. A door in the far wall led to the tiny kitchen, also spotless. The police would not have cleaned the house: he figured this was the way Diogenes habitually kept it.

  Back in the living room, Smithback wandered to the piano, hit a few keys. It was beautifully in tune, the hammers working smoothly.

  Okay, that was one thing: Diogenes played the piano.

  He looked at the music open on the stand: Schubert’s Impromptus, opus 90. Under that, sheet music for Debussy’s “Clair de Lune,” a book of Chopin’s nocturnes. A relatively accomplished pianist at that, but probably not at the concert level.

  Next to the piano was another archway, leading into the library. This room was unaccountably disordered. Books lay on the floor, some open, with gaps on the shelves. The rug was rumpled and turned up at one end, and a table lamp lay broken on the floor. A large table dominated the middle of the space, covered with black velvet; above stood a row of bright spotlights.

  In one corner, Smithback saw something that sent a shiver down his spine: a large, finely machined, stainless-steel anvil. Next to it lay some rumpled rags and a strange kind of hammer made out of a gray, gleaming metal—titanium, perhaps?

  Smithback backed out of the library, turned, and ascended the wooden stairs. At the top was a landing with a long hall, paintings of seascapes on both walls. A small, stuffed capuchin monkey crouched on a table, next to a glass dome under which stood a fake tree festooned with butterflies.

  The doors to the rooms were all open.

  Walking into the room directly at the top of the stairs, Smithback realized it must have been the one where Viola Maskelene was held prisoner. The bed was in disarray, there was a broken glass on the floor, and someone had scraped off the wallpaper on one wall, revealing metal underneath.

  Metal. Smithback went over and carefully peeled off some more wallpaper. The walls were made of solid steel.

  He shivered again, feeling a creeping sensation of alarm. The window was of the same thick blue-green glass as downstairs, and was barred. The door, which he examined next, was extremely heavy, also of steel, and it moved noiselessly on oversize hinges. He peered at the lock—superheavy machined brass and stainless steel.

  Smithback’s feeling of nervousness increased. What if Diogenes came back? But of course he wouldn’t come back—that would be crazy. Unless there was something in the house he had forgotten . . .

  He made a quick tour of the other bedrooms. On a hunch, he took his screwdriver and poked the wall of another room. It, too, was steel.

  Did Diogenes plan to imprison more than one person? Or wa
s the whole house fortified like this as a matter of course?

  He skipped downstairs, heart pounding in his chest. The whole place was giving him the creeps. The day had proved a total waste: he’d come out there without a real plan, without looking for anything specific. He wondered if he should take notes—but of what? Maybe he should just forget it and go visit Margo Green. He was already out of the city. But that would be an equally useless journey—she had taken an abrupt turn for the worse, he understood, and was now comatose and unresponsive . . .

  Suddenly he froze. Soft footsteps were moving across the porch.

  With a sudden feeling of terror, he ducked into the coat closet at the bottom of the stairs. He pushed his way toward the back, nestling himself behind the row of cashmere, camel’s-hair, and tweed coats. He could hear the rattle of the door, and then the groan as it slowly opened.

  Diogenes?

  The closet was thick with the smell of wool. He could hardly breathe from fear.

  Footsteps moved quietly across the carpeted entry and into the living room, then stopped. Silence.

  Smithback waited.

  Next, the footsteps moved into the dining room, then faded away into the kitchen.

  Should he run for it?

  But even before he could consider, the steps returned: slow, soft, deliberate steps. Now they moved toward the library, back out, and up the stairs.

  Now. Smithback flitted out of the closet, scurried across the living room, and dashed out the open door. As he rounded the corner of the porch, he saw that a cop car was standing in the driveway, engine running, door open.

  He skipped through the backyard of the house next door and ran down onto the beach, almost laughing with relief. What he had assumed was Diogenes was only a cop, coming to check on the place.

  He got back in his car and spent a moment recovering his breath. A wasted day. But at least he’d exited the house in one piece.

  He started the car, turned on the navigator.

  “Where would you like to go?” came the smooth, sexy voice. “Please enter the address.”

  Smithback punched up the menu and chose the “Office” option. He knew his way back, but he liked listening to Lavinia.

  “We are going to the location called Office,” came the voice. “Proceed north on Glover’s Box Road.”

  “Righty-o, darling.”

  He drove slowly and nonchalantly past the house. The cop was now outside, standing next to his cruiser with a mike in his hand. He watched Smithback drive by but made no move to stop him.

  “In five hundred feet, turn left on Springs Road.”

  Smithback nodded. He raised a hand to brush away a wisp of tweed wool from his face. As he did so, he stiffened with an almost electric shock.

  “That’s it, Lavinia!” he cried. “The coats in the closet!”

  “Turn left on Springs Road.”

  “There were two kinds of coats! Super-expensive cashmere and mohair, and then a bunch of heavy, hairy, itchy tweed coats. Do you know of anyone who wears both? Hell, no!”

  “Proceed for one mile on Springs Road.”

  “Diogenes is the cashmere-and-mohair type, for sure. That means his alter ego wears tweeds. He’s disguised as a professorial type. It’s perfect, Lavinia, it feels right. He’s a professor. No, wait! Not a professor, not exactly. After all, he knows the museum so well . . . The police are saying the diamond heist had to have had inside help—but can you imagine Diogenes enlisting help? Hell, it’s staring us right in the face. Holy shit, Lavinia: we nailed it! I nailed it!”

  “In five hundred feet, take a left on the Old Stone Highway,” came the placid response.

  32

  What repelled Hayward most about the Bellevue psych ward wasn’t the dingy, tiled corridors, or the locked steel doors, or the mingled smell of disinfectant, vomit, and excrement. It was the sounds. They came from everywhere—a cacophony of mutterings, shrill outbursts, monotonic repetitions, glottal explosions, whining, soft high-speed babblings: a symphony of misery, now and then punctuated by a cry so hideous, so full of despair, that it wrenched her heart.

  Meanwhile, Dr. Goshar Singh walked beside her, speaking in a calm, rational voice as if he heard nothing—and maybe, she thought, he didn’t. If he did, he would no longer be sane himself. It was that simple.

  Hayward tried to focus on the doctor’s words. “In all my years of clinical psychiatry,” he was saying, “I’ve never seen anything quite like it. We’re trying to get a handle on it. We’ve made some progress, although not yet as much as I’d like.”

  “It seems to have happened so suddenly.”

  “The sudden onset is a puzzling feature, indeed. Ah, yes, Captain Hayward: here we are.”

  Singh unlocked a door and held it open, ushering Hayward into an almost bare room, divided in half by a long counter, a thick plate-glass window above separating it from the other half—exactly like a visitors’ room at a prison. An intercom was set into the glass.

  “Dr. Singh,” said Hayward, “I requested a face-to-face meeting.”

  “I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” Singh replied almost sadly.

  “I’m afraid it will be possible. I can’t question a suspect under these conditions.”

  Again, Singh shook his head sadly, his plump cheeks wagging. “No, no, we’re in charge here, Captain. And I think when you see the patient, you’ll realize that it wouldn’t make a difference, no difference at all.”

  Captain Hayward said nothing. Now was not the time to fight with the doctors. She would evaluate the situation and, if necessary, return under her own conditions.

  “If you would care to have a seat?” Singh asked solicitously.

  Hayward seated herself at the counter and the doctor settled into the seat beside her. He glanced at his watch.

  “The patient will be out in five minutes.”

  “What kind of preliminary results do you have?”

  “As I say, it is a most puzzling case. Most puzzling indeed.”

  “Can you elaborate?”

  “The preliminary EEG showed significant focal temporal abnormalities, and an MRI revealed a series of small lesions to the frontal cortex. It is these lesions that seem to have triggered severe cognitive defects and psychopathology.”

  “Can you translate that into English?”

  “The patient seems to have suffered severe damage to the part of the brain that controls behavior, emotions, and planning. The damage is most pronounced in an area of the brain we psychiatrists sometimes call the Higginbottom region.”

  “Higginbottom?”

  Singh smiled at what was evidently an inside psychiatric joke. “Eugenie Higginbottom worked on an assembly line in a ball-bearing factory in Linden, New Jersey. One day in 1913, there was a boiler explosion in the factory. Blew apart the stamper. It was as if a huge shotgun shell had gone off: ball bearings flew everywhere. Six people were killed. Eugenie Higginbottom miraculously survived: but with some two dozen ball bearings embedded in the frontal cortex of her brain.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, the poor woman suffered a complete personality change. She was instantly transformed from a kind, gentle person to a foulmouthed slattern, given to outbursts of profanity and violence, a drunkard, and, ah, sexually promiscuous. Her friends were astounded. It underscored the medical theory that personality is hardwired in the brain and that damage can literally transform one person into another. The ball bearings, you see, destroyed Higginbottom’s ventromedial frontal cortex—the same area that is affected in our patient.”

  “But there are no ball bearings in this man’s brain,” Hayward said. “What could have caused it?”

  “This is the crux of the matter. Initially, I hypothesized a drug overdose, but no drug residues were found in his system.”

  “A blow to the head? A fall?”

  “No. No evidence of coup/contrecoup, no edema or bruising. We’ve also ruled out a stroke: the damage was simultaneous in several widely separat
ed areas. The only possible explanation I can come up with is an electrical shock administered directly to the brain. If only we had a dead body—an autopsy would show so much more.”

  “Wouldn’t a shock leave burn marks?”

  “Not a low-voltage, high-amperage shock—such as one generated by electronic or computer equipment. But there’s no damage anywhere but to the brain. It’s hard to see how such a shock might have occurred, unless our patient was performing some kind of bizarre experiment on himself.”

  “The man was a computer technician installing an exhibit at the museum.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  An intercom chimed, and a voice sounded softly. “Dr. Singh? The patient is arriving.”