The Inner Circle

by Brad Meltzer

  There was no time to lose, not one minute.

  He stood up and punched the intercom. “Noyes? Get in here. Right away.”

  The man was in the doorway even before Custer’s finger was off the button.

  “I want the top ten detectives assigned to the Surgeon case over here for a confidential briefing in my office. Half an hour.”

  “Yes, Captain.” Noyes raised a quizzical, but appropriately obsequious, eyebrow.

  “I’ve got it. Noyes, I’ve figured it out.”

  Noyes ceased his gum chewing. “Sir?”

  “The key to the Surgeon killings is in the Museum. It’s there, in the Archives. God knows, maybe even the murderer himself is in there, on the Museum’s staff.” Custer grabbed his jacket. “We’re going in there hard and fast, Noyes. They won’t even know what hit them.”

  THREE

  USING CORNICES AND ESCUTCHEONS AS HAND- AND footholds, Smithback slowly pulled his way up the wall toward the stone embrasure of a second-story window. It had been harder than he expected, and he’d managed to scrape a cheek and mash a finger in the process. And, of course, he was ruining a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar pair of handmade Italian shoes. Maybe the Times would pay. Spreadeagled against the side of the house, he felt ridiculously exposed. There must be an easier way to win a Pulitzer, he thought. He grabbed for the window ledge, pulled himself upward with a grunt of effort. Gaining the wide ledge, he remained there a moment, catching his breath, looking around. The street was still quiet. Nobody seemed to have noticed anything. He turned his attention back to the rippled glass of the window.

  The room beyond seemed utterly empty and dark. Dust motes hung in the anemic shafts of light that slanted inward. He thought he could make out a closed door in the far wall. But there was nothing to give him any indication of what lay beyond, in the rest of the house.

  If he wanted to learn anything more, he’d have to get inside.

  What could the harm be? The house had clearly been deserted for decades. It was probably city property now, public property. He’d come this far, done this much. If he left now, he’d have to start all over again. The image of his editor’s face, shaking a fistful of copy, eyes popping with anger, filled his mind. If he was going to charge them for the shoes, he better have something to show for it.

  He tried the window, and, as expected, found it locked—or, perhaps, frozen shut with age. He experienced a moment of indecision, looked around again. The thought of clambering back down the wall was even less pleasant than climbing up had been. What he could see from the window told him nothing. He had to find a way in—just for the briefest look. He sure as hell couldn’t stay on the ledge forever. If anyone happened by and saw him…

  And then he spotted the cop car a few blocks south on Riverside Drive, cruising slowly north. It would not be good at all if they caught sight of him up here—and he had no way to get down in time.

  Quickly, he pulled off his jacket, stuffed it into a ball, and placed it against one of the lowest of the large panes. Using his shoulder, he pressed until it gave with a sharp crack. He pried out the pieces of glass, laid them on the ledge, and crawled through.

  Inside the room, he stood up and peered through the window. All was calm; his entry hadn’t been noticed. Then he turned around, listening intently. Silence. He sniffed the air. It smelled, not unpleasantly, of old wallpaper and dust—it was not the stale air he’d been expecting. He took a few deep breaths.

  Think of the story. Think of the Pulitzer. Think of Nora. He would do a quick reconnaissance and then get out.

  He waited, allowing his eyes to adjust to the dimness. There was a shelf in the back, and a single book lay on it. Smithback walked over and picked it up. It was an old nineteenth-century treatise titled Mollusca, with a gold engraving of a conch on the cover. Smithback felt a slight quickening of his heart: a natural history book. He opened it, hoping to find a bookplate reading Ex Libris Enoch Leng. But there was nothing. He flipped the pages, looking for notes, then put the book back.

  Nothing else for it: time to explore the house.

  He carefully removed his shoes, placed them by the window, and proceeded in stockinged feet. With careful steps he made his way to the closed door. The floor creaked, and he stopped. But the profound silence remained. It was unlikely that anyone would be in the house—it looked like even the junkies and bums had been successfully kept out—but caution would be wise nonetheless.

  He placed his hand on the doorknob, turned it ever so slowly, eased the door open an inch. He peered through the crack. Blackness. He pushed it wider, allowing the dim afternoon light from the window behind him to spill into the hallway. He saw that it was very long, quite grand, with flocked wallpaper in a heavy green design. On the walls, in gilded alcoves, were paintings draped with white sheets. The sheets clung to the heavy frames. At the far end of the hall, a broad set of marble stairs swept downward, disappearing into a pool of deeper darkness. At the top of the stairs stood something—a statue, perhaps?—draped in yet another white sheet.

  Smithback held his breath. It really did look as if the house had been shut up and deserted since Leng’s death. It was fantastic. Could all this stuff be Leng’s?

  He ventured a few steps down the hall. As he did so, the smell of mold and dust became suffused with something less pleasant: something organic, sweet, decayed. It was as if the rotten old heart of the house had finally died.

  Perhaps his suspicions were right, and Leng had entombed the bodies of his victims behind the heavy Victorian wallpaper.

  He paused, an arm’s length from one of the paintings. Curious, he reached out, took the corner of the white sheet, and lifted. The rotting sheet fell away in a cloud of dust and tatters, and he stepped back, momentarily startled. A dark painting stood revealed. Smithback peered closer. It depicted a pack of wolves ripping apart a deer in a deep wood. It was ghoulish in its anatomical detail, but beautifully executed nevertheless, and no doubt worth a fortune. Curiosity aroused, Smithback stepped to the next alcove and plucked at the sheet, which also turned to powder at his touch. This painting showed a whale hunt—a great sperm whale, draped with harpoon lines, thrashing about in its death throes, a huge jet of bright arterial blood rising from its spouter, while its flukes dashed a boatful of harpooners into the sea.

  Smithback could hardly believe his luck. He had struck paydirt. But then, it wasn’t luck: it was the result of hard work and careful research. Even Pendergast hadn’t yet figured out where Leng lived. This would redeem his job at the Times, maybe even redeem his relationship with Nora. Because he was sure that—whatever information about Leng Nora and Pendergast were looking for—it was here.

  Smithback waited, listening intently, but there were no sounds from below. He moved down the carpeted hallway in slow, small, noiseless steps. Reaching the covered statue at the top of the banister, he reached up and grasped at the sheet. As rotten as the others, it fell apart, dropping to the ground in a dissolving heap. A cloud of dust, dry rot, and mold billowed up into the air.

  At first Smithback felt a frisson of fear and incomprehension at the sight, until his mind began to understand just what he was looking at. It was, in fact, nothing more than a stuffed chimpanzee, hanging from a tree branch. Moths and rats had chewed away most of the face, leaving pits and holes that went down to brown bone. The lips were gone as well, giving the chimpanzee the agonized grin of a mummy. One ear hung by a thread of dried flesh, and even as Smithback watched it fell to the ground with a soft thud. One of the chimp’s hands was holding a wax fruit; the other was clutching its stomach, as if in pain. Only the beady glass eyes looked fresh, and they stared at Smithback with maniacal intensity.

  Smithback felt his heart quicken. Leng had, after all, been a taxonomist, collector, and member of the Lyceum. Did he, like McFadden and the rest, also have a collection, a so-called cabinet of curiosities? Was this decayed chimp part of his collection?

  He again experienced a moment of indecision. Sh
ould he leave now?

  Taking a step back from the chimpanzee, he peered down the staircase. There was no light except what little filtered in from behind nailed boards and wooden shutters. Gradually, he began to make out the dim outlines of what seemed to be a reception hall, complete with parqueted oak floor. Lying across it were exotic skins—zebra, lion, tiger, oryx, cougar. Ranged about were a number of dark objects, also draped in white sheets. The paneled walls were lined with old cabinets, covered with rippled glass doors. On them sat a number of shadowy objects in display cases, each with a brass plate affixed below it.

  Yes, it was a collection—Enoch Leng’s collection.

  Smithback stood, clutching the upper knob of the banister. Despite the fact that nothing seemed to have been touched in the house for a hundred years, he could feel, deep in his gut, that the house hadn’t been empty all this time. It looked, somehow, tended. It bespoke the presence of a caretaker. He should turn around now and get out.

  But the silence was profound, and he hesitated. The collections below were worth a brief look. The interior of this house and its collections would play a big role in his article. He would go down for a moment—just a moment—to see what lay beneath some of the sheets. He took a careful step, and then another… and then he heard a soft click behind him. He spun around, heart pounding.

  At first, nothing looked different. And then he realized that the door from which he’d entered the hallway must have closed. He breathed a sigh of relief: a gust of wind had come through the broken window and pushed the door shut.

  He continued down the sweeping marble staircase, hand clutching the banister. At the bottom he paused, screwing up his eyes, peering into the even more pronounced darkness. The smell of rot and decay seemed stronger here.

  His eyes focused on an object in the center of the hall. One of the sheets had become so decayed that it had already fallen from the object it covered. In the darkness it looked strange, misshapen. Smithback took a step forward, peering intently—and suddenly he realized what it was: the mounted specimen of a small carnivorous dinosaur. But this dinosaur was extraordinarily well preserved, with fossilized flesh still clinging to the bones, some fossilized internal organs, even huge swaths of fossilized skin. And covering the skin were the unmistakable outlines of feathers.

  Smithback stood, dumbstruck. It was an astounding specimen, of incalculable value to science. Recent scientists had theorized that some dinosaurs, even T. Rex, might have had a covering of feathers. Here was the proof. He glanced down: a brass label read Unknown coeloraptor from Red Deer River, Alberta, Canada.

  Smithback turned his attention to the cabinets, his eye falling on a series of human skulls. He moved closer. The little brass label below them read: Hominidae series from Swartkopje Cave, South Africa. Smithback could hardly believe his eyes. He knew enough about hominid fossils to know they were exceedingly rare. These dozen skulls were some of the most complete he had ever seen. They would revolutionize hominid studies.

  His eye caught a gleam from the next cabinet. He stepped up to it. It was crowded with gemstones, and his eye landed on a large, green cut stone the size of a robin’s egg. The label below read Diamond, flawless specimen from Novotney Terra, Siberia, 216 carats, believed to be the only green diamond in existence. Next to it, in an especially large case, were immense star rubies, sapphires, and more exotic stones with names he could hardly pronounce, winking in the dim recesses—gemstones equal to the finest ones at the New York Museum. They seemed to have been given star billing among the other exhibits. On a nearby shelf lay a series of gold crystals, perfectly beautiful, lacy as frost, one as large as a grapefruit. Below lay rows of tektites, mostly black misshapen things, but some with a beautiful deep green or violet coloring.

  Smithback took a step back, his mind wrestling with the richness and variety of the display. To think all this has stood here, in this ruined house, for a hundred years… He turned away and, on impulse, reached out and twitched off the sheet from a small specimen behind him. The sheet dissolved, and a strange stuffed animal greeted his eye: a large, tapirlike mammal with a huge muzzle, powerful forelegs, bulbous head, and curving tusks. It was like nothing he had ever seen before; a freak. He bent down to make out the dim label: Only known specimen of the Tusked Megalopedus, described by Pliny, thought to be fantastical until this specimen was shot in the Belgian Congo by the English explorer Col. Sir Henry F. Moreton, in 1869.

  Good lord, thought Smithback: could it be true? A large mammal, completely unknown to science? Or was it a fake? Suddenly the thought occurred to him: could all these be fakes? But as he looked around, he realized they were not. Leng would not have collected fakes, and even in the dim light he could see that these were real. These were real. And if the rest of the collections in the house were like this, they constituted possibly the greatest natural history collection in the world. This was no mere cabinet of curiosities. It was too dark to take notes, but Smithback knew he wouldn’t need notes: what he had seen had been imprinted upon his mind forever.

  Only once in a lifetime was a reporter given such a story.

  He jerked away another sheet, and was greeted by the massive, rearing fossil skeleton of a short-faced cave bear, caught in a silent roar, its black teeth like daggers. The engraved brass label on the oak mounting stand indicated it had been pulled from the Kutz Canyon Tar Pits, in New Mexico.

  He whispered through the reception hall on his stockinged feet, pulling off additional sheets, exposing a whole row of Pleistocene mammals—each one a magnificent specimen as fine or finer than any in a museum—ending with a series of Neanderthal skeletons, perfectly preserved, some with weapons, tools, and one sporting some sort of necklace made out of teeth.

  Glancing to one side, he noticed a marble archway leading into a room beyond. In its center of the room was a huge, pitted meteorite, at least eight feet in diameter, surrounded by rows upon rows of additional cabinets.

  It was ruby in color.

  This was almost beyond belief.

  He looked away, turning his attention to the objects ranged about mahogany shelves on a nearby wall. There were bizarre masks, flint spearpoints, a skull inlaid with turquoise, bejeweled knives, toads in jars, thousands of butterflies under glass: everything arranged with the utmost attention to systematics and classification.

  He noticed that the light fixtures weren’t electric. They were gas, each with a little pipe leading up into a mantle, covered by a cut-glass shade. It was incredible. It had to be Leng’s house, just as he had left it. It was as if he had walked out of the house, boarded it up, and left…

  Smithback paused, his excitement suddenly abating. Obviously, the house hadn’t remained like this, untouched, since Leng’s death. There must be a caretaker who came regularly. Somebody had put tin over the windows and draped the collections. The feeling that the house was not empty, that someone was still there, swept over him again.

  The silence; the watchful exhibits and grotesque specimens; the overpowering darkness that lay in the corners of the room—and, most of all, the rising stench of rot—brought a growing unease that would not be denied. He shuddered involuntarily. What was he doing? There was already enough here for a Pulitzer. He had the story: now, be smart and get the hell out.

  He turned and swiftly climbed the stairs, passing the chimpanzee and the paintings—and then he paused. All the doors along the hall were closed, and it seemed even darker than it had a few minutes before. He realized he had forgotten which door he had come through. It was near the end of the hall, that much he remembered. He approached the most likely, tried the handle, and to his surprise found it locked. Must have guessed wrong, he thought, moving to the next.

  That, too, was locked.

  With a rising sense of alarm he tried the door on the other side. It was locked, as well. So was the next, and the next. With a chill prickling his spine, he tried the rest—all, every one, securely locked.

  Smithback stood in the dark hallway, tryi
ng to control the sudden panic that threatened to paralyze his limbs.

  He was locked in.

  FOUR

  CUSTER’S UNMARKED CRUISER PULLED UP WITH A satisfying squeal of rubber before the Museum’s security entrance, five squad cars skidding up around him, sirens wailing, light bars throwing red and white stripes across the Romanesque Revival facade. He rolled out of the squad car and strode decisively up the stone steps, a sea of blue in his wake.

  At the impromptu meeting with his top detectives, and then in the ride uptown to the Museum, the theory that had hit him like a thunderclap became a firm, unshakable conviction. Surprise and speed is the way to go in this case, he thought as he looked up at the huge pile of granite. Hit ’ em hard and fast, leave them reeling—that was what his instructor at the Police Academy had always said. It was good advice. The commissioner wanted action. And it was action, in the form of Captain Sherwood Custer, that he was going to get.

  A Museum security guard stood at the doorway, the police lights reflecting off his glasses. He looked bewildered. Several other guards were coming up behind him, staring down the steps, looking equally perplexed. A few tourists were approaching up Museum Drive, cameras dangling, guidebooks in hand. They stopped when they saw the cluster of police cars. After a brief parley, the group turned around and headed back toward a nearby subway entrance.

  Custer didn’t bother to show the grunt his badge. “Captain Custer, Seventh Precinct,” he rapped out. “Brevetted to Homicide.”

  The guard swallowed painfully. “Yes, Captain?”

  “Is the Museum’s security chief in?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Get him down here. Right away.”

  The guards scurried around, and within five minutes a tall man in a tan suit, black hair combed back with a little too much grease, arrived. He’s an unsavory-looking fellow, Custer thought; but then, so many people in private security were. Not good enough to join the real force.