Carrie Norton and Max Slattery drove up Amsterdam Avenue in the detective’s grumbling old Crown Victoria, slipped over to Columbus, then turned onto West Eighty-first Street and parked in a metered spot halfway up the block once known as Manhattan Square, which contained the sprawling American Museum of Natural History. The exterior of the main building was a paean of praise to gothic, neo-Romanesque and beaux arts overstatement, most of it in a rusticated New York brownstone with a dash of pale, imposing granite making up the triumphal-columned Central Park entrance, named in honor of Teddy Roosevelt, whose father had been one of the founders.
Slattery flipped down his visor to show off the NYPD sticker, then lumbered out of the car, ignoring the meter.
“You’re not going to feed the meter?”
“Are you kidding me?” Slattery snorted. “Does a fire truck pay for parking? I’m here on police business. I could have been really nasty and parked in a handicap zone.” He grinned at Carrie. “Face it, kiddo. I’m not the most politically correct of people. I like red meat, I shoot astrologers on sight and I like reading baseball statistics, either on the toilet or at the dinner table.” They headed up the sidewalk toward the main entrance on Central Park West.
“Too much information for me, Max.” Carrie laughed.
“What’s the name of this friend of yours?”
“Will Croaker, otherwise known as Igor, or Dr. Death.”
“Why do all these people have nicknames?”
“Because we’re all geeks. It helps our self-esteem.”
“We?” Slattery said. “You had a nickname?”
“With a last name like Norton? I was Trixie for years.”
They went up the broad, crowded steps and through the main entrance into the basilica-like lobby. There was an enormous snaking line of people buying tickets in front of the gigantic barosaurus exhibit, even though it was late in the afternoon by now.
“We can’t wait to get a ticket,” muttered Carrie.
“No sweat,” said Max. The big cop dug into the inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out his badge wallet. “Save us twenty-six bucks.” He headed for the nearest guard.
“Thirteen bucks. I’m a member,” said Carrie. They flagged the guard, who waved them on, and Carrie led Max out of the entrance hall, through the North American Mammals exhibit, then left through Northwest Coast Indians and right to a staircase leading down beside a baffle wall of an area by the side entrance toilets that was closed for renovation.
“You know your way around pretty well,” said the detective.
“I interned here three summers in a row when I was at Columbia,” explained Carrie. “I was in love with the place.” She didn’t bother to explain that there was also a young blond curator in the herpetology section that she was in love with that first summer. Both the curator and the love affair were long gone.
“You know this guy Croaker very well?”
“Drinking buddies,” said Carrie. “We’ve got a few mutual friends.”
“Can he keep his mouth shut?”
“If he needs to,” said Carrie. “Why?”
“Tell you later,” said the cop.
They reached the bottom of the stairs and Carrie turned into the food court. “There he is,” she said, pointing to a tousle-haired man in his thirties wearing a white lab coat and piling cooked onions on an already overloaded museum version of a street-meat-cart foot-long hot dog. He waved the onion-covered plastic fork in Carrie’s direction, and she and Slattery threaded their way through the lines of chattering kids and teenagers to where he was standing. By then he’d finished with the onions and was squeezing on another line of mustard.
“Bertman’s Ball Park,” he said, gesturing with the squeeze bottle. “Only place you can find it east of Jacobs Field.”
“You must be from Cleveland.” Slattery grinned.
“Born and raised. You must be Trixie’s cop buddy.”
“See?” Carrie said. “Still Trixie.”
Max and Croaker shook hands after the assistant curator put down the squeeze bottle; then he led the way out of the food court, munching on the hot dog, spilling onions and sauerkraut and dripping mustard all the way to a door set into a plain gray wall at the end of a completely anonymous corridor. The scientist swiped the ID card dangling from his wrist through the electronic lock, and the door clicked open.
“From here on we just follow the breadcrumbs into the forest,” said Croaker. “Thirty-two million individual items in storage from a T-rex skull to a frozen brain slice and liver sample from the Lee Harvey Oswald autopsy. Fourteen separate departments all wanting space from the attic to the basement. They used to say Einstein’s brain was down here, but it’s not. It’s at some obscure university in Canada for some reason I could never quite figure out.” He took another enormous bite from his hot dog and chewed heartily. “Don’t tell the kiddies in the lunchroom, but the last thing anybody cares about in this place is exhibits.”
The walls of the corridors had gone from neutral gray to a dull bureaucratic green. Ten minutes into the maze of narrow halls and passageways and they came to another flight of stairs. They went down to an even lower level and immediately the temperature dropped and the lighting dimmed. The walls were no longer plasterboard but quarried brownstone, the floor some kind of smooth linoleum.
Croaker hunched his shoulder and dragged his foot in a bad imitation of Lon Chaney in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. He waved them forward with the stubby remains of his hot dog. “This way, masters, this way!” he lisped.
“I’ll bet his mother loved him, though,” whispered Max.
“I didn’t have a mother, master,” said Croaker, turning and cocking an eyebrow. “I was a self-made man. I have the bolt through my neck to prove it.” He gave a macabre little laugh and stopped in front of another door with an electronic lock, swiping his card a second time. He stood aside. “Come into my parlor,” the scientist crooned.
The room beyond was remarkably modern. The walls appeared to be lined with stainless steel, and a wide bench running the entire length of the roomy chamber was crammed with an amazing collection of electronic instruments from centrifuges to gas spectrometers. In the middle of the room was a six-by-ten-foot light table, and in the center of the light table, glowing like some alien being, lit from beneath, were the reasonably well-preserved remains of Barnabus Coffin, naked now, the uniform removed, which, to Carrie at least, seemed to diminish him. The room looked like something out of an episode of CSI. Croaker rested the last four inches of his hot dog on the edge of the light table. He picked up one of Coffin’s desiccated hands and gave it a little wave.
“It’s alive! It’s alive!”
“Some weird friends you got, Doc,” muttered Max.
“Just trying to lighten the mood.” Croaker pouted. He chewed his way through the last of his hot dog, then smacked his lips.
“He didn’t look that shiny before,” said Slattery, peering down at the leathery object on the table.
“Gave him a hot lanolin bath, limbered him up,” said Croaker, bending down and rummaging around in a half-size lab fridge under the counter. He resurfaced with a Diet Dr Pepper in his hand and snapped the top. “Had to or I wouldn’t have been able to get him into the barrel of the CAT scanner.”
“What exactly did you find?” Carrie asked.
“Come on over here,” Croaker instructed, motioning them to the other side of the room. He flipped on a bank of wall-mounted X-ray light boxes. There were four views under the clips.
“Check out the throat and esophagus or what’s left of it. It’s a simple endolateral image.”
“From the ME?” Slattery asked.
“Yup.” Croaker nodded.
“I can’t see anything,” said Carrie finally, after looking at all four views. “Just the wound, some shadows and a lot of vertebrae and stuff.”
“Look again,” said Croaker.
Slattery saw it first. “That thin little line.”
“Good for you,” said Croaker. He pulled down the first X-ray and replaced it with a color lateral scan of the bog body’s esophagus. There was a definite round object caught about three quarters of the way down. “Most foreign bodies are found at the level of the cricopharyngeus muscle, but this is much lower.”
“Crico what?” Slattery asked.
“Creek-o-far-in-gee-us,” explained Croaker. “Otherwise known as the upper esophageal sphincter. It’s the muscle that stops you choking and swallowing things down the wrong pipe.”
“Gotcha.” Slattery nodded.
“Hard to swallow something that big and get it past that point. Your throat automatically locks up the way your lower sphincter does when you’re fleeing to the crapper with the runs.”
“Very scientific of you, Willy,” laughed Carrie.
“Abundantly clear, though.” Slattery shrugged. “What you’re saying is, our man here didn’t swallow it by accident like a kid swallowing a penny he found on the floor.”
“Exactly,” said Croaker. They all turned back to the body of Barnabus Coffin.
“Can you get it out?” Carrie asked.
“If I can have your permission.”
“You’ve got the NYPD’s permission,” said Slattery.
“Miss White from LinCorp might not like that,” warned Carrie.
“To hell with her.”
“We talking Henry Todd…that Lincoln?” Croaker asked, his tone suddenly wary. “The one with the ten-thousand-square-foot apartment at 740 Park?”
“The very same,” said Carrie.
“He’s a huge contributor to the museum,” said the curator. “Am I doing something really stupid like risking my job and the possibility of any future employment in the museum business for the rest of my life?”
Carrie nodded. “That would be a possibility. But hey, it’s an extreme world out there.” She patted Croaker on the shoulder. “Think of it as anthropological bungee jumping. An adventure.” Croaker was going pale.
“I’ll take the heat,” said Max. “This is a homicide investigation. Open him up.”
The curator went to yet another bench and brought a tray of medical instruments to the light table. He reached into the pocket of his lab coat, snapped on a pair of surgical gloves, then used his left index finger to gently palpate the area they’d seen on the CAT scan. He found the spot and picked up a number 20 blade in a number 4 handle. He held the oversized surgical blade in a palmar, or dinner-knife, grip and pulled the blade along for about three inches. He put down the scalpel, picked up a pair of something that looked like rubber-nosed pliers, spread the newly created opening in the dead man’s neck and reached into the hole. His tongue came out between his teeth as he concentrated.
“Got it,” he said. He pulled up with the pliers. There was a faint, damp sucking sound and then the object that had been hidden in the dead man’s throat for more than a hundred and fifty years was brought out into the light again. “Twenty-dollar gold piece,” said Croaker, lifting the pliers up to examine the coin. “Dated 1863. Neat.”
Twenty minutes later Max Slattery and Carrie Norton were sitting in a Famous Ray’s on Columbus Avenue, a few blocks north of the museum. Max was having a Ray’s Famous Special—pepperoni, sausage, meatballs, mushrooms, bacon, eggplant, green pepper, onions and extra mozzarella, with maybe an anchovy or two waved over the pie for that salty aftertaste. Carrie had a Greek salad.
“We have a situation,” said Slattery, wiping tomato sauce off his chin and sipping his Snapple. Carrie poked at a suspiciously wrinkled black olive with her fork.
“Cardiac arrest?” Carrie said, staring at the enormous thing on Max’s plate.
“I’m serious,” the detective growled. He scooped up a slice, folded it expertly, then stuck it point first as far as it would go into his mouth. He bit down and chewed, then swallowed.
“What kind of situation?” Carrie asked.
“Murder,” said Slattery.
“We know that already.”
“Not Mr. Leatherhead back there,” said the cop, nodding in the direction of the museum. “There.” He nodded his head in the other direction.
“Where’s ‘there’?”
“Manhattan South.”
“Manhattan South what?” Carrie said, exasperated. She felt as though she was living inside a Marx Brothers routine.
“Manhattan South Detective Squad. Homicide in particular. They’ve had eight murders in the last three months, all below Central Park. All homeless or crazies, or both. One down on Fulton by the river, a couple in Greenwich Village, a couple more on Seventh between Twenty-ninth and Fortieth. One just off Canal. All over the place. No kind of pattern I can figure, or anyone else.”
“And?” said Carrie. She finally decided to pass on the wrinkled olive and had a chunk of feta-sprinkled tomato instead.
“They were all black.”
“Yes?”
“They were all black, and they all had been killed the same way: somebody squirted Krazy Glue up their nostrils and into their mouths. They suffocated.”
“Grisly. But what does it have to do with us?”
“Any criminal homicide rates an autopsy. Guess what they found inside each and every one of the Krazy Glue corpses.”
“You’re dying to tell me.”
“Chocolate.”
“Pardon?”
“Chocolate.”
“Slattery, you’re a very weird man. You’re eating the ugliest pizza ever made and you’re telling me stories about dead people eating chocolate as they suffocate. You’re way beyond fetish here; you’re deep into kinky.”
“Chocolate and gold foil.”
“Gold foil?”
“Like the kind they use to cover chocolate coins.”
“Gold coins.”
“That’s right. Gold chocolate coins with the foil stamped to look exactly like an 1863 twenty-dollar Liberty gold piece.”
“Oh, crap,” whispered Carrie.
“You got that right,” said Slattery. He took another bite of pizza and stared across the table at her. “The question is, now what do we do?”