CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Would wonders ever cease? Lucas thought.
He was hardly able to believe that he had the bones and relics back, that the police had been willing to relinquish them to his care. He carried the sack as gently as if it were a baby he was cradling in his arms. Never again would he let its contents be kidnapped.
Passing under the grinning gargoyles that cavorted along the roofline of Guyot Hall, he looked up at them with a newfound, and wary, appreciation. Although they were much eroded by time and the elements, he could still see the protuberant horns on their brow, the grasping talons, the pointed teeth and furled wings, and he was struck by how closely they resembled the shapes and shadows he had seen in the film made the night the ossuary had been opened. For the first time in his life, a thought crossed his mind — an unwelcome one that he would never before have entertained. Could these fantastical creatures, their visages so familiar from cathedrals and castles the world over, have been modeled on something other than the fever dreams of independent stone carvers? Could they have been cast from living specimens — or, perhaps, from the atavistic memories of such beings, harbored deep in every human soul? Could there be, as the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung had claimed, a “collective unconscious,” where such fears and apprehensions lurked? As children, weren’t we all afraid of the dark?
Maybe, he thought, we had reason to be.
In the lobby, a janitor was down on his knees with a screwdriver in front of the display case containing the Caithness Man; glancing back over his shoulder, he said, “If you ask me, this place should be off-limits to townies. Kids in particular.”
“Why?”
“They snapped the damn lock.”
“Was anything damaged?”
“You tell me,” he said, going back to screwing in the replacement.
Lucas stepped closer and looked into the case. The ancient figure’s lips and eyes were still sealed shut, its back was still pressed hard against the stake where it had been slaughtered. The leathern cap, its muddy color indistinguishable from the weathered brown skin, was right where it had always been. Lucas was about to turn away when something caught his eye.
A loose strip, hanging away from the pole.
He leaned over the kneeling janitor’s bald head to get a closer look.
“Something wrong, Professor?”
“I’m not sure yet.” He peered at the other side of the specimen, and saw that the strap that had held the prisoner in place had been severed there, too. Whoever had broken into the glass case had been trying to dismantle the display, either as an act of vandalism or, even worse, theft. Thank goodness the thing was still there at all. But Lucas couldn’t help but wonder if this particular crime wasn’t somehow connected to the stolen relics, or the destruction of the research materials in Simone’s carrel.
“The hall ought to be locked at all times,” the janitor said, packing up his tools.
“Students, and faculty too, have to get in and out all day.”
“Give ’em all keys,” he replied, lumbering to his feet again.
Lucas didn’t comment on the impracticability of dispensing hundreds of keys to the front door. He headed for the lab upstairs, where he was expected.
The door was already open, and as Delaney raised his head from a microscope, his eyes went straight to the sack of bones Lucas had told him about on the phone.
“Strange doings,” he said solemnly. “I never would have guessed it of Brandt.”
“Neither would I,” Lucas said, as he laid the bag on a countertop.
“Why the hell would he have done something like that?”
Lucas could not divulge, even to Delaney, what he knew. “Maybe he thought he’d make some great discovery and catch the fast track to tenure.”
“By stealing artifacts that even the OSS is keeping tabs on? Makes me wonder if the guy was dealing from a full deck.”
“I don’t think he was.”
“I mean, I’m not saying that he wasn’t a pain in the ass sometimes, but I still wouldn’t have wished what happened to him on anyone.”
And Delaney only knew the half of it. Lucas felt it would be unnecessary, and unwise, to share the gorier details of what he’d seen, only hours before, in that garage on Mercer Street. It was the FBI agent, Ray Taylor, who had summarily hauled him out of a lecture hall and driven him straight to Einstein’s house. The professor was in the yard, in a sweatshirt and a pair of rumpled trousers, holding an unlit pipe.
“This is a sad business,” Einstein said. “A sad business.”
But it was only when Lucas was ushered into the garage that he understood what the professor had been alluding to. The missing bones and relics were strewn around the dirt floor, as were a couple of other items — a chisel and a worn hammer. Toward the back, between teetering stacks of cardboard boxes, he saw a man in a jacket labeled “Coroner” bending over a corpse.
“It’s that guy Brandt, right?” Taylor said.
Lucas nodded, but at the same time he would hardly have recognized him — it looked more like the husk of a man than an actual corpse.
“And this is the other stuff that was missing? From the university?”
Looking around, Lucas said, “Yes.”
“Pick it all up, make an inventory, and give me a copy. Then do me a favor — lock it all up, someplace safe for a change.”
Trying to avert his eyes from the coroner’s grim work, Lucas gathered the things together — even the staff with the crooked handle — and slipped them into the canvas sack he had last seen looped around Brandt’s shoulders. On his way back through the yard, he was stopped by Einstein, who said, “You will come and talk sometime, ja? Afternoons are good.” There was an even more doleful look in his eyes than usual. “In times like these, it is good to talk about other matters. Art… music… the higher things.”
“I promise,” Lucas said.
“And maybe,” he said, in a low voice tinged with embarrassment, “you can bring with you some tobacco?”
“For sure,” he’d replied, as Einstein patted him on the arm and, head down, shuffled back through the screen door Helen was holding open for him.
“Here,” Delaney said, going to the green metal locker, twice the width of a normal locker, bolted securely to the wall. He threw open its door. “You can stash that stuff in here,” he said. “It’s where I keep my reports and the radiocarbon data for Macmillan. It’s got a padlock, and the door to the lab has a dead bolt on it, too.”
“Do you also sleep in here?”
“Occasionally, yes.”
Although he’d been kidding, Lucas wasn’t surprised. He deposited the bag, the crooked end of the staff poking out of one end and barely clearing the top shelf. Delaney closed the locker again, clamped the steel padlock shut, then yanked down on it for good measure.
“How’s Simone doing?”
“I called her this morning, and she sounded like she was still pretty shaken up.”
“Who wouldn’t be? First her father drowns in a bathtub, then she gets chased by some weirdo in the library. It’s a miracle she’s still standing. They figure out who did the damage to her carrel, by the way?”
“Not yet.” Lucas had originally suspected Andy Brandt, but now he knew that he’d guessed wrong. And when Agent Taylor had asked him, pointedly, why Brandt might have made his way — badly wounded by the bus — to Einstein’s house, of all places, Lucas had said it might have been dumb luck.
“Some dumb luck,” Taylor had replied. “A hundred garages between here and Washington Road and he picks this one to die in?”
Lucas was wrestling with his own suspicions. Could Brandt, like Wally Gregg, have possibly intended to attack the professor? Or — and this struck even closer to home — could Brandt have been on the way to the boardinghouse across the street, to silence the one man who knew his secret, Lucas Athan?