Petrified (13 page)

‘Why you do this?' he shouted, hysterically. ‘Why you do this? You crazy mad?'

Kavita came over and knelt beside him. Ron Kasabian took out his cellphone and punched out 911. ‘Ambulance. And real quick, please. One of our researchers has just suffered a very serious burn to his hand. Yes, we can. Yes.'

Between them, Aarif and Ron Kasabian lifted Nathan to his feet and helped him up to the sink. Aarif unwound the towel. Underneath, Nathan's skin was blackened and charred, with scarlet flesh showing through the cracks. The heat had shriveled his tendons so that his fingers were curled over in a claw. Aarif turned on the faucet, making sure that it was lukewarm and not icy cold, and held his hand under the running water to cool it down. Nathan let out a whimper, and his knees buckled.

‘Kavita, bring me that coat, will you?' said Ron Kasabian. ‘We have to keep him warm.'

There was a red duffel coat hanging on a peg by the laboratory door. Kavita brought it over and lifted it over Nathan's shoulders. Nathan was already shivering from shock, and his teeth were chattering. He rolled his eyes toward Kavita and whispered, ‘Thanks, Kavita. You're an angel.'

Ron Kasabian kept shaking his head from side to side. ‘What in
hell's
name were you trying to prove, Nathan? I always thought you were nuts, but this takes the cake.'

Nathan gave him a slanted, deranged smile. ‘I haven't proved anything yet, Ron. But I'm going to. And then you and your stockholders can shove your funding where you don't need Ray-Bans, because so many companies will want what I can offer them, I'll be fighting them off.'

‘How does your hand feel now, Professor?' asked Aarif.

‘It doesn't feel like anything,' Nathan told him. ‘In fact, I can't feel it at all.'

Ron Kasabian said, ‘Jesus. This is all we need. Think how this is going to play in the media. And what the hell are we going to do with this goddamn bird?'

THIRTEEN

Wednesday: 3:47 p.m.

J
enna was woken by the sound of the front door opening. She looked across at her bedside clock and thought:
Great, I've managed to get all of two and a half hours' sleep
.

She heard footsteps passing her bedroom door and she called out, ‘Ellie! What are you doing home so early?'

There was a long pause and then her door opened and Ellie put her head around it. She looked just like Jenna except that she was hauntingly thin, with dark circles under her eyes. She was wearing a floppy black cowl-neck sweater, black narrow-cut jeans and a black cotton headscarf.

‘Sorry, Mom. I didn't mean to wake you up. Our art teacher was sick so they let us take the rest of the afternoon off.'

Jenna was tempted to say,
have you eaten anything
? But she knew better than to nag Ellie about food. What Ellie needed from Jenna was reassurance that she looked slim and pretty, not constant criticism about her diet.

Jenna sat up in bed. ‘Open the drapes for me, will you? I might as well get up. My next shift starts at six.'

Ellie went across to the window and tugged the curtain cord. It had stopped raining, but the sky was gray with low-hanging clouds.

‘Everybody at school was talking about those people who got killed on top of that apartment block,' said Ellie.

‘Oh, yeah?'

‘Joey Krasnik thinks it was a pterodactyl that did it.'

Jenna was struggling out of her nightshirt. ‘A pterodactyl? How did he work that out?'

‘He said it's all down to global warming. He said there's hundreds of prehistoric creatures frozen in the polar ice-caps but now the ice is melting and they're all going to thaw out and come to life again.'

‘Joey Krasnik has some imagination.'

‘He said what else could it be? All of those witnesses say they saw something like a huge great bird, didn't they?'

Jenna fastened her bra at the front and then twisted it around to the back. ‘Did you ever hear of herd delusion? That's when one person thinks they've seen something weird and everybody else begins to believe that
they
have, too. Let me tell you this, sweetheart: whatever killed those two poor men, I'll bet Joey Krasnik a hundred bucks that it wasn't a pterodactyl.'

‘So what do you think it was?'

‘Right now, I don't have the faintest idea. Right now I'm going to make myself the strongest cup of coffee ever brewed and a large baloney sandwich. I don't suppose you want anything to eat, do you?'

Ellie shook her head. ‘I'm fine. I ate lunch at school.'

Jenna could tell by the way she looked down at the floor that she was lying, but she decided not to say anything more. She stood up and stepped into her waist-high elasticated briefs and then pulled on her navy-blue comfort-fit pants.
If anybody should
be worrying about what they ate
, she thought,
it's me.

She was sitting at the kitchen table eating her sandwich and watching TV when her cellphone played ‘Blanket On The Ground'. It was Dan Rubik calling.

‘
What
?' she snapped, with her mouth full.

‘Jenna? It's Dan. You're never going to believe this.'

‘Can't it wait, whatever it is? I'm trying to have some breakfast.'

‘I don't think so. Another one of those statues has fallen on to Baltimore Avenue, right next to the Woodlands Cemetery.'

‘You're kidding me! Was anybody hurt?'

‘Not this time. Which was pretty darn lucky, considering how heavy the traffic was.'

‘When did this happen?'

‘Only about twenty minutes ago. I was on my way home when I heard it on the radio. I'm here on Baltimore Avenue now.'

‘Any eyewitnesses?'

‘There was a funeral party in the cemetery who might have seen it. I haven't had time to talk to them yet. But this trucker was driving east on Baltimore and it fell on to the road right in front of him. It's all smashed up now, like the one outside the convent, but the trucker saw it a split second before it hit the blacktop and he says it was like an angel, with wings and everything, only ugly.'

Jenna didn't answer him for such a long time that Dan said, ‘Jenna? You still there?'

‘Sure, I'm still here. I'll come right out now. Did you call Ed Freiburg?'

‘Of course.'

Jenna put down her cellphone and looked at her sandwich and her mug of coffee. She was still hungry and tired and she badly needed a caffeine jolt. But if ugly stone angels were falling on Philadelphia out of the sky, she knew what her priorities were.

‘Ellie?' she called. ‘I have to go out for a while. I don't know what time I'm going to be back.'

Ellie came into the kitchen. ‘OK, Mom. I'll probably go see Cathy this evening. Aren't you going to finish your sandwich?'

Jenna shook her head. She wanted so much to put her arms around Ellie and hold her tight, but she knew this wasn't the right moment. She didn't want Ellie to feel that she was grieving for the healthy, well-balanced daughter that she should have been.
Sometimes
, she thought,
you have to smile and make the best of what you've got, even if you feel like crying.

Traffic on Baltimore Avenue was at a standstill so she had to drive along the wide sidewalk next to the cemetery fencing, with her lights flashing. By the time she arrived at the scene of the incident, it had started to rain again. Dan came over and opened the door of her car for her.

‘This time we got one or two bigger chunks. Like a part of an arm, and something that definitely looks like the tip of a wing.'

‘How about a head, or a face?'

‘Haven't found one yet. Mind you, we got debris scattered over three hundred feet, and we're still finding pieces in the cemetery.'

Ed Freiburg walked up to them, wearing a bright yellow raincoat with the hood pulled up, so that he looked like a giant gnome. ‘Hi, Jenna. Looks like more of the same to me. Good-quality limestone, with dressed and sculpted surfaces. Almost certainly a statue.'

Jenna looked up at the clouds. ‘It's smashed up pretty good, though, isn't it? How far do you think it fell?'

‘Hard to say until I've done all the math. But my guess is that it reached a terminal velocity of two hundred miles an hour, at least. That means it could have dropped from half a mile up, possibly higher.'

Jenna reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a pair of beige latex gloves. She snapped them on to her fingers and then she reached down and picked up one of the lumps of limestone. It was shattered on one side, smoothly carved on the other. It was a bulbous eye, staring at her out of nowhere at all.

‘Where's the truck driver?' she asked.

Dan beckoned to a tall, heavily-built man with a bald head, a big nose, and a heavy gray walrus moustache. He was wearing a black T-shirt with
Speedy Trucking
printed across his chest. He came over to join them with a rolling cowboy-like walk.

‘Detective Pullet, Ninth Division,' said Jenna, showing him her shield. ‘I don't mean to be rude, but did you ever ride a horse?'

‘Never,' the truck driver told her, in a thick, gravelly voice. ‘Broke both legs ten years ago coming off my hog.' He had large gold earrings in both of his earlobes, and a tattoo of an eagle on the left side of his neck. She should have guessed he was a former Hell's Angel.

‘I see,' said Jenna. ‘Sorry. Do you want to describe what you saw?'

He pulled a face. ‘I didn't see much because it all happened so quick. I was driving along listening to Meat Loaf and it landed directly in front of my rig, out of nowhere at all, like a goddamned bomb.'

‘You told my partner here that it looked like a statue of an angel.'

The trucker nodded. ‘Just like you see outside of a church, or in a boneyard. Only this angel was real ugly. I seen its face for just a second before it hit the road, and it was like
snarling
, with its teeth bare and its eyes all starey, like it was angry and scared, both at the same time.'

‘Angry, but also scared?'

‘That's right. I seen that exact same expression on guys when they're fighting. Angry as fuck but scared shitless, too, because they know that, win or lose, they're going to get themselves hurt real bad. But let me tell you something. It scared
me
shitless, too. I mean, more than it should have done, by rights. So it was a statue, dropping out of the sky. That's pretty goddamned scary. But it was more than a statue. It was like the Grim Reaper himself. Cold, and real evil. That's the feeling it gave me.'

Jenna looked around. It was raining harder now but at least the traffic was slowly beginning to move. ‘OK, sir,' she told the trucker. ‘We have your name and cellphone number, don't we, in case we need to speak to you again?'

‘There ain't nothing more I can tell you,' said the trucker. ‘It came down like a goddamned bomb, and God knows from where.'

It was then that Jenna's attention was caught by a man among the small crowd of spectators who were standing on the sidewalk. He was wearing a long gray plastic raincoat and a matching rain-hat, and eyeglasses. For some reason, Jenna thought he looked
furtive
. It was the way he kept glancing from side to side, as if he wanted to make sure that nobody was watching him. It reminded her of the way that shoplifters look around before they quickly lift something from a department store counter.

Her instinct was right. After a few seconds, the man crouched down as if he needed to tie up his shoelace, but at the same time he reached across the sidewalk and picked up a small lump of broken limestone, which he pushed into his raincoat pocket. Then he looked around some more, and picked up another small lump.

‘Dan,' said Jenna. ‘That guy in the plastic raincoat. Go collar him. He just brodied two pieces of evidence.'

‘He did what?'

‘He pocketed two bits of statue. Go get him. I want to ask him what the hell he thinks he's doing.'

Dan crossed the road and negotiated his way through the crowd of spectators. By the time he had reached the place where the man the plastic raincoat had been crouching down, however, the man had disappeared. Dan turned around and around, looking for him, but in the end he had to look back at Jenna and give her an exaggerated shrug.

Jenna looked left and right, too, but she couldn't see the man either. Maybe he had climbed into a car, or blindsided them by walking off behind the cover of a slow-moving bus or truck.

Dan came back. ‘No sign of him. I don't know how he did it, but he's vamoosed.'

‘I just want to know why he made off with two bits of statue. Put out a description . . . he couldn't have gotten far, even if he has a car.'

‘OK. But my guess is that he's a souvenir hunter.'

‘A souvenir hunter?'

‘Sure. One of the first cases I ever worked on, there was this screwball who kept stealing mirrors from crime scenes. He thought he'd be able to look into them when he got them home and see who the perps had been, so that he could claim a reward.'

‘Just put out the call, Dan.'

Jenna went over to Ed Freiburg, who was kneeling in the roadway, photographing each lump of limestone and marking its position on a chart. As Jenna approached, he stood up and said, ‘Jenna! I think I may have found something interesting.'

‘Oh, good. Usually, it's so ho-hum when a half-ton statue falls out of the sky.'

‘No,' he said, and passed her a clear plastic evidence bag with a heavy piece of limestone inside it. ‘Take a look at this.' She held it up and saw that the limestone was carved into three parallel curves, like three stone bananas.

‘What is it?'

‘What does it look like? Some kind of a claw. More like an animal claw than a bird's talon.'

‘And?'

‘Go on – look at it real close.'

Jenna examined it carefully. The tips of the claw were all stained brown.