The Bone Hunters (14 page)

“The body in the basement has been tentatively identified as Daniel Morrissey, the owner of the house, but I guess you knew that,” said McAdams.

Lexy nodded.

McAdams glanced down at Macaulay's paper-towel-covered foot.

“I know better than to ask,” he said as they headed down the basement steps.

Sean Patrick Morrissey was no longer lying on the basement floor where Lexy had cradled his head in her arms. He was standing and facing them, his wrists nailed in the crucifixion position to two of the pine studs. His head was strapped to the wall with a leather dog leash. He was naked.

Someone had carved the skin off his body from his
neck to his waist. A knife had been driven through his heart and was embedded in the wall behind him. Lexy refused to turn her eyes away, letting the visual evidence of what they had done to him register forever in her brain.

“I've come to think that wolves are farther up the food chain than human beings,” said McAdams. “They are cleaner, more honest and hardworking creatures, and they protect their young.”

“He never felt anything,” said one of the forensic technicians as he examined the hilt of the knife. “He was already dead when they did this.”

“Why would they have taken the time?” asked Lexy.

The forensic man looked back at her with weary, cynical eyes. He was in his fifties, with rabbit teeth and metal-rimmed glasses.

“You should see the artistry of some of the gang killings in this city,” he said, “the ones where they want to send a message. At least this poor guy still has his eyes and his genitals between his legs.”

He motioned McAdams over to examine the knife in Morrissey's chest.

“Looks to me like a short broadsword,” he said.

“More like a bowie knife,” said McAdams, “except sharpened along both edges.”

“It's hard to see because of the dried blood, but this appears to be an inscription of some kind,” said the technician, pointing to the hilt.

“Maybe initials?” said McAdams, looking at it closely.

“They're probably Chinese,” said Macaulay.

McAdams turned to look at him appraisingly.

“Any other important insights to provide?” he asked.

Macaulay shook his head.

•   •   •

Hard rain was spattering the windows, and Sebastian Choate's inner office was inexplicably cold. Someone had apparently turned off the steam vents to the radiators. Otherwise the room was exactly as Barnaby had remembered it. Choate's tiny silk slippers rested on the ottoman in front of his favorite easy chair.

The room was now crowded with the museum's deputy security director, three federal agents from Dusenberry's task force, two New York police detectives, a forensic team, and an officer from the precinct K-9 squad accompanied by his salivating German shepherd. Barnaby wondered what Choate would have said if he had seen them all in their muddy shoes tracking up the oldest-known carpet in the world.

“We really don't have anything to go on at this point,” said Horace Starling, the deputy museum security director. “Professor Choate is very quirky in his habits. For all we know, he could be in Chile or Zanzibar.”

“That's fine,” said Barnaby. “All I want at this point is to gain access to his safe, and you now have the federal warrant allowing us to do so.”

“That ain't so easy,” said the little red-haired man who the local police commander had brought with him to “consult” on the problem of opening the state-of-the-art steel safe in which Choate had protected his seventy years of research into the Peking Man.

“I thought I made it clear to you that opening this safe was a matter of national urgency,” said Barnaby to the police commander.

The portly senior officer was in his sixties and probably close to retirement. Barnaby assumed the little man was some kind of longtime crony. The commander was obviously uncomfortable with the situation.

“I believe Mr. Doyle gives us the best chance to do that,” he insisted.

Doyle stared up at Barnaby with the same look of incredulity that Barnaby was feeling as he gazed down at him. Pushing seventy at least, Doyle looked like an extra in
Darby O'Gill and the Little People
. Almost as diminutive as a leprechaun, he had flaming red hair that was clearly a dye job. To say that he had a ruddy complexion was an understatement. His face matched his hair.

“You look like you're right out of central casting,” said Barnaby.

“I'm right out of Leavenworth,” said Doyle, “although I have had many years since to appreciate the error of my past ways.”

“He's the best safecracker in New York,” said the police commander.

“One of the last,” said Doyle, sadly. “It's a dying art, you see. In my own case, it was a family business, handed down from generation to generation since the Doyles arrived here in 1847. My great-grandfather broke the safe of J. Pierpont Morgan when he lived on Madison Avenue during the Panic of 1907.”

“Really?” said Barnaby. “And what did he find?”

“An Episcopal Bible,” said Doyle, “along with some letters written by Morgan to his son's governess that were indiscreet, you might say.”

“I hope he put them to good use,” said Barnaby.
“Right now we have bigger fish to fry as the Irish are fond of saying. How the hell do you plan on opening this safe?”

It looked like nothing more than a polished black wall cabinet across one wall of the room, but the police had told Barnaby it was almost impregnable. Doyle walked over to it, opened the outer door, and knelt down.

“A double combination lock,” he said. “If it was a key lock I could pick it in an hour. This little girl offers more of a challenge.”

“What are our options?” asked the police commander.

Doyle slowly twirled the combination key and cocked his ear as if listening for voices. “The so-called modern experts would probably recommend a magnetic limpet drill with bits that can penetrate the hard plates. I'm told they now use a fiber-optic scope to read the position of the wheels. Unfortunately, there's soft steel back there to inhibit the drill.”

Barnaby had no idea what he was talking about.

“How long will it take?” he asked.

“Those fifty-millimeter bolts extend in every direction,” said Doyle. “You could burn the hinges off with acetylene and the door would still hold.”

“How long?” repeated Barnaby.

“You could blow it, of course,” said Doyle, “but there is no guarantee that anything inside it would survive the blast. Anyway, blasting ain't my line.”

“What is your line?” asked Barnaby.

“He feels it,” said the police commander.

“Please go ahead and feel it,” said Barnaby.

“Here is what I do,” said Doyle. “There is no click when the tumblers reach the right position, but I can
usually hear when the lever descends into the slot for each number in the combination. I can feel it after getting to know her ways . . . at least most of the time.”

“How long will all the feeling take?” asked Barnaby.

“Maybe four days,” said Doyle. “Could be sooner, depending on her.”

Barnaby looked around at the rest of the group. None of them would meet his eye except the German shepherd.

“You have my cell phone number,” Barnaby said to the police commander.

An hour later, Barnaby had consumed two glasses of Orfevi Frascati to clear his palate and was about to sample the first of two dozen bluepoint oysters at La Grenouille when his phone began to ring. He picked it up.

“He's in,” said the police commander.

When Barnaby returned to Choate's office, the door to the safe was cracked open a few inches.

“You have to see this,” said the commander.

Barnaby swung the steel door open.

There were no papers or file folders such as the ones Choate had described. There was nothing in the safe at all. Except Choate. He was lying in the fetal position, facing the door. He looked as if he had gone to sleep.

24 May

Washington, D.C.

White House Situation Room

Ira Dusenberry surveyed the sterling silver tray stacked with warm, freshly baked scones, donuts, and cookies that had been sent down a few minutes earlier from the White House Mess. Their fragrance filled the conference room along with the aroma of his favorite blend of dark Colombian coffee.

He was tempted to fill his plate with a full medley of pastries but saw that the others were already at the conference table and waiting for him to begin the meeting. Selecting a French cruller and an Irish cream chocolate tart, he took his place at the head of the table.

As the national security adviser to the president, he now used the largest of the three soundproof situation rooms in the intelligence management center deep beneath the West Wing of the White House. Today, it seemed a bit like overkill. There were twenty-eight chairs around the table and only six were occupied at his end.

Dusenberry glanced down at the president's morning book containing the latest update of pending matters of national security importance. It was opened to the Peking
Man folder. He took a few moments to scan the summary page while ingesting the cruller.

His personal assistant, Darlene Choy, set a mug of the black coffee down on the coaster next to the morning book and took a seat in one of the staff chairs along the wall along with Dusenberry's deputy security adviser and two senior aides.

He took a first sip and glanced at the members of Barnaby Finchem's so-called team. Its makeup was not reassuring. Not for the first time, he wondered if he had made a serious mistake in enlisting Finchem's help.

To Dusenberry's left was the degenerate old CIA operative Somervell in his stained seersucker suit, and next to him the prune-faced crone June Corcoran, who was rolling an unlit cigarette back and forth between her nicotine-stained fingers like Captain Queeg juggling his steel ball bearings.

Alexandra Vaughan was as lovely as he remembered, although the retired air force brigadier general Macaulay looked as played out as he had been when Dusenberry last saw him at the hospital in Maine after the Valhalla matter. He had walked into the situation room with a distinct limp.

To his right, Barnaby Finchem was looking back at him with a sardonic and almost insulting grin, his tangled mass of white hair flowing down the back of his disreputable jumpsuit. Dusenberry hoped that none of his senior White House colleagues had witnessed their arrival at the situation room.

“I gather your team has made some progress,
Professor Finchem,” he said, deciding to keep it formal in front of his aides.

“We have indeed,” began Barnaby. “In the last four days, we have accomplished more than your intra-agency task force has accomplished in three years.”

“Really?” said Dusenberry with a skeptical smirk. “Let's hear it.”

Barnaby glanced over at the four NSC staff members sitting along the wall.

“It's for your ears only,” he said.

Dusenberry gave him a supercilious smile and said, “I can assure you that everyone on my staff can be trusted with the most sensitive information you have gathered.”

“Like Jessica Birdwell, Ira?” asked Barnaby innocently.

Dusenberry flushed. She had been a member of the national security staff during the Valhalla matter and had turned out to be an enemy mole. Lovely woman, Dusenberry recalled, great legs and very bright. He wondered for a moment if she was still at Guantanamo.

Turning to his aides, he said, “I will handle it from here.”

As they got up to leave, Darlene Choy looked at her watch and said curtly, “The NSC meeting on the Yemen crisis begins in fifteen minutes.”

Dusenberry waited until they left the room.

“Now that you have insulted my staff, please tell me where we are in this thing,” he said.

“Actually, we have a pretty good idea where the Peking Man can be found,” said Barnaby, “at least within a hundred square miles.”

Dusenberry's initially buoyant expression disappeared.

“We believe Peking Man is at rest under the Bahamian
sea,” said Barnaby. “We are in the process of narrowing the parameters of exactly where.”

“On what basis can you make that assurance?”

Barnaby began with their visit to meet Sebastian Choate at the Museum of Natural History. He briefly summarized the conclusions drawn by Choate after seventy years of searching for the fossil, and concluded with the startling assertion that Choate had confided to him after reading the diary of the famed archaeologist Davidson Black.

“You're saying that Choate believes that the Peking Man was some form of alien being?”

“Believed is a more appropriate word,” said Barnaby. “Choate was murdered shortly after our visit. His exact words to me were that Davidson Black concluded in his test findings in 1934 that Peking Man did not conform to the train of human evolution as we know it. We'll have to find it to prove that one way or another.”

“And Choate had the journal or diary containing these test findings?”

“That's what he claimed. When I had your security experts crack his office safe three days ago, we discovered that his entire collection of Peking Man records and documents had been stolen. The only thing we found in the safe was Choate. According to the medical examiner, he was still alive when they locked him inside. The FBI is still searching for his Chinese research assistant.”

Dusenberry got up from the table and replenished his plate with two cannoli and a hefty wedge of apple strudel topped with whipped cream.

“What makes you think the fossil is in the Bahamas and that you'll be able to pinpoint its location?” he asked.

“A good deal of pertinent research,” said Barnaby. “I'll let Dr. Vaughan take it from here.”

“You already have our report on Sean Patrick Morrissey, who was the only survivor of the marine truck convoy,” she began. “Before he was killed four days ago by the Chinese paramilitary team, I took down his recollections in shorthand. His memories were often fragmentary, but together they formed a consistent pattern. The key elements were that after the ship sailed from Chinwangtao on December eighth, he remembered being on it a long time. Later, he thought it broke down somewhere from engine failure. He was suffering an attack of malaria at the time. We have concluded that the ship was actually stopped while waiting to go through the Panama Canal. The only other way the ship could have reached the Atlantic coast would have been by steaming around Cape Horn, and it could not have reached the Caribbean in the necessary timeline.”

“How do you know the ship reached the Caribbean?”

“It's in the report you have there,” she said, pointing to the president's morning book. “Morrissey was dropped off by an unknown rescue vessel at Key West, Florida, on March 2, 1942. You'll remember that the ship he was on departed from Chinwangtao, China on December 8, 1941. The distance by sea from Chinwangtao to the Panama Canal is approximately nine thousand miles. Morrissey referred to the ship as a tramp. Assuming it had a maximum speed of ten knots, it would have taken the ship at least thirty-eight full days and nights of steaming to reach the canal. At that time in the war, hundreds of merchant ships were desperately trying to escape Japanese waters and a logjam developed when they reached
Panama. We believe one of them was Morrissey's ship. For our theoretical matrix, we also assumed that the ship was unregistered, since Sebastian Choate told us that he reviewed the records of all the shipping lines operating in China in December 1941, and none of them were in Chinwangtao on December eighth.”

“I will concede it sounds theoretically possible, at least so far,” said Dusenberry, surreptitiously unbuttoning the vest of his brown suit.

Dusenberry had recently taken to wearing three-piece suits after one of the White House social advisers suggested they were coming back in style. He had ordered them in three seasonal sizes from his Indian tailor in Trinidad. The smallest size was for baseball season, when he got out more and tended to lose some weight. The football season suit was one size larger, since he tended to binge-eat while watching the Redskins find a way to lose nearly every week. The basketball suit was the largest. He rarely had any physical exercise during the winter. Although the baseball season was already a month old, his body was now threatening to burst out of the basketball suit.

“June can speak to the next phase of our report,” said Lexy.

“I flew down to Panama City four days ago at the request of Dr. Finchem,” she began, “and requested access to the record vaults that the canal authority has maintained of all ships that passed through it since 1914. The records from World War Two were of course classified for security purposes, but thanks to the intercession of your office, I was permitted to review them.”

Dusenberry saw that the cigarette she had been rolling
in her fingers was slowly coming apart. The others appeared to take no notice of it.

“I began my review of the records by searching for ships that arrived at the canal in mid-January 1942, the earliest date our ship could have reached there from Chinwangtao. We know it must also have passed through the canal no later than the third week in January, since the ship had to travel another thousand miles to reach a point close enough to the coast of Florida to put Corporal Morrissey ashore at Key West on March second. I learned that in January 1942 the approximate wait time to go through the canal for merchant vessels was five days. Top priority was granted to warships. A tramp freighter would have been at the bottom of the priority list.”

“This is all very interesting, but is there any way you could expedite your presentation, Ms. Corcoran?” said Dusenberry. “I admire your diligence to detail, but there are other pressing matters on my agenda for today.”

She crushed the unfiltered cigarette in her right hand and dropped the loose tobacco on the table. Scooping a small portion with her thumb and forefinger, she placed it in her mouth and silently chewed for a few seconds.

“I found the record of a single merchant vessel that met all of our principal criteria,” she went on. “The freighter's name was the
Prins Willem
. It arrived at the Panama Canal on January twenty-first and was carrying marine engines, tractors, and other agricultural equipment. Its port of origin was stated as Yingkou, China. Yingkou is slightly north of Chinwangtao on the Gulf of Chihli. Although the ship's captain had a Dutch passport, he could not provide the ship's official registration papers.
He claimed that his ship was licensed to operate within Chinese waters, but that its papers had been left behind in Yingkou during the chaotic conditions after the Japanese advance. The
Prins Willem
was allowed to pass through the canal five days later.”

“You said that this marine corporal Morrissey was aboard the ship when it reached Panama,” said Dusenberry. “Why wouldn't the captain have let him off the ship there?”

“You may recall he said he was suffering from an attack of malaria at that point,” said Lexy. “Putting ashore an ill marine corporal from an unregistered tramp steamer would only have raised unwanted questions.”

“And by then the Dutch captain knew there was something of exceptional value in the crate,” added Macaulay before relating to Dusenberry the circumstances under which it was loaded aboard the ship while under attack from the Japanese advance guard.

“So what happened to the
Prins Willem
?” asked Dusenberry, his curiosity now aroused.

“Captain DeVries declared his next port of destination as Martinique in the Lesser Antilles, with the ship's final destination being New York,” said June Corcoran, after chewing and swallowing the last shreds of her cigarette. “The
Prins Willem
arrived at Fort-de-France in Martinique on February twenty-third. It departed after refueling on February twenty-fifth bound for New York. Then it disappeared.”

“So how the hell would you know where to find it after all these years?” asked Dusenberry.

“One of the things Corporal Morrissey remembered was being on the deck of the ship on a warm night with
a gentle breeze when there was a brilliant light,” said Macaulay, “which was followed by his head being slammed into a steel bulkhead.”

“A torpedo?” said Dusenberry.

Macaulay nodded and said, “By early 1942, allied merchant ships were being sunk every day from the Gulf of Mexico to the Bahamas. The navy called it torpedo alley. Tommy and I found the next key to the puzzle in the German Kriegsmarine records captured in Flensburg by the American army in 1945. They are all on microfilm in the military archives at College Park. Tommy felt that for security reasons we should do it ourselves. We personally went through the claims of every U-boat that was operating in Caribbean waters in early 1942.”

“Aren't those records in German?” asked Dusenberry.

“I read and speak German fluently, Ira,” said Tommy Somervell, as if speaking to a mentally challenged child. “So does June.”

Dusenberry's smartphone began to chirp. He picked it up, listened for a few moments, and said, “I will be there shortly. It's only goddamn Yemen.”

“We found more than three dozen claims by U-boat commanders of definite sinkings of merchant ships in those waters within the timeline we were looking for. We then cross-referenced those claims to the lists of vessels acknowledged to have been lost in the same period by allied maritime authorities and shipping companies. There were only three ships for which there was no corollary information . . . all of them freighters, all three apparently unregistered and without any survivors who reported the sinkings.”

“Isn't it possible that the freighters claimed by the
U-boat commanders weren't actually lost?” asked Dusenberry. “A lot of claims were exaggerated on both sides.”

“Good point, Ira,” said Tommy, “but in these three cases, the U-boat captains witnessed the ships going down. In one case there was a blurry photograph of its last moments. In any event, the one sunk off the Turks and Caicos went down in broad daylight. Another was attacked at night, but it was sunk near the Caymans southwest of Cuba. Whoever rescued Corporal Morrissey would not have taken him all the way to Key West from there.”