Vespers Read online

  “The detective is right about those things,” Arvids said.

  “I’ll take my chances,” Joyce replied.

  “I’m sorry,” Gentry said, “but that’s not an option.”

  “I don’t believe this-”

  “It’s nothing personal,” Gentry said.

  “No, it’s insulting!”

  Gentry excused himself. He went over to one of the lockers and got a flashlight. He tested it, then walked back to Arvids. “Let me have the radio.”

  Arvids handed it to Gentry.

  Joyce’s lips were pressed tightly together. “And what exactly are you going to do inside?”

  “Look for bats.”

  “Look for bats. And how are you going to read what you see? Genera, guano color, maternity roosts-”

  “I’ll make very careful observations and report back. That’smy job.”

  “It won’t be enough,” she said. “You won’t be able to tell an invasive species from an indigenous one, a sick bat from a healthy one. You need someone who knows what to look for.”

  “You can come back later-”

  “If you do find bats and they’re anything like the Westchester bats, there may not be a later.”

  “In that case, your being there won’t help.”

  “I disagree. I’ve had to improvise in the field.”

  “Me too. Look, I understand and I’m sorry.” Gentry glanced at Arvids and cocked his head toward the main tunnel.

  The young officer backed away from the crane. “Come on, Dr. Joyce.”

  Joyce balled her fists. “Gentry, don’t!”

  He said nothing.

  “This is moronic!” Joyce turned away from Gentry. She faced the main tunnel then swung back around to Gentry. “Don’t do this. I hate it. God, I hate it.”

  “I’m sorry,”Gentry said, “but I’ve been down this road before-”

  “So have I!”

  “-and no one except me is taking a chance.”

  “This is my field!”

  “I don’t care. You’re not going with me. You’re not even staying here.”

  Arvids moved gingerly toward the scientist. “Come on, Doctor.”

  “You’re all the fucking same,” she said angrily. “Every damn one of you!”

  Outside, another subway train passed. Then, as Arvids led a furious Dr. Joyce back down the tunnel, Gentry walked toward the crane.

  Twelve

  Gentry didn’t like bullying good people, and pushing a young woman around left an iron-heavy weight on his conscience. He felt like he’d done that with Priscilla the entire time they were married-forced her to do what he wanted, which was not to have kids and not to have a life together because he couldn’t think of anything except bringing Akira Mizuno down. He hadn’t felt like this in a while, and he didn’t like it.

  Maybe you should have blamed it on the city,he thought.You can’t let civilians into a suspected crime scene because of insurance regulations. If anything happened, she or her estate could have sued the city. It was true; it was on the books. And it would have made New York the villain, not him. Except that wasn’t the reason he’d done it.

  With effort he squeezed behind the crane, where the slender woman had fit so comfortably. At the opening, he shimmied down, sliding his backside along the train carriage and feeding his legs through. It was not a place for the claustrophobic. When his feet finally reached the ground he wriggled into the dark. If the bats or some territorial tunnel people were in there waiting for him, he was going to be in serious, serious trouble. He continued worming through, until he was inside and was able to shine the flashlight around.

  The room he was in was slightly larger than a garage. The walls were made of brick and the floor was a heavy iron grille. A metal staircase, like a fire escape, disappeared into the floor on the opposite side. There were open ducts and bundles of wires overhead. He didn’t see any bats, but the smell of guano was definitely stronger in there. Drops of blood led straight ahead. He followed them across the room.

  He wondered what this place had been built for. Once a floor was put down, it could have been a storage room or an office for maintenance personnel. He looked up. Or it might have been designed as a power room. It was large enough to hold a large gas turbine, and the ducts could have vented fumes through the roof.

  He headed slowly toward the steps, walking on the balls of his feet. What Joyce had said about the bats’ hearing made him realize that walking softly was useless. But he did it anyway so that he could hear. He shined the light down through the grate. It looked as though the rooms went down several flights. That would make sense. Everything in the station was probably built in layers to maximize space. And if this was going to be a generator room, they might have wanted access from underneath.

  The smell of guano was stronger the deeper he went into the room. The drops of blood were thicker as well. They reminded him of someone who got popped in the nose and was trying to hold it in. He was going to have to go down the stairs. Before he did, he tried to call Ari Moreaux, just to let him know where he was. All he got was static. Out of communication, without a roadmap, and with blood on the floor-he knew it didn’t make sense to go ahead. But Gentry didn’t intend to go back and tell Joyce he didn’t check the place out.

  He had no idea how far down the stairs went. He turned the light on the steps. He could see the bottom twenty steps below-and more small drops of blood leading down.

  That could be from tunnel people fighting over food or clothes,he tried to persuade himself, without success. His sixth sense was telling him whatever left the mound in the tunnel left the blood here as well.

  He held tight to the damp, rusty railing as he descended. He toe-touched each step tentatively before putting his full weight down. The stairs groaned and listed slightly to the left, toward the inside of the room, as though the entire structure were coming away from the wall. Maybe it was. It probably hadn’t been safety-checked in half a century.

  The blood continued in a thickening line down the steps. As he neared the second-level landing he stopped. There was a rank, metallic smell coming from the room-not guano, something else. He brought the flashlight around. His eyes, increasingly accustomed to the dark, saw the hint of shapes on the floor. They were too large to be bats, and they weren’t moving. They were also just out of reach of his light. He continued down.

  Upon reaching the landing, the toe of Gentry’s shoe bumped against something on the grate. He shined the light down. And swore at what he saw.

  Within days of joining the police force, Gentry had helped lift the bloated, partially decayed body of a young woman from the Hudson River. He had entered a former crack den where a kid had died and been left to rot for nearly a week. He’d seen pedestrians who had been run down by cars and one who had been crushed under a crane. There were mugging victims who had been stabbed in the chest or side or back, and he’d once come to the assistance of an officer who’d been shot through the throat. All of those events were memorable as tragedy, and none of them had prepared him for what was in the room.

  The grate was carpeted with blood and bodies. There were fourteen corpses in all, two of them very young children. All of them were fully clothed, a few were in sleeping bags, and some were lying face-down. A couple of bodies were sprawled across other bodies, as though they’d tried to get out or to help someone before falling themselves. Countless small but deep gashes scored the throats and faces that were turned toward him. The bloodied hands of some of the victims were splayed across their eyes, as though they’d been trying to protect them. There was guano on the bodies, and the grate below some of them was clogged with gummy patches of blood.

  He knelt beside the body closest to him, the one his shoe had touched. She looked nothing like the other victims, not her dress or her condition. It was a young woman-or what was left of one. She was wearing sweat clothes and a bloody bicycle helmet. She was lying on her back, her left foot near the bottom of the steps. Her shoulde
rs had been flayed, her throat had been crushed flat, and her chest had been torn open. The woman’s rib cage was pulled out, not pushed in, and the bones had been flung to the left and right. The heart and lungs and most of the face were eaten almost entirely away.

  He looked closely at the blood on the grate. It was still relatively moist. It couldn’t have been more than three or four hours old. This had to have happened shortly before or after the maintenance worker found the guano. He wondered if the bats had been coming or going when they did this, whether they’d wanted to take this spot over or were just using it as a pit stop.

  He could almost feel Nancy wagging a finger at him and saying,“I told you so.” But he wasn’t going to risk another partner. Especially one who wasn’t even a member of the force.

  Gentry rose. He felt light-headed and slightly nauseated. Grabbing the rail behind him, he shut his eyes and breathed deeply. The worst part of feeling dizzy down here was that taking a deep breath only made it worse. It filled his nose with air, guano, and the smell of fresh death. He put his teeth together and slowly sucked air through them, the way he’d been taught at the academy. No smells, no hyperventilating.

  When Gentry felt better, he opened his eyes, breathed one more time through his teeth, then walked slowly down the steps toward the third level.There were no more victims there and no bats. Only drops of blood that had seeped through the grate.

  Returning to the second level, Gentry went to each of the bodies in turn. He wanted to make certain that everyone was dead. Not just so that he could help anyone who might still be alive but also to make sure that one of the bodies wasn’t a psycho pretending to be dead.

  There was no one left alive.

  As he stood and backed away from the corpses, Gentry noticed that there was artwork spray-painted on the far wall. Not-bad portraits and a panorama of bright blue sky. Tucked into corners of the room were garbage bags stuffed with clothes; pieces of carpet were spread under some of the sleeping bags. These people obviously lived in this part of the underground. They weren’t intruding in a bat area like the people in Westchester.

  The bats had come here wanting something. And then there was the woman in the bicycle helmet. He turned and looked down at her. He didn’t want to search for an ID until the forensics team had a chance to take photographs. But he wondered where she fit into all of this.

  As he looked away, he suddenly noticed a thick trail of blood. It began about a foot from the dead woman’s left ear and thinned the closer it got to the landing. It continued up the steps in closely spaced dollops.

  That’s where the blood on the steps came from, he realized. But there was something odd.

  Gentry crouched and looked at the blood more closely. The trail thinned as it went up, as though it had been drippingup the steps. Which meant the killer did this and then left by the stairway. It was also a slow, thick, steady drip, which meant it probably wasn’t made by a creature in fast flight. He wondered if that ruled out a bat as the killer.

  He turned the flashlight up.

  “Oh, shit,” he said.

  There was blood on the underside of the grate above him. It was left in hash marks all along the grate. They looked like large chicken scratches.

  Or bat scratches?he wondered.

  What seemed curious,though,was that the bloody marks above were thicker than the ones below. And they followed the trail on the stairs exactly-

  Like they dripped down.

  And then it hit him, though it didn’t make sense. Someone, something, could have left this way without using the steps.

  The killer could have been hanging from the grate.

  Thirteen

  Gentry went back to the main tunnel to call for assistance. Captain Moreaux told the detective that they’d get a team down as soon as possible.

  Gentry asked if he knew where Nancy Joyce was. Ari told him that she’d gone up to the Museum of Natural History.

  That made sense. It was where her assistant had taken the mold from the deer bone.

  Feeling guilty again, the detective went back to the walled-off sublevel. He sat on the landing and looked into the room. The only sound was the occasional distant thunder of a subway train.

  It was difficult for him to process the horror of what had happened down here. The pain. The speed-these people were slaughtered where they lay. But it also underscored what he had always believed,despite the years his father had made him go to church. That human beings are animals. Not just the perpetrators but the victims. The reverential funerals and talk about immortal souls notwithstanding, people inevitably bear an unnerving resemblance to beef.

  Captain Moreaux arrived nearly half an hour later, with Arvids and four other officers from Metro North. Two of the men got sick. In the heat, the smell was becoming intolerable. The officers were joined by three transit police-under whose jurisdiction the subways typically fell-and five officers from the police Emergency Service Unit. This mobile force of 350 elite officers is not attached to any one precinct. They’re divided into ten regional squads and are called in to assist precinct police in extreme situations ranging from hostage standoffs to river rescues.LieutenantGary Holmes of ESU, City South, was at the end of his two-to-ten shift when he arrived with his team.

  Gentry stayed for a while in what was already being referred to as “the butcher shop.” Police were always quick to assign lighthearted nicknames to places of violence or danger. This was done not out of disrespect but, Gentry believed, to give them a way of denying the extreme horror until the situation could be dealt with and processed.

  A Metro North police officer photographed the scene before ESU officers began placing the bodies in bags. While Gentry watched from the landing, two officers gently searched the outside woman’s body for identification. They found a blood-soaked pouch beneath the body, attached to her leather belt. Her wallet was inside, along with a can of mace, a Swiss army knife, and an I Love New York key ring. No money had been taken. Arvids looked at her driver’s license. The woman’s name was Barbara Mathis and she lived on Riverside Drive. She was smiling in the photograph and attractively made up. She was twenty-eight years old. About the same age as Dr. Joyce.

  Most of the bodies would be taken to the city medical examiner. Before they were removed, Gentry went over to Captain Moreaux.

  “Ari, I need you to do me a favor. I want you to take Ms. Mathis’s remains to the Scientific Research Division.”

  “Chris Henry?”

  Gentry nodded.

  Moreaux winced. “Ouch. The medical examiner will not be pleased if I do that.”

  “I know. But the medical examiner is going to have his hands full with the tunnel people. This lady came from someplace else.”

  “Obviously-”

  “I need to know where and I need to know it soon. Chris’ll do this fast and right.”

  Moreaux thought for a moment. “Okay. I’ll go set it up.”

  Gentry thanked him. Moreaux looked pale as he took the wallet and went back to his office. The captain was the one who was going to have to call the young woman’s family.

  Before leaving, Gentry went over to Arvids and thanked him for his help. Then he started up the stairs.

  “Detective,” Arvids said.

  Gentry stopped and looked back.

  “I just thought you should know that Dr. Joyce was still pretty steamed when she left.”

  “I’m not surprised. And I don’t blame her.”

  “What I’m saying is, maybe you should talk to her. Keep her in the loop. She wants to help. And this”-he gestured behind him-“is gonna take some explaining.”

  “Don’t worry, Arvids. I’m going to involve her.”

  Arvids thanked him. Gentry wondered what the hell that was really about.

  It was much easier getting out of the tunnel than it had been getting in. In order to accommodate the evacuation team, subway traffic had been rerouted along the tracks leading to the underground rooms. The detective was surprise
d at how cool and clean the air tasted and how bright the daylight seemed when he reentered the terminal. The concourse was much less crowded than it had been before.

  Gentry stopped at a pay phone and called Chris Henry. He told him to expect Barbara Mathis’s body within the hour and to front-burner the autopsy. He wanted to know as soon as possible whether the woman had been sexually assaulted and if there was anything on her that would place her whereabouts at the time of her death-dust particles in the lungs or eyes, muffin crumbs in her mouth, anything. Henry thanked him and said he’d be back to him as soon as possible.

  As he left Grand Central, Gentry’s mind was on the bats. As he walked west toward the station house, he wondered whether the attack and possible infestation were going to be a small problem or a big one; or whether it was a small problem that would become a big one when the media got their teeth into it. Nancy had been right about one thing. He wished he knew more about bats. Unlike human perps, he had no way of knowing what, if anything, they were going to do next. That was frustrating.

  People were ambling along Forty-second Street, self-absorbed or talking to whomever they were with. Some were looking at Bryant Park or toward Times Square or the Chrysler Building. They were oblivious to the hidden worlds of the city, to the hidden dangers behind walls or beneath their feet. Which was how it should be. The job of the city’s forty thousand police officers was to give them that luxury. He was proud of the way they handled that responsibility even when, as now, the problem was moving faster than he was.

  After the silence of the underground world, the Midtown South station house seemed unusually raucous. Gentry got himself coffee, shut the door to his office, opened the window, and stared at the street for several minutes before starting through the folders on his desk.

  The phone beeped. He snapped it up.

  “This is Detective-”

  “What’s going on in the subway, Robert?”