Blue Labyrinth by Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child Read Free Book Online

from the bones of smaller specimens. Leaves the skeletons nicely articulated.”
    “Articulated?” D’Agosta asked in a strangled voice.
    “You know—wiring the bones together, mounting them on metal frames for display or examination. Marsala cared for the beetles, watched over the specimens that were brought in. He did the degreasing, too.”
    D’Agosta didn’t ask, but Sandoval explained anyway. “Once a specimen is reduced to bones, it’s immersed in benzene. A good soaking turns them white, dissolves all the lipids, gets rid of the odor.”
    They returned to the central hallway. “Those were his main responsibilities,” Sandoval said. “But as I told you, Marsala was a whiz with skeletons. So he was often asked to articulate them.”
    “I see.”
    “In fact, the articulation lab was the place Marsala made his office.”
    “Lead the way, please.”
    Dabbing at his nose again, Sandoval continued down the seemingly endless corridor. “These are some of the Osteology collections,” he said, gesturing at a series of doors. “The bone collections, arranged taxonomically. And now we’re entering the Anthropology collections.”
    “Which are?”
    “Burials, mummies, and ‘prepared skeletons’—dead bodies collected by anthropologists, often from battlefields during the Indian wars—and brought back to the Museum. Something of a lost art. We’ve been forced to return a lot of these to the tribes in recent years.”
    D’Agosta glanced into an open doorway. He could make out row after row of wooden cabinets with rippled glass doors, within which lay innumerable sliding trays, each with a label affixed to it.
    After passing another dozen or so storage rooms, Sandovalshowed D’Agosta into a lab full of workbenches and soapstone-topped tables. The stench was fainter here. Skeletons of various animals sat on metal frames atop the benches, in various stages of completion. A few desks were pushed up against the far wall, computers and a variety of tools sitting on them.
    “That was Marsala’s desk,” Sandoval said, pointing at one.
    “Did he have a girlfriend?” D’Agosta asked.
    “Not that I know of.”
    “What did he do in his off hours?”
    Sandoval shrugged. “He didn’t talk about it. He more or less kept to himself. This lab was practically his home—he worked long hours. Didn’t have much of an outside life, it seemed to me.”
    “You say he was a prickly guy, hard to work with. Was there anyone in particular that he clashed with?”
    “He was always getting into spats.”
    “Anything that really stood out?”
    Sandoval hesitated. D’Agosta waited, notebook in hand.
    “There was one thing,” Sandoval said at last. “About two months back, a curator of mammalogy came in with a suite of extremely rare, almost extinct bats he’d collected in the Himalayas. Marsala put them in some of the dermestid beetle trays. Then he… messed up. He didn’t check them as frequently as he should have, left them too long. That wasn’t like Marsala at all, but at the time he seemed to have something on his mind. Anyway, if you don’t take the specimens out of the trays in time, they can be ruined. The hungry beetles chew through the cartilage and the bones get disarticulated and then they eat the bones themselves. That happened to the bat specimens. The bat scientist—he’s a little crazy, like a lot of curators—went nuts. Said some terrible things to Marsala in front of the whole Osteology staff. Really pissed Marsala off, but he couldn’t do anything about it, because he was the one at fault.”
    “What was the name of this mammalogy curator?”
    “Brixton. Richard Brixton.”
    D’Agosta wrote down the name. “You said Marsala had something else on his mind. Any idea what it was?”
    Sandoval thought a moment. “Well, around that time he’d started working with a visiting scientist on some research.”
    “Is that uncommon?”
    “On the contrary—it’s very common.” Sandoval pointed