"Strange way for someone to go to his eternal rest, isn't it?" I asked. "Standing up inside a brick coffin."

"And naked. Unless his drawers fell down to his kneecaps and I just can't see them in there, he's stark naked. Somebody could have had the decency to spring for a black suit, don't you think?" Mike said, turning back to the professor. "Were there people living here when the university bought the building?"

Davis nodded. "Yes, it was completely occupied until a couple of years ago. This basement was the original kitchen of the house, which explains some of the pottery and cooking tools that have been dug up. Then in the 1940s it was a restaurant called Bertololloti's, refitted for apartments in the sixties. In fact, it's generally been students and faculty who've lived in here going back decades. The way the campus has grown, it's conveniently in the middle of things."

"I know a few guys who are gonna hate you for this, Coop. Some poor slob over at the cold case squad will be digging through occupancy records and census data till his pension vests, trying to figure out whether any tenants disappeared or people were reported missing over the past few centuries."

Professor Davis had seated himself on the edge of the table in the far corner, where the recently dug artifacts were displayed. "You don't hear a heartbeat, do you?"

Mike smiled at him. "I didn't see you drinking, Mr. Davis. These bones have been picked clean."

"The floorboards, Detective. I'm not talking about the chest cavity."

Mike looked at me quizzically but I was just as puzzled as he.

"No telltale heart, Mr. Chapman? I'll give your colleagues a head start. This building was once the home of Edgar Allan Poe. This grim little structure was known to the neighbors as Poe House."

Mike Chapman ushered Andy Dorfman down the narrow staircase shortly after 9P.M. "The last place that Poe lived in Manhattan, that's what the professor was telling us. Eighteen forty-five, right?"

"Eighteen forty-five, forty-six. It was called Amity Street then. Number Eighty-five Amity Street. Greenwich Village," Davis said.

Dorfman was as excited by the find as I was. The literature major in me thought it extraordinary to be in these haunting surroundings that Poe had actually inhabited. The literary provenance seemed to matter not at all to the forensic anthropologist. He made straight for the skeleton and spent several minutes just staring at it, his two technicians over his shoulder, before he set his large metal case on the floor and opened it to remove some of his tools and a camera.

Mike leaned in to talk to Andy. "What can I do to be useful? Imagine you've got the greatest American writer of his time, the man who created the first fictional detective-damn, I bet Coop can recite his poetry, can't you?-and all the while he's living next door to a corpse."

Andy waved him off. "Back off, Mike. Let me get some shots before we open this up. Any bets that Poe himself was the perp?"

I thought of all the stories I had read from adolescence on by the master who created the genre that had become modern crime writing, including everything from mystery and detection to horror.

"That's like suggesting someone in my own family's a murderer," Nan said. "Don't break my heart."

"You have to admit," I said, as Andy's flash went off repeatedly and his assistant loaded film into a second camera, "he was fascinated with premature burial and entombing people in odd ways."

"These bones are gonna talk to Andy. They're gonna tell him everything," Mike said. "Seven hundred homicides a year citywide. How many are like this-skeletal remains?"

"Only one for the last twelve months," Andy answered.

"No wonder you're so frisky. You might earn your keep, starting out the new year with something to dig your teeth into."

Pathologists worked with soft tissue-flesh, brains, organs. Anthroplogists worked with bone, and rarely in New York City did Andy get the chance to do only that.

"Here's what we're going to do. The three of us will try to take another section of brickwork down. You got gloves, Mike? I may need you to hold on to your friend here as we remove the support in front of him. Then we'll see whether there's anything inside with him, on the ground, to give us a sense of date."

Mike pulled a pair of rubber gloves out of his rear pants pocket and started to put them on, while Andy's assistant tossed some to Nan and to me.

"So, where's his fingers?" Mike asked, stepping toward the wall.

"The phalanges probably dropped off. Small bones do that," Andy said, shining his flashlight over the side of the brick column and looking down. "The spinal ligament's still in place. That's what connects the bones to each other, so it keeps the body and head together-for the moment. But your friend's never going to come out of here in one piece. This will be a long night."

Andy and his team were suited for work in white lab coats and boots, and they laid out a sheet on the floor in front of the skeleton's vertical coffin. Professor Davis watched us from his remote corner of the room.

With construction tools that they had brought with them, Andy's assistants began to chip carefully away at the layer of bricks. The first four came out easily, and still the upper torso remained in place.

"Mind if I try something?" Mike said, lifting one of the stones and carrying it over to the table. He compared it with several others that had been mounted there and labeled as objects from the original foundation. "Looks like it could be as old as the ones removed from another part of the wall earlier today."

"This building has been restored and rehabilitated so many times over the years that it's entirely possible there were piles of the old materials just stored down here in the basement, maybe used and reused," Professor Davis said.

Andy was bagging a couple of the bricks, and into another envelope he was scraping the substance that had bonded each of them to the others. "Whatever this cementlike compound is might give us a clue about age."

He laid the bags carefully on the floor, to be tagged and numbered, just as each piece of stone had come down from the wall.

I picked one up and ran my gloved finger over the surface, smoothing out the plastic so I could examine the stone. It was the color of a burnt sienna Crayola, faded from its once red glaze. It was pocked and pitted on the exterior surface, smooth on the sides where it had been resting against one of its mates. The taupecolored sealant was clumped on the top and bottom, some substance that had fixed it in place for all the years it had been here.

"You and Alex mind holding hands with him for a minute?" Andy asked. "Gently, Mike. Not like he's a suspect in a homicide."

We stood on either side of the Thin Man, an arm under each elbow, as Andy directed us while he worked below us to free the last foot of space to ease the rest of the removal. I had handled bones before at the morgue, and I had seen my share of human skeletons on late-night visits to the medical school at the University of Virginia when I was engaged to a student there. This was eerily different and discomforting, as I wondered what brought our unfortunate soul to such a macabre resting place, naturally or unnaturally.

"You see anything down there?" Mike asked.

"Nothing from this angle, but it's too dark to tell." He picked up his camera and took more photographs, including close-ups from head to legs. "Okay, guys, let's go."

The technicians who were assisting Andy moved in next to him. They replaced Mike and me, one of them taking hold of the arms and the other of the skull, while Andy secured the lower torso. Together they moved the skeleton slowly and painstakingly out of the brick niche and swiveled it onto the sheet, laying it out flat. Leg bones fell away and clattered to the bottom of the brick shaft, and Andy returned to reach in to retrieve them. One by one, he kneeled and laid them out to complete his human jigsaw puzzle, gently and deliberately.