Slowly, she descended the staircase to the fourth floor. In the corridor she paused, surprised to see the door to her office wide open. She looked inside. In the place she had been standing not fifteen minutes before, a very odd-looking man was now framed by the window, leafing through a monograph. He was wearing a dead black suit, severely cut, giving him a distinctly funereal air. His skin was very pale, whiter than she had ever seen on a living body. His blond hair, too, was almost white, and he turned the pages of the monograph with astonishingly long, slender, ivory fingers.

“Excuse me, but what are you doing in my office?” Nora asked.

“Interesting,” the man murmured, turning.

“I’m sorry?”

He held up a monograph, The Geochronology of Sandia Cave. “Odd that only whole Folsom points were found above the Sandia level. Highly suggestive, don’t you think?” He spoke with a soft, upper-class southern accent that flowed like honey.

Nora felt her surprise turning to anger at this casual invasion of her office.

He moved toward a bookcase, slid the monograph back into its place on the shelf, and began perusing the other volumes, his finger tapping the spines with small, precise movements. “Ah,” he said, slipping out another monograph. “I see the Monte Verde results have been challenged.”

Nora stepped forward, jerked the monograph out of his hand, and shoved it back onto the shelf. “I’m busy at the moment. If you want an appointment, you can call. Please close the door on your way out.” She turned her back, waiting for him to leave. Ten percent. She shook her head in weary disbelief. How could she possibly manage it?

But the man didn’t leave. Instead, she heard his mellifluous plantation voice again. “I’d just as soon speak now, if it’s all the same to you. Dr. Kelly, may I be so bold as to trouble you with a vexatious little problem?”

She turned. He had extended his hand. Nestled within it was a small, brown skull.THREE

NORA GLANCED FROM the skull back to the visitor ’s face. “Who are you?” Regarding him more carefully now, she noticed just how pale his blue eyes were, how fine his features. With his white skin and the classical planes of his face, he looked as if he’d been sculpted of marble.

He made a decorous gesture somewhere between a nod and a bow. “Special Agent Pendergast, Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

Nora’s heart sank. Was this more spillover from the trouble-plagued Utah expedition? Just what she needed. “Do you have a badge?” she asked wearily. “Some kind of ID?”

The man smiled indulgently, and slipped a wallet out of his suit pocket, allowing it to fall open. Nora bent down to scrutinize the badge. It certainly looked real—and she had seen enough of them over the last eighteen months.

“All right, all right, I believe you. Special Agent—” She hesitated. What the hell was his name? She glanced down but the shield was already on its way back into the folds of his suit.

“Pendergast,” he finished for her. Then he added, almost as if he had read her thoughts: “This has nothing to do with what happened in Utah, by the way. This is an entirely different case.”

She looked at him again. This dapper study in black and white hardly looked like the G-men she had met out west. He seemed unusual, even eccentric. There was something almost appealing in the impassive face. Then she glanced back down at the skull. “I’m not a physical anthropologist,” she said quickly. “Bones aren’t my field.”

Pendergast’s only reply was to offer her the skull.

She reached for it, curious despite herself, turning it over carefully in her hands.

“Surely the FBI has forensic experts to help them with this sort of thing?”

The FBI agent merely smiled and walked to the door, closing and locking it. Gliding toward her desk, he plucked the phone from its cradle and laid it gently to one side. “May we speak undisturbed?”

“Sure. Whatever.” Nora knew she must sound flustered, and was angry at herself for it. She had never met someone quite so self-assured.

The man settled himself into a wooden chair opposite her desk, throwing one slender leg over the other. “Regardless of your discipline, I’d like to hear your thoughts on this skull.”

She sighed. Should she be talking to this man? What would the Museum think? Surely they would be pleased that one of their own had been consulted by the FBI. Maybe this was just the kind of “publicity” Brisbane wanted.

She examined the skull once again. “Well, to start with, I’d say this child had a pretty sad life.”

Pendergast made a tent of his fingers, raising one eyebrow in mute query.

“The lack of sutural closing indicates a young teenager. The second molar is only just erupted. That would put him or her at around thirteen, give or take a few years. I would guess female, by the gracile brow ridges. Very bad teeth, by the way, with no orthodontry. That suggests neglect, at least. And these two rings in the enamel indicate arrested growth, probably caused by two episodes of starvation or serious illness. The skull is clearly old, although the condition of the teeth suggests a historic, as opposed to prehistoric, dating. You wouldn’t see this kind of tooth decay in a prehistoric specimen, and anyway it looks Caucasoid, not Native American. I would say it’s at least seventy-five to a hundred years old. Of course, this is all speculation. Everything depends on where it was found, and under what conditions. A carbon-14 date might be worth considering.” At this unpleasant reminder of her recent meeting, she paused involuntarily.

Pendergast waited. Nora had the distinct feeling that he expected more. Feeling her annoyance returning, she moved toward the window to examine the skull in the bright morning light. And then, as she stared, she felt a sudden sick feeling wash over her.

“What is it?” Pendergast asked sharply, instantly aware of the change, his wiry frame rising from the chair with the intensity of a spring.

“These faint scratches at the very base of the occipital bone . . .” She reached for the loup that always hung around her neck and fitted it to her eye. Turning the skull upside down, she examined it more closely.

“Go on.”

“They were made by a knife. It’s as if someone were removing tissue.”

“What kind of tissue?”

She felt a flood of relief as she realized what it was.

“These are the kind of marks you would expect to see caused by a scalpel, during a postmortem. This child was autopsied. The marks were made while exposing the upper part of the spinal cord, or perhaps the medulla oblongata.”

She placed the skull on the table. “But I’m an archaeologist, Mr. Pendergast. You’d do better to use the expertise of someone else. We have a physical anthropologist on staff, Dr. Weidenreich.”

Pendergast picked the skull up, sealing it in a Ziploc bag. It disappeared into the folds of his suit without a trace, like a magician’s trick. “It is precisely your archaeological expertise I need. And now,” he continued briskly, replacing the telephone and unlocking the door in swift economical movements, “I need you to accompany me downtown.”

“Downtown? You mean, like headquarters?”

Pendergast shook his head.

Nora hesitated. “I can’t just leave the Museum. I’ve got work to do.”

“We won’t be long, Dr. Kelly. Time is of the essence.”

“What’s this all about?”

But he was already out of her office, striding on swift silent feet down the long corridor. She followed, unable to think of what else to do, as the agent led the tortuous back way down a series of staircases, through Birds of the World, Africa, and Pleistocene Mammals, arriving at last in the echoing Great Rotunda.

“You know the Museum pretty well,” she said as she struggled to keep up.

“Yes.”