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beginning to dawn on him exactly how formidable a woman Mrs. Wisher was.

= 5 =
    The metal door at the end of the gray hallway was discreetly marked FORENSIC ANTHROPOLOGY in stenciled capitals. It was the Museum’s state-of-the-art facility for analyzing human remains. Margo tried the knob and to her surprise found it locked. This was odd. She’d been here countless times, assisting in examinations of everything from Peruvian mummies to Anasazi cliff dwellers, and the door had never been locked before. She lifted her hand to knock. But the door was already being opened from the inside, and she found her rap falling onto thin air.
    She stepped in, then stopped abruptly. The lab, normally brightly lit and bustling with grad students and curatorial assistants, looked dim and strange. The bulky electron microscopes, X-ray viewers, and electrophoresis apparatus sat against the walls, silent and unused. The window that normally boasted a panoramic view of Central Park was covered by a heavy curtain. A single pool of brilliant light illuminated the center of the room; at its edge, a semicircle of figures stood among the shadows.
    In the center of the light lay a large specimen table. Something brown and knobby lay on it, along with a blue plastic sheet covering some other long, low object. As she stared curiously, Margo realized that the knobby object was a human skeleton, decorated with desiccated strips of sinew and flesh. There was a faint but unmistakable odor of corpse-reek.
    The door closed and locked behind her. Lieutenant Vincent D’Agosta, wearing what looked like the same suit she remembered from the Museum Beast murders of eighteen months before, walked back to join the group, nodding briefly at her as he passed. He seemed to have shed a few pounds since she’d last seen him. Margo noticed that his suit matched the dirty brown color of the skeleton.
    Margo scanned the row of figures as her eyes adjusted to the dim light. To D’Agosta’s left was a nervous man in a lab coat, a cup of coffee gripped in his pudgy hand. Next came the tall, thin form of the Museum’s new director, Olivia Merriam. Another figure stood farther back in the shadows, too dim for Margo to make out anything but a vague outline.
    The Director gave Margo a wan smile. “Thank you for coming, Dr. Green. These gentlemen”--she waved vaguely in D’Agosta’s direction--“have asked for our help.”
    There was a silence. Finally, D’Agosta sighed irritably. “We can’t wait for him any longer. He lives way the hell out in Mendham, and didn’t seem too thrilled about coming in when I telephoned last night.” He looked at each person in turn. “You saw the Post this morning, right?”
    The Director looked at him with distaste. “No.”
    “Let me backtrack a bit, then.” D’Agosta gestured toward the skeleton on the stainless steel table. “Meet Pamela Wisher. Daughter of Anette and the late Horace Wisher. No doubt you’ve seen her picture all over town. She disappeared around 3:00 A.M. on the morning of May 23. She spent the evening at the Whine Cellar, one of those basement clubs off Central Park South. Went to make a phone call and never came back. At least, not until yesterday, when we found her skeleton--minus the skull--in the Humboldt Kill. Apparently it was flushed out of a West Side storm drain, probably during a recent heavy rain.”
    Margo looked again at the remains on the table. She had seen countless skeletons before, but none belonging to anyone she’d known, or even heard of. It was difficult to believe that this grisly assemblage of bones had once been the pretty blond woman she had been reading about barely fifteen minutes before.
    “And with the remains of Pamela Wisher we also found this .” D’Agosta nodded at the thing lying beneath the blue plastic sheet. “So far, the press knows only that a second skeleton was found--thank God.” He glanced at the figure standing apart in the shadows. “I’ll let Dr. Simon