Entombed Read Online Free PDF Page B

P.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