Beep.
“CALVIN’S INBrooklyn!” I all but shouted at Neil.
“You don’tknowthat, Seb! Yes, sorry, I’m here,” Neil said into his phone, essentially putting his argument with me on hold.
“You say that like I wasn’t born and raised here—like I wouldn’t be able to put these clues together,” I continued without a breath, waving my piece of paper in his face.
Neil grabbed my wrist, pulled my hand out of his line of vision, and strained to listen to the voice on the other end of the call. “Ben Dover.” Neil looked at me. “What does that name mean to you?”
“That he should have gone by Benjamin,” I retorted, yanking free from Neil’s vise grip.
Neil rolled his eyes, thanked the caller, and hung up. “That was the lab. DNA came back on the first victim—the one who was mailed to Frank last week. Ben Dover. He was reported missing last Wednesday when he didn’t show up to work and wasn’t returning calls.”
“Where’d he work?”
“NYU. He was a professor of photography. How’s that tie in with your Cope skull history lesson?” Neil questioned. He typed out a text message at the speed of light before looking up at me.
“Who gives a fuck?”
“Yougave many fucks last night.”
“The Collector has taken twelve hours off the clock, Neil. We don’t have time to play their game. Calvin needs helpnow!” I held up the paper again. “He thinks the building is five to seven stories. He can see over roofs, so he must be near the top, and it’s definitely turn-of-the-century. Exposed-brick walls, what sounds like original wood flooring—he said there’s machinery in the room. I suspect it’s an old warehouse or factory that hasn’t been converted into some swanky hipster joint. That fits into the search radius Quinn and I discussed yesterday.”
“Sure it does,” Neil agreed. “But that description alone covers Dumbo, Vinegar Hill—hell, even the Navy Yard could be a possibility. I can’t set you loose on Brooklyn, shouldering down more doors, without at least narrowing that radius to a single neighborhood.” He dialed another number on his cell. “I’ll put in a request to have that number Calvin phoned from get tracked by cell towers, but I’m going to guess it was a burner. We might not get much.”
“You know who else is from Brooklyn?Rossi.”
“Please stop talking, Seb. For thirty seconds.” Neil stared at me hard before a static voice over the phone captured his attention.
“I’ll stop talking when I’m dead,” I muttered. I moved away from Neil as I chose Pop’s number from my contacts and gave him a ring.
He answered immediately, as if he’d been staring at his phone, waiting for me to call. “Sebastian?”
“I need your help, Pop.”
“What’s wrong?” he asked with alarm.
“Did you know a professor at NYU named Benjamin Dover?”
I could practically hear Pop’s struggle to calm himself upon realizing I wasn’t asking for him to come bail me out of jail or informing him I was in the ER. “Ah… no. No, I don’t think so. Why?”
“He taught photography up until last week,” I explained.
“Photography? Definitely not, then. You know how little overlap—what happened last week?”
“He was murdered.”
“Good God,” Pop murmured.
“Do you think you can do a little recon on him?”
“What kind of information are you looking for?”
“I’m not sure. But these murders and word games, the nonsense surrounding Edward Cope—it’s all connected to the Museum of Natural History. And yet Benjamin Dover, working in a completely unrelated field, at an unrelated location, was Patient Zero. I need to know why.”
“What if it’s nothing more than his reputation, Sebastian?” Pop asked. “Like you. You, too, work an unrelated field, and yet you’ve been pulled into this.”
I thought of Rossi, of how he was a perfect example of six degrees of separation, and said, “No. I kind of… figured out my connection to the museum.”
