White Fire Read Free Page B

had discovered this archive. It was pure gold—once she’d made friends with the archivist and figured out her way around the disorganized drawers and heaping shelves of stuff. She had been to the Red Museum archives many times in search of topics for papers and projects, most recently in her hunt for a topic for her Rosewell thesis. She had spent a great deal of time in the old unsolved-case files—those cold cases so ancient that all involved (including the possible perps) had definitely and positively died.
    Corrie Swanson found herself in a creaking elevator, descending into the basement, one day after the meeting with her advisor. She was on a desperate mission to find a new thesis topic before it became too late to complete the approval process. It was mid-November already, and she was hoping to spend the winter break researching and writing up the thesis. She was on a partial scholarship, but Agent Pendergast had been making up the difference in tuition, and she was absolutely determined not to take one penny more from him than necessary. If her thesis won the Rosewell Prize, with its twenty-thousand-dollar grant, she wouldn’t have to.
    The elevator doors opened to a familiar smell: a mixture of dust and acidifying paper, underlain by an odor of rodent urine. She crossed the hall to a pair of dented metal doors, graced with a sign that said RED MUSEUM ARCHIVES , and pressed the bell. An unintelligible rasp came out of the antiquated speaker; she gave her name, and a buzzer sounded to let her in.
    “Corrie Swanson? How good to see you again!” came the hoarse voice of the archivist, Willard Bloom, as he rose from a desk in a pool of light, guarding the recesses of the storage room stretching off into the blackness behind him. He presented a rather cadaverous figure, stick-thin, with longish gray hair, yet underneath was charming and grandfatherly. She didn’t mind the fact that his eyes often wandered over various parts of her anatomy when he thought she wasn’t paying attention.
    Bloom came around with a veined hand extended, which she took. The hand was surprisingly hot, and it gave her a bit of a start.
    “Come, sit down. Have some tea.”
    Some chairs had been set around the front of his desk, with a coffee table and, to the side, a battered cabinet with a hot plate, kettle, and teapot, an informal seating area in the midst of dust and darkness. Corrie flopped into a chair, setting her briefcase down with a thump next to her. “Ugh,” she said.
    Bloom raised his eyebrows in mute inquiry.
    “It’s Carbone. Once again he rejected my thesis idea. Now I have to start all over again.”
    “Carbone,” Bloom said in his high-pitched voice, “is a well-known ass.”
    This piqued her interest. “You know him?”
    “I know everyone who comes down here. Carbone! Always fussing about getting dust on his Ralph Lauren suits, wanting me to play step-n-fetchit. As a result, I can never find anything for him, poor man…You know the real reason he keeps rejecting your thesis ideas, right?”
    “I figure it’s because I’m a junior.”
    Bloom put a finger to his nose and gave her a knowing nod. “Exactly. And Carbone is old school, a stickler for protocol.”
    Corrie had been afraid of this. The Rosewell Prize for the year’s outstanding thesis was hugely coveted at John Jay. Its winners were often senior valedictorians, who went on to highly successful law enforcement careers. As far as she knew, it had never been won by a junior—in fact, juniors were quietly discouraged from submitting theses. But there was no rule against it, and Corrie refused to be deterred by such bureaucratic baggage.
    Bloom held up the pot with a yellow-toothed smile. “Tea?”
    She looked at the revolting teapot, which did not appear to have been washed in a decade. “That’s a teapot? I thought it was a murder weapon. You know, loaded with arsenic and ready to go.”
    “Always ready with a riposte. But surely you know most