Ghost Image (8 page)

“I'm not upset.”

“I love you. And I'm afraid I have to go. I'm leaving for the desert tonight and I'm not sure what kind of Internet service I'll have. But I promise I'll call or write as soon as I can.”

“I love you, too.”

Nick wasn't at all religious—the family joke was that he was waiting for the Rapture—so I didn't expect him to say what he said next. “I guess God decided He needed Kevin more than we did, so He called him home.”

If he meant it as a comfort to me, it wasn't. I didn't think God had called Kevin home.

I still thought there was a killer out there who had made that decision.

• • •

My solitary idea about what the little gray key unlocked wasn't that imaginative. At the party two nights ago, Kevin and Thea Stavros had talked about a study room he used in the Science, Technology and Business Library at the Library of Congress. I had already checked and found it was located in the John Adams Building across the street behind the main Jefferson library. What were the odds I'd find lockers there where scholars like Kevin could leave books, papers, and other reference materials at the end of the day?

I grabbed my camera bag and the key to my Vespa from a hook on an antique hall rack and went downstairs. Nick and I rented the top two floors of a Queen Anne gingerbread row house on S Street, just north of Dupont Circle. India Ferrer, our landlady, lived next door, and the lower two floors were occupied by Maximillian Katzer, an interior designer who owned an upscale antiques gallery in Georgetown. Our apartment had come furnished, and we'd sold almost everything we owned in England rather than pay to ship it home, so over the winter Max had taken me around town to his friends' galleries and used his professional discount and bargaining skills to help me purchase a number of pieces of vintage furniture that would have otherwise been out of my price range. Nick and I moved India's things to the carriage house in the alley behind the two row houses, and gradually the duplex started to feel like home. In return for
Max's design help and services, I photographed several of his clients' homes for his portfolio and took pictures for his website. So far we both thought it had been a good deal.

An envelope with M. Katzer Fine Antiques engraved in plum-colored ink lay on the floor below the mail slot when I got downstairs to the foyer. The handwritten note looked like he'd written in haste.

Left very early this morning and didn't think you'd be up. My deepest condolences on the death of your friend—saw the story on the news. I'll call you for a drink. I'm sure you could use one. Love.

I took a deep breath, sent him a thank-you text message, and put the note in my camera bag. Overnight the weather had changed from yesterday's late-winter raw chilliness to the soft sunshine and sharp blue skies of early spring. Washington is like that now, seasons that ping-pong back and forth, so it might be seventy for a few days in December, or there will be a brief, fierce blizzard in late March, instead of the orderly trajectory of the seasons that I remember growing up. Kevin had told me climate change evolved over centuries, not decades, but I still thought the weather was crazier and more extreme now.

I unlocked the large sliding doors to the carriage house where I kept my mint-green Vespa in bad weather. It had been one of my first purchases when I moved home after owning one in London and discovering what a godsend it was in a city with no place to park. But D.C. didn't have London's temperate climate, so when the weather turned bad, I took cabs or the Metro, or borrowed Niles, India's late husband's British racing-green Jaguar. Parking the Jaguar was like docking the
Queen Mary
, and within a few months Nick had moved back to D.C. as well, so at Christmas we bought a used red-and-white-striped Mini Cooper convertible from a family friend.

But today was perfect for the Vespa, and after a half-hour trip from Dupont Circle to Capitol Hill, it took only a few minutes to find a lamppost on 2nd Street, a block from the Adams Building, where I chained the scooter.

A guard at the front desk in the empty lobby looked inside my camera bag and asked me to walk through a metal detector before directing me to a bank of elevators down the hall. I was the lone occupant of the car, which went straight to the fifth floor. Unlike the palatial Thomas Jefferson Building across the street, the staid-looking Adams Building, built in the 1930s for the sole purpose of housing overflow books, wasn't a tourist destination. The only people I was likely to encounter in the corridors were employees of the Library of Congress and people who had come to do research as Kevin had done. So far, other than the guard downstairs, I hadn't seen a soul.

The double doors to the Science and Business Reading Room had been thrown open on an enormous high-ceilinged Art Deco space of lighted bookcases and walls of gray concrete block decorated with subtly colored murals and quotations. Candlestick lamps with green-striped copper shades lined rows of mahogany tables and made pools of golden light in an otherwise coolly lit elegant room where half a dozen people read, wrote, or typed on laptops. Kevin must have loved this beautiful place with its air of Old World scholarship and reverential silence.

A cute blonde who looked like she'd just graduated college asked for my reader's card at the entrance desk. The laminated ID around her neck said her name was Logan Day. A few months ago when I was still working at the photo agency in Georgetown, I'd gotten a reader's card when I needed to use another of the library's specialized reading rooms before a photo shoot at the Turkish embassy. I pulled it out of my wallet and handed it to Logan Day. She examined it and asked me to sign in.

“Is Thea Stavros here?” I asked.

“She's in her office. Do you have an appointment?”

“No. Actually, I was just wondering if this reading room has public lockers.”

“Around the corner,” she said, and I felt a little zing of excitement. “The long teal doors, two rows of them, above the bookshelves. You'll need a library ladder to reach the top row. Unfortunately, ever since the earthquake a few are jammed shut, but you won't have any problem finding one that's free.”

“The earthquake damaged this building?” I said.

“It did that.” She pointed to a long jagged crack like a lightning bolt in the far wall. “And some of the lockers. But I'm sure you'll find an empty one.”

I thanked her and walked around the corner.

A moment later I was back, holding the key. “Those look like storage cabinets. I'm looking for the locker that this key fits, number fifty-eight.”

Logan examined it. “It's not ours.”

“Don't the people who use your research facilities need lockers to keep their things secure when they leave at the end of the day?”

She passed the key back to me and shook her head. “They're called study rooms, but they're more like individual private offices with doors that can be locked. Everyone leaves their stuff in their own room.” She frowned. “Why are you so sure that key belongs to us?”

I'd tripped too many red flags and now I'd made her suspicious. But I was also out of ideas about what the key might unlock. “I'm not. A friend who uses one of your rooms might have dropped it when he and I were down at the Tidal Basin yesterday.”

Her eyes narrowed. “So you're trying to get into your friend's locker, rather than returning the key to him?”

“I don't know if it's his, so I thought I would check here first. Unfortunately I can't ask him anymore if it belonged to him.”

“Why not?”

“He's dead.”

We were no longer speaking in library whispers, and I could feel the eyes of everyone sitting nearby focused on the two of us as though an electrical current had passed through the place.

She turned pale. “I think I should get Thea.” She glanced down at my name on her sign-in sheet. “Please wait here, Ms. Medina.”

I set my camera bag down and pretended to study the murals that formed an enormous frieze around the room, ignoring the stares I was getting. In a lighted alcove above the reference desk, a fan-shaped painting of Thomas Jefferson with Monticello in the background had an inscription in a corner:
THIS ROOM IS DEDICATED TO THOMAS JEFFERSON.
By the time I realized that all the murals and all the quotes were in some way related to Jefferson, Thea Stavros had burst through a set of double doors and was striding across the room.

She wore a tailored navy silk shirtwaist dress and held a lace-trimmed handkerchief in one hand. As she got closer, I wondered if she had been crying because her mascara looked smudged.

She didn't bother with a greeting, nor did she seem surprised to see me. “I heard the awful news about Kevin this morning,” she said. “I still can't believe it.”

“I know. Me, either.”

“Logan said you've brought a key that belonged to a friend who died and you thought it was ours. It's Kevin's, isn't it?”

“I don't know.”

Logan placed a hand over her heart as though she'd just felt a sudden pain. “Your friend was Brother Kevin Boyle?” she asked me, and I nodded. “He was such a sweetheart, everyone here loved him.”

“May I see the key?” Thea asked.

We still had the undivided attention of everyone in the room. I handed it to Thea and she studied it.

“Why don't you leave it with me? I'll ask around at the other libraries and see if I can find out what it opens.”

Giving up the key wasn't what I had in mind. “What about Kevin's study room?” I said. “Would it be possible to see if the key unlocks something he left in there?”

“You've got the master key, Thea,” Logan said. “Maybe the three of us ought to check it out.”

Thea gave Logan an admonishing look. “There are privacy issues, my dear.”

“Kevin's dead,” I said. “I can give the key to Father Navarro, the guardian at the Franciscan Monastery. He can fill out the appropriate paperwork to get Kevin's things returned. I guess I can wait and ask him.”

I held my breath, hoping Thea was as curious as I was about the key. She turned it over in her hand and wrestled with protocol. Finally she sighed and said, “The study rooms are just through those double doors. I suppose we can take a quick look.”

A small staircase on the other side of the doors led to a dimly lit corridor of sea-green walls. Glass-fronted doors lined one side of the hallway. A floor-to-ceiling metal bookshelf divided into compartments ran the length of the opposite wall, and a few of the compartments held books, magazines, and reference items bound together in neat bundles.

“After I saw Kevin yesterday morning, he was planning to come by here and pick up the documents you told him about at the engagement party,” I said. “Is this where you left them?”

Thea rifled through the bundles that were waiting to be retrieved. “Yes, but Kevin's papers are still here. He never got them. Did he sign in yesterday, Logan?”

Logan picked up a clipboard with a sheet of paper on it from a small table near the stairs. “The last time he was here was Monday. Four days ago.”

Thea removed her ID lanyard from around her neck and
picked out a key from a ring that was attached to it. She walked over to the door directly in front of us. “This is Kevin's room . . . was Kevin's room.”

She unlocked the door and pushed it open. Logan and I gasped and Thea muttered something under her breath that sounded like a curse. The place had been ransacked—books pulled off shelves and dumped on the floor, desk drawers opened and emptied, the contents of file folders scattered everywhere.

There was no way Kevin had trashed this room.

His stalker had been here.

7

F
or a moment the three of us stood without speaking, surveying the ruined state of Kevin's study room. Beautiful books splayed open or spine down lay on the floor around us. “What in the world . . . what happened?” Thea sounded distraught. She walked in and began picking up books where they'd been flung haphazardly.

Logan and I followed her. The room was small but efficient, just enough space for an old-fashioned desk and chair, a metal file cabinet, a colorful framed poster from the National Book Festival, a bookcase now mostly emptied of books, and a wooden table strewn with files and papers, presumably reference material for Kevin's new book. No laptop, but he wouldn't leave something that valuable behind.

“The blinds are closed,” I said. “I wonder if whoever did this came at the end of the day when it was dark.”

Thea nodded, still visibly shaken. “We're open until nine thirty at night so people can come by and do their research after work. But we don't really monitor these rooms. The occupants
are serious scholars. They're hardly the sort of individuals who need supervising. I can't imagine anyone among them who would do . . . this.”

Logan bent down to retrieve a sheaf of papers from under the desk where they'd slid out of several file folders like a fan, her lips pressed together in anger. I helped Thea reshelve the books. Many were old and fragile, the yellowed pages as delicate as parchment. The person who'd been here hadn't cared about damaging them.

I read the eclectic collection of titles as I picked them up. Aristotle's
Politics
. John James Audubon's
Delineations of American Scenery and Character. Thomas Jefferson's Garden Book.
Numerous books on the unpublished and published papers and letters of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. The history of the founding of Washington, D.C., multiple biographies of Pierre L'Enfant, including a copy of the book Olivia wanted me to read. A plant and seed catalog published in London in the 1800s. Several copies of a pamphlet called
Twinleaf
, published at Monticello, the common thread being that each edition contained an article on the Lewis and Clark expedition.

“I wonder if anything is missing,” I said.

Thea looked up from caressing the spine of a book on the history of the Chelsea Physic Garden in London. “I was just wondering the same thing. Though this”—she gestured at the mess around us—“seems like pure malicious vandalism, it's just so awful.”

“Maybe someone was searching for something.” I didn't say it, but I thought it: for what Kevin had left in locker number 58.

Thea set the book on the bookshelf and swung around to stare at me, one hand on her hip. “Do you know what it could be?”

“No. I don't.”

“We've got records of everything Brother Kevin borrowed,” Logan said. She leaned against the desk as if she suddenly needed something solid to support her. “I'll go through them, Thea. If anything has been taken, we'll know.”

Thea shifted her gaze from me to Logan. “Yes, of course, start there. Though the only person who would truly know what's missing is Kevin. Not everything here might be ours.”

I picked up
The Journals of Lewis and Clark by Meriwether Lewis
from under the table. “Your security guards search everyone,” I said. “Not just on the way in, but also on the way out, to make sure no one takes something that belongs here.”

“If you're wondering whether someone could get something out of the Library of Congress that belongs to us, I think anything's possible if you're determined enough,” Thea said. “We're a lot less strict with our security than most of the other government buildings in Washington. You can't just walk into the Main Reading Room in the Jefferson Building anymore, but this still is a library, the library of the American people, not Fort Knox.”

“What about security cameras?”

Thea set the last book, a history of English gardening in the eighteenth century, on the bookcase. “I'm afraid there aren't any. There's also a corridor that bypasses the reading room and takes you to the back elevators on Third Street. Someone could have come and gone quite easily without being noticed.”

She sat down in Kevin's scarred-up chair. “The lock appeared to be intact when I opened the door, and these are dead bolts so you can't jimmy them. It costs a pretty penny if you lose your key,” she said. “I wonder if someone got hold of Kevin's key? Except he wasn't careless about things like that, he never left anything lying around.”

Unless it had been taken yesterday in the monastery garden.

“Speaking of keys,” Logan said, “I've been thinking. A few of the Smithsonian museums have public lockers, including the Natural History Museum. I know Brother Kevin spent a lot of time there doing research.” She shrugged. “It's worth a try.”

Thea gave Logan a sharp look. “Kevin knew the entire staff at that museum. If he needed to store something, anyone who
worked on the third floor would have let him leave it in their office.”

I tried to quash my newly revived excitement and keep my voice calm. “It's also possible the key isn't even his. I found it on the ground by the stone lantern at the Tidal Basin. A couple of women were there just before Kevin and I arrived. One of them could just as easily have dropped it.”

Thea fluttered her eyelashes and gave me an ironic
nice try
look. “I presume you're going directly to the Natural History Museum after you leave here?”

I blushed. “Yes, but first I need the key. You still have it.”

She looked startled. “Oh, goodness, so I do. I put it in my pocket when we started to clean up and forgot about it.”

She gave it to me, along with her business card, which she took out of her plastic ID holder. “I'd really like to know what you find, Sophie. Would you call me, please? The card has my direct number at the library and my cell number.”

I nodded, and she added, “Perhaps you could give me your contact information as well?”

She waited while I got my own card from my camera bag and passed it to her. She ran a finger around the edge. “I'm sure we'll be talking soon. And, Logan, dear, I think you should start working on that list of documents and books right away.”

Logan stood up and when she spoke her voice wavered. “It's going to be sad going through all this and knowing he's gone.” To me she said, “He brought Thea and me flowering Lenten roses after he came back from his fellowship at Monticello at the end of January. I thought it was so sweet. He hardly knew me.”

“
Helleborus orientalis
,” Thea said. “They're lovely, though Kevin and I joked about it being a plant that's supposed to cure insanity because he mentioned that he was insanely busy with work.” Her voice cracked with emotion when she said that, but then she was all brisk business again. “I'll walk you out, Sophie. We can use the back corridor.”

An elevator was waiting. Just before the door closed, she said in a soft voice, “Good luck.”

On the ground floor I walked down the corridor to the main lobby and stopped at the guard's desk. Something in my demeanor must have put him on alert because he gave my camera bag an extra-thorough going-over. Finally, he said, “Okay, thanks. Have a nice day.”

“Do you also inspect the bags of employees when they come and go?”

“We check everyone,” he said. “No exceptions.”

I walked down 2nd Street to where I'd left the Vespa, but once or twice I couldn't resist looking over my shoulder, even though there was no one around. Kevin's stalker knew about his study room, I was sure of that. And as for Thea, was it my imagination or had she been reluctant to hand the key over to me, as well as a bit annoyed when Logan suggested the lockers at the Natural History Museum? Though I knew Kevin trusted Thea, it seemed to me that someone in her position at the Library of Congress would have been as familiar with that museum as Kevin had been, and that she, too, would have known about those lockers.

Maybe I wasn't being followed just now because someone already knew where I'd turn up next.

And what I was going to do.

• • •

I checked the Vespa's side mirrors and kept glancing over my shoulder, but no car cut in and out of traffic tailing me as I drove down Constitution Avenue until I finally chained the scooter to a bike rack across from the Natural History Museum.

A museum guard checked my bag—again—and I walked through another metal detector. Today school groups seemed to be visiting the museum in force, kids swarming the Rotunda or leaning over the wrought-iron balcony railings on the upper
floors to stare at Henry, the enormous African elephant that dominated the room, its trunk raised as if calling to the herd. I found the information desk and asked where the lockers were located.

A man with a pale face looked over the top of his horn-rimmed glasses and pointed across the room. “Behind the security desk. Over there.”

I thanked him and my gaze fell on a rack stuffed with pamphlets and museum maps. Between a glossy photo of the Dom Pedro aquamarine and a brochure on life in ancient Egypt was another brochure, this one with a familiar title: “Losing Paradise: Our Endangered Biosphere and the Challenges of Safeguarding It for Our Children.” It was an upcoming symposium that would take place at the Botanic Garden in a few weeks, part of an ongoing forum on endangered species and conservation science. This year's topic was the alarming number of plant species disappearing from their natural habitats.

I already knew that the keynote speaker was Brother Kevin Boyle, OFM.

I skimmed the names of the other presenters and panelists. No doubt Kevin had known everyone, but I didn't recognize any of the names, though I did notice that someone from Monticello was one of the speakers. Dr. Ryan Velis, director of horticulture at the Center for Historic Plants.

“Help yourself,” the man behind the desk said to me. “The symposium's open to the public. You have to register and there's a small fee. But it's quite good. You might enjoy it.”

“Thank you.” I didn't want to tell him the news about Kevin, so I smiled and said, “It sounds fascinating. I'll keep it in mind.”

I put the brochure in my camera bag and walked across the Rotunda past the security desk. The storage lockers were in a room located behind a partial wall, which acted as a screen, creating a narrow semiprivate corridor and softening the din from the Rotunda. When I finally found it, the corridor was deserted.
A locker slammed shut as I pushed open the door. A moment later a man in a Redskins sweatshirt came around the corner of a row of lockers holding a small rucksack.

“Sorry,” he said with an easy smile, “didn't mean to scare you.”

“It's okay,” I said. “I didn't realize anyone was there.”

He left and I checked out the room. Most of the lockers weren't being used; only a few had missing keys, including number 58. I put the key in the lock and turned the knob. Something dropped to the ground next to my feet. A quarter. Kevin's quarter. You got your rental money refunded when you returned the key. I picked up the coin and put it in my pocket. The next time I visited the monastery I would put it in the poor box.

The locker door swung open. A canvas bag encasing what looked like a large box sat in the middle of the shelf. At a rough guess, the box was approximately nine by twelve inches and about four inches high. It was heavier than I expected, maybe six or seven pounds. I still had the room to myself, and before I walked out of this building, I needed to know what was in that box.

I set it on a long, low bench, knelt down, and slipped off the bag. The dark gray cloth-covered box was old, centuries old. I lifted the cover, which was hinged to the bottom so it would lie flat when it was open. Inside was a coverless book that fit the space perfectly.
Adam in Eden: or, Natures Paradise. The History of Plants, Fruits, Herbs and Flowers.
It was Kevin's, all right, and probably valuable, to have its own purpose-built protective box. The author was someone named William Coles, Herbalist. At the bottom of the title page was a quotation from Genesis:
Then the Lord took the Man, and put him into the Garden of Eden.
Below that, in red and black, was this:
London, Printed at the Angel near the Royal Exchange, 1657.

There was more written on the page, including a bit of shameless author self-promotion—
a Work of such a Refined and Useful Method that the Arts of Physick and Chirurgerie are so clearly
laid open,
et cetera. So it was a dictionary or an encyclopedia of plants and their proper use for medicinal purposes.

The box slid easily back inside its protective covering. I removed my camera from my bag, did some rearranging, and set the box inside. Here at the Natural History Museum no one checked your purse or backpack on the way out as they did at the Library of Congress, so getting the book out of here wasn't going to be a problem. Nobody gave me a second glance as I left the building.

Kevin had taken a vow of poverty, so he wouldn't have had the means or money to buy such a rare book. I suspected Edward Jaine had purchased it, but whether it belonged to Jaine or the Franciscans now was a matter for them to sort out. What I wanted to know was why Kevin had gone to the trouble of hiding it in a museum locker.

So before I did anything else, I was going to call Max Katzer, my neighbor, and ask if I could pay a visit to his antiques gallery in Georgetown. If he couldn't tell me something about the book's provenance and its value, he would know someone who could.

And, more to the point, was this 350-year-old book that seemed to grow heavier as I carried it down the museum steps important enough to be the reason for someone to murder Brother Kevin Boyle?