Lethal Legacy (27 page)

“May I see one?” Mike asked.

“Sure,” Lucy said, standing on tiptoe to remove
one from the mug in which it was standing.

The knife was about seven inches long, with an
angled steel blade and wooden handle. Mike held it in his left hand and with
his right thumb tested the cutting edge. “Wicked.”

He passed it to Mercer, who studied the beveled
edge. “We ought to take a few of these to the morgue. They’d make a pretty
distinctive cut.”

“Was Tina…?” Lucy couldn’t finish the sentence.

“We’re not sure what happened to her yet,” Mike
said. “We’re just trying to help the medical examiner out. Did Tina keep her
tools here?”

“Some of them,” Lucy said. “They’re in this next
cubicle.”

The three of us followed her to the desktop at
which Tina had been working. Her station had been left in perfect order. It was
a smaller space than Lucy’s, and there were fewer tools displayed, but Tina had
been spending only part of her time at the library.

“Would you know if any of her knives or scalpels
was missing?” Mike asked.

“I haven’t any idea. These things are our security
blankets. I can look at my shelves in the morning and be able to tell you
exactly where everything is. But that’s unique to each conservator, and we
never touch each other’s tools.”

“Visitors,” Mercer said. “Did anyone visit Tina
while she was here?”

Lucy thought for a few seconds. “When she was on
staff, of course people from other departments dropped in to talk about their
needs, or just take a break. Lately? The usual people coming by to queue up
their projects, beg us to jump the line. Some of them know Tina, so they
chatted.”

“Any outsiders?”

“Just one that I can think of, several weeks ago.”

“Do you know who he was?” Mike asked.

“She, actually. It was a woman. And I didn’t know
her.”

“Can you describe her?”

Lucy closed her eyes and pulled up an image. “An
attractive woman, about fifty years old. Tall and really thin, a little
overdressed and jeweled for eleven in the morning.”

A good shot Tina’s visitor was Minerva Hunt. “Did
they arrive together?”

“No. She rang the bell and one of my colleagues
let her in. She asked to see Tina, so I assumed it was someone she was working
with.”

“Do you know any of the Hunts?” Mike asked.

Lucy looked over her shoulder to see whether Jill
was in earshot, and when it seemed she was far enough away, Lucy leaned back
against one of the worktables.

“Not personally,” she said. “Sometimes we joke
about the collectors. We know some of their books so well, we feel like we’ve
lived with them. In my imagination, I’ve been talking to Jasper Hunt the Third
for years, even though we’ve never been introduced. His father had exquisite
taste, that’s for sure.”

“Have you met either of his children?” Mike asked.
“Talbot or Minerva?”

“Just his leather-bound babies, Detective.”

“The woman who came to see Tina,” I said. “Do you
remember how long she stayed?”

“I don’t think she was there more than ten or
fifteen minutes.”

“What did she want?”

Lucy looked away from me. “None of my business. I
don’t know.”

“But your desks are so close to each other.
They’re back to back.”

“They argued, okay? That’s all I know. The woman
seemed to have a bad temper. I didn’t hear words, but she was displeased about
something Tina had done. She sort of chewed Tina out, and then she left.”

“Did Tina talk about it at all?”

“Not to me. Not to any of us, I’d guess,” Lucy
said. “But as soon as the woman left, Tina broke down and started crying. I
asked if she was okay, and she said she was just upset and needed to go outside
for some fresh air. That’s all I know.”

“What day that was?” Mercer asked.

Lucy was beginning to understand there was some
importance to what she had observed. I wondered if that would jog her memory.

“Two, maybe three weeks ago. You can ask my
colleagues if they can place it. The only other person who engaged Tina in any
kind of—well,
personal
conversation was Mr. Krauss. But he actually came
to see me. Sort of surprised him that she was here, and I guess he asked her
what she was doing.”

“Krauss?” Mike asked, looking at me for help in placing
the name.

“Would that be Jonah Krauss?” I asked Lucy. I
remembered that Alger Herrick had mentioned his name to us.

“Exactly. He’s on our board. Drops in every now
and then—a lot of the trustees do—to see what we’re working on and what we
might need.”

“Did Krauss know Tina?”

Lucy pushed a lock of hair behind her ear. “He
certainly seemed to. I can’t imagine he has a clue who I am, but once he caught
sight of her, he made a beeline right for her and called her by name.”

“Did you—?”

“I didn’t hear a word, Detective, and it all
seemed very cordial. I just thought it was strange that they knew each other.”

There was an index card tacked to the wall on the
side of Tina’s desk. “What’s that?” I asked.

“Might be the list of things she had in the works.
I track mine on my laptop, but everyone does it differently.”

I pulled the thumbtack and the card came off with
it.

“Is this Tina’s handwriting?” I asked.

Lucy glanced at the card. “Yes. She always
printed.”

I thought of the call slip that had been in Tina’s
pocket. This was not written in the same style. I read the list to Mike as
Mercer walked off, making his way around the far end of the large room.

“‘The Nijinksy Diaries—Performing Arts Collection.
The Grunwald Correspondence—Rare Books. The Whistler Sketches—drypoint—Art and
Architecture.’”

Lucy Tannis interrupted me. “That can’t be
current, Ms. Cooper. Those are all items from collections in this library. Tina
had finished those projects. I saw the papers down here when they were assigned
to her. She’s only doing private work now.”

I skipped to the bottom of the list. “What does
this mean, Lucy? ‘The Hunt Legacy.’ What’s that?”

She squinted to look at the words, then shook her
head. “I’m pretty familiar with the Hunt Collection. I’ve never seen that
expression before.”

I passed the card to Mike, who pocketed it as
Mercer called his name.

“Wassup?”

“In here, in the back room. You and Alex come
quick. Leave the girl.”

Mercer’s voice had an urgency to it that I rarely
heard. I broke into a trot and made my way around the old wooden tables that
filled the room.

There was an archway into the adjacent space, a
darkened work area that had large mechanical equipment—paper cutters and a
standing book press—and along one side of the room, where Mercer was waiting,
three huge stainless steel chests were lined up end to end.

“These are freezers,” he said, lifting the lid of
the first one to show us the books—four of them—inside. “Remember how cool
Tina’s body was?”

“Yes, but this doesn’t look like it’s been
disturbed at all,” I said.

Mercer lifted the closure of the second one and
revealed a single volume, folio size, resting in its icy storage container.

When he shifted to the third freezer and hoisted
its heavy lid, I gasped. The book inside was small and slim, its gold calf
binding elaborately decorated with gilt designs and lettering:
The Poems of
Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

The cold blast of air from within the chest
couldn’t hide the dark red stain, most likely blood, that had seeped into the
pale calfskin—and three strands of brown hair that had frozen onto the cover of
the old book.

TWENTY-TWO

“What’s with the freezers?” Mike asked Lucy.

“Why? Do you think…?”

Jill had gone over to Lucy when she heard us run
to the back. She was standing with her arm around the girl, who seemed to be
trying to absorb the fact that Tina’s body may have been concealed right under
her nose.

“How often do you open them?”

“Not—not often. Not for months at a time,” Lucy
said.

“What are they for?”

“Disaster recovery. Freezing the books stops mold
from doing more destruction. It kills insects that have infested them. You want
to do some damage control to a hurt volume, you put it in the freezer, record
that in the log in the back room, and nobody opens it again for six months.”

“And everybody working down here knows that?” Mike
asked.

“Yes. But not just us. All the curators upstairs
know it, too. So do most of the collectors we deal with,” Lucy said, wide-eyed
with concern, as though Mike were accusing her of Tina’s murder.

“Frozen coffins,” Mike said to none of us in
particular. He was trying to get a signal on his phone. “How frigging
convenient. Plenty of room for a short broad. Odor proof—and it already stinks
in here. An unwelcoming basement room with no windows for anyone to peek
inside. Whoever killed her could have kept her on ice for weeks, if the mayor
hadn’t made the evening so convenient for a nearby disposal.”

“The thermostat’s right on top,” Mercer said. “I
imagine he turned up the temperature till he took the body out.”

“Same effect. Cool but not so stiff he couldn’t
move her after the rigor passed,” Mike said. “By the time somebody discovered a
body, there’d be so much contamination in this room that no forensics would be
of any value.”

“Cell phones don’t work down here,” Lucy Tannis
said. “You can use the landline near the door.”

“Why don’t you wait here with Lucy while I grab
the Crime Scene crew?” Mike said to Mercer. His impatience was palpable. “She
can explain this place to the guys. You show them what you found. I’ll take
Coop and Jill with me. We’ll make that map room the command post.”

Mike took the stairs three at a time, yelling back
at us to wait for him in Bea Dutton’s office.

There was no reason for me to separate Jill and
Bea at this point. I walked to a corner of the room, away from them, to call
Pat McKinney and give him an update. I was unlikely to get any goodwill out of
letting him be the one to tell Battaglia about the developments, but it was
worth a try.

By the time I finished answering McKinney’s
questions, Mike had returned.

“Did you catch up with the guys?”

“Yeah,” he said. “They’re going to process the
conservation lab first. You going downtown to your office?”

“That makes the most sense. If you need a warrant
drafted or any subpoenas, I’ll be at my desk.”

“Excuse me, Mike,” Bea said as she approached us.
“Are you going to keep me locked up all day? I don’t want to be a nuisance, but
if your plan is just to make me sit here, I’ll go stir-crazy.”

I could tell that he liked her manner—feisty and
direct.

“Now how about that assignment I gave you? That
should keep you busy.”

She laughed at him. “A historical footprint of
Bryant Park? Who do you think prepared the one that was actually used when the
place was restored twenty years ago?”

Mike walked me to the door, and I turned to thank
Jill for her cooperation.

“Dead bodies, right? Like I told Alex, nothing but
dead bodies down there.”

“Dead wrong, Detective,” Bea said, wagging a
finger at him.

“What do you mean?”

“Books. Eighty-eight miles of books.”

“What happened to the bodies?” Mike asked.

I stopped in the doorway, thinking about the spot near
Sixth Avenue where Tina Barr’s body was found. It was a long city block away
from the conservation lab just below us on the Fifth Avenue side of the
library. “What do you mean, there are books under the park?”

“The entire piece of land below Bryant Park was
turned into an underground extension of the library a while back.”