The Bone Vault - Linda Fairstein (23 page)

Mike leaned in over the young man's shoulder to read through the list. "Sandstone. A four-foot-tall Cambodian statue of Ganesha, the Hindu god with an elephant's head. And a bronze statue of Theseus fighting the Minotaur. What do these initials mean?"

"Somebody from the Met team has to sign out the pieces here, sending them back. That last one, that's signed by the head of European sculpture."

"Whoa, here's some Egyptian stuff going back."

"Like what?" "The coffin of some guy named Khumnakht. A false door from the tomb of Metjetji. Who signed for this?"

Zimm brought up the signature. "Timothy Gaylord. I'll print it out."

Mike grabbed the pages as they came out of the machine.

"Want this one, too? Looks like another big sarcophagus that we shipped up to the Cloisters the week before. May eighth. Some guy named Ermengol, also carved in limestone. The whole block of stone is supported by three lions, and I think one of them has a pig in his mouth." He was more riveted by the animal images than by our mission.

"Signed out by?"

"Bellinger. Hiram Bellinger."

"Can you search through your programs to see whether Katrina signed in or out on anything?"

"Did that already, for Mamdouba. Nope. Somebody over her head would have to do that. She wouldn't have had that authority."

"How about a cross-check, to see whether any other exhibits are missing. Things that have not been signed out--like the sarcophagus--but have disappeared." "Ditto on Mamdouba. That's going to take a lot longer to do, but we've got a team of students who are trying to do a hand count right now. So far, three other items can't be located. But they're all small things. Pilfering, probably. Like a seven-inch silver drinking vessel from medieval Germany, shaped like a stag. Kinds of things that people could easily sneak out of here. Not quite as startling as shipping out that coffin."

Mike straightened up. "Can you take us to where the fishes sleep?"

"Ichthyology? Why not?" Zimm locked the door behind him and led us back up the drab stairway we had descended earlier. "Sorry for all the steps. It's the only way in and out of this basement. We're kind of landlocked down here. So you guys do any DNA on her body?"

I could tell from the expression on Mike's face that he was as surprised by the question as I was. "You know anything about Katrina's murder besides what you've read in the papers?"

"Nope. But I wasn't sure whether Mamdouba told you that all of us who work here, they've got our genetic profiles on record. They've got our DNA."

No one had mentioned it to us, and the idea had never crossed my mind.

"Much of the work we do in the labs here is identifying different species and subspecies of animal life within our fields of specialty. See what their similarities and differences are, and which characters are threatened with extinction. The bird guys can tell you whether a spotted owl on a mountain range is a relative of the ones that live a mile away, or in Northern California, or if it's more closely linked to a particular family of owls in Mexico."

"What does that have to do with you scientists?"

"We sit at the microscopes all day, looking at and breathing onto our specimens and slides. A sneeze, some sweat--well, anything that one of us contributes to the mix would obviously throw off the research results. So they take an oral swab from each of us when we start working here. Thought you might just want to know that."

The same procedure was followed at most morgues and serologists' offices. It should have occurred to me that anyone working with genetic samples would be required to have his or her own DNA on file. If Dr. Kestenbaum found something of serological value on any of Katrina's crime scene evidence, it would be a good place to start.

We crossed through several corridors until Zimm came to another unmarked door behind a row of service elevators. Again he swiped his identification card and took us into a dingy staircase that led four tiers below the main lobby.

The hallways were dark and he flipped on light switches as he walked along. "A lot of people took the day off, before the long weekend. But I've got friends who work in this department, and it's where I spent my first two summers, back when I was in high school. I can show you most of what you need."

There were compact laboratories on either side of us, filled from floor to ceiling with fish tanks and glass jars of all sizes. Then came storerooms of fish samples-- some two million of them--each drifting in some kind of watery solution, carefully labeled and housed in stacks of rolling metal cabinets, like so many books on library shelves.

"What's that smell?" Mike asked.

"Which one? Dead matter? Preservatives? The odor of death is all over this museum. We've just learned to mask it pretty well."

I studied the markings on scores of fish skeletons, their whiteness standing out in striking contrast to the dull painted gray of the basement floors and ceilings. "How do you do that?"

"When I was first an intern here, they brought in a huge whale skeleton that had washed up on a beach in Long Island. I'd never smelled anything like it. Couldn't shake the odor. My boss sent me to Columbus Avenue, to a drugstore. Oil of bergamot, he told me to ask for. I bought the place out."

"What is it?"

"It's an essence made from the rind of a citrus fruit. Bergamot--it's like an orange smell with mint in it. We'd just douse some cloths in that and leave them draped over the specimen when we weren't working on it. Everyone here has tricks like that. It's the only way to deal with the smell of the dead specimens."

Mike was writing in his notebook. He'd make Kestenbaum test the linen cloth that was wrapped around Katrina's body. Perhaps the mummified linen had been soaked in a substance that had masked the odor of death while she was in storage somewhere. That sweet smell that hit us when the coffin lid was opened on the truck, before the stronger blast of garlic, might have been something like bergamot.

"Suppose you wanted to kill someone, Zimm. How would you do it down here?" Mike was checking to see whether the availability of arsenic was common knowledge. The cause of Katrina's death had not yet appeared in the press.

He steered us past the ichthyology X-ray department and into a room crowded with three-foot-long fish tanks, alive with samples. "Know anybody with a weak heart? This sucker's an electric catfish. African. He can pump out about three hundred volts when he's riled up."

The whiskered brown creatures darted about, one pressing his nose against the glass as though he wanted to prove Zimm's point to us.

"Over here's where we keep the tissues, for molecular work." He turned on another light in a small lab across the hall. There were two enormous vats, withDANGER signs printed on their sides. "Liquid nitrogen. Eighteen degrees. If I stuck your head in this for just a minute you'd burn to death from the intense cold. Painful, fast, quiet." "But you'd still have the problem of getting rid of me."

"I could at least keep you in cold storage till I figured out how to do that. Us bug guys? We don't get many things that won't fit in a jar. A couple of giant insects from the Amazon or the African jungles. You wanna talk to some people in mammalogy? They just got a new degreaser."

"What's that?"

"Hey, you're the detective. How do you figure they get their skeletal samples clean? They got this brand-new degreasing machine. You can fit an entire elephant skull into it, submerge it for a few days. This thing takes all the fat off the bones. Then we give them some of our beetles to nibble off whatever's left, before they stick it in the freezer to kill off all the germs. Dip somebody in there and they'd be clean as a whistle."

I ignored the midday rumblings of my empty stomach. Museum work was killing my appetite.

He was leading us down a long, dim corridor and around one more corner. "Ever hear of a coelacanth?"

"No."

"It's the missing link of the fish world. All anybody had seen for centuries were fossils of this thing. Scientists thought it had died out several million years ago. Five feet long, very unusual fin structure, gives birth to live young. In 1938 a trawler off South Africa came up with one. A young scientist working down there sketched it and then sent the fish over to this museum. We've had it here ever since."

"That same fish?"

"Yeah. She's pickled."

"How come everyone in your business uses that expression?"

"Because alcohol is such a great preservative. This beauty has lasted more than sixty years, just as she was pulled out of the water, in a solution that's seventy percent ethyl alcohol." He was around the last nook and into an open space.

"Have a look. There's her coffin."

We were standing in front of a six-foot-long metal container with a hinged lid. It was three feet high and a couple of feet deep, large enough to hold a prehistoric fish or a large shark, and most human beings I knew.

20

Zimm lifted the lid on the heavy metal casket. "Stand back. The smell of the alcohol can knock you off your feet." He was right. My head jerked away and I was reminded of the overwhelming stench of formaldehyde that had been so pervasive when I viewed my first autopsies at the medical examiner's office as part of my training for homicide investigations.

I covered my mouth with one hand and rested the other on the end of the case. Mike and I stared in at the behemoth, whose single glassy eye gazed back at us. Zimm reached into the murky fluid and lifted up the head of the coelacanth for us to admire. The fish was larger than the body of Katrina Grooten.

Mike was more interested in the container than the fish. "What's this?" he asked, tapping on the inside.

"It's completely lined with stainless steel. You couldn't have odors like this escaping into the room for very long, and still have people working around here, could you?"

"You'd lose me at the end of a day. How many of these have they got?" Mike helped lower the lid into place.

"Maybe four. Maybe six. I'll ask my friend next week."

"Where are the rest of them?"

Zimm shrugged his shoulders. "This is the only one that's got a permanent resident. They move the others around as needed." We had walked through most of the department and had not seen any similar coffinlike vats. "They're certainly not small enough to conceal."

"People don't hide them intentionally. There are endless numbers of small offices in which the research is done. Some are probably tucked away in corners of those rooms, and others are in storage areas. Believe me, Ms. Cooper, you'd need an army to go through this place from top to bottom to figure out everything that we've got in here. And Mr. Mamdouba isn't about to let that happen."

"Those other friends of Katrina's you mentioned, can you take us to meet them?"

"I'm not really sure who's in today." He hesitated, and I thought he was afraid to make trouble for any other graduate students.

"We're just trying to talk to people who might have known she was in distress. People whom she may have confided in about her return home to South Africa."

"I wasn't kidding about her friend, the one who left. I didn't know her by name. Only by sight. I just know she was an anthropologist who was asked to resign and --"

"Fired?"

"Yeah. That's why she's in London now." "What do you have to do to get fired from a natural history museum?"

"Steal things would be the easiest. But that wasn't her problem," Zimm said. "Rumor was she crossed someone in administration."

"Mamdouba?"

"No, but he'd certainly know the story."

Mike looked at his notes. "And the African peoples connection?"

"They're up on the second floor. I can take you up there. Maybe I'll recognize her pals."

We trekked again, up the stairs and out into the public space, past North American forests and through the Hall of Biodiversity, among the birds of the world, and into the African Peoples hall.

Zimm asked the guard if he knew where any of the interns were, but the man just shook his head.

My beeper began to vibrate as I stood before a photo exhibit of an early African expedition. "Cell phones work up here?"

"Not in the basement, and not in most interior areas like this. Better walk back to the birds." I checked Ryan Blackmer's number and returned his call. "I've been trying to page you for half an hour. Black hole?"

"Yeah, sorry. These museum foundations are too thick in places. What'd I miss?"

"The meet with the Internet pedophile that we had set for three o'clock today? The perp canceled."

"You think he smells something?"

"Nah. Wants to do it Monday. Sounds like he just couldn't get into town early enough. I didn't want you hanging around the museum for no reason. And Sarah said to tell you one other thing. We're on the lookout for a chaperone from a company the Maury Povich show uses."

"What for?"

"The producer brought in a bunch of wild-child types for a show called `Uncontrollable Teens.' Would it surprise you to know that after the taping, a spunky fifteen-year-old from Hemp Hill, Texas, took off with the chaperone? Last seen giving him a blow job in the backseat of the stretch limo, parked right in front of the hotel where they were waiting to pick up her mother. Wire services have it."

"How'd they get it?" "Mother gave it out. She's looking to sue the show."

"Where the hell was she while the kid was on the loose?"

"Back in the hotel room with a guy she picked up at a bar the night before. Must be a genetic thing."

"We're almost done here. If I don't have to wait for your sting to go down, we've got another witness to interview," I said, thinking of Ruth Gerst, the Met trustee.

Our eager guide took us through many of the back corridors and unpeopled areas of the museum before we left: hallway after darkened hallway filled with cases of forgotten bird displays, rows of unmarked lockers, and blocks of empty containers covered over with thick layers of plastic tarp. By the time he walked us out the door, it was close to three o'clock.

Zimm had known nothing about arsenic sources within the museum, since his department did not use any in their work, but he was now alert to endless ideas about how to dispose of a body within the vast network of buildings.