The Bone Vault - Linda Fairstein (42 page)

Mike picked several sheaves of paper out of the large pile and handed them to Mercer and me while he continued to search for a more up-to-date floor plan. The directory I was holding appeared to be a comprehensive inventory of categories of collections. It was several hundred pages thick, bound together with a large metal clamp.

I peered over at Mercer's folder, which was equally weighty. It listed names of donors, going back almost a century, and the specimens they had contributed to the museum.

"Is there anything that itemizes your collections by name and refers to the storage areas or display cases they're in?"

"Everything that's now on exhibit is computerized. You'll find that printout here, too," Mamdouba said, thumbing through the stack he had given to Mike.

"Like that only leaves us looking for the other ninety percent?"

"Well, we're trying to get that all into the system, Miss Cooper. It's a dreadfully difficult process. Two million butterflies, five million gall wasps, fifty million bones. Is that the kind of thing you're interested in?"

"Fiftymillion? How many of them are human?"

"They're mostly mammals, Detective. The numbers are in these folders that my assistant organized for you."

"Settle us in somewhere. It's gonna be a long night. And one of those magnetized passes--we'll need to borrow one in case we go to the basement."

Mamdouba was quiet for a few moments, undoubtedly trying to decide whether to engage in a battle with us. With obvious reluctance, he went into his desk drawer and handed Mike a plastic pass with a VIP guest label on it. He was thinking, it seemed to me, about what space he could stick us in temporarily that would cause the least interference or notice. "Come down the hall after me, please."

He led us to an empty office about five doors away from his corner room. It was sparsely furnished, except for the shelves of mollusks that covered three walls from floor to ceiling. "If this is acceptable, I'll check on you later."

Limpets, snails, mussels, and oysters, all looking very gray in their pickled juice, watched over us as we set to work spreading out the floor plans on the empty desktop. "Start looking?" Mike asked.

Mercer sat on the window ledge, resting one of his long legs against an open desk drawer. "I'd concentrate on the level below the ground floor and the area up on five, above the offices," he said, handing Mike a red felt-tipped pen. "They've got to be the least populated spaces when the museum is shut down. Look for unmarked rooms or closets and circle 'em so we can take a peek."

"And compare the different generations of maps," I added. "See if something has been reconfigured and whether it's accessible now or not."

"Man, we're gonna have to come back with comfy shoes. We got miles to cover in here."

I made myself comfortable on the floor and looked up at Mercer. "You and I need to cross-reference what we find. Why don't you start looking to see whether there are any familiar names from this case? Like is the Gerst collection mentioned, or anything about Erik Poste's father? Maybe there are references to items on loan from the Met, like the mummies Timothy Gaylord was talking about."

More than two hours went by and we were still drowning in paper. Mamdouba knocked on the door and pushed it ajar without saying a word.

"We keeping you?"

"On the contrary, Mr. Chapman. Just to let you know some of us will be here working late as well, in case that's helpful to you."

We had caught the attention of some of the staffers, and they were all probably too curious to leave when they stood the chance of seeing in which direction we might be moving.

He closed the door behind him and Mike spoke: "Damn. Looks like he'll try to outlast us. This could change the evening's plan."

"I've been through this twice," Mercer said. "Only name I recognize is Herbert Gerst."

"A private vault?"

"This doesn't show any such thing. Looks like he accounts for two of the elephants, a load of mammals --okapi, elands, and every other endangered species you can think of--and a whole bunch of crawling things that should be in little glass jars. But they're spread out all over the museum."

"And I've circled places where I think you could find arsenic," I said, "starting with the taxidermy department. I suppose I should let Dr. Kestenbaum go through these lists, too. I have no idea where else to search for it."

"Hey, it never occurred to any of us that the damn stuff was being used for so many different purposes in either museum. Somebody's gonna have to account for all of it."

My beeper went off and it was Harry Hinton's number. I called him from the phone on the desk. "We're on the way," he said, "and Ryan's still working on a court order for the computer interception. Maybe we'll have it up and running for you by morning."

"No luck for tonight?"

"Nah. Jumped on it too late."

"Mercer will meet you at the corner of Columbus Avenue and Seventy-seventh Street in fifteen minutes. Tell Clem I'll run interference inside."

Mike kept poring over the interior layouts and contrasting the areas that we had accounted for as either open display space or rooms we had seen when Zimm had taken us through the place last week. Mercer and I took the elevator down to the ground floor. We showed our identification to the guard and told him Mercer was going out to meet another detective, but would return right away.

The man was slumped back in his chair, the brim of his cap pulled down on his forehead with his eyes glued to a science fiction magazine. The small black- and-white monitors on the stand beside him showed the entrances and exits within the network of courtyards behind us; twilight was descending, making it even more difficult to distinguish between the various gray walls of the abutting structures.

I thought of making small talk to distract him, in case he might recognize Clem from her days of employment here, but he was as oblivious to me as he was to the television screens he was supposed to be viewing. I turned my back to him to be certain the long, highceilinged corridor was still empty. The poor lighting forced me to squint to see beyond midway, but the cavernous space would clearly make footsteps audible if anyone approached.

Minutes later, Mercer and Clem jogged toward the doorway. My square-badged companion, nose-deep in aliens and space pods, was grateful when I told him I'd swing open the door for my partners without needing his help. He waved me toward it and kept reading. Walking briskly on either side of our petite charge, Mercer and I led her around to the first elevator bank we came to and disappeared from view of the guard's watch station.

When we reached the last leg of the walk back to our small room, I left Mercer and Clem at the entrance to the hallway. Passing the open door where Mike was at work, I continued on to Mamdouba's corner turret. The door was closed, but I could hear voices inside. I gave the two of them a signal to come ahead to the mollusk room, then followed them in, locking the door behind me. The three of us rearranged ourselves in the cramped space to make room for Clem to sit. She had been glad for the short break, having showered and eaten a light dinner from the room service menu.

"Will this hold you guys?" She dumped out the contents of a small shopping bag. "Hope the city can afford the bill. It was all in the room, and I figured you might get hungry."

I laughed as Mike grabbed the glass jar of pistachios and Mercer reached for a couple of candy bars. I opened the bag of M&M's and washed them down with a few gulps from a can of soda that the three of us shared. We left the minibar bottles of scotch and vodka for the end of our night's routine.

"That's using your brain. I thought I'd have to eat bugs. C'mon," Mike said, flattening the creased floor plans with which he'd been familiarizing himself, pointing to the basement areas surrounding the joint exhibition offices. "Make yourself useful. Can you give us any more specifics about what's kept in these rooms?"

She talked us through some of the places where she had worked, guiding us with the capped tip of a pen. "It's deceptive. See this? It's a wall that separates two buildings. From the main floor it flows through like it's connected, but from where you're looking? You can't get there from here."

"Maybe we ought to go see these places," I said. "It'll give us a better sense of how we'll have to maneuver and what to specify when I draft a warrant."

"Let Mercer stay here with Clem, going over the rooms. Start figuring out where the bones are for us. You and I'll check out this part of the basement. See if anyone's still around."

I heard the click of the lock as Mercer closed the door behind us. We paused for a minute, and listened to the shrill voice of a woman, coming from Mamdouba's anteroom. I couldn't recognize from its pitch whether it was Eve Drexler, Anna Friedrichs, or the curator's assistant, who had stayed after hours.

Mike and I took the elevator to the lobby. The glass eyes of dozens of wild beasts, frozen in the safe confines of their dioramas, seemed to follow us down the vast corridor that led away from the museum's southwest corner toward the basement entrance Zimm had used to lead us downstairs on earlier visits.

Clem was right. The place was eerie at night. Vast spaces followed after one another with every turn and change in direction, each one dimly lit at best. Elegantly detailed Art Deco light globes suspended from ceilings on brass chains had the look and effectiveness of another era.

Every thirty feet or so, a modern fluorescent fixture had been stuck in place, looking like something you'd see in a bus station rest room.

We descended down the dismal staircase to the section of the basement we had seen before. Zimm was still at his desk, working on the computer, three jars of repulsive arachnids at his side.

"Mamdouba said you might be down. Anything I can help with?"

I had my legal pad and pen ready to take notes. "Just back for some detail we missed. You alone down here?"

"Nope. Lights are still on. I think we've got a full house tonight." He smiled at Mike and me. "You're sure stirring up some excitement."

We avoided the exhibition offices and headed to the far end of the hallway. Doorway after doorway, I sketched a record of whether the rooms were open or locked, what form of animal specimen seemed to be floating in the jars on the shelves, and what the climate conditions were.

Where had poor Katrina Grooten's body been stored all these months? The possible options were overwhelming. I made a note to pin down Dr. Kestenbaum for a date to come back to take temperature controls to help determine the most likely surroundings for the creation of an "Incorruptible."

For more than an hour we worked our way in and out of small storage rooms and smaller laboratories. Each time we reached a fork in the road, I'd take one side and Mike the other, agreeing to meet back at the intersection in fifteen minutes. We worked our way through three separate basement areas without any findings of significance.

By the time we got to the fourth subbasement, I was beginning to feel at home with the chemical odors, artificial lights, and countless numbers of dead things that filled every shelf, drawer, and closet.

"Your call, Coop," Mike said, reading from a small sign on the wall in front of us after he pulled a hanging string to turn on an overhead bulb. "Wasps and winged things to the left. Dinosaur fossils to the right."

"No bugs for me."

"They're not alive."

"No bugs, period. I owe you, okay? There's no choice here."

I started down the narrow corridor to my right, trying the doors and finding several of them locked. The fifth knob gave easily, and I groped along the wall till I found the light switch.

This hallway had possibilities. Here was a room labeledBarosaurus Femurs, with leg bones larger than tree stumps. A quick scan suggested nothing small enough to be human, but I could not reach the higher shelves or see their contents. I marked it on my pad for a return visit.

Door after door yielded similar fossilized parts. Some rooms were all dinosaur heads, with hollow eye sockets four feet in diameter and horned nostrils that stood taller than my waist. Others had nothing but vertebrae lined up end to end. It would be hard to discern, without an expert guide, whether any other species remains had been mixed in with these antiquities.

I reached the end of the gray hallway and pushed against the last door, meeting with resistance as I did. It opened slowly, operating on a rusty old air pump hinged on the wall behind it. I leaned against the door to secure it in place while I studied the contents of the room. This one stored even smaller bones, and I walked to a rack against the far wall to study a tag that appeared to have some written description on it.

As I bent over to read it, hoping the bare bulb from the far end of the hallway would provide enough light for me, the door came loose from its anchored position. I heard a loud whooshing sound as it sprung away from the wall and slammed shut, leaving me alone in the confined space with a century's accumulation of dust- covered animal skeletons.

I tried to tell myself that I was too tired to be upset. I talked to myself like a mother calming a six-year-old child. They're just bones, I kept repeating, as I tried to get my bearings and make my way back to the door in the dark. There's nothing in here to hurt me. I'm in a museum, the most child-friendly museum in the world, and my favorite policeman is fifty yards away.

I reached out to hold on to a shelf to help me feel my way back to the exit. I brushed against the rough surface of a ragged piece of cartilage and moved my hand upward to grasp the cool steel of the rack instead. Inching along step by step, I startled myself when I struck a glass object, banging it against something else.

It was a large glass jar.

Shit. I stopped in my tracks. Like dominoes, the jar I hit had knocked against its neighbor, rattling the one behind it until another in the next row toppled on its side and broke. The noxious fluid inside splashed to the floor, releasing both a foul smell and whatever pickled creatures had been sleeping inside.