The Bone Vault - Linda Fairstein (7 page)

"But surely, beneath the skin--"

"I'm telling you, they did this to her two or three times. They reburied her and brought her up again. There are lots of witnesses. Muscles and ligaments were all in good condition."

"Why did they do it?"

"Incorruptibility used to be one of the requisites for canonization, until some of our boys began to cheat and do it the surgical way. Like Saint Margaret of Cortona. Turns out she wasn't preserved naturally. Had a little medical intervention. Did it by the Egyptian method, then put her back in the coffin and pretended it had happened naturally.

"But Bernadette was a real phenomenon. The third time they brought her up was when they began to take relics. Pieces of her bones that doctors and priests removed from her corpse. Part of the body of the saint to help perform more miracles."

"They cut out the poor woman's bones?"

"Ribs, muscles. If they found gallstones they took them, too. Looking for proof of divine grace, trying to memorialize the person who was responsible for attracting this powerful good." "So, you're telling me that Bernadette was mummified? Naturally, not like the Egyptians did with the removal of all the body organs?"

"It really was miraculous, at least in the Church if not to science. I mean, the way she was buried, nobody expected it. She'd been very ill at the time she died, and the chapel in which she'd been interred was so humid that everybody expected the flesh had decayed. After all, the rosary was rusty, the crucifix inside the coffin had turned green, and even her habit was damp."

I shuddered at Mike's description. "This must have been very rare. Zita, Bernadette--"

"Saint Ubald of Gubbio, Blessed Margaret of Savoy. You want me to go on? I know my saints and virgins better than I know Yankee statistics. Had my knuckles rapped enough times back in parochial school for catechisms I couldn't follow, but when they got to this kind of stuff, it grabbed me."

"I'm missing something here. You two have figured out who our victim is? You're not trying to tell me she's some kind of saint, are you?"

"She's Saint Cleo to me, working her only little miracle for us. I never thought we'd find anything under those linen wraps. I figured that body would be partially if not fully decomposed. You gotta think the person who put her in that box and stuck a shipping label on it to sit on the blacktop in Newark during the summer heat, or in the hold of a freighter headed for Cairo, wouldn't have expected there'd be anything left to make a visual ID of his victim." "You've done the autopsy?" I asked Kestenbaum.

"Later today. But we've unwrapped the linen and taken the photos. Mike's right. The body is completely intact, in remarkable condition."

"Maybe she just died recently, within the week."

"Unlikely. I'd say she's been dead for months, maybe the better part of a year. I'll have a better idea after I get to work, but the skin has some discoloration and it's shriveled a bit, the muscles have atrophied, and the lashes on her left eyelid have come out and are stuck to the brow."

"And she's dressed in winter clothing, am I right, doc?"

"Yeah. Nothing you'd wear at the end of May. Heavy woolen slacks and a four-ply cashmere sweater with long sleeves and a crewneck."

Kestenbaum removed a few Polaroid photos from the pocket of his lab coat and passed them to me. I lifted the one on top for a close look and passed the others to Mike.

The young woman stared back at me with a sober expression. It was remarkable to think that she had been dead for any period of time greater than a few days. She appeared to be about thirty years old. Her skin had a strange cast, but I could not tell how much of that was due to the poor quality of the Polaroid shot in the dim light of the morgue basement.

"I'm telling you, Coop, she's an Incorruptible."

Her sandy brown hair seemed to be falling out of her scalp, but otherwise, she appeared to be perfectly preserved.

"She's going to tell us what we need to know. Where she's been all this time--"

"Any ideas, doc?"

"Think about the way the saints were buried. A number of pathologists have studied these cases, just as religious historians have. Most of the Incorruptibles, before canonization, were interred in burial vaults beneath the altars of churches. Not only was it hallowed ground but it was also cool and the area was often lined with heavy stone. The temperature was usually quite low beneath the floor, even when the seasons changed. That's what you're going to be looking for, Mike. Someplace cool and dry that would naturally preserve this body."

"What happened to her?" I studied her small face, with its high cheekbones and thin, straight nose.

"I'll work on that. You and Chapman figure out who she is and who wanted her dead."

"No signs of trauma?" "None."

"You don't think she could have died naturally, do you?" I suddenly worried that we did not even have a crime victim here.

Chapman shook his head. "Like a premature burial? Cleo just got in the box because she didn't feel well, and someone closed the lid? I don't think so, Coop. How about you, doc?"

Kestenbaum wasn't the guessing type. He'd wait and let the science of the postmortem procedure tell him what had caused the young woman's death. That's why I was surprised when he answered Mike.

"Don't quote me on this before I give you a call later on today. In all likelihood, it's poison. I'd say it's arsenic."

7

Mike was still chewing on his hot dog as we jogged up the several tiers of steps at the entrance of the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue at Eighty- second Street shortly after 2P.M.

"Shootings, stabbings, strangulations. Drownings, decapitations, defenestrations. Beatings, bombings, bludgeonings--" He had a manner of death for every riser as we maneuvered our way around sun-bathing students and sightseers. "Hey, watch it, Houdini, will ya?" An amateur magician was performing tricks for a crowd of onlookers and from under his cloak released a pigeon that practically landed on Mike's head. "A dove I wouldn't mind, but these guys stink."

He skipped a beat to wave off the bird. "Robberies, rapes, rubouts. I've had everything else, but I don't think I've ever had a homicide by poison. You?"

"Just the guy who put Drano in his wife's martini."

"Yeah, but she didn't die."

"Almost. Burned a hole in her gut."

"Doesn't count in my squad. She lived to tell about it. Jeez, I forget how huge this place is."

"Quarter of a mile long, more than a million square feet in area."

"How do you know that?"

"I read it in the program last night, before things got crazy."

The four sets of double doors were wide open, freshening the interior with the mild breeze of the May afternoon. The Great Hall was a spectacular space, elegant and airy beneath the high, domed ceiling and filled with light. "My dad used to bring me here all the time."

"Mine, too." My father began to buy art after the success of his medical invention, and had a small but impressive collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth- century European paintings, Flemish to Florentine.

"Saturday morning?"

"As soon as the doors opened."

"Same for us. It was my reward, after five days of school--my daily torture--and before I had to hang out in church all day on Sunday. You think we would have hit it off if we met here back when we were six or seven? I picture you all decked out in patent leather Mary Janes with starched crinolines and dopey little headbands on."

"Wrong kid. I was a total tomboy, except for my ballet slippers."

"You probably weren't quite so bossy yet, then, were you?"

We were having the identical thought. As different as our backgrounds were, we had probably stood in this very space on the very same day many times during our childhood. Mike Chapman was half a year older than I. His father, Brian, had died of a massive coronary just forty-eight hours after turning in his gun and shield. Twenty-six years as a cop had earned him the respect and admiration of his favorite son, who was a junior at Fordham University when Brian died so suddenly. Although Mike completed college and graduated the following spring, he enrolled in the Police Academy shortly afterward.

Mike had risen through the department like a rocket. He had spent most of the years since his promotion to the detective bureau in the elite Manhattan North Homicide Squad, which was home to some of the best men--and a smattering of women--in the NYPD. His days and nights were devoted to solving the steady stream of killings that occurred on his half of the island, north of Fifty-ninth Street. We had met in my rookie year in the office, when we both had other assignments, and had spent a great deal of time together, on and off the job.

"Wipe the mustard off your chin before we get to Thibodaux's office."

"See what I mean? I take it back. You must have been a pain in the ass already by the time you were six. It's in your blood. Where'd you hang out?"

"Second floor, paintings and sculpture. That's where I saw my first Degas." I had started taking ballet lessons when I was five years old. The elegance of the movement and the beauty of the music had always been a refuge for me, and to this day I continued to take classes whenever I could fit them into my unpredictable schedule. As a child, I had often sat spellbound in front of the painting of two dancers practicing in their white tulle dresses with large yellow ribbons on their backs, stretching their legs along the barre before they began their exercise on pointe, hoping to grow up to be just like them. "Me, I went straight over here," Mike said, pointing across the hall past the bottom of the Grand Staircase. "Arms and armor." The Met had a stunning collection, and although my brothers spent hours wandering around the cases filled with gilded parade armor, presentation swords, and rapiers, I raced past them to get to my dancers and the other portraiture I loved so much.

I asked the woman at the information desk the way to the museum director's office. She called ahead to Thibodaux's secretary, who told her we were expected.

"This is where I got hooked on battles and warriors. Couldn't get enough of that stuff." Mike had an encyclopedic knowledge of military history. I knew he had studied the field at college, but it had never occurred to me to ask how his interest had originated.

We walked through the galleries of Greek and Roman art to find the bank of elevators to take us upstairs. "They've got more than fourteen thousand objects in there, from knights in chain mail to samurai swords. There's an armor workshop in the basement. Uncle Sam used it in World War Two, copying medieval designs to make flak jackets for the army."

A middle-aged woman was standing by the elevator door when we got out. "Miss Cooper? I'm Eve Drexler, Mr. Thibodaux's assistant." I introduced her to Mike and we accompanied her down the hallway. Her ankle-length flowered print dress swished between her legs as she walked to the door of the office, ushering us past the secretary and into a lavishly decorated room with large windows. The sunny view looked across Fifth Avenue to the handsome town houses that had been converted years ago into the prestigious private girls' school Marymount. The perks of the directorate were obvious. An ancient hero, sculpted in bronze, was battling a centaur on Thibodaux's desk, a Savonnerie carpet ran the length of the room, and paintings by recognizable Masters-- C�zanne, Goya, Brueghel--were hung on three of the walls.

"Miss Cooper, Mr. Chapman, won't you sit down?"

The director reached out to shake hands with us, and moved from his chair to join us at a conference table. An ornate silver tray holding an antique coffeepot that had probably served an emperor or queen had been placed in front of Ms. Drexler, who poured for each of us into an ordinary mug.

"I've been trying to get as much information for you about that shipment as I possibly could," Thibodaux began, opening a folder which contained a sheaf of papers.

Drexler seated herself at the far end of the table, opposite her boss, while Chapman and I were next to each other. She opened a leather-bound notebook and seemed to be dating the top page, noting the time and writing down each of our names. Mike flipped open the cardboard cover of his steno pad, a clean one for the beginning of a new case, and made similar notations.

"I've made copies of the bill of lading so you can take them along. Have you learned anything this morning from the medical examiner?" "Nope. They'll be doing the autopsy right about now." Mike reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out one of the head shots taken at the morgue this morning. "Brought this along to see whether you happened to know this girl. Maybe she worked here or something."

Thibodaux took the Polaroid shot, glanced at it, almost doing a double take before turning it facedown on the table. "No, she's not at all familiar to me. But we are a very big place, Mr. Chapman, and I can't say for a moment that I know half the people who work here."

"You looked startled."

"Well, I am, eh? Such a young woman, it's a terrible thing. I never expected she would look--so--well, so alive as she does. To be in a coffin like that for some time, well--"

"What do you mean, `for some time'?"

"I have absolutely no idea how long she was there, it's just that I assume she didn't die yesterday, Mr. Chapman."

"What's that assumption based on?"

"Here, why don't you look these papers over. Eve has made this set for you." He passed a copy of the multipage document and we started to read it together. "While it is clear that the truck went to New Jersey directly from the museum, the shipment was made up of objects from a number of other institutions. As you can see, there are records of which crates came in when, and from which other museums."

I scanned the top few pages, squinting at the tiny typewritten descriptions of the various sources. There were amphorae on loan from the Smithsonian, African masks from the American Museum of Natural History, mummy cases from the extensive collection at the Brooklyn Museum, and Asian paintings from the Getty.

"I think you've just made our job about a thousand times more difficult. These things all appear to be mixed into the same crates as your own stuff. Why'd that happen?"