Lethal Legacy

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.”

I let go of the door and it closed behind me. Mike rubbed his hands together and then scratched his head. “Connected to this building?”

“By a one-hundred-and-twenty-foot-long tunnel,” Bea said, coming alive again as she explained the setup to us. “They couldn’t build an extension that would change the appearance of the main library, because that’s landmarked. So when the park was closed for restoration, the old Revolutionary War battleground and the potter’s field were dug up. Originally, the stacks were right beneath us in this section, but we outgrew that space ages ago. The Bryant Park extension has greater capacity than this entire library.”

“How do we get there?” he asked, ready to dash off to the nearest stairwell.

It had never occurred to any of us when Barr’s body was found the night before that below the park was a cavernous structure that coupled with this one.

“May I show them, Jill?” Bea turned to ask.

“Yes, of course. Whatever they need.”

“Does anyone work in there?”

“There are two levels underground. That’s where the conveyor system that takes books up to the call desk winds up, so there are always a few staffers on the first floor throughout the day to pull the requested volumes and ship them back upstairs. The lower floor is usually deserted.”

“And books?”

“Just a few million of them,” Bea said as I held open the door.

“Valuable ones?”

“Everything here is valuable to somebody.”

Her short legs couldn’t move fast enough for Mike. This time, she led us down the other direction of the long corridor to a service elevator, trying to keep up with Mike’s pace. She had to catch her breath as we waited for the doors to open, and then waited again for the old lift as it creaked and groaned to deliver us down to the north end of the basement.

When we got out, she told Mike that the entrance to the stacks was only accessible from the stairwell straight ahead. This time, he started off and I ran with him, leaving a slightly bewildered Bea Dutton alone in the quiet hallway, with an order for her to ask one of the cops in the main lobby to send some men to help us.

The two of us pounding down the steps made as much noise as a small herd of ponies, the sound reverberating through the great empty space. The granite and marble so prominent throughout the rest of the library building ended abruptly at this point. There was a long, sloping steel ramp that started at the bottom tread, and I grabbed on to the red metal handrail along the wall to keep my balance as we rounded corners, racing farther below ground.

The path flattened and the narrow entryway opened onto a cluttered workspace that looked like a scene from a Victorian novel-industrial, impersonal, damp, and cold.

Mike stopped to scope the area-a handful of unoccupied desks, piles of books ready to be restacked and shelved, and ahead of us and on the floor below, several acres of volumes, row after row of shelves, that formed this enormous hidden book vault beneath the formal gardens of Bryant Park.

“It’s like a catacomb of forgotten books,” Mike said, his hands on his waist.

I ventured past the desks to the beginning of the tightly packed shelves that stretched out in the distance farther than either of us could see. The space was musty and airless. It was impossible to think that anyone really knew what was among the pages relegated to this dank reserve.

“What are we looking for exactly?” I asked.

“A way out.”

“We just got here. Bea said it’s the only entrance.”

“What she said is that it’s the only entrance from within the library. I’ll never look at the park the same way again,” Mike said. “I want to see if there’s an exit near the Sixth Avenue side.”

“Why don’t we wait for someone to guide us through it?” I asked.

“You and your damn claustrophobia again. Let’s go over it fast, kid, before we’ve got the whole department tied up here,” Mike said, brushing past me. “You’re looking for blood, a weapon, clothing. Any sign this was part of the killer’s escape route. And another staircase.”

Mike headed off down the first row to our right. I watched him as he loped along, ignoring the books shelved from floor to ceiling on both sides of him, looking instead at the floor, pausing to pick up a scrap of paper, which he eyeballed and then slipped into his pocket.

I took the left half, setting off on a slow jog to look for anything out of place. By the time I reached the end of the third row, I was coughing so badly from the dust that I had to stop and clear my throat.

“You okay?” Mike shouted.

“I’ll be fine. Why do you sound so far away?”

“I got smart, Coop. I’m going down to the other end, closer to Sixth Avenue. I’ll work my way back from there. Meet you in the middle. You just keep going.”

Every now and then I bent over to pick up a blank call slip that had fallen out of book, but none had any writing on it.

I trolled through the Slavic and Baltic sections and was in the middle of an archive of Islamic manuscripts from the Asian and Middle Eastern collection when I saw something shiny on the floor, between two of the tall racks of books. From a distance, it appeared to be shaped like one of the scalpels I had seen at Lucy Tannis’s desk.

I stepped out of the aisle between the already overcrowded mechanically operated shelves to get closer to the object so that I could better tell if it was something for the Crime Scene cops to pick up. But as I knelt down, I could see that it was a silver-colored ballpoint pen, its body matted with enough dust for me to know that it had been on the floor there for some time.

Another two rows farther on and something else caught my eye. Also metallic, but this was shorter in length and much flatter than the pen.

It was a few yards in from the long aisle, and I got right on top of it, kneeling again to inspect it. It was a small key, and it wasn’t covered with dust. I had no idea if it had any significance to our search.

I held on to the edge of a divider to steady myself, making a mental note of what row I was in-between large folios of the designs for the Royal Pavilion at Brighton and watercolor plates illustrating dress during America’s colonial period-when the entire bookshelf behind me began to move, quickly and quietly, pinning me against the one that I had grasped.

Someone was trying to crush me between the heavy compact movable shelves, and I screamed for Mike as my wrist twisted and I fell onto my side.