Lethal Legacy

THIRTY-EIGHT

“It’s a fake,” Bea Dutton said, her gloved hands spreading the parchment that appeared to be a panel of the 1507 world map across one end of my dining room table, after we’d made the short drive from East Ninety-third Street.

We had waited forty minutes in the basement apartment until one of the forensic biology lab techs appeared with the key that I had found along the path the killer probably took to dispose of the body of Tina Barr.

Mercer had opened the locked chamber to reveal a watertight series of metal chests within chests-like a small version of the caskets in Napoleon’s tomb-and removed them from the hidden compartment.

The smallest one was fitted with a velvet lining large enough to hold double-folio-size prints. Only one thing-a piece of the map-rested within the case. Mercer removed it and Mike called the lieutenant to tell him we were on our way to my apartment to determine what it was.

“How can you tell it’s a fake?” I asked.

“Remember what I said yesterday about forgeries of something as detailed as this piece? The fact that it’s a made from a woodcut, not just a drawing?” Bea asked. “It would be next to impossible to pull off.”

Bea put on her reading glasses and began to examine the paper more closely.

Mike was looking over her shoulder. “Which of the twelve parts is it?”

“Winturn Eurus. The easterly skies. That’s the coast of India, with Tibet above it, and the island of Java off to the side. It’s one of the easier panels to try to copy because so much of it is just water rather than the finely documented landmasses, which require minuscule writing and exquisite particularity.”

Bea rubbed the edge of the parchment between her fingers. “The texture is the first giveaway,” she said, starting to explain the flaws. “Most experts could tell right off the bat.”

“Someone like me, Bea, who doesn’t know rare maps,” I said. “Would it fool me?”

“Stevie Wonder could tell this one’s a forgery, Coop. Get with the program.” Mike pulled at a strand of hair that had fallen between my eyes. “Make yourself comfortable, Bea. Want a soda?”

He walked into the kitchen and helped himself to a soft drink.

“Nothing, thanks. Do you have that photocopy of the entire map I made for you at the library?”

“I got it,” Mercer said. He had brought a stack of work up from the car and sorted it out from the pile he had dropped on the credenza on his way inside.

“Let’s lay it out on the table. Do you mind if I move your flowers, Alex?” Bea asked.

Mike lifted the vase of white lilies. “More where those came from, Bea. Guess this guy didn’t get so lucky. The place usually looks like a funeral home when she’s put out her best stuff.”

Bea ignored him. “Grab me some tape and a few pads.”

Mike knew his way around my place. He left the room, then returned from my office with what Bea requested.

“You guys keep going on your end. Let me play with the map a bit,” she said.

Mercer, Mike, and I set ourselves up around the coffee table in the living room. It was late in the afternoon, and the three of us were trying to use a quiet Saturday to regain the territory and figure out what we had to work with so far in the murders of Tina Barr and Karla Vastasi.

“You liked what the old broad had?” Mike asked.

“Jane Eliot?” I said. “Absolutely.”

“But the guy who broke in to her place didn’t bother with a mask. So why would he bother with the fireman outfit the first time he hit Tina Barr’s place?”

I leaned back and put my feet up on the sofa. “Maybe he thought she’d make him, recognize him.”

Mercer nodded. “Possible. Didn’t mean to kill her if he could find what he was looking for in the apartment.”

“Jane Eliot can’t see well enough to describe her assailant,” I said. “If he knew her vision was impaired and was confident she had no reason to identify him from any previous encounter, he didn’t have to go to the trouble of hiding his face. Besides that, he’d lost the gas mask.”

“Alex has a point,” Mercer said. “The delivery uniform he wore to break in to Eliot’s was a disguise of sorts.”

Mike had found a deck of cards in the drawer of the coffee table and was playing solitaire while we talked.

“Did you ever follow up with the lab on that DNA profile in the mask?” I asked Mike.

“I’m on it. Partial match to Billy Schultz, but it’s a combo, so they can compare it to other samples we submit.”

“So how you doing on profiles?” Mercer asked. “Whose DNA have we got?”

“Schultz’s, obviously. But his alibi works for Tina’s murder,” Mike said. “And I gave the lab the Hunts.”

“Which Hunts?” I asked.

“Let’s see,” he said, folding his losing hand and shuffling again. “Minerva’s first.”

“I know they’re only amendments,” I said, too tired to go at Mike full force. “But they are still part of the Constitution. Hope the seizures were lawful, but then if they were, I probably would have known about them.”

“That cigarette butt she crushed to death in the squad room the other night? Abandoned property,” Mike said.

“I’ll give you that,” I said with a smile. “Nice work.”

“Think of it, a woman inside a fireman’s uniform and mask. Who’d guess that? You automatically assume it’s a guy.”

Bea Dutton looked over at us every now and then as we tried to put the clues together.

“You’re right, Mike. It would never occur to me, hearing that description, to think of a Minerva Hunt-or a Jill Gibson.”

“What are you saying about Jill?” Mike asked.

“Forget I mentioned it. It’s just a personal thing.”

“I’m gonna talk to you about that, Bea,” Mike said. “You can’t hold back if you think there’s something that might be useful to us.”

“Sorry. I just think she plays both sides of the street. She means well, but she’s in a difficult position, as an administrator, between sucking up to the board and keeping her staff squared away.”

I made a note on the top of my pad to get back to Bea Dutton.

“So what did you get from Talbot Hunt?” I asked.

“Swiped a cocktail napkin that the butler missed in the living room yesterday. Figured the one with lipstick was Minerva’s and the one without was her brother’s.”

“Swiped doesn’t work for me.”

“Don’t get in a swivet about it, Coop. I didn’t take it from his house. He doesn’t have any standing at Papa’s pad. Give me any illegal search bullshit and I’ll have a seizure.”

“I’ll remember to argue that when I’m taking heat in the hearing.”

“Who else should we look at for DNA?” Mercer asked. “I’d like to go back into Forbes’s apartment. See what he’s got going on.”

“Ask Shalik to scoop up some Band-Aids for you while Travis is picking himself clean on the stoop,” Mike said. “I want Alger Herrick. The man with the golden arm.”

“Because you think he’s dirty?” Mercer asked.

“’Cause he likes maps so much.”

“We have Herrick’s DNA,” I said.

Mike’s head snapped in my direction. “Promise me you went back to his house and got your sample the old-fashioned way. None of this swabbing and drooling stuff.”

“Not my type, Mikey.”

“So what’d I miss?”

“Herrick told us he’d been stopped for drunk driving back in England,” I said.

“And the Brits do DNA on every infraction, no matter how minor,” Mike said. “So Scotland Yard has Herrick’s DNA profile in the hopper.”

“Frankly, I don’t see him playing dress-up,” I said. “And he certainly didn’t do Jane Eliot. She described a young man.”

Mercer stood by the window and dialed his phone. “Hey, Loo. Get on the horn with that deputy inspector in London who owes you. Alger Herrick-he’s got a genetic fingerprint on file there. Ask them to transmit it to the lab, stat, will you?”

Peterson must have assured him he would before Mercer thanked him and hung up.

“Jonah Krauss is another story,” Mike said. “Walked out of his office gym all pumped and ready to fly out of town. No question he’s strong enough to heave that garden ornament.”

“Kinky enough for the first night attack on Tina?” Mercer asked.

“Hey, his favorite display item is a book made out of human skin,” Mike said. “Plus he has access to all those subterranean spaces in the library.”

“Don’t forget his connection to Minerva Hunt,” I said.

“That’s a pretty slimy trio-Krauss, Minerva, and Forbes the map thief, all trying to figure out how to find the panels of the great treasure.”

Bea Dutton had been assembling the pieces of the photocopied map. It covered almost the entire top of the dining table. “Want to see what I’ve been up to?”

“Sure,” Mike said, throwing down the cards and walking toward her.

I stood and stretched, and we all took up positions on one side of the table, our backs to the window with the high, sweeping view over the city.

Bea stood in the center, flattening the enormous map with her small hands. “Okay. So we’ve talked about the twelve panels, right?”

She reached to a chair beside her and raised the image we had found earlier in the day. “You asked if this fake could fool anyone, Alex, and I’d have to say the answer is not anyone knowledgeable, and not for very long. The paper isn’t a fit, it’s probably been stained by tea-yes, just an ordinary tea bag-to discolor it a bit, age it some. The drawing itself is rather crude.”

Bea juxtaposed the parchment next to its copy on the map. It formed part of the border on the right, in the midsection.

Mike looked at the pieces side by side. “I kept thinking of Karla Vastasi when we found this thing in the apartment today,” he said, referring to Minerva Hunt’s housekeeper.

“Why Karla?” I asked.

“’Cause she was set up, Coop. No doubt in my mind that Minerva sent her in, dressed in the madam’s clothes, to meet someone who wouldn’t have a clue if she was Minerva Hunt or not.”

“Rules out Alger Herrick,” Mercer said. “And Jonah Krauss.”

“But rules in the possibility that she had brought that tote bag to carry something out-something just about the size of one of these panels,” Mike said, pointing to the map. “And she wouldn’t be expected to know if it was genuine or not.”

“She had the psalm book, too,” I said.

“Maybe she-or the killer-found it there. If Tina Barr is the one who stole it from Talbot Hunt’s apartment, she might have been hiding it on her own.”

“Waiting for the best offer,” Mercer said.

“I smell a cross,” Mike said. “Somebody double-teaming someone else. Mild-mannered Tina Barr, the pawn in a treacherous double cross, with stakes so high she couldn’t even imagine what a dangerous position she put herself in working with any of these greedy bastards.”

“So this document is a fake,” Mercer said, turning his attention back to Bea. “Let’s start with that. What else can you tell us?”

“Let’s take this puzzle piece by piece. There’s got to be a logic to the way Jasper Hunt broke it up and concealed the panels.”

“Like his son said, Bea, you can’t assume that with a complete eccentric.”

“Nonsense, Mike. Maybe what Hunt did won’t seem logical, but there had to be some kind of method to his madness, especially if he ever hoped to see these pieces reunited.”

And especially if Jasper Hunt ever hoped to leave this map as part of his legacy.

“What makes you think so?” I asked.

“So far, the two panels found weren’t hidden randomly,” she said. “What’s the most important feature of the piece you found yesterday morning in the library?”

Mike was quick to answer. “The inset about the New World as a separate continent, with the portrait of Amerigo Vespucci. Mr. America, himself.”

“And where did you find it, Mike?” Mercer said, following Bea’s lead. “Tucked inside a rare volume of Audubon’s Birds of America. Not all that crazy, is it?”

I thought of Jane Eliot’s story and looked at the photocopy of the large map, placing my finger on the lower right section that featured Ceylon and Madagascar. “Jasper put this one in the back of his very unique edition of Alice in Wonderland because it made him-the Mad Hatter of the family-think of Ceylonese tea.”

“Ten to go,” Mike said. “All we need is a list of the double-folio-size books that Jasper Hunt bequeathed to the library. Feeling lucky, Bea?”

“You get the commissioner to open the doors for us tonight, give me a handful of curators,” Bea said, “and maybe I’ll give you the world. Jasper Hunt’s world.”