The Bone Vault

10

“I’ll be happy to talk to you tomorrow, Detective. I’ve just been ordered up to the director’s office. We’ve clearly got a crisis at the museum that none of us had anticipated an hour ago.”

“And I got a dead broad in my locker who croaked on your watch, Mr. Gaylord.” Mike walked to the phone. “What’s Thibodaux’s extension?”

“He-he’s not there. In his office, I mean. He was already out the door before Eve got on the phone to me. I wanted to talk to him myself. Honestly.”

Timothy Gaylord was as rattled as Mike and I. Thibodaux was either a brilliant actor, able to mask whatever professional trouble was brewing when we talked to him half an hour earlier, or this abrupt resignation might have had something to do with the photograph of Katrina Grooten that we had just stuck under his nose.

“It’s Chapman here. I want your boss. I want to talk to him before he leaves the museum, do you understand?” Mike was running his fingers through his straight black hair. I knew he was angry, thinking Thibodaux had pulled a fast one on him. “Yeah? Then why’d you ask Gaylord to come upstairs if he’s already gone?”

Mike didn’t like Drexler’s answer. He slammed the receiver back into the cradle.

“Want me to try to catch up with him on his way out?”

Mike looked at me as though I were crazy. “You know how many ways there are out of this place? The man has at least a ten-minute jump on us, we’re buried down here in the bowels of the museum, and you don’t know which way he’s headed. Give it up, blondie.”

Gaylord tried to move to the door again. “I’m afraid I’ve got to get upstairs. Eve has asked me to call several of the board members to convene a special meeting.”

Mike pointed at Gaylord like a trainer ordering a show dog to sit. “Stay put.” He used the same finger to dial his squad commander, explaining the situation. “Get a couple of guys over here to get Thibodaux’s address. They want to be talking to Eve Drexler. He’s probably got a car and driver, too. Get the plate number. Have a detail sit on his apartment to make sure he doesn’t go anywhere, will you? Lemme know when you find him, loo. I’d like to pay him another visit. Talk to you later.”

Erik Poste and Anna Friedrichs both looked as though they were afraid to move. They were whispering to each other, as surprised by the news as Gaylord was.

“Any of you know what this is about?”

“I think it’s clear we’re as startled as you are,” Poste said. He tapped his fingers nervously on the tabletop.

Anna Friedrichs tried to muster a smile. “I don’t think you need to treat him like a criminal, Mr. Chapman. I can’t imagine for a moment this is related to Katrina’s death.”

Chapman ignored the comment and spoke to Gaylord again. “Before you run out of here, you want to explain to me where this sarcophagus we found last night has been for the last six months?”

“I’m sorry. It’s just hard to balance all this right now. I’ve got my staff trying to reconstruct the movement of the piece and get you that information as soon as possible.”

“How about the innards?”

“Excuse me?”

“Ms. Grooten didn’t have a bunk mate in the coffin. Wasn’t there a little old princess inside that thing for a few thousand years? Does that mean you got an extra mummy lying around here somewhere?”

Erik Poste stood up and walked to Gaylord’s side, putting a hand on his shoulder. “That’s a good point, Timothy. Perhaps we should be looking for-”

Gaylord stepped away from his colleague. It seemed this added another problem to his plate that he had not considered. “No, certainly not. If any of my people had come across-well, nothing’s been found.” He turned to Erik Poste and Anna Friedrichs. “There’s no point having word of all this spread through the junior staffers. I know it’s an imposition, but Pierre promised Mr. Chapman that he would be shown through the storage area today. Would you two mind very much taking them around?”

Poste appeared to accept the assignment more graciously than Anna Friedrichs. She glanced at her watch and exhaled her annoyance audibly.

“You’ll see what a monumental task we have, Detective. The sad truth is that no one can tell you where the piece was at any given moment during the past few months. The best we can do is try. You want to scout through a few million other pieces of art, be my guest. I’ll turn you over to Anna and Erik, for the moment.”

Gaylord passed a large metal ring with dozens of long keys dangling from it to Erik Poste and walked out.

Chapman took his cell phone from his pocket to see whether there were any messages.

“You can forget about getting calls down here, Detective,” Anna Friedrichs said. “Might as well use the phone on that table. We’re so deep inside the museum that cell phones don’t penetrate. Too many thick steel beams in the foundation. It’s the bane of my existence when I’m stuck working in the basement.”

He dialed the number from the museum phone and asked for Mercer Wallace, who got on the line. “Don’t tell your boss what I’m about to ask you to do, ‘cause someone up there dropped the ball on this. See if you can find a sixty-one from spring or summer of last year. Three-four precinct. Your complaining witness is a Katrina Grooten. Female, white, about twenty-eight years old. Sneak a copy of the file out, and Coop is buying us dinner at-?” He looked at me for the answer.

“Primola.”

“Hear that? Meet us there any time after seven.”

The complaint report, the NYPD’s uniform force form number 61, along with the follow-ups from the detective division known as 5s, would tell the story of Katrina Grooten’s assault. Precinct cops would likely have responded to the original complaint and filled out the initial paperwork, referring the investigation to the detectives of the well-trained Special Victims Squad. If the case had been closed without an arrest, these papers would have to explain why.

“Shall we get started?” Erik Poste led us out of the room. Mike walked beside him while I followed with Anna Friedrichs, and Lissen brought up the rear.

“Each department has its own storeroom, acres and acres of it here under the museum.”

“Turf battles?”

“Of course, Detective. Mr. Gaylord’s Egyptian galleries are crowd pleasers, always have been. His exhibits take up an inordinate amount of space. Giant stone sculptures and actual pieces of temples and tombs. Dendur was shipped over here from the Aswan as six hundred and eighty-two enormous pieces of rock, and stored wherever they could find a niche, until it could be reassembled as you see it today.”

We reached another doorway and Erik Poste searched for an engraved number on the shank of one of the keys. He found one that matched the lock and opened the door. Ahead of us on either side were endless lines of funerary objects, some exposed and others sticking partway out of packing crates, with painted figurines and jasper animals sitting upon their backs. Many had plastic drop cloths draped over them, while hundreds more collected dust.

“I believe Mr. Gaylord has about thirty-six thousand objects from his collection on display upstairs. If you care to hazard a guess about how many remain down here, I’ll be happy to take the bet.”

Mike was walking up and down the narrow rows, looking at labels and reading tags affixed to the objects. He called back to Poste and Friedrichs, “But all the Egyptian stuff is in here, right?”

“Not exactly. There’s overflow, especially because so many of the pieces are oversize, and that goes into some of our underpopulated areas.”

“What would they be?”

“Islamic art, for example. It’s one of our smaller departments. Artifacts, miniatures, ceramic tiles. The pieces aren’t as bulky, don’t take up as much room. Same for musical instruments. It’s not uncommon for some larger pieces-whether Egyptian relics or American period furniture-to be moved for the purpose of storage.”

“Do the other curators get annoyed at Gaylord for using their space?”

“Of course not. And he’s not the only one who trespasses. I’ve got thousands of paintings in my division. And I need room to do restoration. Many of the pieces are quite sizable and the canvases must be spread out for weeks while workers tend to them. You call on a friendly neighbor, examine his quarters, and find some way to beg for the area you need.”

Mike walked back to us. “These things aren’t even in numerical order. They’re all out of whack.”

“That’s why we have students and scholars, Detective. Eager young interns. They like nothing better than poring over these treasures and having that ‘eureka!’ moment when they’ve put their hands on a missing masterpiece. I can assure you that all of these things are carefully cataloged in each department and in the overall collection. They can all be tracked and traced. At least, we’ve always assumed that.”

“The sarcophagus in which Ms. Grooten was found, do you know about that?”

Friedrichs answered: “Mr. Gaylord told us about it shortly before you arrived here.”

“Why is it that no one can tell us where it had been stored?”

“There are several possibilities, Miss Cooper. We expect to narrow it down within the week.” Erik Poste played with his key chain. “Mr. Lissen and Miss Drexler are going over all the records. This storeroom is one of them.”

“Makes it look like trying to find a dollar bill you’ve dropped on the floor at Grand Central Station,” Chapman said, trying to sketch the layout in his notepad.

“I’ll show you some of the other areas as well, where the Egyptian overflow usually goes. I guess you’ll have us all looking for the missing mummy now, won’t you, Detective?” Poste said as he walked back to the doorway.

“Have you had a good look at the sarcophagus?” Friedrichs asked. “If it was ever considered for the bestiary exhibit, it might even have been carted over to Natural History at some point in the last few months, to be vetted and photographed for the show.”

“Why vetted?”

“To be certain it was authentic. We’ve suffered that embarrassment before. Put on the big show only to learn that the featured artwork was a forgery or a fake.”

“Why would the coffin be in the show?”

“Some of those ancient Egyptian pieces are richly decorated with animal paintings. Not just the ones that belonged to royal families, but also just the well-to-do. You’ll see baboons with their arms raised in worship of some god, the hippopotamus that was the patroness of women during pregnancy, or a cobra whose tail encircled the sun for some reason I can’t remember. There were falcons and scarabs and sacred cats, many of them portrayed on funeral objects of the wealthy.”

“I doubt anyone would have gone to the trouble of moving a sarcophagus over to Natural History,” Erik Poste said.

“Objects-even large, heavy ones like that-were being carted back and forth every week,” Anna said, correcting him. “Somebody must have put it on the list to be shipped overseas. I’ve asked Maury to check out those intermuseum transfers, too.”

We continued back along the long, gray corridor and around another corner, more than a city block away. Again, Erik Poste inserted a key in a lock and stepped away to let us enter. Here, hundreds of paintings were displayed, one on top of another until they reached the high ceiling, all encased in glass for the entire length of the room. The lighting was dim and none of it shone directly on the canvases. It was obvious we had come to the European painting area, Poste’s professional home.

“It’s a bit easier to store paintings. Although the size varies, and our walls can make the accommodation to hold them, they’re all quite flat. I have a much easier time keeping records of what’s in here.”

Again, Mike walked up and down the long rows, examining tags and sketching the setup. “What’s this door?” He was out of sight, at the far corner of the room.

“It’s open, Detective. Go right in.” We made our way back to find Chapman, who was standing inside a room the size of my office. It was like a carpentry workshop, with pieces of wood and parts of gilded frames against the walls and on the tabletops. “In each department’s storage area, there are shops like these. Some are for the conservators who restore works of art, others make frames or do repairs.”

“This isn’t the only shop?” Mike’s question conjured up the image of endless small cubbyholes within the massive storage areas. Pierre Thibodaux’s point about several million objects of art below the museum’s surface was becoming very real to both of us.

“Oh, no. Must be at least a dozen more like this scattered about within the building, as well as space we rent outside.”

“Anybody else getting hot flashes?” Mike pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his brow.

Anna laughed. “All of these fragile works of art have different needs. Those sculptures that survived in the deserts for centuries like it hot and dry inside. My department-things from the South Pacific islands and the ocean people-thrive in a damp environment. There are climate controls all over the museum-thousands of sensors. You can go to all extremes of temperature, hot or cold, damp or dry, just by moving from gallery to gallery.”

“And you can tell me what the weather is in every section, more reliable than those schmucks I listen to every night on TV?”

“We certainly can,” Anna said, “because we manufacture our own weather conditions.”

I knew Mike was trying to figure out where within a museum Katrina Grooten’s body could have been best kept without decomposing. Would her killer have known how these temperatures and conditions would affect a human body? Or would it have proved to be a circumstance that accidentally worked against his interest, preserving the remains so that they were recognized and identified before leaving the country?

“You’re welcome to come back here any time to go through all of these storerooms, Detective,” Poste said, locking up behind us. “I think you’ll need an army to help you do it.”

“You got a list of all your employees, Maury?” Chapman asked Lissen as we reentered the hallway. “Names, dates of birth, social security numbers?”

“Yeah, Eve was going to print it out for you. They’re all bonded. Won’t find any criminals in my department. The thieves all work upstairs in archaeology and anthropology, if you ask me, robbing the graves and stealing these pots and pans from other countries.” Lissen wasn’t the first one to complain about the ethics involved in museum acquisitions.

“Other workmen?”

“You got a sea of ‘em down here. They got offices in the subbasement for locksmiths, plumbers, electricians. They roam around this place like it was the wide open spaces.”

We turned another corner and reached a divide between sections of the corridor. The lights dimmed even more and the ceiling dipped to a mere eight feet. Poste and Friedrichs led us across a low barrel vault, which ran north to south through the center of the building, deep below the museum, and brought us out on its other side.

Mike had stopped in the middle and called out to us, “What’s in here?”

“One of the original structural features of the museum,” Poste said. “It’s long been obsolete.”

“Let’s have a look.”

We all turned back to join Mike.

“This was constructed in the middle of the nineteenth century,” Anna said. “An enormous storm drain-off for the Central Park reservoir.”

We walked ten or fifteen feet into its mouth, and the temperature dropped noticeably. There were ghostly figures of bronze bacchanals and carved Asian dragons, heavy pieces of furniture and fluted columns. Most of these neglected or unwanted artworks had been dressed in plastic shrouds and left to guard this useless tunnel.

Mike used the point of his pen to lift the covers and poke around the objects.

“Even art goes in and out of vogue, Mr. Chapman. Something that was all the rage for collectors a century ago gets cycled out. Some of the greats have staying power, but-”

“Anything Egyptian in here, Mr. Poste?”

“I’d be surprised if there isn’t. We can light this for you more properly when you come back. There are a couple of areas like this which just aren’t the first priority to be fixed up with our limited funding.”

Our walking tour continued until we had circumnavigated the entire museum basement, peering into storerooms and skirting empty corners. Erik Poste wasn’t wrong; it would pay to come back here with reinforcements in serious numbers. Perhaps we could convince the chief of detectives to let us have some cadets from the Academy to scour the vast space for us.

We left our three escorts near the front door, where a uniformed guard was waiting to let us out. The museum had closed at five-fifteen, and it was just after seven in the evening.

Even though it was dusk, the Fifth Avenue steps remained a place for groups of all sorts to congregate. Three rappers were doing moonwalks at the bottom of the staircase, a juggler was trying to keep six balls in the air while playing the harmonica, and a bespectacled kid was reading aloud fromUlysses to the accompaniment of her friend’s guitar.

We stayed to the far south and descended the three tiers. “You think you could actually kill someone in that museum?” I asked.

“I’ll let Dr. K. figure that one out. You could sure as hell stick her there to rest for a few months without any interruption, except by chance. Or probably even have the coffin moved in and out, without anybody being the wiser. I never gave any thought to how big that place is. Kind of like an iceberg below the main display floors.”

“Millions of objects that never see the light of day.” I pulled my cell phone from my handbag and dialed Nina’s hotel, leaving her a voice mail about where to meet us for dinner.

Mike and I were the first to arrive at the restaurant on Second Avenue near Sixty-fourth Street.

“Buona sera,Signorina Cooper. You going to be four tonight?”

“Yes, Giuliano. Do you mind if we borrow your office for a few minutes?”

He laughed and told Adolfo to unlock the door at the foot of the staircase. Mike and I went down and turned on the small television set, switching the channel to find Alex Trebek. One of our common bonds was a devotion to the Final Jeopardy! question at the end of the daily quiz show. For the decade throughout which we had worked together, Mike had found a way at almost every crime scene or station house to get to the tube in time for the last question, to bet on it against me and against Mercer.

“Tonight’s category, ladies and gentlemen, is ‘The Cinema,’” Trebek said, stepping back to reveal a giant screen with those two words printed on it.

There were some topics I didn’t challenge Chapman on, and others that were completely my domain. This was one we both knew and loved.

“Twenty dollars.”

“Dinner, Coop. For four.”

“You’re on.”

“Tonight’s Final Jeopardy! answer is: William Shatner starred in this movie, filmed completely in the universal language Esperanto.”

The nauseatingly cheerful music bounced along in the background as two of the three puzzled contestants stared blankly at the board. The only one of them who ventured a guess at a title was wrong, and I told Chapman that I didn’t have the faintest idea. Before Trebek read the studio audience the question, Chapman tweaked the back of my neck. “And a good bottle of wine with that dinner, too. Right, blondie?”

I laughed and swatted his hand away. “Anything you say. Just let go of me.”

“What isIncubus? Nineteen sixty-five. A man possessed by demon spirits. Only Shatner outing worse than that one isBig Bad Mama, ” he said, shutting off the TV and walking out of the office, “where you actually get to see his pubic hair in one of the scenes. Chow time.”

“And you make it so appetizing, too.”

Fenton had our drinks ready at the bar, where Mercer had greeted Nina as they were waiting for us to come back upstairs.

“Let’s have some fried zucchini for the table while we’re talking,” Chapman told Adolfo. Nina embraced Mike, whom she had not seen in several months, and Mercer finished telling her that Vickee was less than two weeks away from delivering the child Mike referred to as “our baby.” He was the first on our team to start a family, and the significance of that was not lost on either Mike or me.

“Cheers!” We clicked glasses and caught up briefly before Mike asked Mercer to tell us what he had learned about Katrina Grooten.

“I couldn’t sneak the folder out so I just made some notes. The sergeant was sitting right next to the Xerox machine.”

“Whose case?”

“Cathy Daughtrey’s.”

“No wonder I don’t know about it.” I’ve tried several times to have her transferred out of the squad. She had burned out somewhere along the way, and never went the extra mile needed to solve the difficult cases. She would do anything possible to avoid taking direction from me or from Sarah Brenner, because it always meant more legwork than she wanted to do.

“Happened almost a year ago, just about this time of night. Monday, June eleventh. Katrina Grooten, twenty-nine years old. Employed at the Cloisters.

“Sixty-one says she left the museum a little before eight and was walking her bicycle down the steep path, through the park, on her way home. That was a small apartment near Dyckman. Says a gunman pulled her off the path behind a rock, made her undress, and raped her at gunpoint.”

“She give a ‘scrip?”

“Male black. Tall, slim.”

“That’s it?”

“Face was covered with a ski mask. Couldn’t see anything but the skin color on his hands and the back of his neck. That’s why she refused to pursue the matter. Went to the hospital to be examined. Cathy interviewed her there. But Grooten herself didn’t see any point in coming to look at photos ‘cause she couldn’t make an-”

“But DNA? Forget the corporeal ID.” I was impatient to know why I hadn’t gotten the opportunity to talk Katrina Grooten into letting us investigate and build the case.

“He didn’t ejaculate. No seminal fluid. No DNA.”

“Did we have any other cases like that in the park? Any other crimes to which we could have linked this one?”

“A couple of robberies with a guy who used a ski mask. No arrests, no suspects.”

“Witnesses? Nobody coming from or going to the museum?”

“The Cloisters is closed on Monday. Just a few of the staff working there. She thinks she was one of the last ones to leave.”

“Any record in the file that Cathy called me before closing out the case?” I believe in getting every victim into our office to be talked to by a member of the legal staff of our unit, whether or not it is a long shot, to see if there is any way to develop the facts into a stronger case or determine if the crime is the work of a serial offender or a convicted rapist on parole.

“Nope. Just EC’d it and the boss signed off on it.”

“Exceptional clearance? And she didn’t bother to call me for approval?”

“Your best friend here likes to think she runs the NYPD, and not just my life,” Chapman said to Nina, trying to make sense of this conversation for her. “In case you don’t realize it, Coop, a lieutenant can actually close out a case without your permission.”

“Whole song and dance in there about Ms. Grooten being from South Africa. She felt that too many black men had suffered in prisons in her country for crimes they didn’t commit, so she didn’t want to take the chance of starting a manhunt when she couldn’t even identify the rapist.”

“Great. So we got a bleeding heart. She’s got a Dutch name-descended from Boers, who killed more Africans than you or I could count,” Chapman said, holding his empty glass up in the air for Fenton to see, ordering another round of drinks. “Meantime, one of the brothers be having a field day in my neck of the woods and she decides she’s gonna give him a pass. America the Beautiful. And nobody notices a mope running around the park with a ski mask on in the middle of June, his dick hanging out of his pants.”

“Who was the outcry witness?” The first person Katrina called from the hospital might suggest the name of the friend or relative to whom she was closest, in whom she confided.

“She didn’t make any calls. She told Cathy she had no family in this country. And she didn’t want anyone at the museum to know what had happened. Katrina said she planned to be going back to Cape Town before the end of the year anyway.”

“What’d she do at the museum?” Chapman asked.

“Worked on medieval art. How’s this for weird, considering her final resting place? Had an expertise in tomb sculpture.”