The Bone Vault

19

“Forgot your pass, Mr. Mamdouba?” A bespectacled young man, about thirty, dressed in a denim work shirt and jeans, came up behind the curatorial director and tapped him on the back.

“Ah, Zimm. Perfect man for the job. Meet Alexandra Cooper here. And Mr. Chapman.”

“Mark Zimmerly. Entomology.”

“Bugs?” Mike asked as they exchanged handshakes.

“Yeah, well, spiders in particular. Gnaphosoidae. Australian ground spiders. Six hundred and fifty species and still counting.”

“No offense, but I was hoping for something with fewer legs and no stingers.”

Zimm turned and led us back to a tall doorway behind the bank of elevators. There was a laminated photo ID around his neck, and he bent over to scan it in against the security pad.

Mamdouba followed Zimm, taking us down a poorly lighted staircase that wound around for three flights. The dull gray paint was chipped and faded, and there were smudged handprints on the wall where people before us had tried to balance their footing on the narrow treads.

Chapman whispered in my ear as I turned a corner, “Remind me to tell Mercer and Vickee never to let the kid go to a museum. Friggin‘ arsenic everywhere. Did you have any idea?”

“Takes us back to square one. Whoever poisoned Katrina Grooten knew the field of suspects would be wide open. He didn’t have to go into a pharmacy and ask for a prescription. Just point the finger at someone else who worked in any of the institutions.”

At the bottom of the steps was a large sign:BESTIARY. A red arrow pointed to the right, below the wordsTHE MET. And a green arrow headed left:AMNH. We all followed Zimm around to the office in which he worked.

“Miss Cooper and Mr. Chapman are investigating Katrina Grooten’s death.”

“What a shocker,” the young man said. “Saw the story in thePost. Couldn’t believe it was someone I knew. Someone who worked here with me.”

“Why don’t you tell them about what you’re doing here, and what her role in it was. Zimm’s been with us since he was a high school student.”

“I’m a graduate student at NYU. Started to come here when my family moved to Manhattan, fifteen years ago. Thought this was the coolest place in the world. Spent all my free time here, so my teacher encouraged me to do an internship while I was at Stuyvesant.” Zimm had gone to one of New York City’s premier public high schools, specializing in science and math, for which kids had to pass a special test for admission eligibility.

Mike smiled at him. “So you started working at the museum when Pluto was still a planet, huh?”

“Ah, Mr. Chapman. At least we’re always controversial here,” Mamdouba said. “You disagree with my friends at the planetarium?”

“All I know is that for the first thirty-five years of my life, there were nine planets in the solar system. Now your museum decides Pluto’s just an icy comet. I don’t deal with change that well.”

“Don’t hold it against me, man.” Zimm laughed. “I’ve got nothing to do with the astrophysicists. What we’re doing down here is assembling and cataloging all the specimens that are under consideration for selection in the exhibit.”

“Who’s in charge?”

“Well, Elijah has the final word. I’m just the functionary. People bring me their artifacts, or photographs of the items. I inventory them, scan them into the computer, and pass the lists along to the joint committee, and to Elijah.” He moved over to his desk and clicked the mouse of his computer; the program for the big show appeared on the screen. He scrolled down to give us a sampling of the thousands of proposed artifacts.

Mike stopped him halfway down the list ofB ‘s. “Whoa. You got a namesake here, Coop. They’ve got their own Blondie.”

“Right behind you, Detective.” Zimm pointed, and I looked at the large mason jar on the counter at my elbow. “Blondie-my personal favorite.”

“Mine, too,” Mike muttered to me. “Golden hair, lots of leg, and very painful when she lands on top of you.”

There in the jar was an albino tarantula, about the size of a soup dish. Dead, I hoped.

“This one was raised in the museum and lived here all her life. Kinda the department mascot. She’s my candidate for the bestiary show.”

I stepped away from the large spider and drew the conversation back to our mission. “Katrina, did you work with her on this?”

“Sure. I guess I saw her whenever she came to the museum.”

“How often was that?”

“Last year? I’d say at first it was a couple of times a month. But by last fall, probably two or three times a week.”

“I didn’t realize she had to be here that often.”

Zimm blushed. He looked over at Mamdouba but didn’t offer any more information.

“What’s your hesitation? She’s not exactly going to get in trouble for anything at this point.”

“Oh, well, I’m not sure how much of it was business she had to do for the Cloisters. I mean, I think she just discovered how interesting this place is. She’d do her work, all right. Faster than the rest of us. Then she’d just take off and wander around.”

Mamdouba frowned. This seemed to be news to him. “In the museum, son?”

“Yeah.”

The director took over the questioning. “Are you talking about areas open to the public, or did she have a security pass, like yours?”

“No, sir. Katrina had the basic ID to get into the building and access this office, but she couldn’t get into any of the other departments-without help.”

“What kind of help would that be, Zimm?”

The entomologist was fidgeting with a jar full of stiff bugs, rolling it around with one hand, gripping it by the lid. The label read,Lobster Roaches.

“Katrina made some friends here, Elijah. Borrowed their swipe cards. Nothing wrong with being curious about this place.”

“Who loaned her their cards?” Mike asked.

Mamdouba tried to cut that avenue off. “Why don’t you see me later on this, young man? Detective, this is an internal security matter. It has nothing to do with your investigation.”

“I hate to disagree with you, but it might be exactly what we’re looking for. And what would have stopped her from walking off through the basement from right here, finding her way up into any part of the building?”

“Because, Mr. Chapman,” the director snapped back, “this museum consists of twenty-three separate building structures. Most of them have no interconnection from this level, belowground, to any other.”

“How did that happen?”

“It’s called cash flow. The founders ran out of money early on, so the master plan was never completed. Wings were added piecemeal, and most of them are freestanding structures that only connect on the main floor or some corridor above. Who were Katrina’s friends, Zimm?”

He was still twisting his bugs, their legs and antennae seeming to catch and entangle in each other like a delicate jigsaw puzzle. “I’m really bad on names. There was a woman, a postdoc in anthropology-they used to have lunch together all the time. But she doesn’t work here anymore. I think she was British. And a few researchers in the African peoples department. Honestly, Elijah, I never hung out with any of them. Oh, the Rare Book Room-she loved to go there.”

“Why?”

“Mr. Chapman, we have perhaps the most superb collection of books, journals, documents, and photographs ever assembled about the diversity of human cultures and the exploration of the natural world. Very fragile, some of it. And not accessible in our library. They must be kept in a restricted area, of course, or these papers would just walk out the door. Terribly valuable.”

“Where is it?”

“Adjacent to the library. But again, in a separate building that you can only get into with a special security pass.” Mamdouba was not pleased. “Very well, Zimm. After you show these people what they need to see, I’d still like to have a chat with you in my office.”

He told us he would be available for any further questions that we had, but excused himself to go back upstairs.

“Didn’t mean to jam you up.”

“Not a problem, Detective. Everybody’s so jumpy here about security, but you get a feel for people who respect the same things you do. It’s not like Katrina was going to make off with first editions of hand-colored Audubon drawings from the collection. This place intrigued her, in a positive way. I don’t think she’d ever been exposed to phenomena like this before.”

Mike parked himself on a stool across the counter from Zimm. “You have anything going on with her?”

The kid blushed again. “Nah. Went out for margaritas a couple of times after meetings, but she really wasn’t interested in anything else. Not with me.”

“How about Mamdouba? He and Katrina have any special relationship?”

Zimm looked at Mike as though he were crazy. “Him? That guy is all business all the time. You know what he’s most interested in now? Burning whoever let Katrina break the rules. He’s probably more concerned about that than the fact that she’s dead. This may be the only kind of bureaucracy worse than academia, and I’m bouncing back and forth between the two of them.”

“Don’t try city government next. The two of us could outdo you in a flash with bureaucratic rules. And one other piece of advice: You meet a nice kid like Katrina and you wanna get laid? Get rid of the spiders. Especially the ones you got at home next to the bed.” Mike kicked the stool away and stood up. “We want the same back-door view she had. The museum you don’t see on the school tour. Is that going to be a problem for you?”

Zimm seemed energized by the idea. He rested his jar of roaches next to the tarantula. “I get my degree next month. I’m outta here.” He jerked his thumb back over his shoulder like a hitchhiker. “Off to Chicago, to the Field Museum. Assistant curator of the department. Want to see anything else about the exhibition before we start walking?”

“If I give you a museum acquisition number, can you tell us where the piece is right now?”

The entomologist was ready to show off his computer program. He clicked off the screen with the alphabetical list of items and waited while Mike opened his notepad to the page he wanted.

“It’s from the Met: 1983.752.”

“Limestone sarcophagus, right? Mamdouba had me looking this one up yesterday.”

Mike nodded and Zimm double-clicked, bringing up a color photo of the ancient coffin. The pale beige slab that had looked so macabre in the darkened hollow of the big truck seemed almost elegant as photographed against the faux-marble backdrop of the museum display.

As he read aloud a description of the markings, Mike and I studied the image on the screen. Just as Hal Sherman had told me, there were ornate carvings with rows of wild animals inscribed in exquisite detail, everything from boars and hyenas to wading birds and elephants. But for its grisly diversion to Port Newark, it would have been a perfect object for the bestiary show.

“Is this, um-the newspaper said Katrina was found in-”

“Yeah, this is it. What else does the entry mention?”

While Zimm printed out two pages of information, he straightened up and recited the rest from memory. “The piece came in on December first of last year. Timothy Gaylord-he’s the Egyptian curator-sent it over from the Met for consideration in the exhibition.”

“Where was it kept while it was here?”

“The oversize things like that? They were all in the basement of ichthyology.”

“Fish?”

“Yup.”

“Why there?”

“I guess it was just a question of where there was the most room for storage on the lower level. They’ve got a back door there that opens onto the loading dock. It would be the logical place to bring the heaviest pieces in and out.”

Mike scanned the printout. “This doesn’t say when the sarcophagus left here.”

“According to our records, it never did.”

“Can you reverse the process? Can you plug in the dates-say, last Monday or Tuesday-and see what items shipped out of here?”

Zimm went back to his computer program. He entered May 20 and May 21 into the search for outgoing loads. “Looks like one of our own trucks picked up some things to be transferred to the Smithsonian. Light stuff, though. Birds, shells, mollusks.”

“The week before?”

“Yeah, here’s a bigger truck. See? Here’s a shipment going back to the Met on the fifteenth of May. Some heavy limestone in it. Probably stuff that’s been rejected from the show. This sarcophagus wasn’t the only one they were looking at. They had lots of Egyptian objects that were submitted. Hmmm. An Indian funeral stele with scenes from the life of Buddha.” He brought up a picture, which showed Prince Siddhartha, who later became Buddha, riding off on his horse to renounce his nobility.

Mike leaned in over the young man’s shoulder to read through the list. “Sandstone. A four-foot-tall Cambodian statue of Ganesha, the Hindu god with an elephant’s head. And a bronze statue of Theseus fighting the Minotaur. What do these initials mean?”

“Somebody from the Met team has to sign out the pieces here, sending them back. That last one, that’s signed by the head of European sculpture.”

“Whoa, here’s some Egyptian stuff going back.”

“Like what?”

“The coffin of some guy named Khumnakht. A false door from the tomb of Metjetji. Who signed for this?”

Zimm brought up the signature. “Timothy Gaylord. I’ll print it out.”

Mike grabbed the pages as they came out of the machine.

“Want this one, too? Looks like another big sarcophagus that we shipped up to the Cloisters the week before. May eighth. Some guy named Ermengol, also carved in limestone. The whole block of stone is supported by three lions, and I think one of them has a pig in his mouth.” He was more riveted by the animal images than by our mission.

“Signed out by?”

“Bellinger. Hiram Bellinger.”

“Can you search through your programs to see whether Katrina signed in or out on anything?”

“Did that already, for Mamdouba. Nope. Somebody over her head would have to do that. She wouldn’t have had that authority.”

“How about a cross-check, to see whether any other exhibits are missing. Things that have not been signed out-like the sarcophagus-but have disappeared.”

“Ditto on Mamdouba. That’s going to take a lot longer to do, but we’ve got a team of students who are trying to do a hand count right now. So far, three other items can’t be located. But they’re all small things. Pilfering, probably. Like a seven-inch silver drinking vessel from medieval Germany, shaped like a stag. Kinds of things that people could easily sneak out of here. Not quite as startling as shipping out that coffin.”

Mike straightened up. “Can you take us to where the fishes sleep?”

“Ichthyology? Why not?” Zimm locked the door behind him and led us back up the drab stairway we had descended earlier. “Sorry for all the steps. It’s the only way in and out of this basement. We’re kind of landlocked down here. So you guys do any DNA on her body?”

I could tell from the expression on Mike’s face that he was as surprised by the question as I was. “You know anything about Katrina’s murder besides what you’ve read in the papers?”

“Nope. But I wasn’t sure whether Mamdouba told you that all of us who work here, they’ve got our genetic profiles on record. They’ve got our DNA.”

No one had mentioned it to us, and the idea had never crossed my mind.

“Much of the work we do in the labs here is identifying different species and subspecies of animal life within our fields of specialty. See what their similarities and differences are, and which characters are threatened with extinction. The bird guys can tell you whether a spotted owl on a mountain range is a relative of the ones that live a mile away, or in Northern California, or if it’s more closely linked to a particular family of owls in Mexico.”

“What does that have to do with you scientists?”

“We sit at the microscopes all day, looking at and breathing onto our specimens and slides. A sneeze, some sweat-well, anything that one of us contributes to the mix would obviously throw off the research results. So they take an oral swab from each of us when we start working here. Thought you might just want to know that.”

The same procedure was followed at most morgues and serologists’ offices. It should have occurred to me that anyone working with genetic samples would be required to have his or her own DNA on file. If Dr. Kestenbaum found something of serological value on any of Katrina’s crime scene evidence, it would be a good place to start.

We crossed through several corridors until Zimm came to another unmarked door behind a row of service elevators. Again he swiped his identification card and took us into a dingy staircase that led four tiers below the main lobby.

The hallways were dark and he flipped on light switches as he walked along. “A lot of people took the day off, before the long weekend. But I’ve got friends who work in this department, and it’s where I spent my first two summers, back when I was in high school. I can show you most of what you need.”

There were compact laboratories on either side of us, filled from floor to ceiling with fish tanks and glass jars of all sizes. Then came storerooms of fish samples-some two million of them-each drifting in some kind of watery solution, carefully labeled and housed in stacks of rolling metal cabinets, like so many books on library shelves.

“What’s that smell?” Mike asked.

“Which one? Dead matter? Preservatives? The odor of death is all over this museum. We’ve just learned to mask it pretty well.”

I studied the markings on scores of fish skeletons, their whiteness standing out in striking contrast to the dull painted gray of the basement floors and ceilings. “How do you do that?”

“When I was first an intern here, they brought in a huge whale skeleton that had washed up on a beach in Long Island. I’d never smelled anything like it. Couldn’t shake the odor. My boss sent me to Columbus Avenue, to a drugstore. Oil of bergamot, he told me to ask for. I bought the place out.”

“What is it?”

“It’s an essence made from the rind of a citrus fruit. Bergamot-it’s like an orange smell with mint in it. We’d just douse some cloths in that and leave them draped over the specimen when we weren’t working on it. Everyone here has tricks like that. It’s the only way to deal with the smell of the dead specimens.”

Mike was writing in his notebook. He’d make Kestenbaum test the linen cloth that was wrapped around Katrina’s body. Perhaps the mummified linen had been soaked in a substance that had masked the odor of death while she was in storage somewhere. That sweet smell that hit us when the coffin lid was opened on the truck, before the stronger blast of garlic, might have been something like bergamot.

“Suppose you wanted to kill someone, Zimm. How would you do it down here?” Mike was checking to see whether the availability of arsenic was common knowledge. The cause of Katrina’s death had not yet appeared in the press.

He steered us past the ichthyology X-ray department and into a room crowded with three-foot-long fish tanks, alive with samples. “Know anybody with a weak heart? This sucker’s an electric catfish. African. He can pump out about three hundred volts when he’s riled up.”

The whiskered brown creatures darted about, one pressing his nose against the glass as though he wanted to prove Zimm’s point to us.

“Over here’s where we keep the tissues, for molecular work.” He turned on another light in a small lab across the hall. There were two enormous vats, withDANGER signs printed on their sides. “Liquid nitrogen. Eighteen degrees. If I stuck your head in this for just a minute you’d burn to death from the intense cold. Painful, fast, quiet.”

“But you’d still have the problem of getting rid of me.”

“I could at least keep you in cold storage till I figured out how to do that. Us bug guys? We don’t get many things that won’t fit in a jar. A couple of giant insects from the Amazon or the African jungles. You wanna talk to some people in mammalogy? They just got a new degreaser.”

“What’s that?”

“Hey, you’re the detective. How do you figure they get their skeletal samples clean? They got this brand-new degreasing machine. You can fit an entire elephant skull into it, submerge it for a few days. This thing takes all the fat off the bones. Then we give them some of our beetles to nibble off whatever’s left, before they stick it in the freezer to kill off all the germs. Dip somebody in there and they’d be clean as a whistle.”

I ignored the midday rumblings of my empty stomach. Museum work was killing my appetite.

He was leading us down a long, dim corridor and around one more corner. “Ever hear of a coelacanth?”

“No.”

“It’s the missing link of the fish world. All anybody had seen for centuries were fossils of this thing. Scientists thought it had died out several million years ago. Five feet long, very unusual fin structure, gives birth to live young. In 1938 a trawler off South Africa came up with one. A young scientist working down there sketched it and then sent the fish over to this museum. We’ve had it here ever since.”

“That same fish?”

“Yeah. She’s pickled.”

“How come everyone in your business uses that expression?”

“Because alcohol is such a great preservative. This beauty has lasted more than sixty years, just as she was pulled out of the water, in a solution that’s seventy percent ethyl alcohol.” He was around the last nook and into an open space.

“Have a look. There’s her coffin.”

We were standing in front of a six-foot-long metal container with a hinged lid. It was three feet high and a couple of feet deep, large enough to hold a prehistoric fish or a large shark, and most human beings I knew.