The Bone Vault

25

We flew out of the Vineyard at 7A.M., as soon as the veil of fog lifted from the short runway, on Monday morning, the twenty-seventh of May, which was the Memorial Day holiday.

Quentin Vallejo was to reclaim his plane at Teterboro to fly back to California. I greeted him, hugged Nina good-bye, and walked outside the chain-link fence with Val to find Mike Chapman, waiting in his car.

He whistled a familiar Dylan tune as he opened the trunk of the car for the two suitcases. I knew it was “The Mighty Quinn,” just as I knew he would change that name when he sang the chorus. “…when Clem the Eskimo gets here, Alex Cooper’s gonna jump for joy.”

“Glad to see you’re in such a good mood. See if you can find a song by this afternoon that won’t offend her before she even opens her mouth. You hear anything from Mercer on my missing kid?”

“Still missing. So is the perp. Felix seems to have skipped out of town as soon as his brother posted bail. He’s in the wind. Vandomir’s thinking maybe he took Angel with him.”

My stomach started to churn. “Ouch. Won’t they make an exception to the forty-eight-hour rule and put out an interstate on it?”

“Done. Detective Wallace was very persuasive, on your behalf.” We were on the highway on our way into the city.

“Val, we’ll drop you at your office and head over to Natural History.”

“Fine,” Val said. “Any news?”

“We had the entire squad, and Special Victims, running raps all weekend on museum employees from both sides of the park.”

“Surprises?” I asked.

“Not too many. Anna Friedrichs is the only one of our people with an arrest. Disorderly conduct, about eight years ago. Looks like some kind of civil disobedience thing. A demonstration about some African political situation at the UN.”

The sober anthropologist was an unlikely looking radical.

“And Erik Poste’s been fingerprinted. No record.”

“Why?”

“Routine application for a gun permit, five years back. Must have changed his mind ‘cause he never got the gun or completed the application.”

“Son of the great white hunter thing, I guess.”

“The rest of the professional crew is just what you’d expect. Very few with criminal histories. A couple of young staffers with drug priors. But belowdecks, watch out. You got a locksmith at the Met with a long sheet for burglary, a handful of guys with petty thefts, and about five in both houses with physical assaults. We’ll talk to all of them, but nothing seems to be an obvious connection.”

We had almost reached Val’s building when my beeper went off. I looked at the dial and saw that it was McKinney’s extension. I took out my phone to return the call.

“Isn’t your office closed today?” Val asked.

“Yeah, but if McKinney sits home with his wife and kids,” Mike explained, “then his idiot girlfriend doesn’t get to sit under his desk and give him a blow job all day. Heard they created a new position for Gunsher.”

I dialed the number and pressedSEND. “Yeah, this new position’s even more useless than her warrant apprehension unit, which caught nobody. Here’s an acronym for you: GRIP. Gun Recovery Information Program. Firearm trafficking stuff.”

“Don’t the feds do that? Isn’t that what the United States Attorney’s expertise was?” Val asked.

“They do it better than anybody. Just meant to be a feel-good thing for Gunsher. Gives her a title with no work to do. Cops recover a gun from a perp and she calls the feds and asks them to track the piece. A chimp could do her work.”

“Maybe not the blow-”

“She sits in McKinney’s office all day and tells him he’s a genius. Every time she comes up for air. Hey, Pat, what is it?”

“Where are you?”

“On my way to interview a witness.” I could tell from the tone of surprise in his voice that he figured he had caught me out of town and unable to respond to whatever he was about to ask me to do.

“I hate to seem like I’m picking on you when you’ve got so much to do. How’s the murder investigation coming along?”

“I didn’t realize there was a gun involved in the Grooten case. Why else would you be the least bit interested?”

“I’d like you to get right over to the Waldorf-Astoria this morning before you do anything else. Ask for the head of security-Rocco Bronzini. One of your buddies is staying at the hotel, causing him big headaches. Get over there and clear it up before you drag the office into your personal life.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know anyone who’s-”

“Do me a favor, take ten minutes out of your day and get to the hotel.”

I flipped the lid to end the conversation. “Slight detour, Mike. Val, we’ll drop you and then swing by the Waldorf. Was there a full moon? I didn’t notice.”

By nine-fifteen we were at the concierge’s desk in the lobby of the old hotel, waiting for Rocco. He led us to an empty table in the Peacock Alley bar and spread out his paperwork.

“We’ve been stiffed for twenty-five grand. Third time it’s happened. Looks like the broad is a friend of yours.”

I had no idea what he was talking about.

“Hard to believe. Don’t you return her calls? She leaves you plenty of messages.”

“If you’d stop being cryptic and give me her name I’d be happy to help.”

“That’s just it. We need you to tell us whoshe is?”

“Back it up a step, Rocco. Whaddaya got?” Mike asked.

“Let’s use the latest one as an example. I know part of the story now ‘cause I had the guy on the phone yesterday. Call him John Doe. Businessman from Omaha, here for a sales convention. Checks in almost two weeks ago, on a Tuesday. Junior suite, reserved through Friday. Five hundred fifty bucks a night, plus some room service. Figure the whole thing should run his company about three thousand for the week, even with the best wines and biggest steaks.”

“Nice boondoggle.”

“Last night in town, he’s drinking alone in our other pub, the Bull and Bear. Picks up a girl, buys her a cocktail. Invites her upstairs for a nightcap.

“In the morning, he’s got to dash for the airport and report back to the Nebraska widget company. She’s bathing in the afterglow, spread out on top of the bedsheets like she really had a good time. She’s sipping on a mimosa from the breakfast tray. ‘Mind if I stay an hour or so, take a bath before I leave?’”

“John’s not a bad guy, right?”

“Not a mean bone in his body, Chapman. Tells her she just has to be out of the room by noon, and gives those breasts one more squeeze on his way out the door.”

“What’s your problem?”

“That was Friday morning. ‘Mrs. Doe’ waits for him to scat. She calls the front desk and tells my receptionist that they’re having such a ball they’ve decided to stay on for another week.”

“That works?”

“Hey, he’s got the room on his AmEx card. The front desk calls up the credit card company, which says the corporation is good for it. And lovely Mrs. Doe is in business. You start with the five-fifty-a-night suite rate. You add a week’s worth of room service-champagne morning, noon, and night, shrimp cocktail and filet mignon for dinner. Make that dinner for two, whoever the lucky guy may be. Make some charges at the shops on the concourse level, everything from clothing to a gold watch, all billed to the room. And then you walk out the door a week later.”

“And Mr. Doe?”

“Opens his American Express bill at his office yesterday and almost had a stroke. Instead of three thousand dollars in charges that the company expected, he’s got a bill close to thirty thousand. He calls our accounting office, and they tell him Mrs. Doe authorized the payments.”

“Only Mrs. Doe never left Omaha.”

“How could she? Three little Does, a whole bunch of PTA meetings and soccer games.”

“So he can’t cry to her, and he can’t cry to his boss. So he calls the Waldorf to complain.”

“Yeah, and it wasn’t until his fourth attempt at a story that he got close to the truth. Someone stole his room key, must have lost his credit card, maybe it was the maid. He tried all that crap first. But this one was recent enough that when I went back to the bartender to see if there was anything he remembered from that final night’s bar bill, he actually recalled watching the pickup. Mr. Doe had been there for the last call, chatting up the barkeep about the Cornhuskers’ prospects for next season, till the girl came in. She worked fast, and the guy’s hands were all over her within ten minutes.”

“How’d you put it together?”

“Thanks to Miss Cooper, here. She and her little friend did that for me.”

I looked at Mike and shrugged my shoulders.

“I pulled the last two cases we had like this. One guy from Kansas City and another from Austin. Both got beat for thirty large. There’s only one common denominator. On each of the bills, the girl calls your number, Miss Cooper. Sometimes three, four calls a night. Checked with the phone company and they said it was an extension at the DA’s office. Spoke with the head of the division-this guy McKinney-and he told me it must be one of your crazy pals. You want to straighten this out for me?”

He passed the telephone records to me and I broke into a wide grin. “Crazy, yes. My pal, no. Mike,” I said, “this is Shirley Denzig, the woman who’s been stalking me since last winter.”

“You serious? How can you tell?”

“Because she called again last week. Leaving messages in the middle of the night. The squad’s doing a dump on my phone. They should have results tomorrow but this beats them to it.” I pointed at the times of her outgoing calls, which corresponded with the messages that had been left on my office voice mail. “All they thought they had on her was a harassment case. Looks like there’ll be a grand larceny charge, too. Three of them.”

“You know where we can find her?” Rocco asked.

“That’s been our problem. She must have come up with this scam because she needed a place to live. She was evicted from her apartment and that’s why we couldn’t find her to lock her up during the winter. What’s she had, three weeks under your roof in the past few months? You checked with any of the other hotels to see if they’ve been hit? It’s pretty clever. She probably goes from joint to joint doing the same thing. One night as a hooker and then she lives like a queen for a week.”

“Is she that unstable?”

“Rocco, she’s not only psycho, but she’s been known to carry a gun, too.”

“Don’t go public with that,” I said jokingly to Mike. “McKinney’ll put Ellen Gunsher and her new firearms unit on my case.”

Shirley Denzig had been stalking me for more than half a year. She had stolen a gun from her father’s home in Baltimore, and become unhinged enough that we feared that she might use it.

“You got a file on her?”

“Sure.” I gave Rocco the number for the DA’s squad detectives who were working on the case. They would be happy for the wealth of information the Waldorf files would add to what they knew about Denzig’s recent whereabouts. “May I ask, why didn’t you just call me yourself, instead of going over my head?”

“It never occurred to me. She was phoning you so often I figured you must have been a good friend of hers. The only one she’s got. Why would I think she might be annoying you?”

This morning’s call from Rocco would give McKinney one more reason to think that I was drowning in my own overload. I could either go down to the office and take the time to explain the story to him or get on with the day as planned. “Shall we get over to the museum, Mike?”

We walked out onto Park Avenue and back to Mike’s car. “There’s probably a reason you didn’t tell me Mad Shirl was back in your life again. I’d like to know what that is.”

“Look, I called the squad. They’ll get it done. It’s not like she’s back after me, out on the street. You always overreact to situations like that.”

“Like a woman who’s walking around with a gun, thinks you’re the devil, knows where you work and where you live, and you don’t have a clue about how to find her? Damn right I want to know about it. Anything in that set of facts you don’t understand?”

“Sorry. I’ll keep you up to speed.” I glanced at my watch. “So we’re supposed to have most of the people who were working on the big exhibition gathered at Natural History. We’re a bit late, so they should all be assembled by now.”

“They opening up just for us?”

“Nope. The only two days the museum closes are Thanksgiving and Christmas. Who do you want to start with? Any ideas?”

“We’re gonna go with the group approach first. See some of the dynamic between the-”

“Among them.”

“That little grammatical dictator can’t ever shut off, huh? You’re just pissed off ‘cause the group meeting left you with such a bad headache last time we tried it.” He grinned at me, and I remembered our interrogation up at King’s College last December.

We parked and made our way past the entrance guards, who recognized us now, and called down to the basement, where the meeting was to be held. A student led us through the maze of corridors and staircases, down past the signs that readTHE BESTIARY and into a makeshift conference room in which the mostly familiar faces were talking over their coffee.

Anna Friedrichs poured a cup for each of us and pointed to seats at the table. I sat next to Erik Poste, who was examining a large woodcut, discussing it with a man I did not recognize.

“Hello, I’m Alexandra Cooper.”

“Richard Socarides, African mammals.”

Poste moved the black-and-white image so that I could see it. It was a stunningly detailed drawing of a rhinoceros with its singular horn, whiskered neck, scaly legs, and armored-plated body. “Can you imagine this, Miss Cooper?”

I studied the wonderful print, which seemed a perfect example for the show.

“Albrecht Dürer drew this beast. There he is, in Germany, 1515. No magazines or books or television to let him see the animal. The only rhinoceros ever shipped to Europe from Africa drowned on its way there. All he had to work from were the verbal descriptions of other people. And still to this day, no one has ever produced a better drawing of a rhino. From my collection, of course.” Poste, I remembered, was in charge of European paintings at the Met.

Socarides appeared to be about forty years old, with a serious mien and a more elegant style of dress than most of the Natural History staff. He was wearing a pinstriped suit, tasseled loafers, and a shirt with his monogram on the barrel cuff. “Better than the real thing, Erik. How goes your investigation, Ms. Cooper?”

“Fine, thank you. We’re making progress, slowly.”

“I would think the odds are against you. I watch all those forensic shows on television. The statistics are rather appalling. If the matter isn’t solved within the first seventy hours, the odds of identifying the killer drop off the charts.”

“And every now and then we get lucky, Mr. Socarides.”

“Yeah, the perp drools on a body and the first place we come is the Natural History data bank, making sure it wasn’t one of your taxidermists getting some practice. Mike Chapman. Homicide.”

“What data bank?” Poste asked.

“Not quite like your shop, Erik,” Socarides said. “We’ve all given samples of our DNA. Have to do it so we don’t confuse a new species of woolly mammoth with some hair that’s rubbed off my alpaca overcoat.”

Elijah Mamdouba called the meeting to order. “What you have here, Mr. Chapman, Miss Cooper, is the organizing committee of the joint exhibition. From our museum, that is myself and Mr. Socarides. From the Met,” he said, pointing around the table, “you have Mr. Poste-European paintings, Miss Friedrichs-the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, and Mr. Bellinger-from the Cloisters. So we are missing…”

He scanned the room, trying to recall the other curator.

“Gaylord. Timothy Gaylord. Eygptian art,” Mike said. “Still at the mummy congress.”

“Certainly. Well, let’s see if we can answer some more of your questions.”

Mike let me start the conversation. We both had a preference for the bad cop role-me out of a penchant for cross-examination, and Mike because he was naturally distrustful and impatient.

“We’ve found out a great deal more about Katrina Grooten than we knew when we met each of you the first time. Some of her friends have been very helpful to us.”

Every head in the room seemed to respond to that bluff. Mamdouba was the first to jump at the bait. “So, the people here at the museum that we spoke of on Friday, you’ve located them?”

“It wouldn’t be wise to identify our witnesses to you, sir. We’ve had some contact with a few of her acquaintances in other lines of work, too. One of the things that has us a bit stymied are the differing snapshots of her personality.”

“You mean before she became ill versus afterward?” Bellinger asked.

“No. There are those who have described her as very quiet and, well, meek and shy. Others have said she could be feisty if she was passionate about something. You, Mr. Poste, and you, Ms. Friedrichs, each described her differently. We’re trying to account for that. See if you can tell us what her passions were, exactly.”

Poste spoke first. “As I told you, I only knew Katrina as a serious young scholar, a bit aloof, if I had to use one word to describe her.”

“I’m the one who told you she had another side,” Anna Friedrichs said, clasping her hands and leaning forward on the long Formica table. “I certainly saw it. Hiram, I think you did, too.”

“Well, there was a good deal more of it in evidence before the attack. Before she was raped, I mean.”

“Raped?”Poste asked. “You mean the killer raped Katrina?”

“No, no. Not that I’m aware of. Is that right, Detective?” Bellinger looked at Chapman. “When she was raped in Fort Tryon Park last year, leaving work.”

“I never knew about that,” Mamdouba said.

“Neither did I,” Poste was quick to add.

Anna Friedrichs was annoyed. “I told both of you, I know I did.” The two men looked at each other and were either truly puzzled by her statement or had a similar talent for playing dumb. “Erik, really. Elijah. I made a point of telling you and asking you to keep the confidence. I was afraid she’d be jumpy if she was alone in this place late at night.”

This was exactly what Mike wanted to happen. He wanted to divide the united front, which was most often an artificial response to the unwelcome entry of a law enforcement agency, and find out what fractionalized these colleagues. What drew the fire in the belly of both museums, where ninety percent of their collections lay under wraps?

“It’s clear Katrina had a long-standing interest in medieval art. That was her training and education. That’s what she came to the Met to do. And yet here she was, leaving New York and returning to Africa in December to pursue an entirely new direction.”

“If I may say, Miss Cooper”-it was Mamdouba speaking-“I believe it was her father’s health that was the main reason for her decision to go home.”

A bit late for that, I thought to myself. Something else had to be at the bottom of her change of focus. I counted on Clem to help us figure that out later tonight, but we also needed to see what these curators thought.

“We haven’t heard from you, Mr. Socarides. Tell us your impressions of Katrina.”

He had seemed content to be resting his head against the back of his chair, letting the others take the lead. He sat upright, slowly. “Never met her until we started to put the show together. Loved her animals, the girl did. Endeared herself to me.”

“What was it about them that you think attracted her?”

“Who doesn’t like animals, Ms. Cooper?” He became animated, wagging a finger at me. “Now on your television crime shows,that would be your serial killer. Someone who hated furry creatures, tortured them as a child. Isn’t that always the way to find the killer?”

“I’m talking about the victim for the moment. What was it she liked about your animals?”

“This exhibition is all about animals, young lady. Katrina found examples of dozens of symbolic beasts from her medieval art, and then I introduced her to the real ones. Okapi, elands, Grevy’s zebras, reticulated giraffes.”

“Dead ones.”

“Well, obviously, Mr. Chapman. This is a museum, not a zoological society.”

“The ones you stuff for display?”

“Precisely.”

“She ever watch you-or your staff-prepare one of those mountings?”

“No. Not that I’m aware of. The beasts and the bones, she liked both of those. I don’t think she liked the whole process of using the skins to re-create the animals. A bit too Hannibal Lecter for her, I’m sure.”

“What do you mean by ‘the beasts and the bones’?”

“Well, Ms. Cooper, Katrina loved the animals. They were all African, keep in mind. Maybe that’s what she liked. And she had a real fascination with the bones. Never tired of looking at the bones. Wanted to know everything I knew about the bones.”

Millions of them, as I recalled. Not so unusual, I thought to myself, for a woman whose specialty was funerary art.

“And I must interject, Anna,” Socarides said, before he slumped back into his seat. “Nobody ever told me the girl had been raped. I don’t know what you’re making such a fuss of it for.”

“I never claimed to have toldyou about it, Richard. I had no idea she was so taken with your, your…beasts,” she said dismissively. Anna was determined to show off her close relationship to Katrina. “In fact, I had no idea you’d paid her a bit of mind outside this room.”

It was ordinarily my habit to interview each witness alone, which we would attempt to do later on, but Mike’s idea to bring the group together brought out talons on each that might not have been visible one-on-one.

“You seem to think you had the market cornered on her friendship, Anna. She was actually quite surprised to learn how weak the Met’s history was in your very own specialty, African art.”

“Katrina was hardly what I would call African, would you, Elijah? She was Dutch. Boer. About as primitive as Erik.” Anna laughed at her inside joke.

“Are you Dutch, too?” I asked Poste, remembering that Ruth Gerst had told us his father was a great explorer and hunter who had taken museum trustees on African safaris and shoots.

“Yes, by birth. But we moved here when I was a child, and I grew up in the States.” He seemed embarrassed by the petty squabbling among the museum staff members.

“What did Mr. Socarides mean when he said your department at the Met was weak?”

Anna went on, “Until very recently in museum terms-the late 1960s-the Metropolitan had no interest in what we call the primitive arts. We were terribly underrepresented in my field. The trustees at the time looked on all of it as sort of airport art-Mayan sculptures, African masks, New Guinea ancestor poles. It wasn’t until Nelson Rockefeller gave his entire collection to the museum that we began to be competitive in this field.”

Mamdouba’s irrepressible grin reemerged. “Ah, tell the truth, Anna. Most of your distinguished trustees think all these aboriginal faces belong inour museum, don’t they?”

Bellinger and Poste had to smile along with him. But Anna snapped, “These are works of art, Elijah, every bit as beautifully crafted as the sculptures of the ancient Greeks. In your museum they just become cultural specimens, totem poles stuck next to igloos and canoes.”

“I’m glad Timothy Gaylord isn’t here,” Socarides said. “He’d be apoplectic hearing you compare some of those drooping-breastedNational Geographic figures of yours to his precious Egyptian carvings.”

Mamdouba bowed his head in my direction. “This is a centuriesold dispute, Miss Cooper, not likely to be resolved today. Miss Friedrichs and I often battle for acquisitions. My colleagues and I believe that primitive objects are much better respected under our aegis.”

Friedrichs walked to the coffeemaker and refilled her cup. People shuffled papers and pretended not to notice the silence.

Mike Chapman tried another topic. “I’m gonna ask you to do some word association now. What do you think of when I say the wordvault? What does it mean in your work, or in the museum?”

Friedrichs didn’t want to play anymore. She looked straight ahead and ignored the question. I thought of her disorderly conduct arrest and imagined her planted in the middle of the street with her picket sign in defiance of police instructions to move on.

Erik Poste leaned forward, his hand on his chest. “I suppose I can give you the definition, Detective. It’s an architectural term, illustrated quite often in paintings. In fact, you both saw vaulted areas the day we took you around the basement of the Met. Vaults are a series of arches that radiate from a central point, used to make a roof in a building’s interior.”

“In my business, that’s what the medievalists called burial chambers. They were mostly underground, in churches and cathedrals, so they were called vaults,” Bellinger said.

“Funny how it conjures such a different image to me,” Socarides said. “Those are our storage cabinets. I’ve got my assorted mammal bones in tusk vaults and boar vaults and shrew vaults. But then, Erik’s my expert on museum history, if that’s what you’re looking for. Grew up in these places-it’s in his blood.”

I thought again of our conversation with Ruth Gerst about Poste’s father. Erik might be the one to know something about private vaults.

“I understand that there are some personal storage rooms that wealthy contributors were able to keep in the museums.” I looked to Mamdouba. “Might you have a list of those names?”

“Not here, madam. We’ve had no such thing that I’m aware of.” The smile had vanished and he was quite firm in his denial.

“Are you saying you’re not aware of any, or that there aren’t any? I’m going to ask you to check with President Raspen and consult your archives. Surely, Mr. Poste, you know something about that tradition.”

Everyone turned to stare at Erik Poste. “I, uh, I know they’ve been rumored to exist at the Met. Three or four of them at most.”

Mike wanted to prove to the group that he had this on better information than rumor. “The Arthur Paglin vault. Others like that?”

Poste shrugged his shoulders. “Paglin had the great Egyptian collection. Gaylord would know more about that than I do.”

“What became of your father’s collections?” I asked Poste, who had pursued such a different line of scholarship from Willem, as Ruth Gerst had described it to us.

“You know about him, do you?” He looked pleased that I was familiar with his father’s work.

“Not very much. But I’ve heard he made great contributions to this museum.”

“I was twelve years old when he died, Miss Cooper. Killed by native poachers when he was leading an expedition. Greedy and ignorant men who took his life simply because he stood between them and some ivory animal horns. Killed because of the power of their superstition. My older brother, Kirk, remained on, in Kenya, doing my father’s work. He’d be the one to ask about my father’s contributions.”

“You didn’t stay in Africa?”

“I was sent off to boarding school in New England. My mother’s health was quite fragile. She was hospitalized for long spells while I was growing up. I developed a preference for art, which was Mother’s influence.”

“Are any of your father’s things here, in the Natural History museum?”

Poste extended his hand, palm upward, deferring to Mamdouba. “Oh, surely. Many, many of our finest African exhibits were brought back to us by Willem. I can arrange for you to see a catalog of the items, if you wish,” Mamdouba said.

Mamdouba played to Chapman now, smiling a bit too broadly. “I imagine by the time you’re through with this investigation, you’ll be asking me to sign you up for one of our safaris, Detective.”

“Don’t count on it. I’m a Discovery channel guy. The only safari you’ll get me on is in my Naugahyde chair in front of the television set. No mosquitoes, no wild boars, no hungry cannibals. Just tell me if you’ve got any vaults down here, okay, sir?”

I was ready to break up the group and take them down the hall, one at a time, to an empty lab that had been set aside for us. Mike wanted to ask each of them whether they had known Pablo Bermudez, the worker who fell off the Met roof, and I had scores of questions about their contact with Katrina.

“Any of you done any foreign travel this year?” Mike asked.

Each one of them nodded. He threw out a random sampling of foreign cities, then got to London. Both Bellinger and Poste responded that they had been there.

“When did you go, and with whom?”

“Can’t be sure of the date,” said Erik Poste. “Late March, if I’m not mistaken. Alone. I’d been to an auction of great Masters in Geneva and stopped there on the way back. Did a bit of museum business at some galleries. Twenty-four-hour layover.”

“And you?”

“January,” Bellinger answered. “Pierre Thibodaux took me along. The British Museum was thinking of deaccessioning some medieval objects. He wanted my opinion. Spent an afternoon there with him looking them over.”

“Just the two of you on the trip?”

“And Eve. Eve Drexler. Just along for the ride, as far as I could tell. A perk for being a loyal soldier.”

I put down my coffee and stared across the table at Bellinger. “Museum security’s pretty tight these days. Do you recall signing in and showing any identification to be admitted?”

Bellinger took a deep breath and closed his eyes. “Probably so. Sure, sure.”

“Do you remember how Eve Drexler signed in?”

He ran a finger around the rim of his mug. “I haven’t the faintest idea. There was nothing particularly significant about-”

There was a knock on the door before Mark Zimmerly opened it and came in.

“Excuse me, Mr. Mamdouba, but I need to speak with you immediately.”

Ever careful of his manners, the curator tried to calm the agitated young man. “In just a minute, Zimm. Step outside and I’ll join you shortly.”

Zimm hesitated before speaking, but looked to Chapman for help and decided not to wait. “You got a third-grade class from Scarsdale, sir. They’re freaking out up there, the kids are screaming bloody murder.”

Mamdouba stood up and moved briskly to the door, hoping to cut off the next sentence before any of the guests heard whatever the problem was.

“What is it, Zimm?” Mike asked. He beat the older man to the exit, ready to help.

“It’s in a diorama, in one of the display cases on the main floor. It’s-it’s…an arm. A severed human arm.”