The Bone Vault

36

Mike, Mercer, and I were huddled in the corner outside Zimm’s office.

“I’ve got the subpoena to hand to Mamdouba for the floor plan and list of rooms. The museum closes at five forty-five. That’s half an hour. Clem’s already telling people that she may get to town tonight. Why don’t we have Hinton drive her up here and bring her into the place when there’s no one around to see her. Then-”

“We’d still have to get her past a security guard.”

“Like any one of them is going to have a clue?” Mike smirked. “The place will be emptying out for the night. Mercer, you can meet her outside the entrance. The guard’ll be so busy dealing with Mercer and looking at his shiny gold badge that he won’t even notice Clem. We need an insider to get us around here. Zimm’s good, but he has no idea what we’d be looking for, necessarily. Clem would recognize the significance of anything she and Katrina discussed. She’s snooped everywhere, I’m sure.”

“You think Mamdouba will let us stay late, after closing hours?” Mercer asked.

“Other people are in here doing their work.”

“You trust him? You ready to take him into our confidence about having Clem here?” Mike asked.

I responded by looking at each of them. “What do you guys think?”

Mike wasn’t ready to trust anyone. “Let’s get her here first. One of us will sniff around the attic with Coop, looking at bones. The other one will hold hands with an Eskimo in a quiet room till the coast is clear and she can show us what she knows.”

I called Laura’s number and asked her to put Clem on. “You just missed them. You can reach them on Detective Hinton’s cell phone. He was on his way to the hotel with Clem. She was getting tired.”

I wrote down the number she gave me. “Any messages?”

“Call Nina at home tonight. It’s pretty important.” That would be the UniQuest funding story. “Sarah wants to talk to you later if you’ve got some time. Eve Drexler called. I recognized her name from the case so I asked whether I could help.”

“What’d she want?”

“To see whether I could give her a telephone number to reach Clem.”

“What’d you tell her?”

“You taught me well. Told her I didn’t know who that was and that I’d be happy to ask you. She told me not to bother you with it.”

Eve was getting impatient with the e-mails. She wanted to talk to Clem. Or was she calling on Thibodaux’s behalf? She was obviously spreading the news that Clem had planted with her about Katrina and the police investigation.

I dialed Harry Hinton’s cell phone number. “Where are you?”

“Stuck behind a four-car pileup on the FDR Drive, just below Fourteenth Street.”

“Think you can get Clem to the hotel, get her something to eat, let her put her feet up for half an hour, and get her to the Museum of Natural History by seven-thirty?”

I heard him ask if she was game and he got back on to assure me he could. “Well, we’re down to only one guard to worry about,” I told Mike and Mercer. “Traffic’s bad and she wants a bit of a rest. No way they can make it before this place closes, so that will give us some time to get started. Let’s find out which door they keep open so staff can come and go after hours. Harry’ll call when they leave the hotel and one of you can walk Clem in.”

Mamdouba was less than pleased to see us so near to closing time. His expression soured when I handed him the subpoena.

“Must I go to court?” he asked, reading the language on the small white document.

“No. You can see that the foreman of the grand jury modified the request. Instead of a personal appearance before them, you can satisfy your legal obligation by giving me everything we ask for. That’s why my office called your assistant this morning, so you’d have the papers ready.”

“Let me see what we’ve got for you.” He left us in his colorfully decorated circular office and retreated to his assistant’s desk. When he returned, he had an armload of papers.

The big grin returned to his face. “So, here you can begin.” He unfolded a Xeroxed copy of a museum floor plan that stretched beyond the edges of his desk blotter. He ran his index finger from the Central Park West entrance door through the narrow lines that led into display rooms to the left of the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall as he talked.

“Now, what you see here no longer exists like this. It’s become the Hall of Biodiversity, as you know. But you can use this-”

“Wait a minute.” Mike bent down and looked at the date below the name of the architectural firm that had done the plan. “This diagram was printed in 1963. You’ve torn up and rebuilt this place five times since then.” He tapped the desk with his fist. “And we don’t want the tourist version, Mr. Mamdouba. It’s got to be current and it’s got to be complete. I want details of everything that’s below the ground floor and whatever is above the fourth floor.”

“Mr. Chapman, there are seven hundred twenty-three rooms in this museum. You’ll be here for a week.”

“I gotta be somewhere for a week, and so far nobody’s suggested Paris. Get me everything.”

Mike pulled up a chair to the side of Mamdouba’s desk and began to fan out all the wrinkled maps that diagrammed the mishmash of corridors and stairwells in the museum’s twenty-three interconnected buildings.

“But, but you can’t do that here,” the curator sputtered at him.

“Because?”

“We’ve got to have a meeting. A bit of an emergency.”

“With people from the Met, about the exhibition breaking up?”

“Exactly.”

“Is Mr. Thibodaux coming?”

“No, no. Not since he tendered his resignation. He’s got nothing more to do with this. Some of the others from the Met are already here, and Miss Drexler is on her way with Pierre’s files. I’ll need this room, Mr. Chapman.”

“Park us where you want us, Mr. Mamdouba. We’re all yours.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Right now. We got a lot of territory to cover and-”

“Yes, but I understand you’re even bringing in help from overseas,” he said quietly.

Mike met Mamdouba’s supercilious smirk with one of his own. “I’m a patsy for reunions. Love it when the whole family gets together every now and then. We’ll stay all night if we have to, sir. Is that a problem for you?”

“Of course it is. I have to keep the guards with you-”

“Likewe’re the security risk? Those guys have been sleeping on the job for aeons. There’s more life in your dead T. rex than in the whole passel of mopes somebody stuffed and left guarding your treasures. Tell you what, you can check my pockets when I leave, if that’s your concern. Mercer and I are not much on collecting crabs in formaldehyde, and Coop here has more jewels than she needs. What we could use is a quiet place to look over these lists.”

Mike picked several sheaves of paper out of the large pile and handed them to Mercer and me while he continued to search for a more up-to-date floor plan. The directory I was holding appeared to be a comprehensive inventory of categories of collections. It was several hundred pages thick, bound together with a large metal clamp.

I peered over at Mercer’s folder, which was equally weighty. It listed names of donors, going back almost a century, and the specimens they had contributed to the museum.

“Is there anything that itemizes your collections by name and refers to the storage areas or display cases they’re in?”

“Everything that’s now on exhibit is computerized. You’ll find that printout here, too,” Mamdouba said, thumbing through the stack he had given to Mike.

“Like that only leaves us looking for the other ninety percent?”

“Well, we’re trying to get that all into the system, Miss Cooper. It’s a dreadfully difficult process. Two million butterflies, five million gall wasps, fifty million bones. Is that the kind of thing you’re interested in?”

“Fiftymillion? How many of them are human?”

“They’re mostly mammals, Detective. The numbers are in these folders that my assistant organized for you.”

“Settle us in somewhere. It’s gonna be a long night. And one of those magnetized passes-we’ll need to borrow one in case we go to the basement.”

Mamdouba was quiet for a few moments, undoubtedly trying to decide whether to engage in a battle with us. With obvious reluctance, he went into his desk drawer and handed Mike a plastic pass with a VIP guest label on it. He was thinking, it seemed to me, about what space he could stick us in temporarily that would cause the least interference or notice. “Come down the hall after me, please.”

He led us to an empty office about five doors away from his corner room. It was sparsely furnished, except for the shelves of mollusks that covered three walls from floor to ceiling. “If this is acceptable, I’ll check on you later.”

Limpets, snails, mussels, and oysters, all looking very gray in their pickled juice, watched over us as we set to work spreading out the floor plans on the empty desktop. “Start looking?” Mike asked.

Mercer sat on the window ledge, resting one of his long legs against an open desk drawer. “I’d concentrate on the level below the ground floor and the area up on five, above the offices,” he said, handing Mike a red felt-tipped pen. “They’ve got to be the least populated spaces when the museum is shut down. Look for unmarked rooms or closets and circle ‘em so we can take a peek.”

“And compare the different generations of maps,” I added. “See if something has been reconfigured and whether it’s accessible now or not.”

“Man, we’re gonna have to come back with comfy shoes. We got miles to cover in here.”

I made myself comfortable on the floor and looked up at Mercer. “You and I need to cross-reference what we find. Why don’t you start looking to see whether there are any familiar names from this case? Like is the Gerst collection mentioned, or anything about Erik Poste’s father? Maybe there are references to items on loan from the Met, like the mummies Timothy Gaylord was talking about.”

More than two hours went by and we were still drowning in paper. Mamdouba knocked on the door and pushed it ajar without saying a word.

“We keeping you?”

“On the contrary, Mr. Chapman. Just to let you know some of us will be here working late as well, in case that’s helpful to you.”

We had caught the attention of some of the staffers, and they were all probably too curious to leave when they stood the chance of seeing in which direction we might be moving.

He closed the door behind him and Mike spoke: “Damn. Looks like he’ll try to outlast us. This could change the evening’s plan.”

“I’ve been through this twice,” Mercer said. “Only name I recognize is Herbert Gerst.”

“A private vault?”

“This doesn’t show any such thing. Looks like he accounts for two of the elephants, a load of mammals-okapi, elands, and every other endangered species you can think of-and a whole bunch of crawling things that should be in little glass jars. But they’re spread out all over the museum.”

“And I’ve circled places where I think you could find arsenic,” I said, “starting with the taxidermy department. I suppose I should let Dr. Kestenbaum go through these lists, too. I have no idea where else to search for it.”

“Hey, it never occurred to any of us that the damn stuff was being used for so many different purposes in either museum. Somebody’s gonna have to account for all of it.”

My beeper went off and it was Harry Hinton’s number. I called him from the phone on the desk. “We’re on the way,” he said, “and Ryan’s still working on a court order for the computer interception. Maybe we’ll have it up and running for you by morning.”

“No luck for tonight?”

“Nah. Jumped on it too late.”

“Mercer will meet you at the corner of Columbus Avenue and Seventy-seventh Street in fifteen minutes. Tell Clem I’ll run interference inside.”

Mike kept poring over the interior layouts and contrasting the areas that we had accounted for as either open display space or rooms we had seen when Zimm had taken us through the place last week. Mercer and I took the elevator down to the ground floor. We showed our identification to the guard and told him Mercer was going out to meet another detective, but would return right away.

The man was slumped back in his chair, the brim of his cap pulled down on his forehead with his eyes glued to a science fiction magazine. The small black-and-white monitors on the stand beside him showed the entrances and exits within the network of courtyards behind us; twilight was descending, making it even more difficult to distinguish between the various gray walls of the abutting structures.

I thought of making small talk to distract him, in case he might recognize Clem from her days of employment here, but he was as oblivious to me as he was to the television screens he was supposed to be viewing. I turned my back to him to be certain the long, highceilinged corridor was still empty. The poor lighting forced me to squint to see beyond midway, but the cavernous space would clearly make footsteps audible if anyone approached.

Minutes later, Mercer and Clem jogged toward the doorway. My square-badged companion, nose-deep in aliens and space pods, was grateful when I told him I’d swing open the door for my partners without needing his help. He waved me toward it and kept reading. Walking briskly on either side of our petite charge, Mercer and I led her around to the first elevator bank we came to and disappeared from view of the guard’s watch station.

When we reached the last leg of the walk back to our small room, I left Mercer and Clem at the entrance to the hallway. Passing the open door where Mike was at work, I continued on to Mamdouba’s corner turret. The door was closed, but I could hear voices inside. I gave the two of them a signal to come ahead to the mollusk room, then followed them in, locking the door behind me. The three of us rearranged ourselves in the cramped space to make room for Clem to sit. She had been glad for the short break, having showered and eaten a light dinner from the room service menu.

“Will this hold you guys?” She dumped out the contents of a small shopping bag. “Hope the city can afford the bill. It was all in the room, and I figured you might get hungry.”

I laughed as Mike grabbed the glass jar of pistachios and Mercer reached for a couple of candy bars. I opened the bag of M amp;M’s and washed them down with a few gulps from a can of soda that the three of us shared. We left the minibar bottles of scotch and vodka for the end of our night’s routine.

“That’s using your brain. I thought I’d have to eat bugs. C’mon,” Mike said, flattening the creased floor plans with which he’d been familiarizing himself, pointing to the basement areas surrounding the joint exhibition offices. “Make yourself useful. Can you give us any more specifics about what’s kept in these rooms?”

She talked us through some of the places where she had worked, guiding us with the capped tip of a pen. “It’s deceptive. See this? It’s a wall that separates two buildings. From the main floor it flows through like it’s connected, but from where you’re looking? You can’t get there from here.”

“Maybe we ought to go see these places,” I said. “It’ll give us a better sense of how we’ll have to maneuver and what to specify when I draft a warrant.”

“Let Mercer stay here with Clem, going over the rooms. Start figuring out where the bones are for us. You and I’ll check out this part of the basement. See if anyone’s still around.”

I heard the click of the lock as Mercer closed the door behind us. We paused for a minute, and listened to the shrill voice of a woman, coming from Mamdouba’s anteroom. I couldn’t recognize from its pitch whether it was Eve Drexler, Anna Friedrichs, or the curator’s assistant, who had stayed after hours.

Mike and I took the elevator to the lobby. The glass eyes of dozens of wild beasts, frozen in the safe confines of their dioramas, seemed to follow us down the vast corridor that led away from the museum’s southwest corner toward the basement entrance Zimm had used to lead us downstairs on earlier visits.

Clem was right. The place was eerie at night. Vast spaces followed after one another with every turn and change in direction, each one dimly lit at best. Elegantly detailed Art Deco light globes suspended from ceilings on brass chains had the look and effectiveness of another era.

Every thirty feet or so, a modern fluorescent fixture had been stuck in place, looking like something you’d see in a bus station rest room.

We descended down the dismal staircase to the section of the basement we had seen before. Zimm was still at his desk, working on the computer, three jars of repulsive arachnids at his side.

“Mamdouba said you might be down. Anything I can help with?”

I had my legal pad and pen ready to take notes. “Just back for some detail we missed. You alone down here?”

“Nope. Lights are still on. I think we’ve got a full house tonight.” He smiled at Mike and me. “You’re sure stirring up some excitement.”

We avoided the exhibition offices and headed to the far end of the hallway. Doorway after doorway, I sketched a record of whether the rooms were open or locked, what form of animal specimen seemed to be floating in the jars on the shelves, and what the climate conditions were.

Where had poor Katrina Grooten’s body been stored all these months? The possible options were overwhelming. I made a note to pin down Dr. Kestenbaum for a date to come back to take temperature controls to help determine the most likely surroundings for the creation of an “Incorruptible.”

For more than an hour we worked our way in and out of small storage rooms and smaller laboratories. Each time we reached a fork in the road, I’d take one side and Mike the other, agreeing to meet back at the intersection in fifteen minutes. We worked our way through three separate basement areas without any findings of significance.

By the time we got to the fourth subbasement, I was beginning to feel at home with the chemical odors, artificial lights, and countless numbers of dead things that filled every shelf, drawer, and closet.

“Your call, Coop,” Mike said, reading from a small sign on the wall in front of us after he pulled a hanging string to turn on an overhead bulb. “Wasps and winged things to the left. Dinosaur fossils to the right.”

“No bugs for me.”

“They’re not alive.”

“No bugs, period. I owe you, okay? There’s no choice here.”

I started down the narrow corridor to my right, trying the doors and finding several of them locked. The fifth knob gave easily, and I groped along the wall till I found the light switch.

This hallway had possibilities. Here was a room labeledBarosaurus Femurs, with leg bones larger than tree stumps. A quick scan suggested nothing small enough to be human, but I could not reach the higher shelves or see their contents. I marked it on my pad for a return visit.

Door after door yielded similar fossilized parts. Some rooms were all dinosaur heads, with hollow eye sockets four feet in diameter and horned nostrils that stood taller than my waist. Others had nothing but vertebrae lined up end to end. It would be hard to discern, without an expert guide, whether any other species remains had been mixed in with these antiquities.

I reached the end of the gray hallway and pushed against the last door, meeting with resistance as I did. It opened slowly, operating on a rusty old air pump hinged on the wall behind it. I leaned against the door to secure it in place while I studied the contents of the room. This one stored even smaller bones, and I walked to a rack against the far wall to study a tag that appeared to have some written description on it.

As I bent over to read it, hoping the bare bulb from the far end of the hallway would provide enough light for me, the door came loose from its anchored position. I heard a loud whooshing sound as it sprung away from the wall and slammed shut, leaving me alone in the confined space with a century’s accumulation of dust-covered animal skeletons.

I tried to tell myself that I was too tired to be upset. I talked to myself like a mother calming a six-year-old child. They’re just bones, I kept repeating, as I tried to get my bearings and make my way back to the door in the dark. There’s nothing in here to hurt me. I’m in a museum, the most child-friendly museum in the world, and my favorite policeman is fifty yards away.

I reached out to hold on to a shelf to help me feel my way back to the exit. I brushed against the rough surface of a ragged piece of cartilage and moved my hand upward to grasp the cool steel of the rack instead. Inching along step by step, I startled myself when I struck a glass object, banging it against something else.

It was a large glass jar.

Shit. I stopped in my tracks. Like dominoes, the jar I hit had knocked against its neighbor, rattling the one behind it until another in the next row toppled on its side and broke. The noxious fluid inside splashed to the floor, releasing both a foul smell and whatever pickled creatures had been sleeping inside.

Now panic set in. I looked up at the shelves over my head. Dozens and dozens of mason jars lined the walls above me. The only light in the room was the iridescence emitted by the bright pink dye that illuminated all of the bottled skeletal remains. Some kind of prehistoric crawlers were in those bottles, unidentifiable wet specimens that glowed against the darkness of the room.

I took another step forward, sliding on the slippery substance from the broken jars that coated the floor. Two more steps and I heard a crunching noise below my heel, as though I was walking on some kind of hard-shelled insect. My foot slipped on the wet slime, and again I grabbed for the shelf. The entire rack was on wheels and it rattled wildly as my bug phobia took firm hold.

I reached out my left hand to feel for the door, still clutching the end of the metal shelves. I gripped the knob when I found it and pulled hard with both hands. It wouldn’t give. Stay calm, I told myself. It was hard to open from the other side, so now it’s just stuck again. I yanked with all my strength, my hands greasy from the sweat I was working up. I couldn’t budge the knob in either direction.

I felt along the side of the door for a light switch. Nothing. There was no fresh air in the room, and some sightless fossil with a prickly snout and a snakelike body was eye level with me, daring me to rescue both of us from this claustrophobic cell.

Patting the pockets of my jacket and pants was another useless gesture. I opened the lid on my cell phone and powered it up, but was unable to dial any number from this black hole in the museum basement. I used the point of my pen to try to jimmy the catch on the lock, but it was way too old and sticky to respond.

Feeling behind me, I stepped back and began to scream for Mike. I yelled as loud as I could, kicking against the door like Shirley Denzig had done at my garage the night before. I stopped yelling and listened for the sound of footsteps, but the walls were so thick that I doubted he could hear me any better than I could hear him.

Now the fumes from the liquid I’d released were filling the room. I mustn’t get dizzy, I told myself. I did not want to be down on this floor with whatever had dripped out of the large jar, that much I knew.

Turning in place, I looked again to the far end of the space. In the ghoulish pink glow I could make out the square design of a small window high on the wall that might give out onto the courtyard. It was covered with a shade, and too tiny to get through, but if I could break it open it would give me some air and maybe someone would hear my shouts.

Behind me, I thought I heard the doorknob rattle. I spun around, stepped toward it and yelled Mike’s name again as loud as I could. Nothing. Had I imagined the noise?

I wiped the sweat from my forehead but the thought was already planted in my brain: What if this was no accident? What if we had surprised the killer by coming down to the basement tonight? What if he-or she-had trapped me in this room after I walked in alone, and then gone back to do something even worse to Mike? What if Mike never got here to open this door?

I moved to rest my back on the rack but I landed against it harder than I had intended. It rocked and swayed, and the small set of wheels on the end closest to me spun off and whirled across the room. The shelves slanted downward, and everything hurtled to the floor.

Glass jars crashed and split into pieces, spraying their contents all over the floor. The odor was unbearable, and I coughed and choked on the fumes as they rose from beneath me and invaded my mouth and nose. I was almost panting because of my fear, and the faster the breaths came, the more the odor was drawn into my nostrils and throat.

Animal bones slid off the shelves and over my head and shoulders. I took three steps toward the window and reached up to brush something out of my hair.

Beetles. Thousands of beetles had been stored in the jars and now littered the room, some of them landing on my body as they fell. I choked again, this time fighting back the urge to be sick.

What had Zimm told us? Beetles were used all over the museum to eat the flesh off dead specimens. These must have been sealed into jars with their last meals, then left to rot on dusty trays in the deserted room.

The rational spirit within me kept saying that someone would surely find me before daylight. My other internal voice reminded me that whoever had slammed the door shut would be back to finish me off, if these awful creatures didn’t do it first.

I walked as carefully as I could toward the wall with the window. Beneath it was a metal tank, the same kind of enormous vat that Zimm had shown us-the kind in which the prehistoric fish had been stored in its alcohol bath. Would the lid of that tank support me so that I could climb up onto it and try to break open a pane of the small glass opening behind the window shade?

Again the jiggling sound of the doorknob, and this time, with renewed urgency, I froze in place and screamed, “Michael! Mike Chapman. Get me out of here. I can’t breathe.”

Exquisite silence. I coughed and gagged on the dreadful smell that permeated my clothing and everything else in the room.

I pressed on the lid of the six-foot-long tank. It felt like a thin layer of stainless steel, and I was concerned about putting my weight on top of it. I could make out the label affixed to it because of the oversize lettering in bright red ink. There was a skull and crossbones with the wordsFIRE HAZARD.

Of course it was a fire hazard. A tank that big full of alcohol to serve as a preservative would be enough to light up the west side of town. Add that to my list of ways to kill someone in this museum.

I looked back up at the window. These were double-glazed, we had been told, as another climate control. I had nothing except the wooden heel of my shoe with which to try to break one of the panes. So far, I had managed to destroy everything else made of glass. I might as well take a shot at this.

Before removing a shoe and exposing my foot to whatever was slopping around on the floor, I lifted the lid of the container to see how sturdy its support would be. I didn’t need to drown myself in ethyl alcohol.

I removed a tissue from my jacket pocket, as a precaution, and covered my mouth as I opened the vat. But there was no strong smell of alcohol at all, so I used both hands to rest the top against the wall.

The pink iridescence above my head highlighted something gray inside the box. I bent over to see what was there. I gazed at the face of a small mummified head.