The Bone Vault

37

I let the lid drop back into place and decided to take my chances that it would hold me. I didn’t believe in the mummy’s curse but there were way too many dead things in this room to keep me from losing control before too long. Hoisting myself onto the end of the vat’s closed surface, I pulled off my shoes and stood atop it in my bare feet.

Pushing the faded shade to the side, I raised my hand and began to bang away at the windowpane. It seemed like nothing short of a sledgehammer would have any effect.

Again there was a noise at the door. I poised myself, arm in the air with my weapon aimed at it. The door opened and the light in the hallway reflected off the top of Mike Chapman’s black hair.

“You getting high from these fumes, blondie? I got a box of Krazy Glue I can give you to take home. What the-”

“Somebody locked me in here!”

“Will you get down from there? What are you doing by that window? You can’t kill yourself by jumpingup from the basement to the courtyard. Save your strength.”

“The missing princess-the mummy from the sarcophagus that Katrina was in? She’s in this vat.”

“You afraid she’s gonna walk? That why you’re standing up there, looking like something scared the crap out of you? C’mon, let’s get going. Get off that thing.”

“I can’t.”

“What do you mean you can’t? Let’s go.”

“Look at the floor, Mike.”

“This room’s a mess. Must be some kind of lab. How can you stand it in here with that smell?”

“I broke those jars. It’s not a lab. It wasn’t like that when I got in here.”

“Why’d you do that?”

“I didn’t do it. I didn’t mean to do it. Someone locked me in here.”

“What are you talking about? The door wasn’t locked. It was just tight. I had to lean all my weight against it, but I don’t have a key.”

“Didn’t you hear me screaming the first two times you tried the door? You should have let me know you were there.”

“What first two times? I just came down here looking for you now, ‘cause you weren’t back at the staircase where we said we’d meet. I gave you an extra ten minutes, then just started trying all the doors. This was the last one.”

“I’m telling you that someone closed me in here, then came back and locked the door. I heard them jiggling the handle, I swear to you. I’m not crazy.”

He walked toward me, crunching broken glass and beetle shells on his way. “These creepy crawlies got to you, Coop. It was just your imagination. Zimm and I were the only ones over here.”

“Zimm? We left him in the other building.”

“Yeah, but he decided to catch up with us. See if he could be useful. I sent him back.”

Somebody had been playing with the door when I was locked inside. Why had Zimm followed us here? “It’s not my imagination. I’m not moving till you tell me you believe me.”

Mike stood in front of me, reaching up to grab my legs behind my knees. “I forgot my cape. We’ll do it fireman’s carry and not Sir Walter Raleigh style. Forgive me.”

He lifted me over his shoulder and across the littered floor, my shoes in hand, to the hallway. Then he went back inside and looked into the steel container.

“Egyptian princess. Twelfth Dynasty. That girl just can’t find a quiet place to sleep. C’mon, I need to clean you up before we go upstairs.”

I took Mike’s hand and let him lead me down the corridor. There was a men’s room next to the stairwell and he took me inside.

He ran cold water, soaked a paper towel in it, and began to wipe my face and hands. “It’s a bad night when a broad a couple of thousand years older than you looks better than you do.”

I bent my head toward him and shook it at him. “I’m getting used to that fact. Anything stuck there? Any b-”

“Clean as a whistle.” He handed me his comb and I ran it through my hair.

“I know you think I’m exaggerating, but I’m telling you the truth.”

“Later, kid. We got people waiting for us upstairs. And now I gotta call crime scene and get them working on the mummy. And you,” he said, tugging on a strand of my hair, “you’re not out of my sight for a nanosecond, got it?”

I nodded and walked up the dingy staircase in front of him.

Retracing our path to the fourth floor, I knocked on the door and identified myself to Mercer. He opened it and told me that Mamdouba wanted to talk to me. He had come to ask me a question and expressed his annoyance that I was down in the basement with Mike.

Mike walked to the turret with me and held the door for me to go into Mamdouba’s office. The curatorial director was standing at the window, having pulled himself up to full height and assumed the most clipped, formal version of his manner.

“Inasmuch as I have been gracious enough to be your host, in President Raspen’s absence, and inasmuch as I have cooperated with you in every way possible, I think it is extremely rude-to say the very least-that you have brought Miss Clementine Qisukqut into this museum tonight.”

Mamdouba raised his finger to shake at me. He was furious. “Police business, that I have great respect for. Trusting you and your detectives is one thing. But sneaking in here with a former employee who was discharged from this institution-discharged because of her untrustworthiness, her calumny-well,this, I tell you, Miss Cooper, withthis you have broken every rule. Your little trick on me is over. You’ll have to go. At once.”

My apologies were lame and unsuccessful. I tried to interrupt to tell him that we had just found the mummy from the sarcophagus, but Mamdouba wouldn’t be distracted from his tirade. The more I tried to excuse our ruse, the angrier he became.

“But you even joked about the fact that she was coming to town.”

“To town, perhaps. To my museum, without my permission-no.”

I wanted to know who had blown Clem’s cover. I didn’t think the leak was all that serious, since Clem’s e-mails to some in the museum group had suggested that she might arrive in Manhattan that very night, but Mamdouba’s discovery certainly foiled our plans for the rest of the night. He wouldn’t tell me anything.

“Bring your Trojan horses in here, madam. Now that you’ve made a fool of me, let me tell them what to expect from this point forward.”

I wasn’t sure whether to move.

“Get your friends,” he barked. “It’s almost ten o’clock. I’d like to go home.Get them!”

He stood in the doorway of his anteroom and watched Mike and me walk back the short distance as though it were a gangplank. I opened the door and gave Mercer and Clem the word that someone had spotted her, and that Mamdouba was waiting to rap our knuckles and kick us out into the night.

Clem caught up with me as we walked toward the corner office. “Don’t blame yourself. I’m sure it’s my fault. I was getting a little frisky with those last e-mails. I’ll let you read them. I think I was too excited to exercise much caution. Zimm probably figured out I was already here. He may have thought he had to blow the whistle on me, for his own sake.”

The four of us took our places in the curator’s circular turret. Clem spoke first. “This is not the way I hoped to come back, Mr. Mamdouba. I think you know how much respect I have for this great museum, for the work of my colleagues, for-”

The bantam administrator wanted no explanations. He gave Clem a tongue-lashing for her unauthorized entry into the facility from which she had been banned months ago. I broke in to try to convince him that she had only come at my urging, at my direction. Mike jumped in to defend me, and only Mercer stood with calm reserve, behind Clem’s chair, his powerful hands on her tiny shoulders.

“This will mark the end of your comings and goings, Miss Cooper.” Mamdouba crushed the subpoena and threw it in the wastebasket.

“May I have a moment with you?” I motioned to the anteroom. I did not want to be discussing witnesses and evidence in front of Clem, but I wanted to impress upon the director of curatorial affairs the kind of access we needed from him and why we had taken the chance that we did. Traipsing through his displays in the daytime, with dozens of police officers in the midst of hundreds of schoolchildren, would be far less appealing than our clumsy efforts to operate more discreetly after dark. He also needed to know about our discovery in the basement, which we hadn’t disclosed to Clem.

I followed him out to the anteroom and closed the door behind us, for privacy. I made my pitch and explained how the search warrants would have to be executed, and what other requests I would make to the grand jury to compel his cooperation, but he had reached the end of his very short rope. The subpoena was only a piece of paper. He could rip it up and throw it away, but we still had the power to hold him in contempt.

“This is an institution of science, Miss Cooper. Make your case somewhere else. Go back to the Metropolitan. That’s where the dead girl worked, no? You have abused the privilege of being inside our walls, madam.” The little man was screaming now.

The door opened behind me and both Mike and Mercer joined us in the anteroom. Mike was ready for an argument while Mercer, as usual, took the diplomatic approach. He backed me away with a motion of his arm, and I took a seat on a nearby sofa to let him cool Mamdouba down.

“Ms. Cooper’s been known to step in shit from time to time. Maybe this wasn’t her brightest idea,” Mike said, “but we’re trying to solve a murder without shutting your doors to the public.”

“You’d have absolutely no reason to do that. No right. We won’t stand for it. You don’t even know where this girl died. All you have is a body somewhere in New Jersey.” He lowered himself into the chair at his assistant’s desk and wiped the sweat from the back of his neck.

“And a coat check from a cold day last December, right here in your lobby. And maybe enough arsenic to finish off every one of us. Let’s all be sensible,” Mercer said. “Why don’t we work out a schedule that meets with your approval. We’d like to keep you on our side, sir, okay?”

The two detectives outlined the way they wanted to proceed. Mamdouba was too agitated to listen closely. There would be no way to work out an agreement tonight.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Wallace. It’s very late, I’m quite tired, and I need to speak to the president herself before I can give you an answer.” He got up and walked to the door of his office, standing back as he pulled it open so we could go in and claim our trespassing Inuit.

I stood at the entrance and looked inside the perfectly round room. No one was there. Clementine Qisukqut had vanished.