The Bone Vault

42

“C’mon, Alex. Clem’s okay. She’s going to be fine.” Kerry waved me over to the room. No shots had been fired as Mercer and the others had charged into the small space.

One of the ESU men had cuffed Poste and removed him so that Clem did not have to be near him. Mike and Mercer were untying her bonds as two medics rushed in behind me to check her vital signs and ask about injuries.

I stopped long enough to tell Poste that I’d like the chance to talk to him when we went downstairs in a few minutes. No need to read him his Miranda rights now and give him time to think about lawyering up.

“Don’t waste your time, Miss Cooper. I’ve got nothing to say to you. If you’d stayed locked in the basement all night, none of this need have happened.”

I didn’t have to tell Mike that I had been right. He glanced at me and I knew he understood.

Clem was crying now. She was upright with her back against a rack full of human skulls, a blood pressure cuff around her arm, Mercer massaging her wrists.

Mike got out of the way and made room for me. “I’m great with stiffs. Tears, tea, and sympathy is your turf.”

I kneeled down beside her and she reached her free arm around my neck. “Take it easy, Clem. It’s all over.”

I could feel the scratches on her forearm as I embraced her. I showed them to the medic.

Clem managed a laugh. “You know how many times I’ve dropped one of those arrows on my foot? Margaret Mead would be appalled at how often the interns did that. That poison has a shorter shelf life than a carton of milk. They’ve probably been in this room for thirty or forty years. It’s the guns that terrified me.”

Mike had stepped out into the hallway to examine the firearms. “Not loaded. None of ‘em. I’m not even sure they would work at this point.”

“I feel so stupid,” Clem said, looking up at him. “I would never have done what he told me if I’d known.”

“Hey, you’re alive. Whatever you did was right. We thought the same thing you did,” Mike said.

“We’re gonna take her over to Roosevelt,” one of the medics said, referring to the nearest hospital. “You can talk to her there. We gotta have her checked out.”

“I’ll go with you in a few minutes. I need to talk to the detectives first. Please?”

The medics weren’t happy but they picked up their equipment and stepped out into the hallway.

Clem was sitting on the floor, cross-legged, rubbing her ankles while she talked. “He told me some things about Katrina. About why-”

She looked up at me, biting her lower lip hard with her teeth, as though that would shut off the flow of tears. “That’s why I thought he was really going to kill me. And kill himself. He had the guns. Then the arrows, which he knew had poison tips. Then he picked up one of the hatchets.”

That hatchet had probably caused the chief of detectives to give ESU the order to break in.

“Did you know about the staircase in Mamdouba’s office?”

“No. Never heard about it. Those turrets are coveted space. Honchos only. Never spent much time up there.”

“Did he have the gun when he surprised you?”

“I didn’t see him coming. Of course”-she smiled-“when Mamdouba took you out of the office, to the anteroom, I couldn’t resist the chance to get up and go behind his desk. Look over the papers he had there while you guys were arguing with him. That’s the bit of me that will never change, I suppose.”

“And Poste?”

“The door opened. I turned my head and he was pointing the gun right at me. Grabbed my hand and told me if I made a sound I was dead.”

“He knew you were there?”

“No, I’d guess he knewyou were there. He’s probably the only person who would have known about the staircases. He played in them when he was a boy, visiting the museum with his father. That’s what he told me when we got up here. Even knew whose office it used to be.”

“But why was he there?”

“Listening to your conversation with Mamdouba, trying to overhear what you had figured out about the murder so far. Especially once Zimm told him I might be coming tonight. Just listening. He didn’t expect to find me there alone. That’s why he had no escape route planned. No idea how to get rid of me. Just a place to hide me until he thought it out. Just this, this-” Clem struggled to put a name on this gruesome assemblage of human remains.

“This bone vault,” Mike said.

“Did Erik know about what his father had done?” I asked.

“About desecrating the graves, you mean? Not when he was a kid. Not until about a year ago, when he started to work on the joint exhibit. It was his brother who told him.”

“Brother?” Mike asked.

“In one of our interviews, he told us his older brother had stayed on in Kenya, remember? To do his father’s work.” At the time, I assumed that meant guiding safaris, going on museum explorations.

“Kirk Van der Poste. He’s the half brother. Eight years older than Erik. His mother passed away of malaria. The father married a second time, then died when Erik was twelve. When he wrote to Kirk that he was coming to the Natural History Museum to work on an exhibition, that’s when Kirk told him that all the collections their father had brought here were being dismantled and stored away. Even worse, being given back to native tribes.”

“How did Kirk know that?”

“From his contacts at the McGregor, in South Africa.”

“Hadn’t either of them been here since they were kids?”

“How could they get up here into these storerooms? They had no more access than total strangers. Last year was the first time Erik set foot in this museum since his father was killed. Just think what an opportunity the exhibition work gave him. A free pass to wander around up here, looking for anything he wanted.”

“And Kirk, he wanted the bones?”

“Everything else that went with them. When those graves were plundered, along came all the looted pieces that no one else valued at the time. Bronze castings, Swahili wooden grave markers, terra-cotta potteries. They must all be stashed away in here, with rhino horns and elephant tusks. Hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth, collected by Willem Van der Poste. Bounty to sell to museums, and for even higher prices on the thriving black market.”

We were standing in the middle of a small fortune in bones.

“How did Kirk know?”

“He had heard enough back in Africa to understand what his father was doing. Plus, he’d inherited some of his father’s early field journals.”

“The what?”

“Field journals. The records of all the expeditions, the ledger entries that documented the museums where things were sold or stored. Erik Poste was indifferent to our mission to return the bones. He just thought it was foolish political correctness. All museums had baggage. Things were different fifty, a hundred years ago. But he knew that Katrina would stumble-had stumbled upon something much more valuable the last week of her life.”

“The arsenic, did he talk about that?”

She nodded. “He started out defending himself to me. Telling me that he had only tried to make her sick. Sick enough to want to go home to South Africa. That the small amounts of it he put in her drinks, when they were together at the museum working late into the evenings, would never have killed her.”

Dr. Kestenbaum had told me the same thing. If the occasional poisoning had stopped, Katrina would have recovered when she reached South Africa. When the ME got back the toxicology results on Katrina’s hair samples, they would reveal precisely when the poisoning had started and what the doses had been.

“The rape, he knew about that?”

“Anna Friedrichs told him.” She insisted to us that she had, although Poste had played dumb during our interviews. “He took advantage of that. And of September eleventh, too. Everyone thought, even Katrina herself, that her physical symptoms were the result of the stress of the sexual assault and the terrorist attacks. Like everyone else she was anxious about more bombings and the anthrax scares that made us all so nervous.”

Each of us remembered the torment of those painful fall days.

“Yet she didn’t want to leave New York until she could find the aboriginal bones that she hoped to get back to Africa. Poste just wanted to speed up her exit, weaken her resolve.”

“Something must have changed his mind.”

“Right before Christmas,” she said. “He thought this was what I was referring to in that e-mail you had me send, Alex. That’s why he was so driven to ask me about it. When Katrina was offered the job at the McGregor Museum in Kimberley, she knew they had already begun the process of trying to identify the stacks of skeletons they have, to return them to the native peoples, to their tribes, for burial.

“One of the curators phoned her. Asked her what she knew about Willem Van der Poste’s specimens, whether she could get a look at them and ask Mamdouba’s help in arranging the return of the bones. The man who called her had dealings in Africa with Kirk. Knew that Erik Poste worked at the Met. He suggested she approach him for help making a pitch to the museum administrators. Thought Erik would want to polish up his father’s reputation.”

“Again, he turned her down, right?”

“Yes. But she came up with another idea. To enlist the help of Van der Poste’s widow, and get her support for doing the right thing.”

“Erik’s mother?” He had mentioned his mother to me, when he told us about moving to this country as a child. That she was ill. That because she was hospitalized he was sent away to boarding school. “She’s still alive? How did Katrina find her?”

“Museum records. Correspondence they had with her after Willem’s death.”

“But she must have been very sickly to have been hospitalized for so long so many years ago,” I said.

“She was sick, all right. Mental illness. Profound depression, which she’s suffered from all her life. And Erik had severed his relationship with her when he was still an adolescent.”

“You knew about this?”

“No, no. But Erik assumed Katrina had told me. He kept talking about his mother when he was tying me up. I’m putting it together from the pieces he was rambling about.”

“Did his mother meet with Katrina?”

“Not only spoke to her. Mrs. Poste gave Katrina the field journals, the ones from Willem’s later years. The ones that Kirk didn’t inherit. He had a lot more to hide than smuggled ivory.”

“What-?”

Clem inhaled and looked at me. “He didn’t die the way Erik told you he did. Not as some noble hunter protecting the animals from poachers.”

“What happened?”

“Willem Van der Poste was leading a safari. All amateurs. He was trampled by a bull elephant, nearly crushed to death. He made the tourists go on with several of the guides, expecting them to send back more help to carry him out of the jungle. He couldn’t hunt, couldn’t move his legs at all.”

We stared at Clem silently, waiting for her to speak again.

“Days passed. He ran out of food, out of supplies.” She glanced around at the bones on the shelves surrounding us. “It’s unthinkable, really. He shot his servant, his bearer. The native who had introduced him to Africa and protected him over the decades. Cannibalized him-”

“You don’t need to go on. We get the picture,” Mike said. “No wonder his wife wanted to change her name.”

And no wonder she never emerged from the depression that engulfed her after learning the truth.

“So one night last December, when Katrina had come back from the sanitarium with the field journals that would completely shatter Van der Poste’s reputation, she made the mistake of showing them to Erik. Naively, she thought they would make him see our side of the issue. Make him want to help the aborigines who had been so mistreated for so very long.”

“He must have decided to kill her that very night,” I said.

“With a massive dose of arsenic,” Mike added. “Somewhere in this mausoleum.”

I looked around the room at the sinister collection of skulls and skeletons. “Up here?”

Mercer didn’t think so. “She may have found this room. Lots of others like it. He probably killed her in the basement, though. Zimm took me to some places you couldn’t find without sonar. Remote, cool, dry. Big empty bins that would hold a dead animal twice the size of Katrina. You wouldn’t see it, you wouldn’t smell it. Once he gets his sarcophagus in place, just lifts her in and slides the lid shut.”

“You think Bermudez was an accomplice?”

“Unwittingly.” Clem tried to get on her feet and I helped her stand. She flexed her feet to make sure the circulation had been restored. “I asked him if the guy who fell off the Met last week had helped him-you know-hurt Katrina. I thought maybe he killed himself, out of remorse for what he had done.”

“What did he tell you?”

“How stupid I was. Stupid, I guess, to think he’d let some janitor help him. Bermudez was in charge of the crew who loaded the sarcophagus onto the truck for shipment. He must have seen the story in the newspaper about Katrina. That’s when he showed up in Poste’s office. Poste says the guy guessed that he knew something about Katrina’s death and demanded money. Blackmail. Poste gave him a down payment. Said he’d meet him with more money later in the week. Everybody knew about the poor man’s Friday-morning check of the water treatment center, apparently.”

“He admitted pushing Bermudez?”

“He just laughed at me and told me they parted ways on the rooftop last Friday.”