Linda Fairstein - Lethal Legacy

Lucy slowed down and smiled at me. “Taxidermists’ tools. They’re used to skin dead animals. Gets the top layer off without puncturing the flesh. Serves the same purpose on book bindings. And these are paring knives.”

“May I see one?” Mike asked.

“Sure,” Lucy said, standing on tiptoe to remove one from the mug in which it was standing.

The knife was about seven inches long, with an angled steel blade and wooden handle. Mike held it in his left hand and with his right thumb tested the cutting edge. “Wicked.”

He passed it to Mercer, who studied the beveled edge. “We ought to take a few of these to the morgue. They’d make a pretty distinctive cut.”

“Was Tina…?” Lucy couldn’t finish the sentence.

“We’re not sure what happened to her yet,” Mike said. “We’re just trying to help the medical examiner out. Did Tina keep her tools here?”

“Some of them,” Lucy said. “They’re in this next cubicle.”

The three of us followed her to the desktop at which Tina had been working. Her station had been left in perfect order. It was a smaller space than Lucy’s, and there were fewer tools displayed, but Tina had been spending only part of her time at the library.

“Would you know if any of her knives or scalpels was missing?” Mike asked.

“I haven’t any idea. These things are our security blankets. I can look at my shelves in the morning and be able to tell you exactly where everything is. But that’s unique to each conservator, and we never touch each other’s tools.”

“Visitors,” Mercer said. “Did anyone visit Tina while she was here?”

Lucy thought for a few seconds. “When she was on staff, of course people from other departments dropped in to talk about their needs, or just take a break. Lately? The usual people coming by to queue up their projects, beg us to jump the line. Some of them know Tina, so they chatted.”

“Any outsiders?”

“Just one that I can think of, several weeks ago.”

“Do you know who he was?” Mike asked.

“She, actually. It was a woman. And I didn’t know her.”

“Can you describe her?”

Lucy closed her eyes and pulled up an image. “An attractive woman, about fifty years old. Tall and really thin, a little overdressed and jeweled for eleven in the morning.”

A good shot Tina’s visitor was Minerva Hunt. “Did they arrive together?”

“No. She rang the bell and one of my colleagues let her in. She asked to see Tina, so I assumed it was someone she was working with.”

“Do you know any of the Hunts?” Mike asked.

Lucy looked over her shoulder to see whether Jill was in earshot, and when it seemed she was far enough away, Lucy leaned back against one of the worktables.

“Not personally,” she said. “Sometimes we joke about the collectors. We know some of their books so well, we feel like we’ve lived with them. In my imagination, I’ve been talking to Jasper Hunt the Third for years, even though we’ve never been introduced. His father had exquisite taste, that’s for sure.”

“Have you met either of his children?” Mike asked. “Talbot or Minerva?”

“Just his leather-bound babies, Detective.”

“The woman who came to see Tina,” I said. “Do you remember how long she stayed?”

“I don’t think she was there more than ten or fifteen minutes.”

“What did she want?”

Lucy looked away from me. “None of my business. I don’t know.”

“But your desks are so close to each other. They’re back to back.”

“They argued, okay? That’s all I know. The woman seemed to have a bad temper. I didn’t hear words, but she was displeased about something Tina had done. She sort of chewed Tina out, and then she left.”

“Did Tina talk about it at all?”

“Not to me. Not to any of us, I’d guess,” Lucy said. “But as soon as the woman left, Tina broke down and started crying. I asked if she was okay, and she said she was just upset and needed to go outside for some fresh air. That’s all I know.”

“What day that was?” Mercer asked.

Lucy was beginning to understand there was some importance to what she had observed. I wondered if that would jog her memory.

“Two, maybe three weeks ago. You can ask my colleagues if they can place it. The only other person who engaged Tina in any kind of-well, personal conversation was Mr. Krauss. But he actually came to see me. Sort of surprised him that she was here, and I guess he asked her what she was doing.”

“Krauss?” Mike asked, looking at me for help in placing the name.

“Would that be Jonah Krauss?” I asked Lucy. I remembered that Alger Herrick had mentioned his name to us.

“Exactly. He’s on our board. Drops in every now and then-a lot of the trustees do-to see what we’re working on and what we might need.”

“Did Krauss know Tina?”

Lucy pushed a lock of hair behind her ear. “He certainly seemed to. I can’t imagine he has a clue who I am, but once he caught sight of her, he made a beeline right for her and called her by name.”

“Did you-?”

“I didn’t hear a word, Detective, and it all seemed very cordial. I just thought it was strange that they knew each other.”

There was an index card tacked to the wall on the side of Tina’s desk. “What’s that?” I asked.

“Might be the list of things she had in the works. I track mine on my laptop, but everyone does it differently.”

I pulled the thumbtack and the card came off with it.

“Is this Tina’s handwriting?” I asked.

Lucy glanced at the card. “Yes. She always printed.”

I thought of the call slip that had been in Tina’s pocket. This was not written in the same style. I read the list to Mike as Mercer walked off, making his way around the far end of the large room.

“‘The Nijinksy Diaries-Performing Arts Collection. The Grunwald Correspondence-Rare Books. The Whistler Sketches-drypoint-Art and Architecture.’”

Lucy Tannis interrupted me. “That can’t be current, Ms. Cooper. Those are all items from collections in this library. Tina had finished those projects. I saw the papers down here when they were assigned to her. She’s only doing private work now.”

I skipped to the bottom of the list. “What does this mean, Lucy? ‘The Hunt Legacy.’ What’s that?”

She squinted to look at the words, then shook her head. “I’m pretty familiar with the Hunt Collection. I’ve never seen that expression before.”

I passed the card to Mike, who pocketed it as Mercer called his name.

“Wassup?”

“In here, in the back room. You and Alex come quick. Leave the girl.”

Mercer’s voice had an urgency to it that I rarely heard. I broke into a trot and made my way around the old wooden tables that filled the room.

There was an archway into the adjacent space, a darkened work area that had large mechanical equipment-paper cutters and a standing book press-and along one side of the room, where Mercer was waiting, three huge stainless steel chests were lined up end to end.

“These are freezers,” he said, lifting the lid of the first one to show us the books-four of them-inside. “Remember how cool Tina’s body was?”

“Yes, but this doesn’t look like it’s been disturbed at all,” I said.

Mercer lifted the closure of the second one and revealed a single volume, folio size, resting in its icy storage container.

When he shifted to the third freezer and hoisted its heavy lid, I gasped. The book inside was small and slim, its gold calf binding elaborately decorated with gilt designs and lettering: The Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

The cold blast of air from within the chest couldn’t hide the dark red stain, most likely blood, that had seeped into the pale calfskin-and three strands of brown hair that had frozen onto the cover of the old book.