Linda Fairstein - Lethal Legacy

“What’s with the freezers?” Mike asked Lucy.

“Why? Do you think…?”

Jill had gone over to Lucy when she heard us run to the back. She was standing with her arm around the girl, who seemed to be trying to absorb the fact that Tina’s body may have been concealed right under her nose.

“How often do you open them?”

“Not-not often. Not for months at a time,” Lucy said.

“What are they for?”

“Disaster recovery. Freezing the books stops mold from doing more destruction. It kills insects that have infested them. You want to do some damage control to a hurt volume, you put it in the freezer, record that in the log in the back room, and nobody opens it again for six months.”

“And everybody working down here knows that?” Mike asked.

“Yes. But not just us. All the curators upstairs know it, too. So do most of the collectors we deal with,” Lucy said, wide-eyed with concern, as though Mike were accusing her of Tina’s murder.

“Frozen coffins,” Mike said to none of us in particular. He was trying to get a signal on his phone. “How frigging convenient. Plenty of room for a short broad. Odor proof-and it already stinks in here. An unwelcoming basement room with no windows for anyone to peek inside. Whoever killed her could have kept her on ice for weeks, if the mayor hadn’t made the evening so convenient for a nearby disposal.”

“The thermostat’s right on top,” Mercer said. “I imagine he turned up the temperature till he took the body out.”

“Same effect. Cool but not so stiff he couldn’t move her after the rigor passed,” Mike said. “By the time somebody discovered a body, there’d be so much contamination in this room that no forensics would be of any value.”

“Cell phones don’t work down here,” Lucy Tannis said. “You can use the landline near the door.”

“Why don’t you wait here with Lucy while I grab the Crime Scene crew?” Mike said to Mercer. His impatience was palpable. “She can explain this place to the guys. You show them what you found. I’ll take Coop and Jill with me. We’ll make that map room the command post.”

Mike took the stairs three at a time, yelling back at us to wait for him in Bea Dutton’s office.

There was no reason for me to separate Jill and Bea at this point. I walked to a corner of the room, away from them, to call Pat McKinney and give him an update. I was unlikely to get any goodwill out of letting him be the one to tell Battaglia about the developments, but it was worth a try.

By the time I finished answering McKinney ’s questions, Mike had returned.

“Did you catch up with the guys?”

“Yeah,” he said. “They’re going to process the conservation lab first. You going downtown to your office?”

“That makes the most sense. If you need a warrant drafted or any subpoenas, I’ll be at my desk.”

“Excuse me, Mike,” Bea said as she approached us. “Are you going to keep me locked up all day? I don’t want to be a nuisance, but if your plan is just to make me sit here, I’ll go stir-crazy.”

I could tell that he liked her manner-feisty and direct.

“Now how about that assignment I gave you? That should keep you busy.”

She laughed at him. “A historical footprint of Bryant Park? Who do you think prepared the one that was actually used when the place was restored twenty years ago?”

Mike walked me to the door, and I turned to thank Jill for her cooperation.

“Dead bodies, right? Like I told Alex, nothing but dead bodies down there.”

“Dead wrong, Detective,” Bea said, wagging a finger at him.

“What do you mean?”

“Books. Eighty-eight miles of books.”

“What happened to the bodies?” Mike asked.

I stopped in the doorway, thinking about the spot near Sixth Avenue where Tina Barr’s body was found. It was a long city block away from the conservation lab just below us on the Fifth Avenue side of the library. “What do you mean, there are books under the park?”

“The entire piece of land below Bryant Park was turned into an underground extension of the library a while back.”

I let go of the door and it closed behind me. Mike rubbed his hands together and then scratched his head. “Connected to this building?”

“By a one-hundred-and-twenty-foot-long tunnel,” Bea said, coming alive again as she explained the setup to us. “They couldn’t build an extension that would change the appearance of the main library, because that’s landmarked. So when the park was closed for restoration, the old Revolutionary War battleground and the potter’s field were dug up. Originally, the stacks were right beneath us in this section, but we outgrew that space ages ago. The Bryant Park extension has greater capacity than this entire library.”

“How do we get there?” he asked, ready to dash off to the nearest stairwell.

It had never occurred to any of us when Barr’s body was found the night before that below the park was a cavernous structure that coupled with this one.

“May I show them, Jill?” Bea turned to ask.

“Yes, of course. Whatever they need.”

“Does anyone work in there?”

“There are two levels underground. That’s where the conveyor system that takes books up to the call desk winds up, so there are always a few staffers on the first floor throughout the day to pull the requested volumes and ship them back upstairs. The lower floor is usually deserted.”

“And books?”

“Just a few million of them,” Bea said as I held open the door.

“Valuable ones?”

“Everything here is valuable to somebody.”

Her short legs couldn’t move fast enough for Mike. This time, she led us down the other direction of the long corridor to a service elevator, trying to keep up with Mike’s pace. She had to catch her breath as we waited for the doors to open, and then waited again for the old lift as it creaked and groaned to deliver us down to the north end of the basement.

When we got out, she told Mike that the entrance to the stacks was only accessible from the stairwell straight ahead. This time, he started off and I ran with him, leaving a slightly bewildered Bea Dutton alone in the quiet hallway, with an order for her to ask one of the cops in the main lobby to send some men to help us.

The two of us pounding down the steps made as much noise as a small herd of ponies, the sound reverberating through the great empty space. The granite and marble so prominent throughout the rest of the library building ended abruptly at this point. There was a long, sloping steel ramp that started at the bottom tread, and I grabbed on to the red metal handrail along the wall to keep my balance as we rounded corners, racing farther below ground.

The path flattened and the narrow entryway opened onto a cluttered workspace that looked like a scene from a Victorian novel-industrial, impersonal, damp, and cold.

Mike stopped to scope the area-a handful of unoccupied desks, piles of books ready to be restacked and shelved, and ahead of us and on the floor below, several acres of volumes, row after row of shelves, that formed this enormous hidden book vault beneath the formal gardens of Bryant Park.

“It’s like a catacomb of forgotten books,” Mike said, his hands on his waist.

I ventured past the desks to the beginning of the tightly packed shelves that stretched out in the distance farther than either of us could see. The space was musty and airless. It was impossible to think that anyone really knew what was among the pages relegated to this dank reserve.

“What are we looking for exactly?” I asked.

“A way out.”

“We just got here. Bea said it’s the only entrance.”