Linda Fairstein - The Bone Vault

Lissen motioned us in and we sat on stools facing his desk. “Mr. Thibodaux asked a couple of the curators to come down. I’m really not supposed to poke around their storage areas unless they give me permission.”

“Can we sit somewhere else, so I can take notes while we talk?”

“We don’t got a lot of fancy rooms down here, Detective.”

I heard footsteps and turned to see several people in the doorway. I recognized the tall, balding man as one who had been with Mr. Lissen in the shipyard last night.

“I’m Timothy Gaylord. I’m afraid the Egyptian art collection is under my direction,” he said, extending a hand.

Mike and I stood up in the crowded space and made introductions all around. The second man told us he was Erik Poste, the curator in charge of European paintings, and the third staffer was Anna Friedrichs, who ran the department of the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas.

Gaylord took command of the situation. “Maury, why don’t we all move into our storeroom?” He turned to Mike and me. “There’s a small office we can work in there, a lot more comfortably than in this.”

“Can we access your computer files from that one?” I asked Lissen.

“Only if we had any.” He waved a hand behind him at the dusty monitor. “We’re not the high-tech section of the museum. They got it all cataloged upstairs. We’re just the brawn. Someone tells us to move something, that’s what we do. Never had time to go to school to learn how to catch up on these machines. Sooner or later someone picks up the paperwork and puts it in order. I ain’t lost much more than a couple of African masks that’d scare you half to death anyway, and some fake statuettes. A few minor paintings that weren’t going to get hung.”

Lissen locked his door behind him and we all followed Timothy Gaylord into the hallway. We were at the southeast corner of the basement, and we walked for several minutes down a windowless stretch of corridor without a doorway or stairwell to break the long cement barriers.

“What’s back here?” Chapman was walking on Gaylord’s heels, anxious to find out what was behind the great gray walls.

Gaylord turned his head and smiled at us. “Surely, Detective, you can guess what the most lucrative part of this great art museum is?”

Neither of us had any idea.

“That’s the underground parking garage that was built thirty years ago. It’s entirely museum revenue. Unlike everything else, the city doesn’t get a nickel of that money.”

“It’s public parking?”

“Yes, the daily museum visitors and permanent tenants from the luxury buildings in the neighborhood. As an art lover, it pains me to say that the garage is probably the most significant source of income for the great Metropolitan Museum of Art.”

And I knew Mike was thinking that it was an entirely unexpected headache for him. The fact that one could bring in a private vehicle, park it off the street for days or weeks at a time, and have such immediate access to the institution made it something else to add to his list of facilities to search.

We turned a corner and were walking north now. There were a series of doorways, each with a numbered plaque above the lintel. Gaylord stopped in front of the third one and turned the handle. Inside the large square room two young women sat on opposite sides of a table, wearing magnifying glasses strapped to bands that circled their heads, bent over the model of an ancient boat.

“I’m going to need this area for an hour or so,” Gaylord said in his soft-spoken voice. “Would you mind terribly if we interrupted your work?”

Both of them removed their headpieces and assured us the break was welcome.

We seated ourselves around the table.

“Pierre called to tell me this latest piece of news, and I just want to say how distressing this is to me. To all of us, I’m sure. I have met Katrina Grooten.” He paused and ran a finger over his lower lip. “She was a very serious young scholar. And I’m holding myself responsible for the fact that Ms. Grooten was found in a sarcophagus that belonged to my department.

“I called Erik and Anna in on this because they might have some information that would be helpful. When Pierre told me it was Katrina, I was aware both of them knew her as well, so I’ve asked them to come down here with me. Where would you like us to begin?”

I wanted to know about my victim. The kind of person she was, the things she did for a living, and the things she liked to do when she left her job. What kind of people she socialized with, and whether she was a risk-taker. Who her family was and what they thought had become of her. I needed a sketch of Katrina Grooten that would keep her alive for me in my mind’s eye, so that I could try to re-create the events that had led up to her death.

Mike, on the other hand, did not want to know the deceased any better than the facts forced him to. He kept his sanity by staying at arm’s length from the person whose killer he would try to find. Although he would be dogged in learning every morsel about Katrina’s existence, he wanted to internalize nothing that would make him judgmental about her life or lifestyle. He didn’t care whether she was liked or despised by her peers, sexually active or a recluse. What mattered most to him was that she hadn’t deserved to die, and no one would try harder than he to get the bastard who had brought her to such an ugly end.

“Perhaps each of you could tell us what you knew about Katrina, personally and professionally. We need every detail you can remember.”

Gaylord spoke first. “I would say I have the least to contribute, so I might as well go first. Do you know about the project we’re collaborating on with the Museum of Natural History?”

“I know there’s to be a joint show next year, and that the celebratory announcement was last night. But neither Detective Chapman nor I know any of the details.”

“There’s been a rather intense rivalry between these two institutions for more than a century now. They were both founded in the 1870s, and in fact, the trustees had actually planned that each museum would occupy buildings on the very same site, known as Manhattan Square, on the west side of the park. Only later was the Met resituated to our present site, on what was then called Deer Park, the area between Seventy-ninth and Eighty-fourth streets on the Upper East Side.

“President Grant laid the cornerstone for the Natural History Museum, while President Hayes dedicated the Metropolitan.”

“Why the conflict?” Chapman asked. “Can’t they get over it and talk current events here?”

“Our trustees at the Metropolitan, the fabulously wealthy merchants and businessmen of that period, had extraordinarily lofty goals. They had models in all the great museums of Europe, most of which enjoyed the benefit of centuries of plundering their neighbors or being patronized by royalty. Both methods were tried-and-true for establishing collections. Our founders wanted to use art to educate and refine the American masses, and to provide for them a knowledge of the history of art that existed in civilized countries abroad.”

“Wasn’t Natural History doing the same thing?”

All three of the curators smirked in unison.

“That’s hardlyart, Mr. Chapman. Natural history museums developed from an entirely different type of collecting mania. They are the descendants of what are known as ‘cabinets of curiosities.’ Fossils, minerals, mollusks, shells, bugs, and the ever-popular dinosaurs. They have a fascinating repository of all the bizarre and wonderful creatures that have ever crawled and walked on Earth.”

“They make a good effort at calling themselves scientific in this day and age, but for those of us in the museum business, they’re just pickled remains. Lots of dead things in jars and behind glass walls,” said Erik Poste.