Linda Fairstein - The Bone Vault

Harry had downloaded the response to the photo he sent: “This is me at my computer.” Attached was a picture of a middle-aged man in a polo shirt, looking like an ad for a sportswear catalog.

“And this is mymonster. ” The printed page that followed was a close-up of a penis.

I did a double take.

“Huge, huh?” said Ryan. “Harry and I are betting he borrowed that from a porn site. These guys never have the equipment they claim is theirs. I especially love it when they name their private parts. Just something that never occurred to me to do.”

“Shall I read on?”

“Follows the basic outline. Wants to show her the ropes. Meet the monster and learn how to make love.”

“Is he explicit?” I didn’t want to waste police manpower if he was simply talking dirty.

“Lays out what he wants to do and how he wants to do it. I’m telling you, he’s the perfect target for us. Wants her to suggest a meeting place where there are hotels in the area. He’ll bring the condoms, the marijuana, and some booze to relax her.”

“And you’ve found out who he is?”

“Faxed a court order to the ISP.” The Internet service provider had responded with information about the subscriber whose screen name was MonsterMan. “The response was sitting in my fax machine this morning. Just ran him through Faces of the Nation.”

Ryan read to me from the background report he had pulled off the web. “Frederick Welch III. He’s a high school principal in Litchfield, Connecticut.”

“The meet is a go. Let’s decide on a place that makes Joni comfortable and scout out some SROs that the squad has a relationship with.” The single-room-occupancy hotels were often hot-sheet operations, renting rooms by the hour. Plagued by prostitutes and junkies, they frequently looked to the NYPD when trysts and drug deals turned sour and became emergencies. Harry would call in a chit with some desk manager who owed him a favor.

“You want to take it that far?”

“I want him to sign in and ask for a room key. We lost one a month ago by grabbing the guy as soon as he showed up and gave Joni a kiss on the cheek. The judge said we couldn’t prove that the perp had any intention of following through with his screen banter.”

Cyberspace had become a new kind of playground for pedophiles. Not only were there thousands of sites on which to buy, sell, and exchange child pornography, it was an easy and inexpensive way to correspond with children and adolescents all over the world. Parents who enforced rigid rules about playmates and curfews in their own neighborhoods sent their kids to their bedrooms for hours on end, without ever warning them that the dangers of talking to strangers were every bit as real on-line as on the street.

Sarah Brenner came in with two mugs of coffee, one for her and a refill for me. “Got your message and came right upstairs. Hey, Ryan. Something good, no doubt.”

“Maybe I’ll just skip the coffee and put toothpicks in my eyelids to keep them open. Good morning,” I said, reaching for the hot cup.

“Don’t complain about sleep deprivation to the mother of three kids. Battaglia’s letting you run with this? You know you love it.”

“If you can cover my back down here, Ryan’s Internet sting might heat up tomorrow. We’ve got three people on trial and a holiday weekend. The young and the restless are bound to start celebrating the rites of spring.” Our numbers always went up in warm weather.

“Do I get to make command decisions?” she said, smiling.

“You even get to suck up to McKinney, if you’re in the mood.”

I reached for the ringing phone but Laura came in and grabbed it. She greeted all of us and told me Chapman was on the line.

“I’m just setting things up with Sarah. I’ll be on my way.”

“That’s not why I’m calling. Dr. K. isn’t even back from a domestic up in Chelsea. What do I need to seize someone’s passport?”

“What you don’t have yet, in this case: probable cause. Why, has Pierre Thibodaux packed up his bags already?” I had worried that the soon-to-be ex-director would have no reason to stay in town, but figured that there would be a period of transition until his successor was named.

“I just called Ms. Drexler to see when I could pick up a list of all the employees, and get a guided tour of the other Egyptian coffins from Timothy Gaylord, who left us so abruptly yesterday afternoon. Unfortunately, he’s leaving the country tonight.”

“Business or displeasure?”

“A rather special assignment, down in Chile. He’s going to the mummy congress.”

The morgue attendant at the loading dock on East Thirtieth Street was pushing an empty gurney through the entrance that Mike Chapman was holding open for him. I slammed the cab door behind me and squinted because of the bright sunlight. It was unusual to hear singing at the mouth of this gray tunnel where the night’s dead were brought in to tell their stories to the medical examiners.

“See the pyramids along the Nile…,” Mike crooned softly, a more doo-wop version than Jo Stafford had recorded in 1956. Mike rested his arm against the opening, for me to pass under, pointing me out to the waiting ambulance driver as he got to the coda of the song, “she belongs tome. ”

“I’ll bite. What’s the mummy congress?”

“The Fourth World Congress on Mummy Studies. Now, that has got to be a totally happening group of scientists, don’t you think? You might be able to find some guest speakers for McKinney’s killer camp.”

The DA’s office held an annual retreat that served as a training session on investigating and prosecuting homicide cases for the senior members of the trial division. It was Pat McKinney’s pet project, and he spent the better part of each year lining up the quirkiest experts and the worst lodging that a convention could promise.

“This is the real deal?”

“Ms. Drexler ranks it just below a papal consistory. Every three years, a lively group of paleopathologists and Egyptologists gather together for a serious study of issues related to mummies, old and new. They deliver papers, study techniques, compare hieroglyphics, walk like Egyptians. That kind of stuff.”

“Serious subjects?”

“DNA in mummies, human sacrifices at high altitudes in the Andes, parasites that inhabit mummified corpses.”

“Can’t Gaylord skip a session? Pick it up on satellite? Alan Dershowitz does CNN interviews from the nude beach on Martha’s Vineyard; I’m sure we can hook something up for this guy.”

“He’s delivering the keynote this weekend-‘Ethical Considerations in Studying the Ancient Dead.’ Apparently, he’s got the most serious credentials in the field. Drexler says it’s a big issue in museum work. Things that were tolerated fifty and a hundred years ago, digging up sacred graves and messing with the spirits, are taboo now.”

“Why Chile?”

“A stretch of road called the Atacama, about the most lifeless desert in the world.”

“You knew that?” It must have been a battleground once.

“Never heard of it. Miss Efficiency is my lifeline to the mummy man. There’s a little city in northern Chile called Arica, close to the desert. That one I know. Peru ceded it to Chile after the War of the Pacific. Treaty of Ancón, 1883.”

“You know about wars I wasn’t even aware were fought.”

“What I didn’t know is that it has the distinction of being so dry in the Atacama that the long-term preservation of the human body is practically guaranteed. Mummy heaven. Probably more of them there than in the entire Nile valley.”

“Is Gaylord going there because of what he knows, or what he wants to learn?”

“Seems obvious to me that he wouldn’t need to keep that appointment if he’s our killer. Whoever wrapped up Ms. Grooten must have already completed the course. Can we stop him, just to be sure?” Mike asked.