Linda Fairstein - The Bone Vault

“Common carrier,” I said quietly to Mike.

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Just hold the thought, Detective. I’ll connect the dots for you later on.”

He turned back to Thibodaux. “So there’s no question but that this mother lode left the Met early today?”

The director handed me the receipt he had just taken from the shipping manager. Mike aimed a flashlight on the wrinkled paper, which was stamped with today’s date: Tuesday, May 21, 10:43A.M.

“Was the whole shipment from the museum, or did the driver stop anywhere else along the way to pick up or drop off other crates?”

“No, we keep a pretty tight financial rein on things like this. Mr. Lissen, he’s the fellow over there who runs the department, knows the dimensions of the trucks we rent. And he’s got the measurements of all the lots going out. Makes a point of trying to fill them as full as he can, so we get our money’s worth.”

“How do you inventory the contents?”

“An age-old system, Mr. Chapman.” Thibodaux was rubbing his brow as he stepped back to lean against the adjacent container. “We’ve got more than two million objects at the Met, and the moment one arrives it’s assigned a number. An accession number.”

“Hey, Lenny,” Mike yelled to the detective he’d brought to Newark with him, who had his notepad out, talking to the truck driver. “Wanna gown up, hike up that ramp, and check something for me?”

Thibodaux looked up at us again. “The very first work of art to enter the Met’s collection back in 1870 was a coffin. Ironic, isn’t it? The Garland Sarcophagus. Roman marble, from the third centuryB.C. Every employee at the museum knows that. Item number 70.1. The first gift acquired in 1870, the year we were founded.

“Anyway, Mr. Chapman, that’s the system. After 1970, all four digits of the year were used, followed by the order in which the piece came into the collection.”

“You see any markings on that crate?” Mike had walked to the foot of the ramp. Lenny Dove, who was assigned to the same squad as Mike at Manhattan North Homicide, had put on a crime scene outfit, complete with lab gown and plastic gloves. He was squatting beside the packing box, shining his light across the slats, which had been broken apart by the security officers.

“Got a label for you. Has the Met logo. Says, ‘1983.752. Limestone sarcophagus.’”

“Handwritten?”

“Typed.”

“C’mon, blondie. Alley-oop. Better leave those spikes in the car.” He handed me the proper cover for my clothes, hands, and feet.

I kicked off my shoes and followed Mike up, stepping with my gauze booties on the rungs of the metal ladder that hung off the left corner of the truck and swinging my leg over onto the hard wooden floor. Pierre Thibodaux started up after me.

“Not so fast, Mr. T. We’ll call if we need you.”

“But, I-uh-I’d like to know-”

“Give us a few minutes up here, okay? It’s not exactly like viewing hours at your local funeral parlor. Have a little respect for the dead. We’re not open for business yet.”

Thibodaux backed off and rejoined his two colleagues.

The truck’s well was pitch-black and airless. Mike pulled on latex gloves and he and Lenny trained torch-sized beams along the floor so we could see our way over to the exposed sarcophagus.

“Stand back, Coop. It’s not gonna be pretty.”

“I’ve seen-”

“You’ve seen nothing, kid. Take a few steps over there till I say otherwise.”

I moved a few paces away, backing into another crated package.

“On the count of three, Lenny,” Mike said, positioning himself on the same side of the ancient box as his partner, but at the end closer to me.

“One, two, three.” At the same moment, they attempted to lift the stone lid from its base. Unable to move it more than an inch, they couldn’t look inside before dropping the weighty piece in place. But the brief exposure had released a powerful odor. Not the hideous stench of putrefaction I had expected. There was the sickly sweetness of heavy perfume, laced with a bitter, pungent smell that kicked its way out of the coffin and into our dark, crowded space. I gagged on the thick combination that filled the truck’s hot confines. Even the dog, resting his chin on his paws as he sat at his master’s feet a few lengths away from the eighteen-wheeler, picked up his head and softly howled. He had scented some unmistakable marker of death hours earlier.

“Slide it, Lenny. Just lift and slide.”

This time, Mike had walked around to the opposite side, facing his sergeant at the far end. On the third count, they hoisted the lid just high enough to clear the lip of the coffin and eased it back six or seven inches. Mike picked up the flashlight, looked in, and I started toward him.

“Hold it right there, Coop. Close it up, Lenny.”

I had my nose and mouth covered with both hands, fighting the urge to be sick. The dog was on his feet now, pacing and whining, straining at his lead.

“I’ll draw you a picture, kid. Go on back down.” I knew Mike’s moods and this wasn’t one to mess with. I’d called him here to help me, and I had no choice but to follow his orders.

As I held on to the ladder and stepped off the truck, I saw him drop to his knees and move the flashlight slowly across the lower sides of the casket. Every now and then he ran his gloved hands back and forth along the surface, as though feeling for imperfections.

I joined Thibodaux and waited for Mike and Lenny to stop whispering to each other. Within minutes, they stripped off their gloves and threw them on the floor beside the crates, climbing down to tell us what they had found.

“You okay? You look like a beached tuna, gasping for breath.”

I hadn’t realized that I was ferociously gulping in the clean night air to rid my lungs of the foul smell. “What could you see?”

“First of all, you oughtta get your money back for that coffin, Mr. T. Full of holes. It’s the fluids from whatever that body’s been wrapped in that leaked through the cracks and attracted the dog’s attention this evening. I had my snout right up against them, on the floor, and couldn’t smell a thing. But that’s just what those shepherds are trained for. Drugs and death.”

“So the box and body probably could have made it into a container and out of the country without detection?”

Mike nodded at me. “Till you pull back that lid, it takes a professional nose to get what’s just beginning to seep through.”

“Could you-”

“There’s a body, no question about it. And somebody tried to wrap her in linen cloth, to give it the semblance of a mummy, I guess. But we can’t play games with something like this out here in a filthy shipyard in the middle of the night. We’ve got to get this whole setup to the morgue.”

“Her? Are you sure it’s a woman?”

“It’s just a good guess at this point. Hair a little longer than yours,” Mike said, as I instinctively reached for mine, hanging limply against the nape of my neck. “A bit darker in color, with a shiny silver barrette. Small physique, and thin. That’s all I can give you tonight.”

Mike poked the small of my back to move me away from Thibodaux. We left him talking to Lenny Dove, who was taking down his office telephone number and making arrangements to see him the following afternoon.

“Where was she being shipped to?”

“A long cruise. A sweltering summer voyage to the Cairo Museum on the high seas. There wasn’t even a date set for transport yet. Cleo would have been like soup by the time she got home to Egypt.”

“What do you want to do?”

“There’s only one place to go with this, and the oxymoronic nickname ‘Garden State’ doesn’t figure in my plans.”