Linda Fairstein - The Bone Vault

No one had mentioned it to us, and the idea had never crossed my mind.

“Much of the work we do in the labs here is identifying different species and subspecies of animal life within our fields of specialty. See what their similarities and differences are, and which characters are threatened with extinction. The bird guys can tell you whether a spotted owl on a mountain range is a relative of the ones that live a mile away, or in Northern California, or if it’s more closely linked to a particular family of owls in Mexico.”

“What does that have to do with you scientists?”

“We sit at the microscopes all day, looking at and breathing onto our specimens and slides. A sneeze, some sweat-well, anything that one of us contributes to the mix would obviously throw off the research results. So they take an oral swab from each of us when we start working here. Thought you might just want to know that.”

The same procedure was followed at most morgues and serologists’ offices. It should have occurred to me that anyone working with genetic samples would be required to have his or her own DNA on file. If Dr. Kestenbaum found something of serological value on any of Katrina’s crime scene evidence, it would be a good place to start.

We crossed through several corridors until Zimm came to another unmarked door behind a row of service elevators. Again he swiped his identification card and took us into a dingy staircase that led four tiers below the main lobby.

The hallways were dark and he flipped on light switches as he walked along. “A lot of people took the day off, before the long weekend. But I’ve got friends who work in this department, and it’s where I spent my first two summers, back when I was in high school. I can show you most of what you need.”

There were compact laboratories on either side of us, filled from floor to ceiling with fish tanks and glass jars of all sizes. Then came storerooms of fish samples-some two million of them-each drifting in some kind of watery solution, carefully labeled and housed in stacks of rolling metal cabinets, like so many books on library shelves.

“What’s that smell?” Mike asked.

“Which one? Dead matter? Preservatives? The odor of death is all over this museum. We’ve just learned to mask it pretty well.”

I studied the markings on scores of fish skeletons, their whiteness standing out in striking contrast to the dull painted gray of the basement floors and ceilings. “How do you do that?”

“When I was first an intern here, they brought in a huge whale skeleton that had washed up on a beach in Long Island. I’d never smelled anything like it. Couldn’t shake the odor. My boss sent me to Columbus Avenue, to a drugstore. Oil of bergamot, he told me to ask for. I bought the place out.”

“What is it?”

“It’s an essence made from the rind of a citrus fruit. Bergamot-it’s like an orange smell with mint in it. We’d just douse some cloths in that and leave them draped over the specimen when we weren’t working on it. Everyone here has tricks like that. It’s the only way to deal with the smell of the dead specimens.”

Mike was writing in his notebook. He’d make Kestenbaum test the linen cloth that was wrapped around Katrina’s body. Perhaps the mummified linen had been soaked in a substance that had masked the odor of death while she was in storage somewhere. That sweet smell that hit us when the coffin lid was opened on the truck, before the stronger blast of garlic, might have been something like bergamot.

“Suppose you wanted to kill someone, Zimm. How would you do it down here?” Mike was checking to see whether the availability of arsenic was common knowledge. The cause of Katrina’s death had not yet appeared in the press.

He steered us past the ichthyology X-ray department and into a room crowded with three-foot-long fish tanks, alive with samples. “Know anybody with a weak heart? This sucker’s an electric catfish. African. He can pump out about three hundred volts when he’s riled up.”

The whiskered brown creatures darted about, one pressing his nose against the glass as though he wanted to prove Zimm’s point to us.

“Over here’s where we keep the tissues, for molecular work.” He turned on another light in a small lab across the hall. There were two enormous vats, withDANGER signs printed on their sides. “Liquid nitrogen. Eighteen degrees. If I stuck your head in this for just a minute you’d burn to death from the intense cold. Painful, fast, quiet.”

“But you’d still have the problem of getting rid of me.”

“I could at least keep you in cold storage till I figured out how to do that. Us bug guys? We don’t get many things that won’t fit in a jar. A couple of giant insects from the Amazon or the African jungles. You wanna talk to some people in mammalogy? They just got a new degreaser.”

“What’s that?”

“Hey, you’re the detective. How do you figure they get their skeletal samples clean? They got this brand-new degreasing machine. You can fit an entire elephant skull into it, submerge it for a few days. This thing takes all the fat off the bones. Then we give them some of our beetles to nibble off whatever’s left, before they stick it in the freezer to kill off all the germs. Dip somebody in there and they’d be clean as a whistle.”

I ignored the midday rumblings of my empty stomach. Museum work was killing my appetite.

He was leading us down a long, dim corridor and around one more corner. “Ever hear of a coelacanth?”

“No.”

“It’s the missing link of the fish world. All anybody had seen for centuries were fossils of this thing. Scientists thought it had died out several million years ago. Five feet long, very unusual fin structure, gives birth to live young. In 1938 a trawler off South Africa came up with one. A young scientist working down there sketched it and then sent the fish over to this museum. We’ve had it here ever since.”

“That same fish?”

“Yeah. She’s pickled.”

“How come everyone in your business uses that expression?”

“Because alcohol is such a great preservative. This beauty has lasted more than sixty years, just as she was pulled out of the water, in a solution that’s seventy percent ethyl alcohol.” He was around the last nook and into an open space.

“Have a look. There’s her coffin.”

We were standing in front of a six-foot-long metal container with a hinged lid. It was three feet high and a couple of feet deep, large enough to hold a prehistoric fish or a large shark, and most human beings I knew.

Zimm lifted the lid on the heavy metal casket. “Stand back. The smell of the alcohol can knock you off your feet.”

He was right. My head jerked away and I was reminded of the overwhelming stench of formaldehyde that had been so pervasive when I viewed my first autopsies at the medical examiner’s office as part of my training for homicide investigations.

I covered my mouth with one hand and rested the other on the end of the case. Mike and I stared in at the behemoth, whose single glassy eye gazed back at us. Zimm reached into the murky fluid and lifted up the head of the coelacanth for us to admire. The fish was larger than the body of Katrina Grooten.

Mike was more interested in the container than the fish. “What’s this?” he asked, tapping on the inside.

“It’s completely lined with stainless steel. You couldn’t have odors like this escaping into the room for very long, and still have people working around here, could you?”

“You’d lose me at the end of a day. How many of these have they got?” Mike helped lower the lid into place.

“Maybe four. Maybe six. I’ll ask my friend next week.”