Linda Fairstein - The Bone Vault

Clem ticked off the names on her fingers and nodded her head in response.

“Did you bring your address book with you?”

“I followed all your instructions.”

“Look through it and include anyone else you think had a connection to Katrina,” I said. “Use your own greeting. I want people who know you to recognize your voice, if you will. Your language. And when they open the message, the header will show the hour you sent it as daylight saving time, which would make it pretty late back home.”

“What will you do about that? Won’t the e-mail display what time I sent it?”

“We’ve got a tech unit upstairs. I left a voice mail for one of the guys who works there, who was due in at eight. He’ll come down to reset it for us, so it shows UK time.”

“Good.”

“Mention that you’ve been so worried since the police called you that you haven’t been able to sleep.” I handed her a slip of paper I had worked on last night. “Then tell them this.”

I’m coming to New York later this week. I thought some of you who were also Katrina Grooten’s friends might want to meet with me to plan a memorial service for her. She sent me a letter shortly before she died, as it turned out, and some of you may be interested in what she told me. Have the police been helpful? I’m wondering whether to give the information to them.

“It would be hard not to be curious about that, I guess. Most of the people we’ve talked about know I’m not likely to want to cooperate with government authorities. They think I enjoy being a troublemaker.”

“That’s the idea. Just the way people respond to you should be interesting. How did you set it up with your office in London?” I wanted to be sure that no one would answer Clem’s phone there and give up the fact that she was already in Manhattan. She was safely under our collective wing at the moment, and it helped to know that while we tried to lure Katrina’s killer into plain sight.

“Told my boss I had to make an emergency trip to Greenland, to see an ailing relative. Didn’t leave them a phone number. Just said I’d stay in touch by e-mail.”

“What will your secretary tell people?”

“No such luxury at my level. It’s voice mail. I just changed the outgoing message to say the same thing.”

“Anyone know where you’re staying in New York?”

“How could they? I didn’t have a clue myself until we got to the hotel lobby.”

“Then why don’t you get to work? I’m just going to stick my head into the district attorney’s office to see how he wants me to deal with my sidewalk cheering section.”

Rose Malone was untying her sneakers to change into the high heels that showed off her great legs. “I bet you needed those to dash through my swarm of admirers this morning. What time’s the boss due in?”

“He gave the commencement speech at Stanford’s graduation ceremony yesterday. He’s flying back today, so he won’t be here at all.” She straightened up and whispered to me across her desk, “McKinney already came by to see him about it. I think he’s going to have the Fifth Precinct squad commander cordon off the entrance and move the protestors around to the rear of the building. The police will call it a safety measure. At least it keeps them away from the judge’s entrance and all the grand jurors.”

“You think they have any openings in the appeals bureau, Rose? No witnesses, no lunatics, no controversies.”

“Your life would be so dull you wouldn’t be able to stand it. You thrive on this.”

“I like challenges, I like creative investigations, I like the people I work with.This? ” I pointed out her window to the sidewalk below. “There’s no way to win. If the big guy calls in, tell him I’ll do whatever he thinks is best. And that before the end of the week we should have some developments on the Grooten murder.”

Mike was already in my office when I got back across the hallway. “That’s some flogging you’re getting downstairs. I came mighty close to firing off a few shots to disperse the crowd but I thought I might accidentally get lucky and hit one of ‘em.”

“I’ve got Clem working on her first e-mail-”

“Done and gone. Hank Brock was in here tinkering with the time function on the computer. Said to tell you he got it set to read like she’s in London, okay?”

“Perfect. And I’m going upstairs as soon as there’s a quorum in the grand jury.” I’d be lucky if that happened by ten-fifteen. “I want to get some subpoenas ready for the Natural History Museum. We need a detailed floor plan and a list of anything that might be a private vault or closet.”

“Got my first fish on the line,” Clem said. I picked up my head and watched as she clicked on her new mail.

She read it aloud.

“When do you arrive and where will you be staying? Why don’t we meet for coffee? Katrina was such a sweet girl. The police seem determined to bungle this entire thing. We should talk first.”

“Who’s it from?”

“That woman who works for Pierre Thibodaux. Eve Drexler.”

“Keep her engaged,” Mike said to Clem. “We know she had Katrina’s identification tag when she signed into the British Museum meeting in January. It’s at least worth talking to her about that when Coop and I meet with her again this week.”

I thought of Ruth Gerst’s nickname for Drexler: “Evil.” “You think she’d be doing Thibodaux’s bidding just because she was loyal to him, or did she figure she had a chance at consoling the widower and trying to replace Penelope in his affection?”

“Like she figured Katrina was getting too close? Let me tell you, if Eve could lift the lid onto that sarcophagus by herself, I’ll eat my nightstick. It’d mean someone she trusted had-”

“The man who went off the roof?”

“Bermudez.”

“She was the first one at the hospital, wasn’t she?”

“Yeah, but that would have been her responsibility anyway.”

“But Thibodaux admitted to us that he never actually left town Friday night. He could have gone himself. Maybe Eve had used him for muscle.”

“What man off what roof?” Clem asked quietly.

I explained what had happened at the Met on Friday and asked if she had ever heard Bermudez’s name. I walked to Laura’s desk and picked up the package of news clips that the public information office copied and distributed to the executive staff every morning. It was particularly thick after a three-day weekend, and this one was stuffed with tabloid features about every stabbing, shooting, and sex crime that had occurred since Friday morning.

I flipped through the assorted stories that had been included in the handout because they related to the Grooten investigation. Sunday’sDaily News had an obit of Pablo Bermudez, with a three-paragraph story that quoted Thibodaux, who expressed his sorrow at the tragic accident.

“Ever see him?” I asked Clem, showing her the photograph of the dead man, posed with his wife while on vacation in San Juan a few weeks before he fell to his death.

“He does look familiar.” She took the paper from my hand and studied the picture. “I mean, workmen from the Met were in and out of our basement all the time. They delivered exhibits and picked them up. Some were friendlier than others, hung around and asked questions about the displays. A few guys asked to come back with their kids to show them the animals, the behind-the-scenes stuff.”

“Do you think Katrina knew any of these guys?”

“I haven’t a clue. If I had to guess, I’d say she wasn’t one to chat up strangers. I mean, after the rape, she didn’t like to be down in the basement alone. She was always looking for someone to cling to. It gets kind of creepy there when the place closes up at night.”