Linda Fairstein - The Bone Vault

Gaylord stood up and replaced the pipe in his mouth. “There is a chasm between these two New York institutions that is far wider than the park that divides us geographically. In fact, the reason you find us all here today is because we’re trying to reverse the disaster that Thibodaux started. We’d like to call off this joint exhibition.”

“But there’s so much invested in it already.”

“Not nearly as much as Pierre had anticipated. UniQuest, the company that was giving us most of the commercial backing, is probably going to pull the plug. We got a call from Los Angeles today. Quentin Vallejo has put a moratorium on spending for the moment.”

If Nina had been trying to reach me with that news, I would have no way of knowing since my phone had been dead since the time we entered this basement area.

“A financial decision?”

“Basically, yes. I don’t think any of us shared Pierre’s enthusiasm for the plan. Besides, UniQuest is afraid of the bad publicity because of the Grooten murder. And apparently, while I was away last weekend, a man fell off the roof of the Met. They didn’t like that much, either.”

“Did you know him? Pablo Bermudez, I mean.”

He bit on the pipe stem. “Hard worker. Always busy. Never had much to say.”

Gaylord didn’t seem to care deeply about the human factor. Lucky Pablo didn’t splatter blood on any of the canvases when he hit the ground.

“So what will become of these offices and the objects that are here?”

“Anna Friedrichs is upstairs now, talking with Mamdouba. She’s going to try to convince him to carry on with his own bestiary show. He doesn’t need our input to pull this off. If we dissolve this union quickly and easily, we’ll start to transfer the Metropolitan’s objects back into our own quarters.”

How do you secure a potential crime scene that is closeted away somewhere within hundreds of thousands of square feet, when you haven’t yet identified the exact location? Better still, how do you do the same to two areas? I didn’t want anything moved out until we had a chance to examine every possible hiding place under this vast roof.

“You know,” Gaylord said, walking around us to open the door, “that Bermudez fellow was first hired by Bellinger. I think he lived up near the Cloisters. If I remember correctly, he’d been the super in Hiram’s building, which is how he was recommended to work with us. Maybe Hiram knows something about the man.”

I remembered the obit said he had lived with his family in Washington Heights.

Gaylord walked, hands in pockets and head down, along the hallway to get back to the joint exhibition office. Peering after him, I could see that Bellinger and Poste were gone.

I called Zimm’s name, and the bespectacled student emerged from a lab two doors away.

“Have you seen these guys?” I asked, thumbing my finger toward the empty room.

“They left a while ago. I told them I had another e-mail from Clem. She said she might be in town as early as tonight. She said Katrina must have found the vault she was looking for.”

Mike, Mercer, and I were huddled in the corner outside Zimm’s office.

“I’ve got the subpoena to hand to Mamdouba for the floor plan and list of rooms. The museum closes at five forty-five. That’s half an hour. Clem’s already telling people that she may get to town tonight. Why don’t we have Hinton drive her up here and bring her into the place when there’s no one around to see her. Then-”

“We’d still have to get her past a security guard.”

“Like any one of them is going to have a clue?” Mike smirked. “The place will be emptying out for the night. Mercer, you can meet her outside the entrance. The guard’ll be so busy dealing with Mercer and looking at his shiny gold badge that he won’t even notice Clem. We need an insider to get us around here. Zimm’s good, but he has no idea what we’d be looking for, necessarily. Clem would recognize the significance of anything she and Katrina discussed. She’s snooped everywhere, I’m sure.”

“You think Mamdouba will let us stay late, after closing hours?” Mercer asked.

“Other people are in here doing their work.”

“You trust him? You ready to take him into our confidence about having Clem here?” Mike asked.

I responded by looking at each of them. “What do you guys think?”

Mike wasn’t ready to trust anyone. “Let’s get her here first. One of us will sniff around the attic with Coop, looking at bones. The other one will hold hands with an Eskimo in a quiet room till the coast is clear and she can show us what she knows.”

I called Laura’s number and asked her to put Clem on. “You just missed them. You can reach them on Detective Hinton’s cell phone. He was on his way to the hotel with Clem. She was getting tired.”

I wrote down the number she gave me. “Any messages?”

“Call Nina at home tonight. It’s pretty important.” That would be the UniQuest funding story. “Sarah wants to talk to you later if you’ve got some time. Eve Drexler called. I recognized her name from the case so I asked whether I could help.”

“What’d she want?”

“To see whether I could give her a telephone number to reach Clem.”

“What’d you tell her?”

“You taught me well. Told her I didn’t know who that was and that I’d be happy to ask you. She told me not to bother you with it.”

Eve was getting impatient with the e-mails. She wanted to talk to Clem. Or was she calling on Thibodaux’s behalf? She was obviously spreading the news that Clem had planted with her about Katrina and the police investigation.

I dialed Harry Hinton’s cell phone number. “Where are you?”

“Stuck behind a four-car pileup on the FDR Drive, just below Fourteenth Street.”

“Think you can get Clem to the hotel, get her something to eat, let her put her feet up for half an hour, and get her to the Museum of Natural History by seven-thirty?”

I heard him ask if she was game and he got back on to assure me he could. “Well, we’re down to only one guard to worry about,” I told Mike and Mercer. “Traffic’s bad and she wants a bit of a rest. No way they can make it before this place closes, so that will give us some time to get started. Let’s find out which door they keep open so staff can come and go after hours. Harry’ll call when they leave the hotel and one of you can walk Clem in.”

Mamdouba was less than pleased to see us so near to closing time. His expression soured when I handed him the subpoena.

“Must I go to court?” he asked, reading the language on the small white document.

“No. You can see that the foreman of the grand jury modified the request. Instead of a personal appearance before them, you can satisfy your legal obligation by giving me everything we ask for. That’s why my office called your assistant this morning, so you’d have the papers ready.”

“Let me see what we’ve got for you.” He left us in his colorfully decorated circular office and retreated to his assistant’s desk. When he returned, he had an armload of papers.

The big grin returned to his face. “So, here you can begin.” He unfolded a Xeroxed copy of a museum floor plan that stretched beyond the edges of his desk blotter. He ran his index finger from the Central Park West entrance door through the narrow lines that led into display rooms to the left of the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall as he talked.

“Now, what you see here no longer exists like this. It’s become the Hall of Biodiversity, as you know. But you can use this-”

“Wait a minute.” Mike bent down and looked at the date below the name of the architectural firm that had done the plan. “This diagram was printed in 1963. You’ve torn up and rebuilt this place five times since then.” He tapped the desk with his fist. “And we don’t want the tourist version, Mr. Mamdouba. It’s got to be current and it’s got to be complete. I want details of everything that’s below the ground floor and whatever is above the fourth floor.”