Linda Fairstein: The Bone Vault

“They’re not designated as anyone’s. These-thesethings are just waiting here for someone to decide what becomes of them in this age of political correctness. There-up there, Detective.”

Socarides’s flashlight stopped on something that glinted in the dark. Mike grabbed a bookcase wedged into the space behind the door and slammed it to its side, skulls scattering across the floor. He climbed onto its edge, two feet off the ground, to reach the top few tiers of shelves.

Guns. A rack of hunting rifles spread out across the uppermost space. “Eight of ‘em up here. Looks like there were a couple more here once, if this was ever full.”

He wiped his hand to see what amount of dust had accumulated in the several inches that separated the long guns from each other. One level below were pistols and handguns. No way of really knowing how many had been on the shelf earlier than today and whether any had been taken recently.

Mike stood on his toes and reached behind the row of pistols now clearly visible to me as I tried to give him more light.

“This one of yours?” He balanced against the sturdy wooden shelf with one hand, handing me a couple of the guns while pulling into Socarides’s view the tip of an elephant tusk that must have been four feet long.

“Ivory, Detective. Willem Van der Poste’s private insurance policy, if I had to guess. Every hunter had a stash of some sort or other, and his tusks were probably hidden here against the day he’d get back to the States and need to convert them into cash. Sell them on the black market.”

Mike backed down off the shelf. “Got a few of ‘em up there. Worth what?”

“Fifteen, maybe twenty thousand apiece. Maybe more.”

“Nobody back there, Chapman,” a cop called in after checking the rooms beyond us.

“Open every room. Check every inch of this place.” The uniformed cops hustled as Mike gave out orders. “Where to?”

Socarides was running out of ideas. “Maybe he got her out of the museum. Maybe they’re not-”

“That’s great. I’ll let you know when the chief gives me that news. I’m a worst-case scenario kind of guy. I don’t feature ‘em on the Jitney, on their way out to the Hamptons. Where else could you hide inside here? Where else would-?”

“The basement. I mean, there are several basement areas, each separate and-”

“I know. We got people down there.”

“There’s the attic, above us. Vast spaces, locked storerooms. No reason for anyone to be up there, no one to disturb them once they got there.”

“Can you get to it from the staircase in Mamdouba’s office?”

“Frankly, I didn’t know there was a staircase in his office. No idea where that leads.”

Back to the main hallway, Mike was running ahead of Socarides and me, screaming to security guards to point him to the access to the attic. The older man nearest that end of the building was clearly so intimidated that the keys jangled in his grip as he tried to work them in the lock of the massive door. I laid a hand on his forearm and asked him to give them to me, which he seemed eager to do. When I found the right one, Mike leaned against the panel and headed up the stairs.

Again we followed. Still enveloped in the semidarkness, I tried to orient myself to our location, after having altered our route so many times downstairs. Uniformed cops were coursing through the immense space. If anything could rattle the bones and wake the dead, it would be this stampede of cops who were entirely at home on urban streets, in subway stations, housing projects, and city parks, but thoroughly perplexed by this labyrinth of hidden rooms and concealed closets.

Chapman had gotten his bearings before I did. “That’s southwest,” he said, pointing. “Mamdouba’s office. That would be the corner the staircase would lead up from.”

He took off in that direction and I loped behind him. “Coop, give it a whistle.”

I put two fingers in the corners of my mouth and blew as hard as I could, the cab-stopping kind of signal that could be heard blocks away, that Mike had never mastered. He called out after I got the attention of half of the troops. “Over here. Move all this shit, all these cabinets that are blocking doorways. Anything obstructing any entryway or exit. We’re looking for a woman’s body. Breathing or not. Find her. The guy may be packing.”

There must have been eight or ten attic areas like this over the entire complex of buildings that made up the museum. This was only one of them. Although it led out of Mamdouba’s corner turret, there was no way to tell whether it connected to the rambling set of contiguous halls.

“Soc, what’s up there?”

Under the eaves, still high above our heads, was a steel catwalk. It was not much wider than a balance beam, with chain guylines that bordered it as it crossed the width of the immense room.

“Never been there, never noticed it. Must be for maintenance, for structural repairs.”

“Hey, Pavlova, you wanna be useful? Make all those ballet lessons your old man paid for worthwhile? I don’t think my feet’ll fit on the damn thing.”

I loathed heights as much as I hated vermin, snakes, and spiders.

“Bird’s-eye view, Coop. Different perspective. Give it a shot.”

I stepped out of my shoes, handed my flashlight to Mike, and started to climb the rusty rungs of the ladder that was welded in place against the south wall of the room. The metal dug into the middle of my soles as I climbed higher, trying to focus my eyes on a water-stained spot on the wall above my head. Anything not to look back down.

The solid plank felt good beneath my feet. I glided out onto it, clutching the side rails with all the strength in my hands, and moved forward by planting heel in front of toe in a regular cadence.

The first stretch was the most unsettling, from the wall more than twenty feet across to the first block of storerooms. The open space below me was more than twice that height.

I paused to look down at the tops of the structures below. Some appeared to be permanent fixtures, sizable rooms that must have been built into the original architectural plans for the storage of items and artifacts not on display. They were topped by strips of wooden board, and although it was impossible to see whole objects in between the slats from this distance above them, I could make out the shapes of large, dark masses as well as the occasional glimpse of something that contrasted with that, something light. The whiteness of bones was what it looked like to me.

I propelled myself ahead, stopped, and noted that there were other, more modern cabinets-gray metal lockers that looked like they had been added as the collections outgrew the original design space.

Then I was out over open hallway again, clinging to my side railings and measuring my steps. Storerooms and cabinets. More open corridor. Storerooms and-

I froze over the third cluster of storage rooms. I looked down. Shadows and opaque radiance coming through the skylights that dotted the eaves above me danced atop all the surfaces I saw below. I steadied myself with both hands and crouched lower.

I was sure of it now. It wasn’t the flutter of white clouds or the brilliance of the moon from the skylights. It wasn’t the confusion of dozens of flashlight beams intersecting one another from the floor far beneath me.

Something had moved in the darkness. Something in one of the vaults.

“Stop panting and tell me how certain you are.”

I had managed to turn around and wriggle my way back to the ladder and down to Mike. “No question.”

“Could be rats you saw from up there.”

I thought of the last time I had spent a lonely night hunting down a killer. “Trust me, Mike. I know rats. That was no rat. It was definitely a big human.”