Linda Fairstein - The Bone Vault

“Don’t waste your time, Miss Cooper. I’ve got nothing to say to you. If you’d stayed locked in the basement all night, none of this need have happened.”

I didn’t have to tell Mike that I had been right. He glanced at me and I knew he understood.

Clem was crying now. She was upright with her back against a rack full of human skulls, a blood pressure cuff around her arm, Mercer massaging her wrists.

Mike got out of the way and made room for me. “I’m great with stiffs. Tears, tea, and sympathy is your turf.”

I kneeled down beside her and she reached her free arm around my neck. “Take it easy, Clem. It’s all over.”

I could feel the scratches on her forearm as I embraced her. I showed them to the medic.

Clem managed a laugh. “You know how many times I’ve dropped one of those arrows on my foot? Margaret Mead would be appalled at how often the interns did that. That poison has a shorter shelf life than a carton of milk. They’ve probably been in this room for thirty or forty years. It’s the guns that terrified me.”

Mike had stepped out into the hallway to examine the firearms. “Not loaded. None of ‘em. I’m not even sure they would work at this point.”

“I feel so stupid,” Clem said, looking up at him. “I would never have done what he told me if I’d known.”

“Hey, you’re alive. Whatever you did was right. We thought the same thing you did,” Mike said.

“We’re gonna take her over to Roosevelt,” one of the medics said, referring to the nearest hospital. “You can talk to her there. We gotta have her checked out.”

“I’ll go with you in a few minutes. I need to talk to the detectives first. Please?”

The medics weren’t happy but they picked up their equipment and stepped out into the hallway.

Clem was sitting on the floor, cross-legged, rubbing her ankles while she talked. “He told me some things about Katrina. About why-”

She looked up at me, biting her lower lip hard with her teeth, as though that would shut off the flow of tears. “That’s why I thought he was really going to kill me. And kill himself. He had the guns. Then the arrows, which he knew had poison tips. Then he picked up one of the hatchets.”

That hatchet had probably caused the chief of detectives to give ESU the order to break in.

“Did you know about the staircase in Mamdouba’s office?”

“No. Never heard about it. Those turrets are coveted space. Honchos only. Never spent much time up there.”

“Did he have the gun when he surprised you?”

“I didn’t see him coming. Of course”-she smiled-“when Mamdouba took you out of the office, to the anteroom, I couldn’t resist the chance to get up and go behind his desk. Look over the papers he had there while you guys were arguing with him. That’s the bit of me that will never change, I suppose.”

“And Poste?”

“The door opened. I turned my head and he was pointing the gun right at me. Grabbed my hand and told me if I made a sound I was dead.”

“He knew you were there?”

“No, I’d guess he knewyou were there. He’s probably the only person who would have known about the staircases. He played in them when he was a boy, visiting the museum with his father. That’s what he told me when we got up here. Even knew whose office it used to be.”

“But why was he there?”

“Listening to your conversation with Mamdouba, trying to overhear what you had figured out about the murder so far. Especially once Zimm told him I might be coming tonight. Just listening. He didn’t expect to find me there alone. That’s why he had no escape route planned. No idea how to get rid of me. Just a place to hide me until he thought it out. Just this, this-” Clem struggled to put a name on this gruesome assemblage of human remains.

“This bone vault,” Mike said.

“Did Erik know about what his father had done?” I asked.

“About desecrating the graves, you mean? Not when he was a kid. Not until about a year ago, when he started to work on the joint exhibit. It was his brother who told him.”

“Brother?” Mike asked.

“In one of our interviews, he told us his older brother had stayed on in Kenya, remember? To do his father’s work.” At the time, I assumed that meant guiding safaris, going on museum explorations.

“Kirk Van der Poste. He’s the half brother. Eight years older than Erik. His mother passed away of malaria. The father married a second time, then died when Erik was twelve. When he wrote to Kirk that he was coming to the Natural History Museum to work on an exhibition, that’s when Kirk told him that all the collections their father had brought here were being dismantled and stored away. Even worse, being given back to native tribes.”

“How did Kirk know that?”

“From his contacts at the McGregor, in South Africa.”

“Hadn’t either of them been here since they were kids?”

“How could they get up here into these storerooms? They had no more access than total strangers. Last year was the first time Erik set foot in this museum since his father was killed. Just think what an opportunity the exhibition work gave him. A free pass to wander around up here, looking for anything he wanted.”

“And Kirk, he wanted the bones?”

“Everything else that went with them. When those graves were plundered, along came all the looted pieces that no one else valued at the time. Bronze castings, Swahili wooden grave markers, terra-cotta potteries. They must all be stashed away in here, with rhino horns and elephant tusks. Hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth, collected by Willem Van der Poste. Bounty to sell to museums, and for even higher prices on the thriving black market.”

We were standing in the middle of a small fortune in bones.

“How did Kirk know?”

“He had heard enough back in Africa to understand what his father was doing. Plus, he’d inherited some of his father’s early field journals.”

“The what?”

“Field journals. The records of all the expeditions, the ledger entries that documented the museums where things were sold or stored. Erik Poste was indifferent to our mission to return the bones. He just thought it was foolish political correctness. All museums had baggage. Things were different fifty, a hundred years ago. But he knew that Katrina would stumble-had stumbled upon something much more valuable the last week of her life.”

“The arsenic, did he talk about that?”

She nodded. “He started out defending himself to me. Telling me that he had only tried to make her sick. Sick enough to want to go home to South Africa. That the small amounts of it he put in her drinks, when they were together at the museum working late into the evenings, would never have killed her.”

Dr. Kestenbaum had told me the same thing. If the occasional poisoning had stopped, Katrina would have recovered when she reached South Africa. When the ME got back the toxicology results on Katrina’s hair samples, they would reveal precisely when the poisoning had started and what the doses had been.

“The rape, he knew about that?”

“Anna Friedrichs told him.” She insisted to us that she had, although Poste had played dumb during our interviews. “He took advantage of that. And of September eleventh, too. Everyone thought, even Katrina herself, that her physical symptoms were the result of the stress of the sexual assault and the terrorist attacks. Like everyone else she was anxious about more bombings and the anthrax scares that made us all so nervous.”

Each of us remembered the torment of those painful fall days.

“Yet she didn’t want to leave New York until she could find the aboriginal bones that she hoped to get back to Africa. Poste just wanted to speed up her exit, weaken her resolve.”