Linda Fairstein: The Bone Vault

“Something must have changed his mind.”

“Right before Christmas,” she said. “He thought this was what I was referring to in that e-mail you had me send, Alex. That’s why he was so driven to ask me about it. When Katrina was offered the job at the McGregor Museum in Kimberley, she knew they had already begun the process of trying to identify the stacks of skeletons they have, to return them to the native peoples, to their tribes, for burial.

“One of the curators phoned her. Asked her what she knew about Willem Van der Poste’s specimens, whether she could get a look at them and ask Mamdouba’s help in arranging the return of the bones. The man who called her had dealings in Africa with Kirk. Knew that Erik Poste worked at the Met. He suggested she approach him for help making a pitch to the museum administrators. Thought Erik would want to polish up his father’s reputation.”

“Again, he turned her down, right?”

“Yes. But she came up with another idea. To enlist the help of Van der Poste’s widow, and get her support for doing the right thing.”

“Erik’s mother?” He had mentioned his mother to me, when he told us about moving to this country as a child. That she was ill. That because she was hospitalized he was sent away to boarding school. “She’s still alive? How did Katrina find her?”

“Museum records. Correspondence they had with her after Willem’s death.”

“But she must have been very sickly to have been hospitalized for so long so many years ago,” I said.

“She was sick, all right. Mental illness. Profound depression, which she’s suffered from all her life. And Erik had severed his relationship with her when he was still an adolescent.”

“You knew about this?”

“No, no. But Erik assumed Katrina had told me. He kept talking about his mother when he was tying me up. I’m putting it together from the pieces he was rambling about.”

“Did his mother meet with Katrina?”

“Not only spoke to her. Mrs. Poste gave Katrina the field journals, the ones from Willem’s later years. The ones that Kirk didn’t inherit. He had a lot more to hide than smuggled ivory.”

“What-?”

Clem inhaled and looked at me. “He didn’t die the way Erik told you he did. Not as some noble hunter protecting the animals from poachers.”

“What happened?”

“Willem Van der Poste was leading a safari. All amateurs. He was trampled by a bull elephant, nearly crushed to death. He made the tourists go on with several of the guides, expecting them to send back more help to carry him out of the jungle. He couldn’t hunt, couldn’t move his legs at all.”

We stared at Clem silently, waiting for her to speak again.

“Days passed. He ran out of food, out of supplies.” She glanced around at the bones on the shelves surrounding us. “It’s unthinkable, really. He shot his servant, his bearer. The native who had introduced him to Africa and protected him over the decades. Cannibalized him-”

“You don’t need to go on. We get the picture,” Mike said. “No wonder his wife wanted to change her name.”

And no wonder she never emerged from the depression that engulfed her after learning the truth.

“So one night last December, when Katrina had come back from the sanitarium with the field journals that would completely shatter Van der Poste’s reputation, she made the mistake of showing them to Erik. Naively, she thought they would make him see our side of the issue. Make him want to help the aborigines who had been so mistreated for so very long.”

“He must have decided to kill her that very night,” I said.

“With a massive dose of arsenic,” Mike added. “Somewhere in this mausoleum.”

I looked around the room at the sinister collection of skulls and skeletons. “Up here?”

Mercer didn’t think so. “She may have found this room. Lots of others like it. He probably killed her in the basement, though. Zimm took me to some places you couldn’t find without sonar. Remote, cool, dry. Big empty bins that would hold a dead animal twice the size of Katrina. You wouldn’t see it, you wouldn’t smell it. Once he gets his sarcophagus in place, just lifts her in and slides the lid shut.”

“You think Bermudez was an accomplice?”

“Unwittingly.” Clem tried to get on her feet and I helped her stand. She flexed her feet to make sure the circulation had been restored. “I asked him if the guy who fell off the Met last week had helped him-you know-hurt Katrina. I thought maybe he killed himself, out of remorse for what he had done.”

“What did he tell you?”

“How stupid I was. Stupid, I guess, to think he’d let some janitor help him. Bermudez was in charge of the crew who loaded the sarcophagus onto the truck for shipment. He must have seen the story in the newspaper about Katrina. That’s when he showed up in Poste’s office. Poste says the guy guessed that he knew something about Katrina’s death and demanded money. Blackmail. Poste gave him a down payment. Said he’d meet him with more money later in the week. Everybody knew about the poor man’s Friday-morning check of the water treatment center, apparently.”

“He admitted pushing Bermudez?”

“He just laughed at me and told me they parted ways on the rooftop last Friday.”

The entire spring sky was spread out overhead. The hindquarters of Ursa Major, the Great Bear, were clearly defined in the familiar shape of the Big Dipper. The North Star pointed to Leo, arcing eastward to the constellation of Virgo. And just rising in the northeast for the first time was the sparkling white summer star, Vega.

I leaned my head against the back of the seat, in the rear row of the Hayden Planetarium Space Theater, and listened to the chief of detectives brief the press corps on the arrest of Erik Poste, who had just been taken out of the museum in handcuffs. It was four-thirty in the morning and I was sitting by myself as the reporters fired questions at the police brass and the exhausted detectives.

“You’re telling us he acted alone?”

“That’s right. Detective Chapman will explain a bit of the background about Mr. Poste and his father,” the chief said, stepping back from the podium and giving Mike some play.

“That accident at the Met last Friday? Related to the Grooten death?”

The chief stepped in front of Mike and took control of the microphone again. “We’re not going to go into the evidence we’ve got at this point, but it’s safe to say that we’re no longer treating that as an accident.”

“How about that arm in the diorama? The one that freaked out the schoolkids?”

“My latent print unit tells me that there are fingerprints of value on that. We’ll be doing comparisons with our suspect, of course. Mr. Poste did have access to the master keys that open the diorama cabinets.”

“You think he did that just to cast suspicion on the custodial workers over here?”

“You’re just speculating now, Mr. Diamond. I know you can build an entire story around that arm, so I’ll just leave it to your editors’ judgment. If that’s what they call it at thePost. ”

The other reporters laughed. They had most of their information and were ready to leave.

Mr. Mamdouba tapped the chief on the shoulder and said something to him.

“Before you guys go, Elijah Mamdouba-the director of curatorial affairs here-would like to say a few words.”

Some of the reporters took their seats. Others ignored the diminutive figure and filed out to call in their stories.

“This is a very strange circumstance for us, ladies and gentlemen. Very awkward indeed.” He was speaking to a small audience, maybe twelve or thirteen reporters were left in the room, but he was clearly hoping his words would be printed for millions to read.