Lethal Legacy (13 page)

“Nobody mentioned the feds, did they?”

“Who did you assign to it, Paul? I’ll work with
him,” I said. “We’ll make it a joint investigation. Whatever has been going on
might have something to do with Barr’s assault, or the murder of Karla
Vastasi.”

“Someone’s been stealing from the library, Alex,”
Jill said. “That’s the reason I called Paul for help. Whoever it is—or they
are—has got to be stopped. We’ve got treasures under our roof worth millions of
dollars, some of them not even cataloged, and we’re starting to bleed from the
losses.”

Now I felt guilty for holding back the information
about the jeweled book that had been found under Vastasi’s body.

“What do you know about the Bay Psalm Book?” I
asked.

Battaglia’s eyes narrowed as he listened to Jill’s
answer. “It’s a very rare piece of Americana. Interestingly enough, the
Puritans considered Hebrew to be the ‘mother’ of spiritual languages and used
it in many of their services. The book is a makeshift translation of David’s
Psalms from the original Hebrew into English, printed in Massachusetts when the
first presses were set up. It’s one of the most important items that came to
the library with the Lenox collection.”

Now Battaglia shifted his gaze to me. “I guess
your memory’s improving, Alex. Is that the book the cops found last night?”

“Can’t be the same. The one they vouchered came
from the Hunt collection, not from Lenox. Minerva was quite emphatic about its history.”

Jill Gibson’s elbows were on the table and she
rested her head in her hands. “The police have it? Is it covered with precious
stones?” she asked without looking up.

“Yes.”

“That will be another blow to Leland Porter,” Jill
said, referring to the library’s president. “I don’t think anyone’s aware that
the Hunt piece had gone missing.”

“Stolen or deaccessioned?” Battaglia asked. “We’ve
got to know that before we go looking for bad guys. You’ll check on that, Jill.
Does it literally have jewels on the binding?”

“Yes, it does. Jasper Hunt took a perfectly
interesting piece of history—not important literature—and turned it into a
garish little objet d’art, a personal vanity. It’s been locked away in a
library vault for as long as I can remember,” Jill said. “The only one we
display—the one that scholars work with—is the Lenox version of the Bay Psalm
Book. Thank you, Alex, for letting me know about this.”

I couldn’t tell whether my revelation would come
back to bite me or not.

“Do you know where Tina Barr is?” I asked Gibson.

“No, I don’t.”

“But you know her, don’t you?”

Jill grimaced as she looked to Battaglia again.
“I’m sorry I lied to you before. I, uh—I wasn’t sure Paul wanted me to tell you
the story. Yes, she used to work in our library. She trained there as a
conservator.”

“What exactly do conservators do?” I asked.

“It’s a field that requires great skill. They’re
responsible for the preservation of all our rare documents and books. They’ve
got to be knowledgeable about the history of the materials, and have enough
scientific education to understand the structural stability and characteristics
of whatever they’re working on. Tina’s young, but she’s one of the best.”

“When did she stop working at the library?”

“She was full-time with us until a year ago. Then
she started working with Jasper Hunt,” Jill said. “But that isn’t unusual. All
the private collections of that quality have conservators, and because we have
our own lab, many of them—like Tina—do their work right in our facility.”

“So it wasn’t a problem that she went to work for
Hunt?”

“Of course not. We viewed it as an advantage for
Tina to catalog everything in his home. We expect to get the rest of his
collection some day. It’s been promised to us.”

“Unless one of his children convinces him to
change his will,” Battaglia said.

“But Tina’s no longer working for Mr. Hunt,” I
said. “That’s what Minerva told us.”

“I didn’t know anything about her current
situation,” Jill said. I thought her voice was beginning to tremble. “I had no
reason to, until she called me this week.”

“When did she call?” I asked, looking at Battaglia
out of the corner of my eye.

“It was very early yesterday morning, the day
after she was attacked. She awakened me, in fact, on Wednesday.”

No wonder Battaglia had known about Barr’s assault
when he called me into his office a couple of hours later.

“What did she say? What did she tell you?”

“That she was terrified,” Jill said. “She told me
she was going to take some time off, leave the city for a while. I guess Tina
thought of me as an ally, from the old days when she was first hired at the
library. She wanted to know if I would help her get her job back when she
returned.”

“Did you agree?”

“Certainly. I told her to come in to see me that
very day. I wanted to make sure she was all right. I even mentioned that I knew
the district attorney and perhaps he could help with her case. I had no idea
that you had been called out on the matter during the night.”

“And did she come in?”

“Tina said she’d be there yesterday,” Jill said,
lowering her voice, “but she never showed up. Then Paul called me late last
night to tell me about the woman who was murdered in Tina’s apartment. To ask
if I knew her.”

“Did you?”

“No, no, no. Absolutely not.”

“I’m going to ask you again,” I said, trying to
make eye contact. “Do you know where Tina is now?”

Jill pursed her lips and shook her head.

“Do you know whether she had taken another job?
Was she working for someone else?”

This time Jill nodded, just as someone knocked on
the door.

“Come in,” Battaglia said.

I turned my head to see Patrick McKinney, the head
of the trial division, striding toward the table. He was senior to me, and
although I reported directly to Battaglia on sex crimes, McKinney had oversight
for all homicides and other felonies. The district attorney respected his
investigative abilities, but McKinney was rigid, humorless, and small-minded,
and made it his regular business to stab me in the back whenever an opportunity
presented itself.

“Morning, boss. Sorry I’m late. Good morning,
Jill,” McKinney said, shaking hands with her. Battaglia must have put him in
charge of the library issues that Jill had brought to him. “Alex, I wish you
had called me last night. I just spent fifteen minutes getting up to speed with
the chief of d’s. He had to fill me in on the Vastasi murder himself. You
talking about Tina Barr?”

“I was just explaining to Alex that she had
recently left Jasper Hunt to start working for another one of our patrons,”
Jill said.

“Who is he?” I asked.

“His name is Alger Herrick. She was quite happy,”
Jill said. “It was actually a much better fit for her than Jasper Hunt.”

“Why is that?”

“Herrick is also a collector, with a special
interest in cartography.”

Battaglia’s lips drew back again. “Maps.”

“Most conservators have a specialty, Alex. The
work has increasingly become so technical that they usually develop an
expertise in one area. For Tina, it’s been rare maps,” Jill said. “And Alger is
much younger than Jasper Hunt. He’s in his mid-fifties—a very vibrant
personality.”

“You’ve talked to him about Tina?” I asked,
glancing from Jill Gibson to Pat McKinney.

“He’s as puzzled by her disappearance as the rest
of us,” Jill said.

McKinney seated himself next to Battaglia. “I’m on
it, Alex.”

“Did Tina tell you why she was terrified?” I asked.

“Well, given what had happened to her the night
before, there wasn’t much reason to ask,” Jill said. “The attack made her even
more anxious to get out of the apartment, too. Minerva Hunt was furious with
her.”

“Did she tell you why?”

“Minerva hates Alger Herrick. They’ve crossed
swords in some business deals, is all I know,” Jill said. “Tina couldn’t move
out fast enough once Minerva knew she was working with Alger.”

“It’s crazy to double-team this, boss,” McKinney
said to Battaglia. “Karla Vastasi’s death wasn’t a sex crime. Alex and I can
sort this all out ourselves.”

I could almost feel the point of his elbow digging
into my side from across the wide oak table. “I’d like to find Tina Barr before
anyone causes her more distress, Pat. The woman is still my victim.”

“Tina Barr isn’t anyone’s victim, Alex. She’s a
thief,” Pat McKinney said. “Don’t wrap your bleeding heart around her. She’s a
forger—and a common thief.”

ELEVEN

“I disagree with Battaglia,” Mike said.

It was two-thirty on Thursday afternoon, and he
was eating his second hot dog, leaning against the blue brick wall of the
building that housed the morgue on First Avenue at Thirtieth Street.

“I was hoping you would.”

“Not about taking you off the murder case. About
how you look when you pout.”

“Maybe you’ll ask the lieutenant to go to bat for
me. Keep me on the team.”

“You should get your feelings hurt more often,
Coop. Kind of cute. You look almost vulnerable.”

“All these years together and I thought you liked
edgy and cool. You want to see vulnerable, watch McKinney try to undermine me.”

“Nah, that’s when you go all pit bull on me. Did
Battaglia set ground rules?”

“For the time being, I can work with you and
Mercer on Tina Barr. I guess setting up this interview with Alger Herrick, the
man she’s been working for lately, is my consolation prize. Pat’s sitting on
the larger matter of the library, and the DA may force him to let me in on it.”

“What’s McKinney’s reason for bumping you off
Vastasi’s murder?”

“I may be needed as a witness if there’s an arrest
and trial, so I can’t be the prosecutor. What did we see during the surveillance?

Did I touch the body or the evidence? What did
Billy Schultz and Minerva Hunt say to me? That’s why I thought we could get
back to work on Barr. The two crimes can’t be unrelated.”

“Why did McKinney call Tina Barr a thief?” Mike
asked.

“He interviewed Jill Gibson last week, before any
of this happened. She was talking about some of the things that have
disappeared from the library in the last couple of years. In order to get your
hands on the most valuable items you’d really need to have special access to
the best collections. That’s why the executives think most of the thefts had
involved insiders.”

“This Gibson woman fingered Tina Barr?”

“No, she actually likes Barr. But it’s clear that
the conservators work on materials from different parts of the library. Her
name was one of the common denominators that kept coming up as the individual
curators were interviewed. It’s McKinney who’s drawn a bead on her.”

“Stealing these priceless objects for herself,”
Mike said, “and the best she could do was live in a basement in one of the
Hunts’ buildings?”

“Thefts to order, Mike. That’s apparently the big
scam. Rich collectors are all scrambling for the same limited goods. They know
that thousands of these artifacts are shelved in stacks that nobody ever sees,
or warehoused for decades, like the little book Karla Vastasi hid inside her
jacket. And Barr was courted by many of these collectors because she’s so
extraordinarily talented and had such unique access inside the building.”

“You have time to Google this Alger Herrick after
Battaglia booted you from the inner sanctum?”

“Yes,” I said. “McKinney only interviewed him by
phone, last week when Herrick was still in England. That was about the problems
at the library, so Barr’s name came up in the conversation, but I thought we
should go deeper.”

“He was here in New York when Barr was attacked?”

“Yes, and for Vastasi’s murder, too,” I said. “He
arrived last weekend.”