Lethal Legacy (26 page)

“And you can help them with that, Bea?”

“Like I said, the old maps give you a historical
footprint of every inch of the city.”

“They’ll have to wait another day,” Mike said,
rolling his eyes at her request as he walked back to the desk. “Give the guy a
call and cancel your date. We may need you as we go along.”

“What did the DA say?” Mercer asked.

“Expect this place to be swarming with cops within
the hour,” I said. “Between Scully and the mayor, we’ll have everything we
need.”

“Let’s get moving,” Mike said to me. “Mercer, you
mind going back out to get one of the rookies to babysit Bea?”

“Done.”

“Keep yourself busy, Bea, baby. Do me a historical
footprint of Bryant Park. Where the murder was,” Mike said, trying to make her
smile again, while he summoned Jill to the desk. “So where exactly was Tina
Barr working when she was here?”

“Well, most recently she spent time upstairs in
the reading room. And of course she had access to some of the special
collections.”

“We’ve been upstairs, Jill. Which collections?”
Mike was tapping his fingers on the countertop.

“I can’t be certain. We’ll have to talk with the
curators.”

“How about the conservation laboratory?” I asked.

“Well, yes. Tina used to have access there, when she
worked here.”

“Do all your employees?”

“Oh, no. It’s kept quite secure. Very few people
have clearance to get in there.”

“Why?” Mike asked, heading for the door and waving
at Jill and me to follow.

“It’s where the most fragile items in the library
are taken for repair. They’re often left out on worktables overnight, with
strict environmental controls. We’ve got only four conservators working in
there, and a lot of expensive equipment.”

“Take us in,” Mike said, holding open the door.

“I—I can’t. If none of the conservators is inside,
I’d have to have the code in my library identification tag to be swiped at the
entrance. I’ve no reason to have one.”

“I’ve got Tina’s.” Mike reached into his jacket
pocket and removed Barr’s ID—the one he had found with her body the night
before. “Just lead the way.”

“That won’t work,” Jill said, clutching at her own
plastic card dangling from the chain around her neck. “She was supposed to have
surrendered it when she quit. It should have been deactivated.”

“Let’s give it a try.” Mike took out his cell and
called Mercer. “We’re going down to the conservation lab. Before you come back
in, check at the employees’ entrance, where all the staff is waiting. See if
you can scoop up a conservator to give us a guided tour.”

Jill moved into the dark hallway and started a
reluctant march to the far end of the building. Uniformed cops had taken up
positions inside the front door and at the bottom of each of the grand
staircases. We continued to the end of the corridor, and through an exit that
led to steep steps down to the basement.

As we descended, I could see where the white
marble and granite of the library foundation rested upon the actual rough red
brick of the old reservoir walls, built almost two centuries ago.

If there were lights in the corridor, Jill didn’t
know where the controls were, so we made our way slowly through this windowless
subterranean maze. Metal trolleys and dollies were everywhere, parked on angles
against the wall like dozens of abandoned cars. They were obviously used to
transport books of every size, and could easily accommodate something larger.

Jill stopped in front of the double doors marked
with the conservation lab sign. Mike raised Tina’s pass to the small electronic
pad below the bell. As he moved it back and forth, the buzzer sounded, and Mike
turned the knob to open the door.

Jill hesitated before stepping over the threshold
and flipping on the light switch.

I followed her in and looked around. The grace and
elegance of the library rooms above bore no resemblance to this workhorse in
the underbelly of the building. Large tables, most covered with tools of all
shapes and sizes, filled the center, and along the sides were smaller cubicles
that appeared to be stations for the staff.

“Why does it smell so bad?”

“Chemicals, Mike. There are a lot of toxic
materials used in this work. Solvents of all kinds, ammonium hydroxide—things
that draw acids out of old paper. The students actually have to study organic
chemistry before they’re accepted into a conservators’ program.”

Mike was snooping around all the machinery in the
room.

“This was the library’s original bindery,” Jill
said, pointing to an enormous wooden table straight ahead of us, “so when they
have to repair the spine of an eighteenth-century rare book, they’ve still got
to dissolve a block of animal glue. Hot animal glue, layers of it, from cattle,
rabbits, tigers—more than a century’s worth—adds to the foul odor in here.”

The doorbell rang and Mike turned back to admit
Mercer, who was accompanied by a young woman. She was slightly built, with
auburn hair, and a long fringed scarf doubled around her neck.

“Good morning, Lucy,” Jill said. “You’ve met Mr.
Wallace. This is Alex Cooper, from the DA’s Office, and Mike Chapman, another
detective.”

“It’s true about Tina?”

“I’m afraid so,” she said, completing our
introductions to Lucy Tannis.

“Why did you want to see me?”

“The detectives need to understand what goes on
down here, and whatever you know about what Tina was working on.”

“Or who she was working with,” Mike said.

“I don’t know very much. It’s not like she
confided in any of us.”

“Had you known her very long?”

Lucy shrugged. “A few years. There aren’t many of
us trained in this field, Detective. The four of us who work here full-time,
we’re a pretty tight-knit group. Spend most of our days together in this little
hole below ground, which seems odd to most outsiders. But we get to touch some
of the most exquisite works on paper ever created.”

“And Tina?” Mike asked.

“She just didn’t fit. Good at what she did, no
question about that. But she was cold as ice and never really seemed to enjoy
her work the way the rest of us do. At least not lately.”

“Did you see her this week?”

Lucy thought for a moment and then nodded. “Twice.
Tina was here twice. She was in for a little while on Monday morning. I
remember that because I was sort of surprised to see her. She was working for
some rich guy—from England, I think—and she needed to pick up some supplies.”

That would have been a day before she was attacked
in her apartment.

“And Wednesday. I’m sure it was Wednesday. She got
here right as I was cleaning up to leave. But you’d know that, Jill?”

“Sorry? Why would I know?” Jill said, looking
surprised.

“Tina told me she was here to see you that
evening. That you had asked her to come in for a meeting. She seemed pretty
nervous about it.”

“I told you, Alex. I—I wanted her to come in, but
she never showed up,” Jill said, turning to me to protest Lucy’s suggestion
that she had actually seen Tina on Wednesday. “But that was to make sure she
was okay after—well, after Tuesday’s break-in.”

“Well, she was still here when the three of us
left, shortly after five,” Lucy said.

I couldn’t get a fix on Jill Gibson. I wanted to
trust her, but as fragments of information developed, I wasn’t sure that I
could.

“Can you give me a sense of what you’ve been
working on recently?” Mike asked Lucy, trying to make her more comfortable
before he went back to the details of her last encounter with Tina.

Lucy waited for Jill to nod at her and started to
explain. “Sure. You can see on this table over here, I’ve been doing some
restoration on a copy of the Declaration of Independence.”

Mike was on top of it in a second, leaning over to
study the document. “In Jefferson’s hand?”

“Yes, one of two that survived. And repairing a
tear in the last letter that Keats wrote to Fanny Brawne.”

I tried to make out words in the script that the
dying poet had penned to the lover he left behind in London when he ran off to
Rome.

“Most of the time we’re working on a dozen things
at once. There are tidemarks on this manuscript of
Native Son
that I’ve
got to get started on today.”

“Tidemarks?” I asked.

“Water stains. I’ve got to try to remove them. And
foxing is the probably the most common thing we see. That’s mildew to you. It
occurs when ferrous oxide—F Ox in chemistry—is attracted to the paper and
activated by humidity.”

“I can see why you love this,” I said. “I realize
it’s very hard work, but I envy the opportunity you have to enjoy these riches
every day. And the other conservators?”

“One is rehousing some sixteenth-century prints on
the far side of the room, and another is working on new bindings for books in
which the bindings have failed. See this?” Lucy asked. “Post-it notes are the
bane of my existence.”

“How so? I couldn’t live without them,” I said. “I
wouldn’t remember half the things I have to do.”

“What holds them in place are little globules of
adhesive that explode when you stick them to a page. The adhesive is stronger
than the paper, so it eats away and makes the paper translucent if left there
too long. That’s a constant problem for us. We go from the excitement of saving
documents of great historical importance to the tedium of repairing everyday
damage caused by a reader’s carelessness.”

“What was Tina doing?” Mike asked.

“Same stuff as us, when she worked for the
library,” Lucy said. “Right now, I’m not sure. She was given permission to use
the lab—as long as someone else from staff was in here—’cause she was doing
private consulting with some of the big donors.”

“Did you see her with any maps? Atlases?”

“From time to time, Detective. She liked working
on maps. She had a great talent for that.”

“And recently? In the last few weeks?”

“No. I’m sure of that.”

“Why?”

“’Cause I would have noticed. Old maps are so
beautiful, so visual—none of us would have missed seeing them in these close
quarters.”

“Where did she work?”

“Whatever table was free. Sort of depended on what
she was handling.”

Mercer was more interested in the tools that were
mounted on the walls and grouped in coffee mugs on shelves above each cubicle.
“Tell us about these.”

Lucy loosened her scarf and unbuttoned the top
button of her blouse. I looked at the clear skin on her neck and flashed back
to the sight of the deep wounds that brought Tina Barr’s life to an end. No
wonder Mercer was examining the array of knives displayed above the
workstations.

“About what? My tools?”

“Yeah.”

“Each of us has a set, Mr. Wallace,” Lucy said,
walking to her desk in the next alcove. “Part of the conservation process is
that we each create our own tools, to fit our styles, the size of our hands,
the kind of work we do. Mine are over here.”

She picked up an ivory-colored piece about the
size of a ruler with a sharp, pointed end. “This is a bone folder. It’s made from
the bones of a cow’s leg.”

So much for the refined life of a library
conservator—animal glue and spare body parts.

“I bought it at an art supply store, then ground
and burned it until it fit exactly the shape I like to work with.”

“What do you use it for?” I asked.

“It’s got thousands of functions here. Leather
bruises very easily when it’s wet, so if I’m working on an old binding, I’ll
smooth it carefully with this. Or turn damp pages of a book that’s got water
damage.” Lucy began to point out her equipment with the tapered end of the bone
folder.

Above her head were mason jars and coffee mugs
filled with a mix of household objects and art tools. Pens, pencils, and
brushes were clustered in some, while others held tweezers and an assortment of
dental picks.

Then there were knives, several dozen of them in
all sizes in a large plastic tub on her shelf. “Why so many knives?” I asked.

“They look like weapons, not tools,” Mike said.
“Sharp?”

“Razor sharp,” Lucy said, reaching for one to hand
to Mike. “We have to keep them that way. We’re cutting all the time—from fine
paper to edging the leather on bindings.”

“Mercer, check those shapes,” Mike said.

Lucy described their importance. “These are
lifting knives, and these are scalpels I use to carve fine lines. These are
skifes, and the blades that go with them.”

“Skifes?”

Lucy slowed down and smiled at me. “Taxidermists’
tools. They’re used to skin dead animals. Gets the top layer off without
puncturing the flesh. Serves the same purpose on book bindings. And these are
paring knives.”