Lethal Legacy (28 page)

I let go of the door and it closed behind me. Mike
rubbed his hands together and then scratched his head. “Connected to this
building?”

“By a one-hundred-and-twenty-foot-long tunnel,”
Bea said, coming alive again as she explained the setup to us. “They couldn’t
build an extension that would change the appearance of the main library,
because that’s landmarked. So when the park was closed for restoration, the old
Revolutionary War battleground and the potter’s field were dug up. Originally,
the stacks were right beneath us in this section, but we outgrew that space
ages ago. The Bryant Park extension has greater capacity than this entire
library.”

“How do we get there?” he asked, ready to dash off
to the nearest stairwell.

It had never occurred to any of us when Barr’s
body was found the night before that below the park was a cavernous structure
that coupled with this one.

“May I show them, Jill?” Bea turned to ask.

“Yes, of course. Whatever they need.”

“Does anyone work in there?”

“There are two levels underground. That’s where
the conveyor system that takes books up to the call desk winds up, so there are
always a few staffers on the first floor throughout the day to pull the
requested volumes and ship them back upstairs. The lower floor is usually
deserted.”

“And books?”

“Just a few million of them,” Bea said as I held
open the door.

“Valuable ones?”

“Everything here is valuable to somebody.”

Her short legs couldn’t move fast enough for Mike.
This time, she led us down the other direction of the long corridor to a
service elevator, trying to keep up with Mike’s pace. She had to catch her
breath as we waited for the doors to open, and then waited again for the old
lift as it creaked and groaned to deliver us down to the north end of the
basement.

When we got out, she told Mike that the entrance
to the stacks was only accessible from the stairwell straight ahead. This time,
he started off and I ran with him, leaving a slightly bewildered Bea Dutton
alone in the quiet hallway, with an order for her to ask one of the cops in the
main lobby to send some men to help us.

The two of us pounding down the steps made as much
noise as a small herd of ponies, the sound reverberating through the great empty
space. The granite and marble so prominent throughout the rest of the library
building ended abruptly at this point. There was a long, sloping steel ramp
that started at the bottom tread, and I grabbed on to the red metal handrail
along the wall to keep my balance as we rounded corners, racing farther below
ground.

The path flattened and the narrow entryway opened
onto a cluttered workspace that looked like a scene from a Victorian
novel—industrial, impersonal, damp, and cold.

Mike stopped to scope the area—a handful of
unoccupied desks, piles of books ready to be restacked and shelved, and ahead
of us and on the floor below, several acres of volumes, row after row of
shelves, that formed this enormous hidden book vault beneath the formal gardens
of Bryant Park.

“It’s like a catacomb of forgotten books,” Mike
said, his hands on his waist.

I ventured past the desks to the beginning of the
tightly packed shelves that stretched out in the distance farther than either
of us could see. The space was musty and airless. It was impossible to think
that anyone really knew what was among the pages relegated to this dank
reserve.

“What are we looking for exactly?” I asked.

“A way out.”

“We just got here. Bea said it’s the only
entrance.”

“What she said is that it’s the only entrance from
within the library. I’ll never look at the park the same way again,” Mike said.
“I want to see if there’s an exit near the Sixth Avenue side.”

“Why don’t we wait for someone to guide us through
it?” I asked.

“You and your damn claustrophobia again. Let’s go
over it fast, kid, before we’ve got the whole department tied up here,” Mike
said, brushing past me. “You’re looking for blood, a weapon, clothing. Any sign
this was part of the killer’s escape route. And another staircase.”

Mike headed off down the first row to our right. I
watched him as he loped along, ignoring the books shelved from floor to ceiling
on both sides of him, looking instead at the floor, pausing to pick up a scrap
of paper, which he eyeballed and then slipped into his pocket.

I took the left half, setting off on a slow jog to
look for anything out of place. By the time I reached the end of the third row,
I was coughing so badly from the dust that I had to stop and clear my throat.

“You okay?” Mike shouted.

“I’ll be fine. Why do you sound so far away?”

“I got smart, Coop. I’m going down to the other
end, closer to Sixth Avenue. I’ll work my way back from there. Meet you in the
middle. You just keep going.”

Every now and then I bent over to pick up a blank
call slip that had fallen out of book, but none had any writing on it.

I trolled through the Slavic and Baltic sections
and was in the middle of an archive of Islamic manuscripts from the Asian and
Middle Eastern collection when I saw something shiny on the floor, between two
of the tall racks of books. From a distance, it appeared to be shaped like one
of the scalpels I had seen at Lucy Tannis’s desk.

I stepped out of the aisle between the already
overcrowded mechanically operated shelves to get closer to the object so that I
could better tell if it was something for the Crime Scene cops to pick up. But
as I knelt down, I could see that it was a silver-colored ballpoint pen, its
body matted with enough dust for me to know that it had been on the floor there
for some time.

Another two rows farther on and something else
caught my eye. Also metallic, but this was shorter in length and much flatter
than the pen.

It was a few yards in from the long aisle, and I
got right on top of it, kneeling again to inspect it. It was a small key, and
it wasn’t covered with dust. I had no idea if it had any significance to our
search.

I held on to the edge of a divider to steady
myself, making a mental note of what row I was in—between large folios of the
designs for the Royal Pavilion at Brighton and watercolor plates illustrating
dress during America’s colonial period—when the entire bookshelf behind me
began to move, quickly and quietly, pinning me against the one that I had
grasped.

Someone was trying to crush me between the heavy
compact movable shelves, and I screamed for Mike as my wrist twisted and I fell
onto my side.

TWENTY-THREE

Yuri—the engineer who had taken us up to the
attic this morning—was the first person to reach me. “Was accident, miss. Was
my accident.”

“What are you doing down here, Yuri?” Mike asked.
“What hurts, Coop?”

I was sitting up, massaging the fingers of my left
hand. “My tailbone, my wrist, and mostly my pride. You think everybody on
Forty-second Street heard me scream?”

“Miss Jill send me. Miss Jill make me come.”

“You moved the shelves? Why’d you do that?” Mike
shouted at Yuri.

The man was flustered and struggling to express
himself. “I don’t see nobody in aisle. Shelves not on line.”

“On line?”

Jill Gibson walked up behind Mike in the company
of two uniformed cops. “He means aligned. I’m sure he means aligned.”

“Let him tell me what he means,” Mike said. “Why’d
you touch the controls?”

“Is my job, Mr. Mike. In morning, I check things
and make even again.”

At the end of each long row was a round handle,
like the steering wheel of a car. I had passed scores of them in the last few
minutes, and knew when cranked they compacted the shelves to allow more
inventory. But I never gave a thought to anyone’s activating them while one of
us was between the densely packed bookcases.

“Alex couldn’t have gotten trapped in there,” Jill
said. “I’m sure the movement just frightened her. There are motion sensors that
won’t let the shelves close completely if something—someone—is in between
them.”

“Is there a way to override that?” Mike asked.

“Well, I guess any system can be meddled with,”
Jill said. “There’s probably an override. Yuri, you didn’t happen to do
anything—?”

“Everybody’s got a dose of Columbo in him,” Mike
said. “Just jump in with your questions, Jill. Then you can lift the
fingerprints and pick up the evidence and find the little double helixes.
You’ve seen it all on television and it looks so easy, doesn’t it? Well, you
know what? My buddies in blue here will take Yuri upstairs and he’ll have a
chance to explain exactly what happened. How’s that for law and order?”

Mike stooped beside me and lifted my chin to look
me in the eye. “You ready to dance yet, kid?” he said. Then he reached out to
take my right hand to pull me up.

“Just about. I need your handkerchief for a
minute.”

I didn’t want Jill or Yuri to see the key I had
stopped to pick up, but I didn’t want to touch it either. I dabbed at my nose
and then reached under my calf to adjust my shoe, palming the key inside the
white cotton square Mike had given me.

“Alley-oop, Blondie.”

I stood up and brushed myself off.

“I came down here because I thought I could save
you some trouble,” Jill said. “I didn’t know quite what you were looking for,
but I can certainly tell you about the emergency exit.”

“Maybe Bea should have thought of that,” Mike
said, annoyed with Jill Gibson.

“She doesn’t know about it. Most people who work
here have no reason to know. The space was designed and built with a single
entrance—the way you came in—to better protect the books against both theft and
the elements,” Jill said. “But we failed all the fire department codes on the
first inspection.”

“So what did you do?”

“Yuri can show you, if you’ll allow him. Down at
the far end—”

“Near Sixth Avenue?” Mike asked.

“Yes. There are two emergency hatches, small steel
plates, just about two foot square, that were dug into the ceiling.”

“Are they kept locked?”

“Just latched on the inside. That’s the whole
point. No one can get them open from above, but theoretically, whoever was down
here could be evacuated. If someone was working and, say, a fire broke
out—worst-case scenario—he’d have to be able to push the hatch up. There’s a
short folding ladder that drops down.”

“And bingo—you’re in Bryant Park. Watching the
Yankees give up a five-run lead,” Mike said. “And from up top?”

“The plates are camouflaged with dirt and
shrubbery this time of year. No one can get close enough to walk on them
because of the little railing around the plants, and yet the bushes are light
enough to let you lift the lid beneath them.”

I remembered arriving at the park last night and
noting the disarray of the greenery in the area where all the heavy equipment
was standing.

Mike took me aside while he talked to the two
young officers who were waiting for an assignment. “We’re killing the Crime
Scene Unit with this case. They’re working another part of the library now, so
one of you needs to stay put till they arrive. Keep this guy Yuri with you. Let
him show you these hatches Ms. Gibson is talking about, so they can check them
over, inside and out, okay?”

They both nodded.

Mike handed one of them a card with his phone
number on it and told them to call with any questions or developments.

Jill asked me what we wanted her to do.

“Let’s go up to your office,” I said. “I’d like to
get a list of your trustees—names and addresses.”

“The president of the library and the board chair
are in China, on a major acquisition trip,” she said, looking glum. “I’m
hesitant to do anything involving our trustees until I can reach them.”

“Look, Jill, these are names I can get off your
website or in your annual report. We need to talk with some of these people
today. Now. Before facts and misinformation start to appear in the news. All
I’m asking for is to speed this up by giving us a way to get to the folks we
need. We’ll get it done with or without you.”