Lethal Legacy (46 page)

The front cover was decorated in an elaborate
fleur-de-lis pattern with a leafy border, gilt flowers, and gryphons adding to
its striking appearance.

“Only thirty-three copies of this work survived,”
Bea said. “And before the Second World War, this library owned a pair.”

“The gift of Jasper Hunt?” I asked.

“At the time, yes, it was. He decided to take one
of these atlases back. Long before my time, mind you, but no one here ever saw
it again, though I’ll bet Jill will still include it on the list of our
acquistions she gives you tonight.”

“Sure, rather than agitate—or challenge—any of the
Hunt heirs,” Mike said. “Why are you looking for this version?”

“Because it might have been exactly the kind of
idea that would have amused our eccentric friend Jasper Hunt Jr.,” Bea said.
“Remember—no use of the word ‘America’ appeared in any cartography until the
1507 map. It certainly never entered into anything Ptolemaic. But with the
development of the press and the incorporation of all the new explorations of
the period, the Strassburg Ptolemy of 1513 was the first book to print a solo
map of America. Only America. The first map devoted uniquely to this
continent.”

Bea was turning pages in the great volume with
painstaking care as she talked.

“A fitting place for Jasper to hide the panel from
our map that depicts America,” Mike said.

“Yes, but I think I’m striking out,” she said,
separating and flattening the pages as she went.

“There is a second copy of this book though,” I
said. “It never surfaced again?”

“Only in rumors,” Bea said. “And then from the
mouth of Eddy Forbes.”

“How reliable was he at gossip?”

“Almost as good as he was at stealing,” she said.
“In the 1940s, the deals between collectors were a lot different than they are
today. With the Internet, we can all keep track of books and maps—who’s got
something to sell and who’s in line to buy. Back then, there was much more
discretion, many more one-on-one interactions, and lots of secrecy.”

“What did Eddy tell you?” Mike asked.

“His story was that after the war, Jasper Hunt
sold the second Strassburg atlas to Lord Wardington. He was always unhappy when
the library didn’t treat his bequests like they were their most important gifts
of the year. He represented to the buyer, of course, that he had the title free
and clear.” Bea pushed the glasses to the top of her head. “It didn’t take long
for Wardington, who was a real gent, to learn the truth. He returned the map to
Hunt at once to let him make amends with the library.”

“But Hunt never did that,” Mike said.

“Much to my regret,” Bea said. “Now, I had this
conversation well before Eddy got in trouble.”

“You mean before he got caught for all the trouble
he’d been causing.”

“Right again, Mike.” Bea closed the large book and
rested her hand on its lid. “Eddy told me that when Lord Wardington returned
the book to Jasper Hunt, the old boy kept it for a while—he had no intention of
ever letting it collect dust in our stacks again. Eventually, he gave the book
to his granddaughter, Minerva.”

“What?”
Mike seemed
stunned.

“I’m only the messenger, Detective. That’s what
Eddy said, and he knew Minerva Hunt—they’d had some dealings with each other.
Why wouldn’t I believe him? None of this had any significance until you found
that panel under the water tank yesterday. Till you told me this map—which I
wasn’t even certain existed—might be connected to the murder of Tina Barr.”

Mike was circling the table now, punching his
right fist into the palm of his left hand.

“We’ve got to get to Eddy Forbes, Coop. You talk
to the feds on Monday,” Mike said. “What else did he tell you, Bea?”

“Of course, my angle was selfish, too. I asked
about the map because I wanted to get it back from the family. Have it here,
where it belonged,” the librarian said. “Eddy told me that for most of her
life, Minerva had kept the atlas in her father’s library. She had no use for
it, and no real idea of its value. Then, shortly before his arrest, Eddy Forbes
reintroduced her to Alger Herrick, who offered to pay her dearly for the atlas,
not withstanding its clouded provenance.”

“For a reason?”

“Herrick’s collection is heavy on Ptolemy,” Bea
said. “He’s got the most important library of maps in private hands, now that
Lord Wardington is gone.”

“Yes, he told us about his Bologna Ptolemy,” I
said. “But Herrick also said Minerva dabbled in maps. Why wouldn’t she have
wanted to hold on to it?”

“If you ask me, you’re making too much of the fact
that Alger Herrick was after that book. It’s much more like the rivalry between
the Red Sox and the Yankees,” Bea said. “Herrick’s a Ptolemy guy. He’s been
trying to corner the market on all the great editions of that work.”

“And Minerva?” I asked.

“Strictly Mercator,” Bea said, handing the book
back to Mike to reshelve.

“Sorry? I don’t get what you mean.”

“Mercator was one of the greatest
sixteenth-century geographers, Alex. Mercator maps? Every schoolkid knows
them.”

“Sure,” I said, recalling the famous images of the
cylindrical projection maps, with parallels and meridians and perpendicular
chartings all neatly aligned.

“Gerardus Mercator. His maps were designed for
marine navigation, so that sailors could use a straight line to determine their
position at sea, even without instruments.”

“What’s it called when sailors do that?” I asked.

Mike brushed back his hair and answered. “Dead
reckoning.”

Bea Dutton wagged her finger at Mike. “That’s just
what Eddy Forbes said about that girl. Back then, I thought he was joking. He
said she was total Mercator all the way.”

“What did he mean?” I asked.

“If Minerva Hunt is doing the reckoning,” he used
to say, “anyone who gets in the way of the straight line between her and
whatever she’s after, the odds are they’ll be dead. That’s what he meant by
dead reckoning.”

FORTY

By nine o’clock, curators and cops had been
returning to the map division room in rolling waves, like eager kids gathering
clues on a scavenger hunt.

Bea was in charge of examining each volume they
found in hopes of coming across a panel of the missing map, but none of the
rare books and atlases yielded any treasure. Jill Gibson sat glumly in a corner
of the room, checking her master list against the items that had been
retrieved, noting those that were reported to be missing from their proper places.

“I’m so hungry, I’m losing it,” Mike said.

“There are some places in the neighborhood,” Bea
said. “We could take a walk.”

“No time for that. Coop, you got enough cash for
about eight pizzas to feed these guys?”

I dug into my pants pocket and handed him my
money.

“We can’t eat in here, Mike,” Bea said. “You can
lock me up before I let you get food into this room.”

“Deal.” He signaled to one of the rookies. “Send
your partner for as many pies as this will buy. Anything but anchovies. Get me
some tarps from the Crime Scene wagon. Set them up on the ground at the
receiving dock.”

Mike turned to Bea. “A little brisk for an al
fresco picnic, but that’s what I’m offering.”

“Accepted.”

While we waited for the takeout order, Bea
continued to study the books, most of them from the Hunt Collection. I caught
glimpses of the Asian sex lithographs, the Curtis photos, and several versions
of Marco Polo’s journals. The erotic drawings were as visually stunning as the
sepia prints of Native Americans and the brilliant notations made by the great
Italian traveler, but nothing she searched turned up any unexpected bonus.

Twenty-five minutes later, when our dinner
arrived, Mike and I—joined again by Mercer—led our bleary-eyed soldiers out to
the freight entrance and tried to get our minds off work while we ate.

“I bet you’re real good at trivia,” Mike said to
Bea. He was sitting cross-legged on a tarp while she parked herself on one of
the steps a few feet away.

“Not many topics. Why?”

“Mercer, the Coopster, and I bet on the
Final
Jeopardy!
question most nights. I’m asking you to be my teammate, okay?”

“I won’t be much help.”

Mike was on his second slice of pepperoni and
sausage. “You were taking your crazy cab ride last night, kid, so I know you
didn’t see the show. And Mercer was with me. Lucky that I’ve got TiVo and no
life. Twenty bucks, everybody. Coop, I’m taking it out of your change.”

“Help yourself. It would have been the first time
you ever gave me change.”

“The category is
Animals. Animals,
ladies
and gents.”

“No fair, Chapman. You know the Q and A,” Mercer
said.

“Double or nothing. I’ll keep my mouth shut, and
if Bea gets it, I’m buying dessert.”

“So what’s the answer?” Mercer asked.

Mike did his best Alex Trebek imitation. “The
answer is…Oldest living animal on the planet. Oldest living animal on the
planet.”

“Wait a minute, Bea,” I said. “I’ve got another
idea, another possible literary hiding place for Jasper Hunt.”

“Hold that thought, Coop,” Mike said. “I’m looking
to score.”

“I give up. This is more important. Whales,
elephants, rhi-noceri.”

“Bad sport, Blondie. Don’t spoil it for the
others.”

Bea was wiping the crumbs from her veggie pizza
off her sweater. “Tell me, Alex. What are you thinking?”

“Aw, Bea. Give me an old animal,” Mike said. “In
the form of a question.”

“What’s a snail?”

“Bad answer, Bea. You’re letting me down. Mercer?”

“What’s a…?”

“I’ll give you a hint. Coop’s favorite restaurant
in the world. Martha’s Vineyard. The Bite.”

The Quinn sisters’ tiny shack by the side of the
road in Chilmark served the very best chowder and fried clams I’d ever tasted.
But Mike revealed the question before I could shift my train of thought from
rare books to shellfish.

“What’s an ocean quahaug?” Mike said. “Trebek said
some researchers dredged up a four-hundred-year-old clam near Iceland this
year. It’s got growth rings, just like trees, so you can tell its age. Check
your chowder next time. Those old quahaugs could get chewy.”

He was eating his third piece of pizza, with no
sign of slowing down.

I went back to the thought I had while Mike was
quizzing us. “Bea, I’m sure the library must have a good sampling of
Shakespearean originals.”

“Absolutely. I’m not familiar with them, but I
know we have several copies of the four folios. Someone in this group will be
able to tell us,” she said. “And we’ll find out if any have to do with Jasper
Hunt. What’s his connection to the Bard?”

Mike wiped his mouth. “Slip of paper on the
corpse. ‘The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interred with
their bones.’”

Bea bent down to help me stack the empty boxes and
collect the trash. “So why are you looking for the books?”

“Because Hunt was into pranks and tricks,” I said.
“Seems like it would have appealed to that eccentric part of him to hide pieces
of the map in a Shakespearean folio, if that was his favorite passage. Make it
hard for his greedy heirs to put them back together.”

“Maybe that was the evil part of him,” Bea said,
straightening up. “Maybe the good—the rest of the panels to complete the
map—maybe they’re interred with his bones.”

Mike Chapman was on his feet faster than a bolt of
lightning could strike a tree.

“You’re my girl, Bea. Didn’t Talbot tell us that
his grandfather wanted to go out like a pharaoh, surrounded by all his worldly
goods? Let’s find out where Jasper Hunt was laid to rest. Let’s see what’s
buried with his bones.”

FORTY-ONE