Lethal Legacy (50 page)

“Stop!” I said, pleading with Alger Herrick. “I
can’t breathe.”

His good hand, the right one, smacked the side of
my head so hard that I saw stars. “I need you with me. Just keep moving.”

“I’ll be back for you. You’ll do fine,” I heard
Mike say to Minerva.

He must have gotten to his feet and retrieved his
gun. He’d be coming after us.

Just then I heard a thud from the direction in
which Travis Forbes had run.

“Forbes?” Herrick shouted again. “Have you found
the steps, man?”

There was no answer.

Herrick seemed distracted by the silence. I
thought—and maybe he did, too—that Forbes had reached the exit and dropped the
lid on us after he escaped.

I pulled my arm from Herrick’s viselike grip, but
he yanked me back, face-to-face. I swung my free hand up from my side, covering
his nose with the chloroform-soaked cloth, using my height to my advantage.

The silver hook released its hold as Herrick tried
to swat me away. I pressed the rag to him again, not knowing whether there was
enough of the gas on it to overwhelm him.

He swiped at my neck with the hook, and I stepped
back. He must have scored a cut. I felt a trickle of blood seeping behind my
ear.

“Get down, Coop,” Mike said, rushing out of the
dark.

Before Mike could reach me, Alger Herrick fell to
his knees.

I didn’t know if chloroform had done its job, or
if he was brought down by Shalik Samson, who cracked him on the back of his
legs with a baseball bat.

FORTY-SEVEN

The night watchman at the Provenzano funeral
home had opened it up for the chief of detectives while he was waiting for us
to be led out of the cavernous burial ground.

Mercer brought me inside the large parlor,
decorated for old-fashioned comfort—sofas and armchairs of burgundy silk, with
antimacassars—meant to soothe grieving relatives. It wasn’t where I wanted to
be right now, but I had no choice in the matter.

Detectives and uniformed cops, huddling in small
groups to gossip about the case now that the emergency had passed, moved out of
the way as I walked through the room.

I lowered myself onto one of the sofas and rested
my head against the pillow.

The watchman was telling some of the officers
about the old cemetery. “I bet you didn’t even know it was here, did you? We
get asked about it all the time,” he said. “It was because of the terrible
contagion in Manhattan back then—yellow fever, tuberculosis, scarlet fever. The
city banned aboveground graves, so these rich guys decided to excavate this
block and build marble vaults ten feet under. Regular plague pits, they must
have been.”

I shivered, wrapping a blanket around myself as I
waited for Lieutenant Peterson to clear the room.

I saw a couple of the guys who were leaving make
way for Shalik Samson. Mercer brought him over to me to say good night.

“You saved us, you know,” I said to him, mustering
a smile.

“You gonna say that to the judge?”

“Of course I will, if you tell me how you did it.”

“Mercer was helping that sick man, you know? He
made me go wake up the chauffeur ’cause the amb’lance took so long.
Carmine—that guy? He had a baseball bat in the car. Guess he thought I was
gonna rob him. Mercer was like gonna shoot him if he didn’t drop the damn
thing.”

“How’d you get down into the burial vault?”

“That way you went in got locked, you know,”
Shalik said. It happened when Alger Herrick dropped the lid. “Me and Mercer, we
just went around the whole garden, all along that crumbly stone wall, looking
for another entrance. Had to be, he kept telling me. Couldn’t have just one way
in or out for all those bodies.”

“And you found it,” I said.

“Back behind a tree. Mercer didn’t fit, but I
did.”

I hadn’t been wrong. That sliver of light I thought
I saw had been Shalik opening the lid of the second hatch.

“So you tripped the guy with the backpack?”

“Dude didn’t even see me. That dungeon’s as black
as I am.”

“What do you think, Mercer? Gold shield?” I asked.

“First, we’re taking him home. I’m not ready to
give Shalik any commendations yet, but we’ll get those charges thrown out.”

The kid high-fived me, and Mercer handed him off
to the cops who were going to drive him home.

Mike came into the room a minute later. He had
cleaned himself up, and brought some hydrogen peroxide and a bandage to cover
the cut on my neck.

“You know the river Styx, Loo? Greek mythology?”
Mike asked as he leaned over me, dabbing the small wound before he dressed it.
“The river of hate, it was called. An old guy named Charon ferries the dead
across the river to the underworld. I swear, Coop and me—we were on that ferry
tonight.”

“I don’t care if the whole magilla is made of
marble or papiermâché,” Peterson said. “Couldn’t get me down in there for all
the money in the world. Are you telling me, Alex, that Alger Herrick is the
half brother of Minerva and Talbot Hunt?”

“The lab is hot on this new familial search
technology. Howard Browner says he can prove it with a sample from the father.”

“Think of it, Loo,” Mike said. “Jasper the Third
spent a lot of time in England, liked the ladies—young ones—as much as he liked
his books. Herrick’s mother was a single girl who deposited him in an
orphanage. Alex thinks Hunt’s father might even have paid to steer the infant
to a good home. Placed him so well, they wound up with the same friends.”

Mercer sat down beside me and held my hand. “You
want us to put this together for you?” he asked the lieutenant.

“It’s all about the map, isn’t it? The rarest map
in the world?”

“Seems to be.”

The backpack that Travis Forbes had been wearing
when Shalik brought him down with the first blow of the bat was on a table next
to me.

While Mercer talked, Mike removed the large folio
from the bag. It was a volume of the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt—the atlas
of the world—the same book in which the Grimaldis had concealed the panels for
centuries.

All conversation ceased as Mike lifted the cover.
There were four folded sheets of paper, which he slowly and carefully opened
before us.

“The four corners of the earth,” he said.
“Magnificent, Coop. Aren’t they?”

We all leaned in to look. The three of us had seen
a fake earlier in the day, and a real one in the library, under Bea’s tutelage.
Experts would confirm it for us, but everything about these papers looked authentic.

The first one, the top left section of the entire
map, represented the North American continent, with exquisite drawings of
Zephir and Chor—the wind and the sea—surrounding the land.

The second piece, from the top right position, was
Cathay and Japan, mapped with more detail than the previous segment, since they
had actually been described as a result of Marco Polo’s thirteenth-century
journeys.

Mike opened the third of the large pages that
would form the bottom right corner. Below the Spice Islands of Indonesia was
the legend written by the mapmaker, attributing the name of America to
Vespucci.

The bottom panel, to the west, documented the
extension of the new land—the South American continent—that Vespucci had
explored as far down as the River Plata. The word
America
showed up for
the first time, south of what is now Brazil.

“You’re looking at history, Loo. Not many people
beside the Hunts even knew this baby existed, and as time went by, scholars
began to think it was a myth.”

“How’d the Barr girl get mixed up in all this?”
Peterson said, an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth.

“Eddy Forbes, the map thief, he seems to have been
the driving force keeping the legend of this treasure alive. First he tried to
get Minerva to back him in finding the panels. You’ll have to ask her, but I
don’t think she believed him until Jane Eliot called her a few months back to
give her a gift—a book she didn’t want, which happened to have a piece of the
map inside,” I said. “I’d guess it was Eddy Forbes who educated Minerva about
the Strassburg Ptolemy, and the panel inside it. That’s the book that Grandpa
Hunt reclaimed from the library during the war.”

“Eddy had a romance with Tina Barr at one time,”
Mike said. “Once you interrogate him, check their phone records. I bet you’ll
find they were still in touch. He may be a convicted felon, but he’s still a
scholar. I’m sure he did all his research on the Hunts. He probably set Tina up
with Minerva, suggested that she move into the apartment. That would have
enabled him to steal the panel right out from underneath her nose.”

“Using Tina,” Peterson said, “like Eddy Forbes
seems to have used everyone else over the years—librarians, curators, trustees.
So why the gas mask? Do you think that Billy Schultz had anything to do with
all this?”

“Nothing at all. I’d bet it’s just what he
claimed,” Mercer said. “The guy did the right thing and called the police after
Tina was attacked. He probably was just stupid enough to pick up the gas mask
and try it on.”

“Will you have someone call the lab in the
morning?” I asked, rubbing my forehead to ease the tension headache that was
building up. “Run that mixed sample against Travis Forbes.”

Peterson stood up and rested his elbow on the
mantel over the fireplace with the faux logs. “Why’d Travis go in with a mask?
Did Tina know him?”

“He told us she didn’t,” I said. “But Travis
apparently looks so much like his brother, Eddy, he was afraid she’d make him.”

“Why was he there?” the lieutenant asked again.

The three of us—Mike, Mercer, and I—had lots of
time to work through these answers. Now we were only making educated guesses.

“Because the double cross was already under way,”
I said. “Tina had quit her job with the Hunts and was working for Alger
Herrick. Is he talking?”

“Not yet,” Peterson said. “Your boss has Pat
McKinney at the station house doing the questioning.”

I closed my eyes and groaned.

“Get her some pain relievers and a scotch,” Mike
said.

“I hope that jackass remembers to separate Herrick
and Forbes.” I was joking with Mike, trying to regain my sea legs, but it would
be like McKinney to screw up the most basic rules in his rush to get back in
the case.

“Don’t be such a control freak,” Mike said to me,
walking over to a uniformed cop and handing him some bills. “There’s a pub on the
corner of Third Street. Fill a plastic cup with Dewar’s and don’t spill any of
it running back. Coop’s indicted guys for less than that.”

“This was the once-in-a-lifetime score, Loo,”
Mercer said. “Herrick wanted to put this map together to cap his collection, no
matter what it cost him.”

“And Forbes?” Peterson asked.

“For him, it was his last great scam. Lead these
greedy fools like the pied piper, and his endgame, with his brother’s help, was
to wind up with this masterpiece for himself,” Mike said. “Sell it to the
highest bidder—twenty, maybe thirty million.”

“For this, Tina Barr had to die?” the lieutenant
said.

“She must have panicked when Travis showed up in
the library, just a night after she’d been attacked,” Mike said.

“Tina walked away from the emergency room because
she knew this was all tied into the stolen books and maps,” I said. “She wasn’t
giving up a thing that would lead us in that direction, even if she didn’t know
exactly who Travis was the first time she encountered him.”

“But she probably recognized him when he came into
the conservation lab in the library,” Mike said. “And in her own devious little
mind, began to put the pieces together. Realized she was in way over her head,
playing with the bad guys.”

“Too late to help herself,” I added, thinking of
what Jill Gibson had first told Battaglia. “That’s why some of the people in
the library thought she was a thief. She really had been in bed with Eddy
Forbes.”