The Bone Vault - Linda Fairstein (38 page)

A rookie prosecutor I recognized, who was nearing the end of his first year in the office, was reviewing case files. He would be manning the court calendar for the rest of the day. He was puzzled to see me enter from the prisoners' doorway.

"Need anything here?"

"Just taking a visitor on tour. What's your name?" When he told me, I wrote it on a Post-it in my wallet, telling him I might be down with a search warrant later in the day, and asking him to tell the judge to expect me.

I stopped for coffee in the cafeteria in the courthouse lobby, which had long been known as the roach coach. We rode up on the elevators that carried convicted felons to the probation office. I tried to avoid eye contact with one of them--a taxi driver who two weeks ago had been found guilty of fondling an intoxicated passenger who had fallen asleep in the rear seat of his Yellow Cab.

The circuitous routing had added almost twenty minutes to the trip to my desk.

I unlocked the door and told Clem to settle in while I checked my voice mail and organized my desk after the long weekend.

"Here's what we'd like you to do." I set up my laptop on the table between a row of filing cabinets. "I want you to log on a guest account, so it will show your regular address. Last night at dinner, we drafted an e- mail that we'd like you to send."

"To?"

"You tell me. Our thought was that you would send it to the team that was working on the exhibition. Was there a user-group address?"

"Yeah. There was a special `org' account set up for joint access by workers from both museums."

"Would it be logical that you could still get into it?"

"Sure. It's meant to be used by interested people in museums all over the world. A lot of them are former employees or student interns, and many are scholars who know the collections. We're all encouraged to send in suggestions for the exhibition. Things like that."

"Is everyone we talked about last night included in that grouping?"

Clem ticked off the names on her fingers and nodded her head in response.

"Did you bring your address book with you?"

"I followed all your instructions." "Look through it and include anyone else you think had a connection to Katrina," I said. "Use your own greeting. I want people who know you to recognize your voice, if you will. Your language. And when they open the message, the header will show the hour you sent it as daylight saving time, which would make it pretty late back home."

"What will you do about that? Won't the e-mail display what time I sent it?"

"We've got a tech unit upstairs. I left a voice mail for one of the guys who works there, who was due in at eight. He'll come down to reset it for us, so it shows UK time."

"Good."

"Mention that you've been so worried since the police called you that you haven't been able to sleep." I handed her a slip of paper I had worked on last night. "Then tell them this."

I'm coming to New York later this week. I thought some of you who were also Katrina Grooten's friends might want to meet with me to plan a memorial service for her. She sent me a letter shortly before she died, as it turned out, and some of you may be interested in what she told me. Have the police been helpful? I'm wondering whether to give the information to them.

"It would be hard not to be curious about that, I guess. Most of the people we've talked about know I'm not likely to want to cooperate with government authorities. They think I enjoy being a troublemaker."

"That's the idea. Just the way people respond to you should be interesting. How did you set it up with your office in London?" I wanted to be sure that no one would answer Clem's phone there and give up the fact that she was already in Manhattan. She was safely under our collective wing at the moment, and it helped to know that while we tried to lure Katrina's killer into plain sight.

"Told my boss I had to make an emergency trip to Greenland, to see an ailing relative. Didn't leave them a phone number. Just said I'd stay in touch by e-mail."

"What will your secretary tell people?"

"No such luxury at my level. It's voice mail. I just changed the outgoing message to say the same thing."

"Anyone know where you're staying in New York?"

"How could they? I didn't have a clue myself until we got to the hotel lobby."

"Then why don't you get to work? I'm just going to stick my head into the district attorney's office to see how he wants me to deal with my sidewalk cheering section."

Rose Malone was untying her sneakers to change into the high heels that showed off her great legs. "I bet you needed those to dash through my swarm of admirers this morning. What time's the boss due in?"

"He gave the commencement speech at Stanford's graduation ceremony yesterday. He's flying back today, so he won't be here at all." She straightened up and whispered to me across her desk, "McKinney already came by to see him about it. I think he's going to have the Fifth Precinct squad commander cordon off the entrance and move the protestors around to the rear of the building. The police will call it a safety measure. At least it keeps them away from the judge's entrance and all the grand jurors."

"You think they have any openings in the appeals bureau, Rose? No witnesses, no lunatics, no controversies."

"Your life would be so dull you wouldn't be able to stand it. You thrive on this."

"I like challenges, I like creative investigations, I like the people I work with.This? " I pointed out her window to the sidewalk below. "There's no way to win. If the big guy calls in, tell him I'll do whatever he thinks is best. And that before the end of the week we should have some developments on the Grooten murder."

Mike was already in my office when I got back across the hallway. "That's some flogging you're getting downstairs. I came mighty close to firing off a few shots to disperse the crowd but I thought I might accidentally get lucky and hit one of 'em." "I've got Clem working on her first e-mail--"

"Done and gone. Hank Brock was in here tinkering with the time function on the computer. Said to tell you he got it set to read like she's in London, okay?"

"Perfect. And I'm going upstairs as soon as there's a quorum in the grand jury." I'd be lucky if that happened by ten-fifteen. "I want to get some subpoenas ready for the Natural History Museum. We need a detailed floor plan and a list of anything that might be a private vault or closet."

"Got my first fish on the line," Clem said. I picked up my head and watched as she clicked on her new mail.

She read it aloud.

"When do you arrive and where will you be staying? Why don't we meet for coffee? Katrina was such a sweet girl. The police seem determined to bungle this entire thing. We should talk first."

"Who's it from?"

"That woman who works for Pierre Thibodaux. Eve Drexler."

33 "Keep her engaged," Mike said to Clem. "We know she had Katrina's identification tag when she signed into the British Museum meeting in January. It's at least worth talking to her about that when Coop and I meet with her again this week."

I thought of Ruth Gerst's nickname for Drexler: "Evil." "You think she'd be doing Thibodaux's bidding just because she was loyal to him, or did she figure she had a chance at consoling the widower and trying to replace Penelope in his affection?"

"Like she figured Katrina was getting too close? Let me tell you, if Eve could lift the lid onto that sarcophagus by herself, I'll eat my nightstick. It'd mean someone she trusted had--"

"The man who went off the roof?"

"Bermudez."

"She was the first one at the hospital, wasn't she?"

"Yeah, but that would have been her responsibility anyway."

"But Thibodaux admitted to us that he never actually left town Friday night. He could have gone himself. Maybe Eve had used him for muscle."

"What man off what roof?" Clem asked quietly. I explained what had happened at the Met on Friday and asked if she had ever heard Bermudez's name. I walked to Laura's desk and picked up the package of news clips that the public information office copied and distributed to the executive staff every morning. It was particularly thick after a three-day weekend, and this one was stuffed with tabloid features about every stabbing, shooting, and sex crime that had occurred since Friday morning.

I flipped through the assorted stories that had been included in the handout because they related to the Grooten investigation. Sunday'sDaily News had an obit of Pablo Bermudez, with a three-paragraph story that quoted Thibodaux, who expressed his sorrow at the tragic accident.

"Ever see him?" I asked Clem, showing her the photograph of the dead man, posed with his wife while on vacation in San Juan a few weeks before he fell to his death.

"He does look familiar." She took the paper from my hand and studied the picture. "I mean, workmen from the Met were in and out of our basement all the time. They delivered exhibits and picked them up. Some were friendlier than others, hung around and asked questions about the displays. A few guys asked to come back with their kids to show them the animals, the behind-the-scenes stuff."

"Do you think Katrina knew any of these guys?"

"I haven't a clue. If I had to guess, I'd say she wasn't one to chat up strangers. I mean, after the rape, she didn't like to be down in the basement alone. She was always looking for someone to cling to. It gets kind of creepy there when the place closes up at night."

I bet it does, I mused.

"How do you want me to reply to Eve?"

"Did you actually have any relationship with her when you worked at Natural History?"

"Not from her perspective. I mean, I saw her at a handful of meetings, I had to copy her on all my correspondence about the joint exhibition, but nothing personal at all."

"Why not thank her for writing. Tell her your plans are still up in the air. Maybe you should say you're already in Greenland, so she doesn't try to reach you in London." I smiled at Mike. "She seems anxious to talk about the Keystone Kops. Guess you should stop bungling and solve this damn case already."

Clem turned back to the computer and typed her response. "More mail. Whoops, it's from Zimm. He wants me to save an evening for him. Smart enough not to invite me to the museum. Not good for his reputation."

I thought that was odd. He was almost ready to leave for his new job in Chicago and hadn't seemed worried about harming his reputation at all. She pressed the print function as she continued to read to us. "Police think Katrina was poisoned, he says. Mamdouba's put the lid on all of them. Doesn't want anyone talking to the cops out of his presence. They're tightening up the attic and basement. No more wandering in and out of labs and storerooms. He knows how close I was to Katrina. Like that."

E-mail was a strange phenomenon, as our Internet- related cases demonstrated. People who didn't know each other at all developed on-line relationships with the mere sending and receipt of several messages. They frequently revealed things in this impersonal medium that they would never have said to the same relative stranger on the telephone or face-to-face. They often talked without the filters they used in conversations, and I was counting on that fact today.

"Does it feel right to you?"

"What he says to me? That he answers so quickly? Yeah. I didn't know him well, but I'd guess his affection for Katrina is real. He'd want to know what she'd told me."

"Then chum up to him," Mike said. "Today is Tuesday, right? Tell him you're getting into town this Friday. You can see him over the weekend. Then ask him some more questions. Exactly what has Mamdouba told him? What areas that used to be open have been closed off?"

He turned to me. "I'm telling you, Coop. We need layouts of those floor plans today. Ready when we get up there." "Laura can type the subpoenas as soon as she gets in. We can fax them up to the museum."

"You ready to pick up where we left off last night?"

Clem took her hands away from the keyboard and swiveled her chair to face us.

"When we knocked off, I was asking about the friends who were working with you on the return of the bones. Were all of them here in New York, at the two museums?"

"By no means. I guess five or six of us were local. We'd talk about it at dinner or when we got together." She smiled. "We're aware that it was nothing we were going to solve in a hurry."

"But the rest of them, how do you stay in touch?"

"E-mail, of course. The Internet."

That answer pleased me. Once she identified her cohorts to me, a search warrant or court order could help our computer jocks download their office hard drives and examine their Internet browsers for information about sites visited and people contacted.

"On an official level, have you had any support from museum administrators?" "It's not a popular topic here. Try bringing up names like Qisuk and Mene. You'll get a passel of denials, and when you go to find the records, they've all been purged. With whom have you talked about Katrina's disappearance?" She caught herself. "Her murder?"

"At Natural History we've met with Elijah Mamdouba and the curator in charge of African mammals, Richard Socarides. Did you know either of them?"

"I've worked with both. Elijah's a mystery to me. He's a very kind man, but he's really between a rock and a hard place. I tried to engage him on this issue any number of times. As a black African, he would, one might think, have a keen interest in doing the right thing. But he's just a flunky for the trustees, and happy to be that."

"What's in it for the museums to fight this?"

"Think of the human time it takes to sort it all out. Then there's the money to help identify millions of skeletal pieces by DNA. Each and every scientific discipline has a reason to oppose the return. The paleontologists and anthropologists don't want to let these collections go. They think it's more important to know what my greatgrandparents ate for lunch every day than to know they're resting peacefully. Every archaeologist alive thinks this concept of returning the remains disrupts their ability to do their work, both in the field--now and for the future--and in the museums."