The Bone Vault - Linda Fairstein (9 page)

"Know her?"

"Should I? There's probably no one in this whole museum who has less to do with human beings than I do. Frames, pots, swords, masks, instruments, artworks. I open boxes and close them up. I unpack them and send others off. Pretty young girls I don't know."

Chapman repeated her name and still Lissen was flat. "You have anything to do with the Cloisters?"

"Is that where she worked?"

"Do you?"

"I'm responsible for everything that goes in and out of the place. I've got a crew on site to run it, day to day. I don't spend any time up there myself. Small change compared to what we do here. Go to check on things two or three times a year."

"This sarcophagus the body was placed in, where's that been sitting since it got here last fall?"

"We're trying to track all that for Mr. Thibodaux. You know how much floor space I got downstairs? It covers as much ground as thirty football fields."

"I thought everything had a number and a tag and a tidy little home."

"Two out of three, Detective. You gotta give me a few days. Stuff gets moved around all the time down there. We'll get a handle on this as soon as we can."

Thibodaux leaned in on his elbows. "Mr. Chapman, I don't want to make the same mistake as I did earlier and risk insulting you. But there's a simple fact very few people consider when they come to visit us here --in fact, when they go to any museum in the world. "The Metropolitan collection includes more thanthree million objects and works of art. Three million. At any given time, the most that is ever on display in these vast halls is less than ten percent of that number. That means we've got literally millions of objects stored in our basement."

He was right about one thing: I had never given any thought to that.

"Some are crated away because there will simply never be any room for them in our galleries and on our walls. Many are inferior and came to us as gifts, which will eventually be traded or sold off. There are hundreds of thousands that are far too fragile to ever be on display, and scores that scholars study, here or on loan at other institutions."

Chapman and I exchanged glances. Where would we possibly begin?

"I guess we might as well take a look at your territory, Mr. Lissen. Get a sense of how things are organized and stored, what the situation is with your security force--"

"The system is superb, Mr. Chapman," Thibodaux said. "It has all been upgraded since I arrived here. Every single section of the building has guards, and there are watchmen who patrol the museum all throughout the night, above- and belowground."

"Surveillance cameras?" "In the galleries, hallways, storage space, exits, and entrances."

"Ever turn them on?" Several years before Thibodaux was appointed as director, I had handled the prosecution of a celebrated murder case in which a vibrant teenage girl had been killed by a drugaddicted prep-school dropout on the Great Lawn directly behind the museum. Because of construction that was being done on the rear wing that projected into Central Park, the cameras that would have captured the crime on videotape had been poised to shoot but never loaded with film. It haunted me that no one had been able to prevent the murder, nor had we had been able to reconstruct the crime for the trial jury.

"I--I just assume they're working."

Lissen knew the answer, I thought, from the glum look on his face, but was silent. "Is there a problem with the cameras?" I asked him.

"I don't think anybody's changed the film in the ones in the basement for more than a year."

"Like those frigging ATMs," Chapman said to me. A young uniformed cop had been shot and killed during an ATM stickup that Chapman had once investigated. The gunman looked directly into the camera lens, but the film had been used over again so many times that it had completely deteriorated and displayed only the grainy outline of a bearded face. As a result, the state legislature mandated that banking institutions change their film on a regular basis. No such requirement existed for museums. "The detective and I would like to begin with you this afternoon, Mr. Lissen. If there's a telephone I can use first, I'll notify my boss that we've identified the deceased."

"Of course, Miss Cooper. Please use the one on my desk. I'll step out to Miss Drexler's phone and call the gentleman who's in charge of the Cloisters. He can pull up Miss Grooten's file."

I dialed Paul Battaglia's direct line and hoped Rose Malone would answer. She sounded busy--or distant --and tried to patch me through to the district attorney before getting back on the line to tell me that he wouldn't pick up my call. That hadn't happened to me very often.

"Just tell him we think we got an ID. The deceased is Katrina Grooten, and she was working up at the Cloisters, on a special joint project that involved a few of the museums. ME thinks the cause of death is poisoning. Soon as I know any more you'll have it."

I handed the receiver to Chapman and moved out of his way. "Hey, loo. Got a tentative make on Saint Cleo. Some kind of art maven working in one of the museums. From South Africa, here on a visa. Coop and I'll pop up to the Cloisters tomorrow, when we're done in this joint, see if anyone knows why or when she quit her job."

He put the phone down and picked up a photograph from Thibodaux's desk. The handsome woman in the eight-by-ten frame was smiling back at him, dressed to the nines and standing in front of the glass pyramid in the courtyard at the Louvre.

"Mrs. T.?"

Eve Drexler nodded.

"She have anything to do with the museum, officially?"

"No, Mr. Chapman. She's dead. Killed in a ski accident at Chamonix, winter before last. They had only been here at the Met for little more than a year. I was right here in the office with Pierre when he got--"

Drexler stopped talking when Thibodaux opened the door and reentered the room. "Hiram Bellinger, the director of the Cloisters, will see you anytime tomorrow that suits you. He didn't know Miss Grooten well, but he'll pull her file and be prepared to give you whatever you need."

Chapman turned his back to the director and whispered to me, "Let's get a gander at the setup here this afternoon, meet at the morgue in the morning to see what Kestenbaum has for us, then spend as much time as we need uptown, talking to the people she worked with."

"Fine with me."

He walked back to the conference table to pick up his steno pad. "Tell Bellinger we'll be there about twelve tomorrow. Hasn't he got anything he can fax over to you now?" "The basic personnel records should be in the database, even if the entire file is archived. I expect he'll have her address and date of birth over to me shortly. What else would you like?"

"Next of kin would be nice. I'd hate for them to find out about this on CNN. Maybe she has family here who can help us out."

"How thoughtless of me. Why don't you start downstairs with Maury, and Miss Drexler will find you as soon as the information comes in."

"Did he say there was anything strange about Ms. Grooten's disappearance?"

"Nothing at all, Detective. He said he remembered that there was a letter of resignation from late last December that he put in the file. You two should be able to track this down better than we can: Bellinger said that Katrina had been planning to leave the city for some time, ever since she'd been assaulted--how do you say, violated?--in that park up at the Cloisters after leaving the museum late one night. She'd never been quite the same after that."

9

Thibodaux closed the door of his office and left us at his secretary's desk with Ms. Drexler, who was waiting to escort us to the basement. "Could you give us some privacy while we make this call?" Chapman asked. Both women stepped into the hallway.

I watched him dial the number of the Special Victims Squad as he looked at his watch.

"Hey, Joey, Mercer Wallace working today?" He paused while the detective who had answered looked at the duty chart. "When he gets in, tell him to give me a call on my cell. I need him to check an old case. No thanks, no need to bother you with it."

He hung up the phone. "Must be losing your touch, blondie. How is it you wouldn't know about a legit complainant attacked in a public park?"

"'Cause somebody tanked the case. Didn't want to let us take a crack at it."

"That means there's a boss up there who doesn't like you, or even the guy who took the squeal. You sure it doesn't ring any bells?"

"I'll have Laura check the screening sheets, but it's got too many hot-button items not to stand out in my memory." We had a detailed system of tracking sexual assault cases in the unit, in which every incident was cross-referenced by the name of the victim and the offender, the date and place of occurrence. Reports were made in each circumstance, whether or not an arrest was effected or the case went to trial. Sarah and I liked to think our record-keeping was foolproof, although the police department managed to keep things under wraps from time to time.

"You got a victim who's a foreigner--which would make the mayor ballistic." It was bad enough to assault or murder a New Yorker when City Hall was tracking crime stats so closely, but attacks on out-of- towners led to national headlines that threatened the income tourists fed to the hotel and restaurant industries. "She worked for a major art institution, attacked in a public park. Likely to cause a stir. Mercer's coming in any minute on a four to twelve. He can dig around for the case folder."

Mercer Wallace was the third man in what we liked to think of as our team. At forty-one, he was five years older than Mike and me, and about to become a father for the first time. He had remarried his ex-wife, Vickee, on New Year's Day, after she reappeared in his life to help him through the aftermath of an investigation in which he had suffered a near-fatal gunshot wound to his chest.

Mercer's great height and dark black skin made him a physical standout in any room. But it was his meticulous investigative style and compassionate manner with witnesses that won him the coveted spot as my favorite detective at the Special Victims Squad, which was responsible for handling every sexual assault and child abuse case in the borough. The son of a widowed airline mechanic who had worked several jobs to save for Mercer's college education, he had at the last minute turned down a football scholarship to the University of Michigan to enroll in the Police Academy.

Mike and Mercer had worked together at Manhattan North Homicide for several years, until Mercer decided that he preferred to deal with witnesses who were still alive and needed the strength of a sensitive, smart detective to help restore their dignity and find some kind of justice for their assailant. More often than we liked, the work of the two units overlapped, and the victim of some kind of sexual violence became the subject of a murder investigation.

Eve Drexler was waiting for us in the hallway. She led us back to the elevator and pressed the button for the basement level. When the doors opened, she pointed to the sign across the corridor that had Lissen's name printed on it. They closed before I remembered to ask her to finish her sentence about what had happened when Thibodaux received the call about his wife's accidental death. I told Mike to add it to his list of questions.

The cubicle that was home to the shipping department head lacked the lavish accoutrements of the museum director's office. Unframed reproduction posters were thumbtacked to the scratched walls, much as in a college dorm room. File cabinets ringed the perimeter, the dust on the computer looked so thick that it appeared to have been untouched since it was installed, and the desk was crowned by sloppy piles of yellow and white papers.

Lissen motioned us in and we sat on stools facing his desk. "Mr. Thibodaux asked a couple of the curators to come down. I'm really not supposed to poke around their storage areas unless they give me permission."

"Can we sit somewhere else, so I can take notes while we talk?" "We don't got a lot of fancy rooms down here, Detective."

I heard footsteps and turned to see several people in the doorway. I recognized the tall, balding man as one who had been with Mr. Lissen in the shipyard last night.

"I'm Timothy Gaylord. I'm afraid the Egyptian art collection is under my direction," he said, extending a hand.

Mike and I stood up in the crowded space and made introductions all around. The second man told us he was Erik Poste, the curator in charge of European paintings, and the third staffer was Anna Friedrichs, who ran the department of the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas.

Gaylord took command of the situation. "Maury, why don't we all move into our storeroom?" He turned to Mike and me. "There's a small office we can work in there, a lot more comfortably than in this."

"Can we access your computer files from that one?" I asked Lissen.

"Only if we had any." He waved a hand behind him at the dusty monitor. "We're not the high-tech section of the museum. They got it all cataloged upstairs. We're just the brawn. Someone tells us to move something, that's what we do. Never had time to go to school to learn how to catch up on these machines. Sooner or later someone picks up the paperwork and puts it in order. I ain't lost much more than a couple of African masks that'd scare you half to death anyway, and some fake statuettes. A few minor paintings that weren't going to get hung."

Lissen locked his door behind him and we all followed Timothy Gaylord into the hallway. We were at the southeast corner of the basement, and we walked for several minutes down a windowless stretch of corridor without a doorway or stairwell to break the long cement barriers.

"What's back here?" Chapman was walking on Gaylord's heels, anxious to find out what was behind the great gray walls.

Gaylord turned his head and smiled at us. "Surely, Detective, you can guess what the most lucrative part of this great art museum is?"

Neither of us had any idea.

"That's the underground parking garage that was built thirty years ago. It's entirely museum revenue. Unlike everything else, the city doesn't get a nickel of that money."

"It's public parking?"