by Mitch Silver
Amy saw him smile. Scott had run up ahead to the public gallery on the mezzanine, but when Amy looked back, she had caught sight of Devlin’s image on the black-and-white monitor at the security desk in the lobby. She shivered at the sight: all those predatory teeth.
There was the sound of more glass breaking upstairs. On the monitor, Devlin heard it too. His grin widened even as he methodically mounted the stairs with Macken’s gun held out in front of him, slowly swinging it in a continuous arc. Amy turned and scrambled to join Scott as fast as she could.
From the Beinecke entrance area, a double stairway rises to the mezzanine level, a public gallery of free-standing exhibits on two-foot-wide by four-
foot-high pedestals. A sign at the foot of the stairs announced that the current traveling exhibit was of writing instruments: sharpened quills used by various signers of the Declaration of Independence and fountain pens belonging to more modern authors, even a whole desk set of Faulkner’s. Less than thirty seconds later, Devlin had finished inspecting the lobby area and had moved past the sign and up the stairs to the mezzanine.
From where they were hidden, Amy and Scott could hear him stop at the top of the staircase and then walk away from them, along the south side of the promenade that rings the massive glass tower of books. At the far end, the same deliberate footsteps took him along the west side of the library. And now he was coming back along the building’s north wall. On permanent display in the northeast corner stood one of the five complete Gutenberg Bibles in the United States, the one Amy remembered so fondly from childhood. The one she was hiding behind now.
Scott looked over to where Amy was hiding. He could see a bit of the fabric from her skirt sticking out from behind the display case. His legs were starting to cramp again. The long wait in that awkward posture in the bathroom must have done something to his circulation. He needed to change position, but he musn’t. As it was, he was just skinny enough to be hidden by one of the narrow concrete stanchions that protruded from the wall, between the glass case holding a first edition of The House of the Seven Gables and the one with The House of Mirth. Wedged in two exhibits away from Amy, with the case he had broken into off to his left and the Bible to his right, he knew that any movement, even by so much as an inch, would give the game away.
Near the ceiling, a video camera was trained on the case with the Bible in it. Scott could see Devlin now as he raised the gun and took aim. Not at the lens, but at the power cord leading from the back. From an angle under and a little behind the camera, Devlin fired. Bull’s-eye.
The explosion was still reverberating through the cavernous building as Devlin spoke in one of those voices children use at games. “Dr. Greenberg…ready or not, here I come!” It sent shivers shooting straight up Scott’s back and into the hairs on his neck.
On the floor below, someone had unlocked the main entrance and was coming through the revolving doors. More than one someone. The locals. Now Devlin was less than ten feet from Amy. He didn’t even have to raise his voice. “Stand up and give me the papers.”
She was still crouching with her back to him under the big Bible. His voice echoed a little in the vastness of the library. “Slide your computer case over to me. I only want to see what’s in it, the material. No one’s going to get hurt. Once I have it, I’ll let you go.”
Amy Greenberg said nothing. The people downstairs were making enough noise for all of them: “Police! Show yourselves!” And “Who fired a weapon?” And “Commander Devlin! Where are you?”
Devlin had the stiletto out. From where he was, Scott could see it in the man’s hand, the slightest gleam of silver in the dimly lit space. This wasn’t in their plan. Devlin wasn’t waiting to making sure Amy had the Fleming papers. The professional had noiselessly crept forward and now he was right behind her, about to bring his arm forward to deliver the fatal cut.
When William Faulkner’s onyx desk set, with pearlized pen and pencils in their onyx holders, crashed through Devlin’s parietal bone just above the occipital, it nearly cleaved the two hemispheres of his brain. Scott had probably used more force than necessary. He had the fleeting thought that two pens were definitely mightier than one sword.
Chapter 63
That evening the bedlam that had engulfed Yale’s Sterling Library security room packed up and moved about a mile away to the headquarters of the New Haven Police Department on Union Avenue.
When the campus cops, and later the city cops, had charged up the stairs of the Beinecke Rare Book Library, they had discovered that a man was violently dead and two Yale professors—one of whom was wanted for a murder earlier that day in New York City—had done it. The dead man was apparently a law enforcement officer, which made it a capital offense. He was also a foreign national, which meant embassy and State Department involvement. To top it off, the victim had been working on a case of international terrorism, so by law the pair in custody could be held incommunicado without due process. And then there’d be, potentially, a press conference down the road with FBI and National Security brass. For a small city police chief like Felicia Williams, who knew nothing about baseball, it was like hitting one over the fence with the bases full in game seven. Oh, and there was the destruction of university property.
She’d had the strangest phone call. Thirty-some-odd calls, actually, in the hours since the arrest. But one phone call Captain Williams would remember for the rest of her life. Some kind of priority call from a military operator. An Englishwoman, who hadn’t given her name, had started right in about a bunch of papers the vic was supposed to have had. Important papers. When the captain had said no, there was a gun and a knife but no papers, the old lady had ordered—ordered!—her to give each of the suspects “a thorough going-over.” The captain should obtain the papers, hold them till someone flew over from England to get them, and under no circumstances enter them into evidence. Some bushwah about them being the “property of the Crown.” The nerve. And then the call was over and she was gone.
If there had been any papers on Brown or the Greenberg woman, her people would have found them. And then they would have been duly turned over to the property clerk in the basement for processing, like any other evidence. But no, all they’d found was a computer in a computer case, a handbag with the usual woman’s stuff, and a suitcase they’d recovered in a library elevator. A sketchpad, but no papers.
The next call had been from Yale’s president. He’d been awakened by the campus cops, and he was swearing up and down that “his people” couldn’t possibly have done a thing like this. The captain could expect Yale’s lawyers to be filing motions bright and early in the morning.
Nothing like town-gown crap to lift your spirits at one in the a.m. Still, everything would keep. Her guys wouldn’t be done with the crime scene for another couple hours and her best interrogator, Obst, would come on with the morning shift. Williams had been up for about twenty hours straight. She had to get some shut-eye. But it had been a great day.
Chapter 64
The Beinecke was closed indefinitely for repairs. The huge glass doors on the lower level had been specially designed by Gordon Bunshaft, the building’s architect, to be everything but bulletproof. The company that had constructed them was long out of business and a replacement would have to be shipped in by truck from a factory in Wisconsin. The display case too would have to be made to order and installed.
An hour after the homicide, the police had cordoned off the library’s northeast corner with their signature yellow Crime Scene Do Not Enter tape. It stayed up for days while fingerprints were lifted, blood spatter was collected, and the bullet that had shot out the surveillance camera’s power supply was retrieved. A forensic photographer from the FBI took pictures of every surface Amy or Scott had been suspected of touching, from every conceivable angle. Meanwhile, before the staff members who’d been on duty that evening could be permitted to leave on their summer sabbaticals, the department’s detectives interviewed them and then screened every pi
xel of video from all the cameras with them. They watched Amy and Scott rush into the Beinecke, saw Devlin shoot out the glass and leap down into the courtyard. They tracked first one teacher and then the other running past the display cases. The man, Scott Brown, had stopped in front of one of them and hunched over it before smashing it with his shoe. Destruction of property. They could see him take the murder weapon—if, technically, it was murder—and hide. Soon after that, the camera had died. When they’d screened it all, they debated what it meant and screened it again. With one thing and another, big and little, it was a couple of weeks after the “incident,” as Devlin’s death was now being called, before any civilians were allowed back into the damaged jewel box.
The day the yellow tape came down, a Lincoln Town Car was discovered at the parking impound lot next to the West Side Highway in Manhattan, known to its employees as the Fun City Garage. It still sported a card in its passenger window with the name “Dr. Greenburg.” When the vehicle’s owners, the McDonough Brothers, were contacted, they came down to pay the accumulated parking and towing charges but insisted the car had been stolen off their lot in Long Island City weeks before. And they knew no one named Greenburg.
Meanwhile, Special Branch of Scotland Yard was now denying that Devlin had been on assignment to the States. They claimed to have been awaiting his return from a training exercise in Dubai when he had “disappeared from our radar.” A review of Delta Airlines’ records showed Devlin had been booked to travel from Dublin’s airport to New York on the same flight as Amy Greenberg but had never boarded. And finally, Interpol had helped determine that the dead man in Grand Central was not a New York limo driver, as his clothing suggested, but an Irish banker who at some point had been wearing a false mustache and a wig. And that two of his colleagues had been killed in a suspicious traffic accident the day before his death.
It all meant that the case against Amy and Scott, piece by piece, was falling apart, much to Captain Williams’s chagrin. Louis Obst, her five-foot-four-
inch Boston terrier of a detective, had taken separate statements from Amy and Scott, and then had taken them again forty-eight hours later, hoping for inconsistencies. They held to their story: that a limo driver with an Irish brogue had accosted Dr. Greenberg at JFK, trying to bundle her into the stolen Town Car before menacing her in Grand Central. (Why anyone should fixate on this particular woman Obst couldn’t imagine.)
Macken’s bank was failing in Dublin. Could be he was on the verge of losing his job. Maybe he’d just gone off his rocker. But if he had, why stalk Dr. Greenberg? There was nothing in the bank records about her, and thanks to her Yale lawyers, she and her boyfriend weren’t volunteering anything. (The summer break had freed up a couple of the big hitters from the Law School faculty to do a pro bono thing, and they’d clamped down on the grilling before it really got started.)
Brown was in the clear anyway for the Grand Central killing: he’d spent a crucial half hour conspicuously sitting alone and drinking beer in New York’s Yale Club. Of course, witnesses had put the woman and Devlin up there too later on. From the chief’s point of view, nothing about this case added up. All she knew was, her press conference with the DC heavies was going bye-bye.
And then came the clincher. From the start, it was clear the knife found near Devlin’s body was a match for the wound that killed Milo Macken. Now forensics determined that at no time had either Amy or Scott handled it. (Or the gun, for that matter.) British-made, the knife proved to be standard issue to UK security field forces. And the kicker: lab tests proved the traces of blood caught between the blade and the hilt were Macken’s. Devlin must have killed Macken in some sort of rogue operation and tried—for reasons unknown—to frame the couple in Captain Williams’s custody. Case closed.
The charges against Amy Greenberg and Scott Brown were dropped and they were released on a particularly nice late spring day. As a small act of official contrition, the couple was driven back to the house on Edgewood Avenue by police personnel. They held hands wordlessly in the back seat. Everything had already been said.
Looking out the window of the car, Amy could read the headline in one of the New Haven Register vending machines along the curb: “Yale Pair Cleared in Library Death.” And beneath it, “Grand Central Murder is ‘Yard Work.’ ” Still looking out the window, Amy said, “I’d like Maggie to be my matron of honor.” Scott gave her hand a squeeze. It was their new language.
That same afternoon, Mary Clare Capuana, the visiting art historian who had originally curated the damaged Beinecke exhibition, received an e-mail from library.yale.edu at her campus office just off Franklin Street in Chapel Hill. An attachment showed her a photo of the damaged display case just as the police forensics team had left things: a mess, with pens and quills jumbled together and scattered willy-nilly among bits of broken glass, a dog-eared manuscript, and a lot of little white cards—now stained from the fingerprint dusting process—that had described everything. As the summer fill-in librarians weren’t familiar with the original installation, would Professor Capuana please suggest a new arrangement for the display? And would she take into account the fact that Faulkner’s bloody desk set was still in police custody and would require extensive cleaning after its release?
She studied the picture for quite a while before typing her reply: “The manuscript isn’t ours.”
Chapter 65
For two days, the large package from Ireland had been sitting on the front porch where the DHL guy had left it. Now Amy put on the dress and stood in front of the mirror. Right then and there she decided on a June wedding.
They would have liked a Saturday, but all the Saturdays were booked. So Amy and Scott settled for an afternoon wedding on the third Sunday in June, Father’s Day. Appropriate. The groom never would have met the bride were it not for the need to clear the name of his own adoptive father. And then there was Robert Greenberg, the only dad Amy had ever really known and the one who had attracted Scott to New Haven, to their house, to her. She wondered how he’d have felt about her deliberately throwing a game of hide-and-seek by letting Devlin find her. She decided Chief would have hated the idea.
Scott’s mother had flown over as soon as she heard they’d been arrested. Then when they’d been freed, the three of them had talked into the wee hours, crying a little, laughing a little. Now Maggie would be standing next to Amy at the ceremony. It would be the world’s smallest wedding outside of a Las Vegas bridal chapel. Scott had gotten a colleague to stand up for him as best man. There’d be Susan and Blanche and, yes, Katie all the way from Australia. That made seven. Add a couple of husbands and boyfriends and a few pizza-loving members of the History of Art Department and the whole group would still rattle around inside Yale’s Battell Chapel.
It wasn’t lost on Amy that here she was, a Jewish girl, marrying an Anglican boy. A Jewish girl who loved the Book of Kells, a crucial pillar of the Roman Catholic faith, and who might yet cast her own two eyes on its possible explicit (now promised by Shields in a week or so), bringing happy news to a billion Catholics while giving her own career a nudge. A girl who was at the moment writing her own vows (and doodling a sketch of herself and Scott at the altar as she struggled to do so) that would be uttered in a brief nondenominational ceremony in an all-comers house of worship. Was she an American, or what?
On the Friday before the wedding, the Beinecke Library issued a press release describing “a major find in the field of modern British scholarship.” “Find” was the operative word. The immediate beneficiaries of the announcement were the two big Connecticut papers, the New Haven Register and the Hartford Courant, the only publications that were given the story for their Sunday editions. Yale had put a forty-eight-hour embargo on it for everyone else, part of their I’ll-rub-your-back-if-you’ll-rub-mine goodwill policy with the local press.
By the morning of the big day, the lurid interest in Amy and Scott had pretty much worn off. They had had their fifteen minutes in the spotlight. So just be
fore noon the couple climbed into the Dodge Caravan Maggie had rented at the airport, without incident and without observing any of the usual wedding superstitions. (The Girls had already ridden off to the church ahead of them.) Amy was striking in her Irish wedding gown, and Scott benefited from the aura tuxedos bestow on the lanky and portly alike. They were adults, theirs was a mature love, and had Amy’s dress not been as long and heavy as it was, they would have floated the six blocks to the chapel together on love. As they drove away, the lovers had eyes only for each other. So the man hiding in the shrubbery went completely unnoticed.
Even as the intruder was watching the bride and groom leave the house, his colleague was strolling across the Yale campus a half mile away with the Sunday edition of the New Haven Register under his arm. Ramesh realized he had uttered only four words all morning, two of them being the “Thanks, pal” he’d forced himself to say with an American accent when he’d picked up the newspaper at the front desk of his motel out on Whalley. The paper served as camouflage, a prop for the nondescript man in the nondescript suit. But soon it would serve another, more important role: when placed on the wooden ledge that ran the length of the front of the choir loft, its four-inch Sunday thickness was just enough for Ramesh to rest his elbow comfortably on it with the gun barrel clearing the brass railing. Always inspect your shooting stand the night before. Always, always, always.
He looked at his phone for the fourth time in the last ten minutes. Nothing yet from Simon Pure. Not for the first time he wondered what sort of gits named Pureton would christen a son Simon. What chance did the boy have in school, in life? The phone vibrated with an incoming text message. One word: “In.” First step accomplished.
The spot in front of the minister where the bride and groom would say their vows was directly in front of and below Ramesh. An empty choir loft, a reasonably thick American newspaper to lean on, a Ruger 24/7 Tritium sight for fast target acquisition in low light situations and a Sausage McMuffin (the other two words he’d said) in one’s pocket—still in its tinfoil wrapper—if one were delayed…What more could a marksman ask?