The Bone Vault

by Linda Fairstein

  “Did Thibodaux know the girl you were talking about was Katrina Grooten? I mean, did you mention her name?” Mike was clearly drawn back to the reaction when he had shown her photograph to the director, who claimed not to recognize her.

  Bellinger thought for a few moments. “I’m not sure whether I did. Pierre had met her a couple of times. But that would have been at group meetings or large social occasions. I’m not sure I thought he would have known her. It shouldn’t have mattered who she was, frankly, once I brought the gravity of this to his attention.”

  “Anyone else you told?”

  “Yes. I tried two of the women next. Thought that might strike a responsive chord with the sisterhood.” Bellinger shook his head as he spoke. “They both knew her from the planning sessions for the big exhibit. Eve Drexler, who’s Thibodaux’s assistant, and Anna Friedrichs, who’s the curator in one of the other departments at the Met.”

  “Yes, we saw both of them yesterday. How did they react?”

  “I was foolish to think that Eve would do anything to cross Thibodaux. She listened to everything I told her and asked me to keep her informed. But she basically advised me not to worry about it. It was just a ‘woman’s problem’ and Katrina would get over it.”

  “And Anna?”

  “She was good. She’s the one who urged me to call the counselor. Anna had noticed the changes, too. She felt the phone call would have more weight coming from me, since Katrina worked directly for me. So I called.”

  “What did Harriet say?”

  “I told her my concern. I described the changes in Katrina since the summer. How she had lost weight and become listless. That lately, she had become apathetic about her work, which was very uncharacteristic of her.”

  It not only sounded like post-traumatic stress, but also like the beginning of an overlay of arsenic poisoning.

  “I asked Harriet whether she thought Katrina should see a physician, whether there was something medically wrong that might be causing this deterioration. You haven’t told me how Katrina died, of course,” Bellinger said, looking at Mike, “so perhaps my secondguessing is all irrelevant.”

  Mike didn’t offer any assistance. “What did she say?”

  “Harriet? That she could handle this herself. That counseling like this was her specialty. She had only been seeing Katrina since late summer, so the differences were not as startling to her as they were to some of us who had known her before she was assaulted. But she led me to believe that she was the expert, so I left it alone. Harriet told me all the symptoms I mentioned were consistent with rape trauma syndrome.”

  “Did you and Katrina continue to talk about it, too?”

  “Not really. By the beginning of November, she was already hinting to me that she was thinking about going home, to Cape Town. Her father was there-”

  “Do you have a telephone number for him?”

  “It’s in the personnel folder here. I don’t think it will do you much good. She told me her father was in a nursing home. Early-onset Alzheimer’s, if I’m not mistaken. I told her I thought it was crazy for her to go back there, for two reasons.”

  “What were they?”

  “I thought she needed to get well before she went home. Brought out that stubborn streak she had. She got all fired up about the medical care in South Africa and how advanced it was. That if there was something psychological impeding her recovery, it would do her good to get out of this environment, where the rape occurred. And that if it was medical as I suspected-and she doubted that, by the way, because she placed such faith in Harriet-then the best doctors in the world were in Cape Town.”

  “And your second reason for thinking she shouldn’t leave?”

  “The work she was doing.”

  “They don’t have tombs in Africa?” Mike asked. “They don’t have museums?”

  “Of course they do. But nothing like her specialty. She had already applied for a job. I’d written a letter of recommendation, which you’ll also see in the file.”

  “For what kind of position?”

  “The McGregor Museum. It’s in Kimberley, South Africa.”

  “They’ve got a medieval art department?” I asked.

  “Botany. Archaeology. Cultural history. Zoology. Natural history. Science, not medieval art. They’re what you do at the McGregor. That was my point, Ms. Cooper. Katrina was such a promising student in this highly competitive field. But all of the medieval studies programs are limited to the European and American institutions. She was throwing away ten years of her education.”

  “But it was her home, Mr. Bellinger.”

  “Her mother was dead. Her father didn’t know her any longer. She’d gone to university in England, so her friends were scattered all over the world.That wasn’t home, in South Africa. She was beginning to make herself a decent life here.” Bellinger was pacing now and was getting more agitated as he spoke about his efforts to stop Katrina from leaving New York. “Anna Friedrichs and I were hoping to restore her health and well-being. I’d talked to Eve about letting her transfer her work to the main branch of the Met so she didn’t have to deal with coming through Fort Tryon Park every day.”

  “Sounds like you wanted to keep her around,” Mike said.

  “Very much so. I even suggested a leave of absence. Go home for the holidays. Visit her father. See that there was nothing left for her in Cape Town. Now I can only imagine the pressure she was experiencing if someone here was trying to kill her all that time.”

  Bellinger hesitated, then looked across his desk to Mike and Mercer. “Are you going to tell me? Am I entitled to know how she died?”

  “Poison, most probably.”

  He pulled out his chair and sat down, throwing his head back and studying a gargoyle in the arch of the ceiling. The last thing I expected to hear him do was laugh.

  “I hope to hell it wasn’t arsenic. I’ve got enough of it here to do in all of us.”

  14

  “Do you mean that Katrina Grooten worked with arsenic here at the Cloisters?”

  Bellinger fidgeted now, swiveling in his chair as though he were looking for something north of the heavy traffic crawling across the George Washington Bridge.

  “No, no, I can’t say that she did.”

  “But a lot of the other staff members do?” Chapman asked.

  He thought before answering. “I wouldn’t say very many. Four at the most. Those who work under my direct supervision. They’ll all tell youI’m the one who uses it most.”

  “Why? In what form?”

  “My particular scholarship is in the field of illustrated manuscripts.” He stood up and walked to some of the open volumes that had been moved to accommodate our gathering. “From the earliest monastic houses on, the production of books was an essential task the monks performed for the greater ecclesiastical community. Each of them had what was called a scriptorium, where scribes and illuminators copied classical texts. Here, in the building we call the Treasury, we’ve got a unique collection of these exquisite books.”

  Bellinger picked one up and carried it back to us. “Certainly our most prized possession. Perhaps you know it. TheBelles Heures. ”

  “Only from the museum catalog.”

  “This one was described in the inventory of the Duke of Berry in 1413. These were made by the monks for the rich patrons and royal families, who were supposed to say their prayers at the same canonical hours that were observed in the monasteries-book of hours.”

  The two pages he displayed were ornately decorated in gold leaf around the text of the prayers. There were stunning paintings in vibrant colors, and I studied the heavy pages before moving out of the way for Mike and Mercer.

  “How has this survived in such good condition?” I asked.

  “The books always suffered less damage than things like tapestries. They couldn’t be melted down into bullion, like jewelry or pieces of gold, so thieves and rogues didn’t perceive them to have very much value. It’s just that their col
ors fade over time, and we restore them here. That’s the work I like to do.”

  “And the materials?”

  “We try to imitate what was done in medieval times.” Bellinger pointed at parts of the elegant page. “Powdered gold for these elaborate drawings was made by grinding the actual metal with honey and mixing it with egg whites. Black came from a carbon-based ink. They made blue in a number of ways. The most expensive was actually ground from lapis lazuli, or indigo mixed with white lead-which is actually quite poisonous itself. And yellow, that’s where the orpiment comes in. The monks used saffron to produce a yellow pigment in the early days. But it wasn’t permanent.”

  “What’s orpiment?”

  “It’s an arsenic compound, Detective. Very widely used to give us a fine yellow color. You can see how effective it is right on that page you’re examining now. In our workshop downstairs, we’ve got more than enough to make someone quite ill.”

  “Is it secured?”

  “Do we keep it under lock and key? Of course not. Our little restoration area doesn’t get a lot of outside interest. It’s very intense labor and doesn’t excite much of the general public.”

  “Did Ms. Grooten have access to the room?”

  Bellinger paused for a moment. “Certainly. But she wasn’t in the habit of licking paintbrushes, Mr. Chapman.” He was beginning to snap at Mike.

  “And Napoléon didn’t chew on his wallpaper, either.”

  “What?” the puzzled curator asked.

  “There was arsenic found in locks of Napoléon’s hair. Lots of it. There were theories that his captors did him in, and some wild conjecture that he was poisoned by the vapors from the wallpaper color in his room at St. Helena’s, during his exile. Copper arsenite.”

  “Scheele’s green, probably. A brilliant pigment. We’ve got some of that, too. Don’t use as much of it because it wasn’t created until after the Renaissance, so it wouldn’t be authentic to our pieces.”

  “That’s exactly why we need to know what Grooten was working on and who she dealt with,” I said. Mike knew more about the great Corsican general than Pat McKinney knew about the law. If he got off on a Napoléonic tangent, we’d be here until midnight. “I assume you have a way to tell us whether any tubes or vials are missing?”

  “I’m sure I don’t. The workmen get all the supplies they need by ordering from the Met. Ask Pierre Thibodaux. Ask Erik Poste. Ask the other medievalists.”

  His counterparts at the main branch were obvious interview subjects. “Why Thibodaux? Why Poste?”

  “I’m sure the director’s office has all the billing records for the goods that are purchased for our needs. The ever-rigid Ms. Drexler must be able to put her fingers on that. There are a host of toxic substances in paints and pigments, varnishes and cleaning agents. And we’re not the only ones who restore old artworks, Ms. Cooper. Mr. Poste’s European collection has far more extensive restoration projects than do I.”

  I didn’t think he was pointing the finger at other colleagues as much as he was highlighting how frustrating our search would be in an institution that apparently needed poisons to enliven the glorious holdings the public came to view.

  “May we have this copy of Ms. Grooten’s personnel file to take with us?” I asked.

  “I’ve reproduced the entire thing for you.”

  I opened it from the back and saw the letter of resignation first. It had been written on a word processor and dated December 24 of the previous year. In place of a signature was the capital letterK, drawn with a marker in almost a stick-figure print.

  “Is that how she usually signed things, not spelling out her whole name?”

  Bellinger took the document from my hand. “Straight and simple, just like that. She usually used both initials, but herG was more Gothic, if you will.” He closed his eyes as if to call up an image of her signature. “TheG would have been harder to imitate, come to think of it, if someone else did the writing.”

  I hadn’t suggested that the letter wasn’t written by Grooten. “Why would you think she didn’t write this herself?”

  “I-uh, I don’t know. When did she die? I just mean she never came back to work after the twentieth, if I’m not wrong. Maybe she’d already been murdered, and the killer wrote this so I wouldn’t be worried about her disappearance.”

  “And were you?”

  “I was out of town that entire period, visiting my in-laws for the holidays. I never knew Katrina had quit until I returned in January. She was gone, and I thought she had left the country. There wasn’t much I could do about it until she sent me a forwarding address, as that letter said she would do once she got set up at home.”

  “Did she have a computer when she was working here?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “With an e-mail address?” I could see where Mike was going.

  “So far as I know, the only e-mail address Katrina had was through the museum system. You’ll see in her file some correspondence that arrived for her after she left for South-” He caught himself. “After she resigned. We bought an entire new computer system, hardware and software, which was installed after the first of the year.

  “When they dismantled Katrina’s equipment, I authorized the head of our management information systems to go into her account with her password, to make sure that nothing had come in for her that was related to museum business.”

  “Did they find anything?”

  “Minor correspondence, really. There were a few responses to requests for materials from museums overseas. We’ve got a good number of objects out on loan that she wanted to see photographs of, for their possible inclusion in the bestiary show. I forwarded those to the committee she had been working with. Gaylord, Friedrichs, Poste, and the others.”

  “Anything personal?”

  “Those should be in that packet you’re holding. A bunch of Christmas and New Year’s greetings from people she knew, here and abroad.”

  I opened the file from the front this time, to skim through it to find those letters. I was arrested by the photograph of the young woman that appeared on the museum identification tag dated almost three years ago. The contrast to the Polaroid that had been taken the night we found the body was stunning. Grooten had smiled at the camera when she first came to work here, her face fuller and her light brown hair alive with chestnut streaks, as bouncy as a commercial for a home permanent.

  I twisted the folder and showed the shot to Mercer, who shook his head.

  “Something wrong?” Bellinger asked.

  “I hadn’t seen her before, except the photographs made the night before last. I realize this was taken a few years ago, but is it a pretty good likeness?”

  Bellinger reached across and looked at Grooten. “A very good one. Until last fall. That’s when she began losing weight and developed that awful pallor.”

  Mike pulled the more recent picture from his jacket pocket.

  Bellinger looked at it and again closed his eyes. “It’s not the way I like to think of her, but it’s certainly how she began to look by October.”

  Perhaps Thibodaux hadn’t been lying to us. It was hard to imagine the physical transformation this young woman had undergone in the short months before her death.

  “How about her apartment?” Mercer asked. “Did you ever check there to see what happened to her belongings?”

  “My wife and I went to see the super in-let me think-it must have been the middle of January. When she was ten days late with that month’s rent, he called the museum. No one in his small building had seen her in weeks, and my secretary said she had resigned to leave the country. He cleaned out the apartment and rented it again before-”

  Mike interrupted. “How about her things? Her belongings?”

  “Katrina hadn’t accumulated much stuff. He figured she just bolted on her last month’s rent. She left no forwarding information, so the super held a tag sale in the building to get rid of what he could, and threw everything else out on the sidew
alk.”

  Mike was thinking about potential evidence. I imagined the possessions of the young woman’s life, meager as they were. Family photographs, treasured art books, perhaps an heirloom-a ring or bracelet that had belonged to an ancestor or friend. All discarded or sold for a few weeks of back rent in a cheap tenement building by a landlord who didn’t think to question her disappearance.

  “This work that Katrina did, with medieval tombs and their sculpture, what was it exactly?” Mike asked. “Did shewant to do that, or did you assign it to her?”

  “It was the specialty she chose, Detective.”

  “Grim, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Not as grim as your job, Mr. Chapman. That’s what most people in my line of work would think. Would you like to see what she was doing here? I can show you on our way out.”

  Mercer took the Grooten file and we followed Bellinger back to the elevators and downstairs. Clouds were forming above us, casting shadows over the crosswalks in the cloistered garden. As we reentered the building on the far side from the tower, nearly every archway in the arcade seemed covered with fantastic animals.

  “She loved those, Ms. Cooper. I’d often see Katrina out here, no matter how cold or wet the day, sketching these odd beasts.” He saw me slow my step to look up at the stone menagerie. “That’s a manticore-a man’s face, lion’s body, and a scorpion’s tail. Quite a combination, eh? And she’d had a cast made of that pelican, to use in the big exhibit. It pierces its own breast so that its blood, falling on its dead brood, can bring them back to life.”

  We walked behind him into a two-story building at the southwest corner of the museum property. Mike whispered to me, “It looks like a stone deadhouse.”

  I shivered at the sound of the words, an old name for a morguelike place where bodies are stored, and shuddered again at the cold interior of the Gothic chapel. Everywhere I looked, against each wall and in the middle of the room, were funereal monuments.

  Bellinger clearly felt at home. “By the eleventh century, it had become quite fashionable in Europe for noblemen to commemorate themselves and their families with carved effigies. These tomb sculptures are what Katrina studied, back in France. Famous masons of the time would plan and execute these, including details of the patron’s coat of arms and the particular costumes and possessions of their ladies.”