“We keeping you?”
“On the contrary, Mr. Chapman. Just to let you know some of us will be here working late as well, in case that’s helpful to you.”
We had caught the attention of some of the staffers, and they were all probably too curious to leave when they stood the chance of seeing in which direction we might be moving.
He closed the door behind him and Mike spoke: “Damn. Looks like he’ll try to outlast us. This could change the evening’s plan.”
“I’ve been through this twice,” Mercer said. “Only name I recognize is Herbert Gerst.”
“A private vault?”
“This doesn’t show any such thing. Looks like he accounts for two of the elephants, a load of mammals-okapi, elands, and every other endangered species you can think of-and a whole bunch of crawling things that should be in little glass jars. But they’re spread out all over the museum.”
“And I’ve circled places where I think you could find arsenic,” I said, “starting with the taxidermy department. I suppose I should let Dr. Kestenbaum go through these lists, too. I have no idea where else to search for it.”
“Hey, it never occurred to any of us that the damn stuff was being used for so many different purposes in either museum. Somebody’s gonna have to account for all of it.”
My beeper went off and it was Harry Hinton’s number. I called him from the phone on the desk. “We’re on the way,” he said, “and Ryan’s still working on a court order for the computer interception. Maybe we’ll have it up and running for you by morning.”
“No luck for tonight?”
“Nah. Jumped on it too late.”
“Mercer will meet you at the corner of Columbus Avenue and Seventy-seventh Street in fifteen minutes. Tell Clem I’ll run interference inside.”
Mike kept poring over the interior layouts and contrasting the areas that we had accounted for as either open display space or rooms we had seen when Zimm had taken us through the place last week. Mercer and I took the elevator down to the ground floor. We showed our identification to the guard and told him Mercer was going out to meet another detective, but would return right away.
The man was slumped back in his chair, the brim of his cap pulled down on his forehead with his eyes glued to a science fiction magazine. The small black-and-white monitors on the stand beside him showed the entrances and exits within the network of courtyards behind us; twilight was descending, making it even more difficult to distinguish between the various gray walls of the abutting structures.
I thought of making small talk to distract him, in case he might recognize Clem from her days of employment here, but he was as oblivious to me as he was to the television screens he was supposed to be viewing. I turned my back to him to be certain the long, highceilinged corridor was still empty. The poor lighting forced me to squint to see beyond midway, but the cavernous space would clearly make footsteps audible if anyone approached.
Minutes later, Mercer and Clem jogged toward the doorway. My square-badged companion, nose-deep in aliens and space pods, was grateful when I told him I’d swing open the door for my partners without needing his help. He waved me toward it and kept reading. Walking briskly on either side of our petite charge, Mercer and I led her around to the first elevator bank we came to and disappeared from view of the guard’s watch station.
When we reached the last leg of the walk back to our small room, I left Mercer and Clem at the entrance to the hallway. Passing the open door where Mike was at work, I continued on to Mamdouba’s corner turret. The door was closed, but I could hear voices inside. I gave the two of them a signal to come ahead to the mollusk room, then followed them in, locking the door behind me. The three of us rearranged ourselves in the cramped space to make room for Clem to sit. She had been glad for the short break, having showered and eaten a light dinner from the room service menu.
“Will this hold you guys?” She dumped out the contents of a small shopping bag. “Hope the city can afford the bill. It was all in the room, and I figured you might get hungry.”
I laughed as Mike grabbed the glass jar of pistachios and Mercer reached for a couple of candy bars. I opened the bag of M amp;M’s and washed them down with a few gulps from a can of soda that the three of us shared. We left the minibar bottles of scotch and vodka for the end of our night’s routine.
“That’s using your brain. I thought I’d have to eat bugs. C’mon,” Mike said, flattening the creased floor plans with which he’d been familiarizing himself, pointing to the basement areas surrounding the joint exhibition offices. “Make yourself useful. Can you give us any more specifics about what’s kept in these rooms?”
She talked us through some of the places where she had worked, guiding us with the capped tip of a pen. “It’s deceptive. See this? It’s a wall that separates two buildings. From the main floor it flows through like it’s connected, but from where you’re looking? You can’t get there from here.”
“Maybe we ought to go see these places,” I said. “It’ll give us a better sense of how we’ll have to maneuver and what to specify when I draft a warrant.”
“Let Mercer stay here with Clem, going over the rooms. Start figuring out where the bones are for us. You and I’ll check out this part of the basement. See if anyone’s still around.”
I heard the click of the lock as Mercer closed the door behind us. We paused for a minute, and listened to the shrill voice of a woman, coming from Mamdouba’s anteroom. I couldn’t recognize from its pitch whether it was Eve Drexler, Anna Friedrichs, or the curator’s assistant, who had stayed after hours.
Mike and I took the elevator to the lobby. The glass eyes of dozens of wild beasts, frozen in the safe confines of their dioramas, seemed to follow us down the vast corridor that led away from the museum’s southwest corner toward the basement entrance Zimm had used to lead us downstairs on earlier visits.
Clem was right. The place was eerie at night. Vast spaces followed after one another with every turn and change in direction, each one dimly lit at best. Elegantly detailed Art Deco light globes suspended from ceilings on brass chains had the look and effectiveness of another era.
Every thirty feet or so, a modern fluorescent fixture had been stuck in place, looking like something you’d see in a bus station rest room.
We descended down the dismal staircase to the section of the basement we had seen before. Zimm was still at his desk, working on the computer, three jars of repulsive arachnids at his side.
“Mamdouba said you might be down. Anything I can help with?”
I had my legal pad and pen ready to take notes. “Just back for some detail we missed. You alone down here?”
“Nope. Lights are still on. I think we’ve got a full house tonight.” He smiled at Mike and me. “You’re sure stirring up some excitement.”
We avoided the exhibition offices and headed to the far end of the hallway. Doorway after doorway, I sketched a record of whether the rooms were open or locked, what form of animal specimen seemed to be floating in the jars on the shelves, and what the climate conditions were.
Where had poor Katrina Grooten’s body been stored all these months? The possible options were overwhelming. I made a note to pin down Dr. Kestenbaum for a date to come back to take temperature controls to help determine the most likely surroundings for the creation of an “Incorruptible.”
For more than an hour we worked our way in and out of small storage rooms and smaller laboratories. Each time we reached a fork in the road, I’d take one side and Mike the other, agreeing to meet back at the intersection in fifteen minutes. We worked our way through three separate basement areas without any findings of significance.
By the time we got to the fourth subbasement, I was beginning to feel at home with the chemical odors, artificial lights, and countless numbers of dead things that filled every shelf, drawer, and closet.
“Your call, Coop,” Mike said, reading from a small sign on the wall in front of us after he pulled a
hanging string to turn on an overhead bulb. “Wasps and winged things to the left. Dinosaur fossils to the right.”
“No bugs for me.”
“They’re not alive.”
“No bugs, period. I owe you, okay? There’s no choice here.”
I started down the narrow corridor to my right, trying the doors and finding several of them locked. The fifth knob gave easily, and I groped along the wall till I found the light switch.
This hallway had possibilities. Here was a room labeledBarosaurus Femurs, with leg bones larger than tree stumps. A quick scan suggested nothing small enough to be human, but I could not reach the higher shelves or see their contents. I marked it on my pad for a return visit.
Door after door yielded similar fossilized parts. Some rooms were all dinosaur heads, with hollow eye sockets four feet in diameter and horned nostrils that stood taller than my waist. Others had nothing but vertebrae lined up end to end. It would be hard to discern, without an expert guide, whether any other species remains had been mixed in with these antiquities.
I reached the end of the gray hallway and pushed against the last door, meeting with resistance as I did. It opened slowly, operating on a rusty old air pump hinged on the wall behind it. I leaned against the door to secure it in place while I studied the contents of the room. This one stored even smaller bones, and I walked to a rack against the far wall to study a tag that appeared to have some written description on it.
As I bent over to read it, hoping the bare bulb from the far end of the hallway would provide enough light for me, the door came loose from its anchored position. I heard a loud whooshing sound as it sprung away from the wall and slammed shut, leaving me alone in the confined space with a century’s accumulation of dust-covered animal skeletons.
I tried to tell myself that I was too tired to be upset. I talked to myself like a mother calming a six-year-old child. They’re just bones, I kept repeating, as I tried to get my bearings and make my way back to the door in the dark. There’s nothing in here to hurt me. I’m in a museum, the most child-friendly museum in the world, and my favorite policeman is fifty yards away.
I reached out to hold on to a shelf to help me feel my way back to the exit. I brushed against the rough surface of a ragged piece of cartilage and moved my hand upward to grasp the cool steel of the rack instead. Inching along step by step, I startled myself when I struck a glass object, banging it against something else.
It was a large glass jar.
Shit. I stopped in my tracks. Like dominoes, the jar I hit had knocked against its neighbor, rattling the one behind it until another in the next row toppled on its side and broke. The noxious fluid inside splashed to the floor, releasing both a foul smell and whatever pickled creatures had been sleeping inside.
Now panic set in. I looked up at the shelves over my head. Dozens and dozens of mason jars lined the walls above me. The only light in the room was the iridescence emitted by the bright pink dye that illuminated all of the bottled skeletal remains. Some kind of prehistoric crawlers were in those bottles, unidentifiable wet specimens that glowed against the darkness of the room.
I took another step forward, sliding on the slippery substance from the broken jars that coated the floor. Two more steps and I heard a crunching noise below my heel, as though I was walking on some kind of hard-shelled insect. My foot slipped on the wet slime, and again I grabbed for the shelf. The entire rack was on wheels and it rattled wildly as my bug phobia took firm hold.
I reached out my left hand to feel for the door, still clutching the end of the metal shelves. I gripped the knob when I found it and pulled hard with both hands. It wouldn’t give. Stay calm, I told myself. It was hard to open from the other side, so now it’s just stuck again. I yanked with all my strength, my hands greasy from the sweat I was working up. I couldn’t budge the knob in either direction.
I felt along the side of the door for a light switch. Nothing. There was no fresh air in the room, and some sightless fossil with a prickly snout and a snakelike body was eye level with me, daring me to rescue both of us from this claustrophobic cell.
Patting the pockets of my jacket and pants was another useless gesture. I opened the lid on my cell phone and powered it up, but was unable to dial any number from this black hole in the museum basement. I used the point of my pen to try to jimmy the catch on the lock, but it was way too old and sticky to respond.
Feeling behind me, I stepped back and began to scream for Mike. I yelled as loud as I could, kicking against the door like Shirley Denzig had done at my garage the night before. I stopped yelling and listened for the sound of footsteps, but the walls were so thick that I doubted he could hear me any better than I could hear him.
Now the fumes from the liquid I’d released were filling the room. I mustn’t get dizzy, I told myself. I did not want to be down on this floor with whatever had dripped out of the large jar, that much I knew.
Turning in place, I looked again to the far end of the space. In the ghoulish pink glow I could make out the square design of a small window high on the wall that might give out onto the courtyard. It was covered with a shade, and too tiny to get through, but if I could break it open it would give me some air and maybe someone would hear my shouts.
Behind me, I thought I heard the doorknob rattle. I spun around, stepped toward it and yelled Mike’s name again as loud as I could. Nothing. Had I imagined the noise?
I wiped the sweat from my forehead but the thought was already planted in my brain: What if this was no accident? What if we had surprised the killer by coming down to the basement tonight? What if he-or she-had trapped me in this room after I walked in alone, and then gone back to do something even worse to Mike? What if Mike never got here to open this door?
I moved to rest my back on the rack but I landed against it harder than I had intended. It rocked and swayed, and the small set of wheels on the end closest to me spun off and whirled across the room. The shelves slanted downward, and everything hurtled to the floor.
Glass jars crashed and split into pieces, spraying their contents all over the floor. The odor was unbearable, and I coughed and choked on the fumes as they rose from beneath me and invaded my mouth and nose. I was almost panting because of my fear, and the faster the breaths came, the more the odor was drawn into my nostrils and throat.
Animal bones slid off the shelves and over my head and shoulders. I took three steps toward the window and reached up to brush something out of my hair.
Beetles. Thousands of beetles had been stored in the jars and now littered the room, some of them landing on my body as they fell. I choked again, this time fighting back the urge to be sick.
What had Zimm told us? Beetles were used all over the museum to eat the flesh off dead specimens. These must have been sealed into jars with their last meals, then left to rot on dusty trays in the deserted room.
The rational spirit within me kept saying that someone would surely find me before daylight. My other internal voice reminded me that whoever had slammed the door shut would be back to finish me off, if these awful creatures didn’t do it first.
I walked as carefully as I could toward the wall with the window. Beneath it was a metal tank, the same kind of enormous vat that Zimm had shown us-the kind in which the prehistoric fish had been stored in its alcohol bath. Would the lid of that tank support me so that I could climb up onto it and try to break open a pane of the small glass opening behind the window shade?
Again the jiggling sound of the doorknob, and this time, with renewed urgency, I froze in place and screamed, “Michael! Mike Chapman. Get me out of here. I can’t breathe.”
Exquisite silence. I coughed and gagged on the dreadful smell that permeated my clothing and everything else in the room.
I pressed on the lid of the six-foot-long tank. It felt like a thin layer of stainless steel, and I was concerned about putting my weight on top of it. I could make out the label affixed to it because of the oversize lettering in bright red
ink. There was a skull and crossbones with the wordsFIRE HAZARD.
Of course it was a fire hazard. A tank that big full of alcohol to serve as a preservative would be enough to light up the west side of town. Add that to my list of ways to kill someone in this museum.
I looked back up at the window. These were double-glazed, we had been told, as another climate control. I had nothing except the wooden heel of my shoe with which to try to break one of the panes. So far, I had managed to destroy everything else made of glass. I might as well take a shot at this.
Before removing a shoe and exposing my foot to whatever was slopping around on the floor, I lifted the lid of the container to see how sturdy its support would be. I didn’t need to drown myself in ethyl alcohol.
I removed a tissue from my jacket pocket, as a precaution, and covered my mouth as I opened the vat. But there was no strong smell of alcohol at all, so I used both hands to rest the top against the wall.
The pink iridescence above my head highlighted something gray inside the box. I bent over to see what was there. I gazed at the face of a small mummified head.
37
I let the lid drop back into place and decided to take my chances that it would hold me. I didn’t believe in the mummy’s curse but there were way too many dead things in this room to keep me from losing control before too long. Hoisting myself onto the end of the vat’s closed surface, I pulled off my shoes and stood atop it in my bare feet.
Pushing the faded shade to the side, I raised my hand and began to bang away at the windowpane. It seemed like nothing short of a sledgehammer would have any effect.
Again there was a noise at the door. I poised myself, arm in the air with my weapon aimed at it. The door opened and the light in the hallway reflected off the top of Mike Chapman’s black hair.
“You getting high from these fumes, blondie? I got a box of Krazy Glue I can give you to take home. What the-”
The Bone Vault Page 34