The Bone Vault

by Linda Fairstein

“Somebody locked me in here!”

  “Will you get down from there? What are you doing by that window? You can’t kill yourself by jumpingup from the basement to the courtyard. Save your strength.”

  “The missing princess-the mummy from the sarcophagus that Katrina was in? She’s in this vat.”

  “You afraid she’s gonna walk? That why you’re standing up there, looking like something scared the crap out of you? C’mon, let’s get going. Get off that thing.”

  “I can’t.”

  “What do you mean you can’t? Let’s go.”

  “Look at the floor, Mike.”

  “This room’s a mess. Must be some kind of lab. How can you stand it in here with that smell?”

  “I broke those jars. It’s not a lab. It wasn’t like that when I got in here.”

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “I didn’t do it. I didn’t mean to do it. Someone locked me in here.”

  “What are you talking about? The door wasn’t locked. It was just tight. I had to lean all my weight against it, but I don’t have a key.”

  “Didn’t you hear me screaming the first two times you tried the door? You should have let me know you were there.”

  “What first two times? I just came down here looking for you now, ‘cause you weren’t back at the staircase where we said we’d meet. I gave you an extra ten minutes, then just started trying all the doors. This was the last one.”

  “I’m telling you that someone closed me in here, then came back and locked the door. I heard them jiggling the handle, I swear to you. I’m not crazy.”

  He walked toward me, crunching broken glass and beetle shells on his way. “These creepy crawlies got to you, Coop. It was just your imagination. Zimm and I were the only ones over here.”

  “Zimm? We left him in the other building.”

  “Yeah, but he decided to catch up with us. See if he could be useful. I sent him back.”

  Somebody had been playing with the door when I was locked inside. Why had Zimm followed us here? “It’s not my imagination. I’m not moving till you tell me you believe me.”

  Mike stood in front of me, reaching up to grab my legs behind my knees. “I forgot my cape. We’ll do it fireman’s carry and not Sir Walter Raleigh style. Forgive me.”

  He lifted me over his shoulder and across the littered floor, my shoes in hand, to the hallway. Then he went back inside and looked into the steel container.

  “Egyptian princess. Twelfth Dynasty. That girl just can’t find a quiet place to sleep. C’mon, I need to clean you up before we go upstairs.”

  I took Mike’s hand and let him lead me down the corridor. There was a men’s room next to the stairwell and he took me inside.

  He ran cold water, soaked a paper towel in it, and began to wipe my face and hands. “It’s a bad night when a broad a couple of thousand years older than you looks better than you do.”

  I bent my head toward him and shook it at him. “I’m getting used to that fact. Anything stuck there? Any b-”

  “Clean as a whistle.” He handed me his comb and I ran it through my hair.

  “I know you think I’m exaggerating, but I’m telling you the truth.”

  “Later, kid. We got people waiting for us upstairs. And now I gotta call crime scene and get them working on the mummy. And you,” he said, tugging on a strand of my hair, “you’re not out of my sight for a nanosecond, got it?”

  I nodded and walked up the dingy staircase in front of him.

  Retracing our path to the fourth floor, I knocked on the door and identified myself to Mercer. He opened it and told me that Mamdouba wanted to talk to me. He had come to ask me a question and expressed his annoyance that I was down in the basement with Mike.

  Mike walked to the turret with me and held the door for me to go into Mamdouba’s office. The curatorial director was standing at the window, having pulled himself up to full height and assumed the most clipped, formal version of his manner.

  “Inasmuch as I have been gracious enough to be your host, in President Raspen’s absence, and inasmuch as I have cooperated with you in every way possible, I think it is extremely rude-to say the very least-that you have brought Miss Clementine Qisukqut into this museum tonight.”

  Mamdouba raised his finger to shake at me. He was furious. “Police business, that I have great respect for. Trusting you and your detectives is one thing. But sneaking in here with a former employee who was discharged from this institution-discharged because of her untrustworthiness, her calumny-well,this, I tell you, Miss Cooper, withthis you have broken every rule. Your little trick on me is over. You’ll have to go. At once.”

  My apologies were lame and unsuccessful. I tried to interrupt to tell him that we had just found the mummy from the sarcophagus, but Mamdouba wouldn’t be distracted from his tirade. The more I tried to excuse our ruse, the angrier he became.

  “But you even joked about the fact that she was coming to town.”

  “To town, perhaps. To my museum, without my permission-no.”

  I wanted to know who had blown Clem’s cover. I didn’t think the leak was all that serious, since Clem’s e-mails to some in the museum group had suggested that she might arrive in Manhattan that very night, but Mamdouba’s discovery certainly foiled our plans for the rest of the night. He wouldn’t tell me anything.

  “Bring your Trojan horses in here, madam. Now that you’ve made a fool of me, let me tell them what to expect from this point forward.”

  I wasn’t sure whether to move.

  “Get your friends,” he barked. “It’s almost ten o’clock. I’d like to go home.Get them!”

  He stood in the doorway of his anteroom and watched Mike and me walk back the short distance as though it were a gangplank. I opened the door and gave Mercer and Clem the word that someone had spotted her, and that Mamdouba was waiting to rap our knuckles and kick us out into the night.

  Clem caught up with me as we walked toward the corner office. “Don’t blame yourself. I’m sure it’s my fault. I was getting a little frisky with those last e-mails. I’ll let you read them. I think I was too excited to exercise much caution. Zimm probably figured out I was already here. He may have thought he had to blow the whistle on me, for his own sake.”

  The four of us took our places in the curator’s circular turret. Clem spoke first. “This is not the way I hoped to come back, Mr. Mamdouba. I think you know how much respect I have for this great museum, for the work of my colleagues, for-”

  The bantam administrator wanted no explanations. He gave Clem a tongue-lashing for her unauthorized entry into the facility from which she had been banned months ago. I broke in to try to convince him that she had only come at my urging, at my direction. Mike jumped in to defend me, and only Mercer stood with calm reserve, behind Clem’s chair, his powerful hands on her tiny shoulders.

  “This will mark the end of your comings and goings, Miss Cooper.” Mamdouba crushed the subpoena and threw it in the wastebasket.

  “May I have a moment with you?” I motioned to the anteroom. I did not want to be discussing witnesses and evidence in front of Clem, but I wanted to impress upon the director of curatorial affairs the kind of access we needed from him and why we had taken the chance that we did. Traipsing through his displays in the daytime, with dozens of police officers in the midst of hundreds of schoolchildren, would be far less appealing than our clumsy efforts to operate more discreetly after dark. He also needed to know about our discovery in the basement, which we hadn’t disclosed to Clem.

  I followed him out to the anteroom and closed the door behind us, for privacy. I made my pitch and explained how the search warrants would have to be executed, and what other requests I would make to the grand jury to compel his cooperation, but he had reached the end of his very short rope. The subpoena was only a piece of paper. He could rip it up and throw it away, but we still had the power to hold him in contempt.

  “This is an institution of science, Miss Cooper. Make y
our case somewhere else. Go back to the Metropolitan. That’s where the dead girl worked, no? You have abused the privilege of being inside our walls, madam.” The little man was screaming now.

  The door opened behind me and both Mike and Mercer joined us in the anteroom. Mike was ready for an argument while Mercer, as usual, took the diplomatic approach. He backed me away with a motion of his arm, and I took a seat on a nearby sofa to let him cool Mamdouba down.

  “Ms. Cooper’s been known to step in shit from time to time. Maybe this wasn’t her brightest idea,” Mike said, “but we’re trying to solve a murder without shutting your doors to the public.”

  “You’d have absolutely no reason to do that. No right. We won’t stand for it. You don’t even know where this girl died. All you have is a body somewhere in New Jersey.” He lowered himself into the chair at his assistant’s desk and wiped the sweat from the back of his neck.

  “And a coat check from a cold day last December, right here in your lobby. And maybe enough arsenic to finish off every one of us. Let’s all be sensible,” Mercer said. “Why don’t we work out a schedule that meets with your approval. We’d like to keep you on our side, sir, okay?”

  The two detectives outlined the way they wanted to proceed. Mamdouba was too agitated to listen closely. There would be no way to work out an agreement tonight.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Wallace. It’s very late, I’m quite tired, and I need to speak to the president herself before I can give you an answer.” He got up and walked to the door of his office, standing back as he pulled it open so we could go in and claim our trespassing Inuit.

  I stood at the entrance and looked inside the perfectly round room. No one was there. Clementine Qisukqut had vanished.

  38

  Elijah Mamdouba brushed past me and strode to the center of his suite. He swept around and shook his fist at me. “Your fault, Miss Cooper. Enough games.”

  I was dumbfounded. My heart was pounding and my head ached as if it were caught in a vise. It was as if two people were staring at a picture and seeing entirely different things: I knew something terrible had happened to Clem, while the director assumed she was the cause of the trouble.

  Mercer raced in and started for the first of four doors that were set back into the walls of the room.

  “Don’t touch that, Detective.” Again, Mamdouba was shouting at us. “She’s playing with all of us. You step into the tiger’s lair and you are surprised when the tiger bites you? We had no reason to trust Miss Clementine, and neither did you.”

  It was as though her disappearance had relieved him of all the tension the evening’s events had created. He leaned forward, hands on his thighs, and broke into the heartiest of belly laughs.

  Mercer opened the first door only to find an empty coat closet, wire hangers on hiatus until the chill of fall returned. He pulled at the next knob to reveal a small bathroom, toilet and sink.

  Mike was livid. “What the hell are you laughing about? Where’s the girl?” He crossed the room and turned another handle. Pitch black. He stepped forward into the darkness and reemerged immediately. “Where are the lights?”

  “She’s run away on you, Mr. Chapman. There’s the devil in that-”

  Mike poked his head into the opening and yelled Clem’s name. “It’s a goddamn stairwell, Mercer. I can’t see a friggin‘ thing in there.”

  He backed up around the large desk and bumped into Mamdouba, sticking him in the chest with his forefinger. “I don’t give a fat rat’s ass if Teddy Roosevelt falls off his horse and the animals come alive in their cages. Get every guard in this place on his feet, sound whatever kind of alarm you’ve got, get me a handful of flashlights, and tell me where the hell these stairs go. Coop, go back and get the floor plans. Hoof it.”

  Mercer was on Mamdouba’s phone with the chief of detectives’ office. “Get Emergency Services here. Send me some patrol cars. Close off the streets around the museum… Theywhat? Don’t tellme they can’t. They do it to blow up Snoopy and those rubber cartoon characters for the Thanksgiving Day parade. Shut it down tighter than a crab’s ass. You got subway entrances north and south of the place. Block ‘em off.”

  I ran back to our workroom and grabbed the maps off the top of the desk.

  “What’s wrong with you, man? Why the hell didn’t you tell us there’s a secret staircase in there? You think Clem came over here from London to play games? Someone grabbed her right from under our noses. Use your brain.” Mike stormed back to the staircase. “What does this lead to and who had access to it?”

  Mamdouba was in his fourth mood swing of the night. The displeasure that had turned to defiance and then briefly become hysteria had now sobered to misery. “It’s not a secret. There’s no reason for anyone to know about it. It’s, uh, it’s vestigial.”

  “I left my thesaurus at the station house. Help me.”

  Mamdouba had called the security command center and alarms were screeching overhead and echoing in the vast hallways beyond.

  “Vestigial.Useless, like your appendix. Built a century ago, when these corner towers were constructed. They’ve been out of use ever since elevators were put in. The steps are narrow and dark and dangerous. Nobody uses them.”

  Now Mercer was talking to the head of the hostage negotiation squad: “That’s the point. We don’t know who’s got her or where she is. It’s not premature. You damn well better have a team up here because if we find the girl and she’s alive, I’m gonna need all the help I can get. Pronto.”

  Three guards rushed into the room, the leader looking to Mamdouba for information and direction.

  “That flashlight. Toss it,” Mike said.

  “Do it.” Mamdouba nodded his head.

  Mercer took another flashlight out of the second guard’s hand and threw it to me, grabbing a third for himself.

  “I’m going up. You go down,” Mike said to Mercer. I started to follow them into the darkened stairwell but Mike shouted at me to go back. “You’re only trouble, blondie. Stay here with the guards and man the phone. Chief of D’s on the way.”

  Mamdouba was playing with a panel of light switches on the landing. I could hear the click as he flipped them but no lights came on.

  His office had erupted into total chaos as guards responded from stations all around the museum. The one who seemed to be their leader was giving them orders to fan out and start scouring every crevice of the building, looking for a short, dark-skinned woman with black hair. They were not licensed to carry weapons, so most of them had only their flashlights in hand.

  Within minutes, three patrol cars had arrived at the museum. A uniformed sergeant and three cops were the first to get to Mamdouba’s office. “Hey, Al, what gives?”

  “You know anything about the murder investigation, the girl who was found-?”

  “Chapman’s case? Seen it in the papers. Body in the back of the truck somewhere in Jersey. You caught the guy tonight? Who’s missing?”

  I gave them the briefest version of the events to get them going. The sergeant sent two guys to follow Mercer and Mike, while he and his driver remained with me.

  “What’s her ‘scrip?”

  I tried to be patient as I told them what Clem looked like, so they could send out a radio broadcast to the other officers arriving at the museum, as well as to those patrolling the neighborhood.

  “Name?”

  I spelled it for him while the driver took notes.

  “Odd one.”

  “Inuit.”

  “What?”

  “Eskimo.”

  “APB the North Pole, Al.” The sergeant laughed, as concerned about the situation as Mamdouba had been at first.

  Mike and a young cop came back into the room. “You want to get reamed at Compstat next month, Paddy? Stand here making stupid friggin‘ jokes while you’re about to notch up one more murder count in your precinct. Get me every man available in Manhattan North.”

  “Now you’re joking. It’s just a museum.”
<
br />   “You ever been up on five, Coop? Or beyond it, to the attic?”

  I shook my head in the negative as Mike went on. “We’re gonna tear it apart upstairs. You won’t believe what it looks like. You could rent out rooms to a dozen people and no one would know they’re living up there. Or dead. There’s a zillion cubbyholes and lockers and cases. Where’s Mercer? Anyone with Mercer? Call him, Coop.”

  I dialed his phone from Mamdouba’s desk and was sent into his voice mail. He must have reached the basement already, where his cell phone wouldn’t work. I tried Zimm’s extension and got no answer.

  “Do you know who else is working in the basement?” I asked Mamdouba.

  “Several of the team were here until an hour ago. Gaylord, Poste, Bellinger, Friedrichs. They were all up here. But it’s late, they may be gone. Zimm, I told him not to leave until he heard from me, in case I needed any last-minute errands completed tonight.”

  Mike was giving orders to NYPD cops, who were arriving in pairs every five minutes or so, and to the bewildered security guards. “You see anything alive and moving under this roof, corral him or her and bring ‘em…”

  He looked at me, not knowing what to say.

  “IMAX theater. Off the main lobby.”

  “Paddy.” He turned his attention to the sergeant. “Interns, grad students, science dorks, janitors. Nobody leaves. What did they see, what did they hear? Bones. I want anyone who knows where the bones are.”

  Mamdouba muttered softly, “They are everywhere, Mr. Chapman. Upstairs and down.”

  The sergeant had a police walkie-talkie and was communicating with his men on the street. “Somebody at every entrance, every doorway. Dumpsters in the courtyard, check ‘em. Flood the place with whoever shows up.”

  “Can you turn off that damn system already?” Mike was on the phone with headquarters again. The internal alarms had been clanging for twenty minutes. If there was anyone who had not realized there was an emergency, he had already met the taxidermists.

  Mercer was practically panting when he came back into the office. “Door from the staircase doesn’t open on three. On two is an office like this one. Lock must be a hundred years old. Shouldered into it and it gave way. Dusty, empty, nothing in the closets except bottles full of lizards. First floor’s a bookshop. Took it all the way down to the basement.”