The solid plank felt good beneath my feet. I glided out onto it, clutching the side rails with all the strength in my hands, and moved forward by planting heel in front of toe in a regular cadence.
The first stretch was the most unsettling, from the wall more than twenty feet across to the first block of storerooms. The open space below me was more than twice that height.
I paused to look down at the tops of the structures below. Some appeared to be permanent fixtures, sizable rooms that must have been built into the original architectural plans for the storage of items and artifacts not on display. They were topped by strips of wooden board, and although it was impossible to see whole objects in between the slats from this distance above them, I could make out the shapes of large, dark masses as well as the occasional glimpse of something that contrasted with that, something light. The whiteness of bones was what it looked like to me.
I propelled myself ahead, stopped, and noted that there were other, more modern cabinets-gray metal lockers that looked like they had been added as the collections outgrew the original design space.
Then I was out over open hallway again, clinging to my side railings and measuring my steps. Storerooms and cabinets. More open corridor. Storerooms and-
I froze over the third cluster of storage rooms. I looked down. Shadows and opaque radiance coming through the skylights that dotted the eaves above me danced atop all the surfaces I saw below. I steadied myself with both hands and crouched lower.
I was sure of it now. It wasn’t the flutter of white clouds or the brilliance of the moon from the skylights. It wasn’t the confusion of dozens of flashlight beams intersecting one another from the floor far beneath me.
Something had moved in the darkness. Something in one of the vaults.
40
“Stop panting and tell me how certain you are.”
I had managed to turn around and wriggle my way back to the ladder and down to Mike. “No question.”
“Could be rats you saw from up there.”
I thought of the last time I had spent a lonely night hunting down a killer. “Trust me, Mike. I know rats. That was no rat. It was definitely a big human.”
“One? Only one?”
“All I could see was one dark figure moving from one side of an enclosed space to another.”
Mike turned to a bright-eyed young cop who was standing behind him. “Want a gold shield? Go downstairs. First find Mercer Wallace. Detective, SVU. Big guy, blackest man you ever saw. Think Shaft. Tell him we got the perp up here. Then look for the highest-ranking boss you can lay your hands on. I want Emergency Services, hostage squad, medics. Everybody else stays downstairs. And one boss. Only one. Tell ‘em I said that. Come back. You’re gonna be my lackey for the rest of the night.”
He told Socarides to get down to Mamdouba’s office and remain there.
Taking me by the hand, a finger held up over his mouth telling me to keep quiet, Mike moved in the direction I had suggested, the third tier of storage rooms. He waved the men closest to that area away and settled us back into an alcove between cabinets to wait for Mercer.
We were face-to-face, inches apart, in the narrow space that separated two glass-fronted cabinets that were filled with shrunken heads, pulled from display decades ago. I put my hands on Mike’s chest, reaching up to whisper to him.
“What do you think you’re going to do?”
“You got any bright ideas? I don’t think. I’m saving my brain to donate to the museum. Thinking’s what they pay the bosses to do. That’s why I need Mercer here. Me? I’d just shoot the guy’s friggin‘ balls off, Clem or no Clem.”
“But if she’s alive-”
“That’s why I’m being so well-behaved. Let it quiet down until the hostage guys get here. Let him think I called off the dogs and he’s safe for the night.”
“Safe? Safe to do what?”
“Maybe he’ll try to use Clem as leverage to get out of there. Face it, Coop. The flip side is that maybe he’s already killed her. If he thinks we’re all in the dark and we’re figuring Clem was already sprung from the museum, or that just like Mamdouba thought, she was playing a game with us and disappeared on her own, he could walk out of here-leaving her body-and just stroll across the park to his office. Depends how delusional he is, what he thinks he pulled off.”
I bowed my head and pressed it against Mike’s shoulder.
“Cheer up, blondie. If she’s in there, we’ll get her out.” He sniffed a couple of times and I looked up. “It’s midnight and you still smell good. How come?” We were squeezed into tight quarters and he was trying to lighten me up.
“Eau de formaldehyde. Stuffed moose musk. Cartilage number five. Beetle juice. You’ve got a good nose.” I looked up at Mike. “Erik Poste?”
“That’s my best guess, too. Knows the museum inside out. Has his old man’s stash of bones here. Access to guns. Works with arsenic. Knew what Katrina and Clem were up to. Now all we have to figure out is why.”
The cops had stopped turning everything upside down and inside out. A calm was settling over the great, grim hall.
“You know what theJeopardy! question was tonight?”
We had missed it this evening, and Mike was offering me a distraction until Mercer got here.
“Category: ‘World-Class Thieves.’ I would have bet a thousand. You?”
“Double or nothing.” I gave him a wan smile. The storeroom was still now. Maybe I had been mistaken once again tonight.
“The answer is: ‘Jack Roland Murphy.’”
I shook my head.
Mike’s mouth was against my ear. “You gonna pay up? Look at that skylight, Coop. See it?”
He tilted my chin up toward the eaves. “Nineteen sixty-four. Miami Beach boy Murph the Surf climbed up the ledge of this old granite building and lowered himself right through that very hole in the roof to steal the Star of India-J. P. Morgan’s sapphire. It was the size of a golf ball, kid. Warm night, the alarm system was disarmed and the window was wide open. Just whacked the glass case with a claw hammer and the guards never even knew he was there. Probably the same guys who are working tonight. My pop worked the caper. You owe me two grand-”
I heard footsteps pounding far down the hallway. Mike stepped out of our alcove and held out his arm, commanding Mercer and the woman with him to stop. I recognized Kerry Schrager, from the DA’s squad, who had been trained recently for the hostage team.
“Don’t move a hair. I’ll explain.”
As soon as Mike walked away, I was convinced I heard scuffling in the small room. I listened for voices but heard none.
Within minutes, Mike, Mercer, and Kerry walked back to our staging area.
“Here’s how we work it, okay?” Mercer said. “Nice and easy. Kerry and I-”
Mike was itching to get started. “Tina Turner. ‘Proud Mary.’ I don’t do nothing nice and easy. I vote for rough. Where are the snipers?”
“On the roof.”
“Snipers?” I looked up again. “But we don’t know where Clem-”
“Exactly. They’re just sitting tight. We don’t know what kind of guns your man has in there. Case he gets crazy, we got firepower. We got Emergency Services at the top of the staircases on every side of the room, a medic with ‘em, and a boss in each corner. Kerry and I do the drill. We’re in charge. You two know more of the facts, so you stand by in case I need info.”
The first rule in hostage negotiation was establishing a perimeter. Sending one man or team in to work with the hostage taker, but having everyone else backed up at the ready.
“We think our pal in there is Erik Poste. D’you find anything in the basement to help connect this to him?” Mike asked Mercer.
“Arsenic?” I asked, fearing he may have used it again on Clem.
“Eve Drexler thinks she found the answer to that. Thibodaux did, actually,” Mercer said. “Looks like every time Bellinger submitted an order for arsenic for his work at the Cloisters, Erik Poste requisi
tioned a bit more of it for the restorations in his department at the Met.”
“He probably never even touched the stuff they’ve got in taxidermy over here, but he wanted it to look like someone fromthis museum could have been responsible for the poisoning,” Mike said. “So if he wasn’t expecting to see Clem tonight when he headed over here, he probably didn’t bring any of his private supply along with him.”
“We’re gonna give it a shot. Our method,” Mercer said, talking to Mike. “You gotta be patient and stay out of my way. We’ve never lost a life, and I’m not planning to start tonight.”
Mike kneeled on the floor and sketched out the exact location of the storeroom in which we thought Erik Poste was holed up. Mercer stood and turned away from us, and Kerry followed him down the narrow alleyway between compartments. The outlines of their bodies were swallowed up in the murky darkness, and all that stood out was the sharp scarlet lettering on the back of Kerry’s jacket:TALK TO ME.
The pair positioned themselves adjacent to the enclosed space, but not in front of it. “Mr. Poste,” I heard next, Mercer’s deep bass voice speaking softly and gently. “Erik? This is Mercer Wallace.”
No reply, no sound at all. The negotiator never refers to himself as a cop, never mentions rank. Never reveals the fact that there’s an arsenal backing him up.
But now there was movement behind us. I turned to look, and two men dressed in jet-black jumpsuits were climbing onto the catwalk. High-powered rifles were slung over their shoulders, and they kept walking-with far more confidence than I had evidenced-out over the spaces on either side of Mercer’s position. Snipers were inside the museum as well as above it.
Mercer squatted a bit closer to the storage area. “Erik. I want you to listen to me.” He needed to find a way to engage his target in a dialogue without striking the wrong nerve. It was a delicate task at best, and this one, with so many unknowns, was like sitting on a powder keg.
Mercer’s goal was to find out what had become of Clem. It would be one thing to force an end to Poste’s standoff if he was alone, but if he had Clem, and she was still alive, it would be an entirely different operation. He didn’t want to start his conversation with the subject of the body in the sarcophagus. There would be little way to fool Poste out of the knowledge that he was facing a life sentence for the murder of Katrina Grooten.
Develop an intimacy, Mercer had told me when I had asked him about how men and women were trained to do this work. Start by grounding the subject and connecting him to people and things he cared about, wanted to see again.
Mercer kept talking, even though there was no response from within the storeroom. “I’ve got a patrol officer bringing your wife over here, Erik. She wants to see you. She wants you to come out of there safe and sound. Nobody gets hurt, that’s the plan.”
Mike put his mouth to my ear. “What if he hates his wife, huh? That’d be the last straw for some guys I know. They’d just as soon blow their brains out than have to face the little woman after a night like this.”
Mercer went on speaking for more than ten minutes without any kind of response. He had been given enough of a briefing before he came upstairs to know what in this world meant something to Poste. “The kids, Erik. Think about your children.”
Still no sign of life.
“I’ve been talking to Mamdouba and he was telling me about your father, about the work he did in Africa, how brave he was. What a great character he was.”
Kerry backed up to where we were standing, toying with the small receiving device wrapped around her ear. Someone was transmitting information to her. She looked up and my eyes followed her glance.
One of the men on the catwalk was making motions with both of his hands. He looked like a mime, pretending to be lowering a rope to the ground. I couldn’t see anything dropping.
I held my hands out, palms upward, and mouthed to Kerry, “What’s going on?”
Mike put his mouth against my ear again and whispered. “Fiberoptic camera. It’s no thicker than a sewing needle. They can slip it between the slats on top of the storage room and we’ll be able to see what’s inside. Who’s with him, whether she’s-you know.”
Three minutes later, Kerry nodded her head and gave us a thumbs-up. “Clem’s there. Looks like she’s alive.” Information kept coming in from whoever was viewing the monitor at the command center within the museum. “She’s bound and gagged. Looks like gauze. No movement except her eyes.” She paused to receive more word. “Yeah, her eyes are open. She’s okay.”
No doubt the gauze was the same kind of old linen rag that had been wrapped, mummy fashion, around the body of Katrina Grooten.
“He’s got a pistol in his hand,” Kerry said, “and a rifle across his lap. He’s sitting next to the girl. He’s got her lying on the floor, hogtied from behind.”
“Can Mercer hear the commentary, too?”
“Exactly what I’m getting. It’s being relayed to both of us.”
The negotiators were not permitted to decide whether or when to take the door. These new high-tech devices took much of the guesswork out of the job. If the perp wasn’t cooperating, the chief of detectives would eventually make the call about whether to storm the storeroom or wait until fear, hunger, or exhaustion caused the bad guy to give in.
“Talk to me,” Mercer said again, calmly and evenly. “Talk to me, Erik. We’ve got to resolve this situation.”
Those three words were the squad’s motto for a good reason. They had to get the subject to open up. Find out what it is that would draw him out of the situation. If they could absorb him in conversation-sports, weather, stamp collecting, European paintings-they could keep him preoccupied, away from his captive, and they could eventually wear him down.
It had worked dozens of times, I knew. When it failed, the results were deadly.
Mercer focused on the work of Willem Van der Poste. Someone, maybe in a phone call to the wife, had suggested that Erik had idolized his late father. “Mamdouba’s got photographs in his office, Erik. Fascinating pictures of your father. Pictures of you as a young boy with him.”
It seemed to me that Mercer had talked for more than half an hour before he got a reaction of any kind. Poste didn’t speak a word until Mercer asked him to put down his guns.
“I know you’ve got them in there, Erik. You’re not going to shoot anyone. You want to tell me what we can do to bring you out of there?”
“You all figure I won’t use the guns, do you?”
The sound of his voice echoed in the corridor. It was Poste, all right. It sounded eerily calm, but greatly magnified. I didn’t think that was his intention, but rather a product of the acoustics in the vast hall.
“How about you let the girl out, Erik? Then we can-”
“What’s in it for me, Mr. Wallace? You’re going to allow me to go home?” Poste laughed.
“I’m going to find out what has you so upset, and see if we can fix it. Mamdouba says-”
“Don’t give me any crap about Elijah Mamdouba. Nobody can fix it, Wallace. It’s a different world now. My father was their hero. The men who were putting this place together thought he was the best thing that ever happened to them. Today, he’s a pariah here. I’d come with him as a child, when we sailed back from Africa. Everyone who worked in the museum worshiped the ground he walked on.”
“That’s still true.”
“They’re all about saving the planet and preserving the species now. You think it was scientists who brought back all those creatures downstairs? They were hunters, for Chrissakes. They did it for sport. At least my father was honest about it. Rich Brits and Americans. Piles of money to throw away on trips to the heart of darkness. If these people didn’t like to kill the beasts, Wallace, how the hell do you think they filled the dioramas downstairs?”
Mercer didn’t have an answer. “Did you go with him on safari when you were a kid?”
“It had all changed by then. When my father was young, before ‘civilization’ r
eached Africa,” Poste said mockingly, “the supply of wildlife seemed inexhaustible. He learned to shoot to defend his home and family, to put food on the table.”
I could hear scuffling now, as though he was changing position.
“Those fools who came over on expedition would shoot whatever they could find. ‘You’ve got your elephant,’ my father would say. ‘You’ve got what you came here for.’ ‘We’ll have another one then. One for the museum, two for me. And after that, Willem, we’ll take some gorillas. Maybe shoot a cannibal or two.’You might have been in danger, Wallace. The old T.R. spirit. Bully. Everything was bully.”
Mercer had him going. The way I understood it, this was a good thing, for Clem’s sake.
“And your father?”
“He warned the sportsmen, the museum trustees, all about the situation. Told them there weren’t enough animals to satisfy them. Nobody listened to him.”
“But his things, his collections are all-”
“They’re all forgotten is what they are. I used to hold on to his great hands, all callused and hard, and walk through the halls with him. His name was everywhere, on all the display labels. He was a giant to these people-the board, the administrators. ‘That one’s mine, Erik,’ he used to tell me. And then the story to go with it. ‘That crowned eagle, see it? It had picked up a monkey-a full-grown one-to carry off for a feast. Got it with one shot, right in its own nest.’ Now Willem Van der Poste is taboo. Everything that once was his is stuck in a box or a closet. Mamdouba? He couldn’t find an elephant tusk if his life depended on it.”
“Is that what you want, Erik? You want to-”
“I have what I want, Detective. I found exactly what I want.”
He was walking now, in the confined space. We could all hear the steps.
“The girl,” Mercer said, his voice louder and more firm. “Don’t touch the girl.”
41
Everyone moved at once.
Mercer stood up and stepped closer to Poste’s enclosure. Kerry left us and eased herself in behind his position. Above us, the two snipers lifted their guns to their shoulders.
The Bone Vault Page 37