Lethal Legacy

by Linda Fairstein

  “Eddy had a romance with Tina Barr at one time,” Mike said. “Once you interrogate him, check their phone records. I bet you’ll find they were still in touch. He may be a convicted felon, but he’s still a scholar. I’m sure he did all his research on the Hunts. He probably set Tina up with Minerva, suggested that she move into the apartment. That would have enabled him to steal the panel right out from underneath her nose.”

  “Using Tina,” Peterson said, “like Eddy Forbes seems to have used everyone else over the years-librarians, curators, trustees. So why the gas mask? Do you think that Billy Schultz had anything to do with all this?”

  “Nothing at all. I’d bet it’s just what he claimed,” Mercer said. “The guy did the right thing and called the police after Tina was attacked. He probably was just stupid enough to pick up the gas mask and try it on.”

  “Will you have someone call the lab in the morning?” I asked, rubbing my forehead to ease the tension headache that was building up. “Run that mixed sample against Travis Forbes.”

  Peterson stood up and rested his elbow on the mantel over the fireplace with the faux logs. “Why’d Travis go in with a mask? Did Tina know him?”

  “He told us she didn’t,” I said. “But Travis apparently looks so much like his brother, Eddy, he was afraid she’d make him.”

  “Why was he there?” the lieutenant asked again.

  The three of us-Mike, Mercer, and I-had lots of time to work through these answers. Now we were only making educated guesses.

  “Because the double cross was already under way,” I said. “Tina had quit her job with the Hunts and was working for Alger Herrick. Is he talking?”

  “Not yet,” Peterson said. “Your boss has Pat McKinney at the station house doing the questioning.”

  I closed my eyes and groaned.

  “Get her some pain relievers and a scotch,” Mike said.

  “I hope that jackass remembers to separate Herrick and Forbes.” I was joking with Mike, trying to regain my sea legs, but it would be like McKinney to screw up the most basic rules in his rush to get back in the case.

  “Don’t be such a control freak,” Mike said to me, walking over to a uniformed cop and handing him some bills. “There’s a pub on the corner of Third Street. Fill a plastic cup with Dewar’s and don’t spill any of it running back. Coop’s indicted guys for less than that.”

  “This was the once-in-a-lifetime score, Loo,” Mercer said. “Herrick wanted to put this map together to cap his collection, no matter what it cost him.”

  “And Forbes?” Peterson asked.

  “For him, it was his last great scam. Lead these greedy fools like the pied piper, and his endgame, with his brother’s help, was to wind up with this masterpiece for himself,” Mike said. “Sell it to the highest bidder-twenty, maybe thirty million.”

  “For this, Tina Barr had to die?” the lieutenant said.

  “She must have panicked when Travis showed up in the library, just a night after she’d been attacked,” Mike said.

  “Tina walked away from the emergency room because she knew this was all tied into the stolen books and maps,” I said. “She wasn’t giving up a thing that would lead us in that direction, even if she didn’t know exactly who Travis was the first time she encountered him.”

  “But she probably recognized him when he came into the conservation lab in the library,” Mike said. “And in her own devious little mind, began to put the pieces together. Realized she was in way over her head, playing with the bad guys.”

  “Too late to help herself,” I added, thinking of what Jill Gibson had first told Battaglia. “That’s why some of the people in the library thought she was a thief. She really had been in bed with Eddy Forbes.”

  “That’s why Travis killed Tina with one of her own tools,” Mercer said. “He didn’t go to the library meaning to do it. He was probably looking for the key that opened the compartment in the basement. Maybe Eddy sent him to get the job done right the second time. The key might have dropped out of her clothing when he was carrying her through the stacks, after she was dead, without his knowing it. I doubt the murder was premeditated-just a flare-up about the missing goods that ended with him slitting her throat.”

  “That’s what Travis Forbes does,” Mercer said. “He cuts. He mutilates. She couldn’t have known that.”

  “Then he dumped Barr’s body the next night. Probably called Herrick when he took off for his night job at the pub,” Mike said. “Must have been Herrick who watched us bag the body. He’s the one who called Tina’s cell phone-and laughed.”

  That would chill the jurors as much as it had sickened me.

  “It’s the housekeeper who gets lost in all this,” I said. “Karla Vastasi.”

  “That has to be Minerva’s doing,” Mike said. “She in the hospital, Loo?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Let me at her when she’s ready to squeal. Minerva had Karla dressed up as her double, carrying a forged copy of one of the panels in her tote. Travis had never met Minerva-wouldn’t know her if he fell over her,” Mike said.

  “My money’s on Eddy Forbes,” I said.

  “I read you. You think Eddy was waiting in Barr’s apartment with Travis that afternoon. He knew the lady in black wasn’t Minerva and realized the panel she was carrying was a fake. Queered the whole deal.”

  “Karla saw that Tina had left behind another treasure when she moved out-the jewel-encrusted psalm book,” I said. “The one Tina stole from Talbot’s bedroom. So Karla tried to take it to her mistress, clutched on to it with what turned out to be her life. One of the Forbes boys caught her and went ballistic. Whacked her over the head with the garden ornament.”

  The pieces were coming together as nicely as the panels of the great world map of 1507.

  “You better get some sleep, Alex,” the lieutenant said. “Battaglia wants all of us in his office at ten o’clock.”

  “Don’t stretch out here,” Mike said, sweeping his arm along the back of the old sofa. “You stay still for very long, they’ll find a box that fits.”

  “Make me a better offer,” I said as Mercer helped me to my feet.

  “That cemetery had me craving some fresh air. Feel like walking up the avenue to the pub? I could use a drink out of a real glass.”

  I thanked the rookie who’d returned with the plastic cup of scotch. “Give that one to the lieutenant. I’ve got a date.”

  Out on the sidewalk in front of Provenzano’s funeral home, I looped arms with Mike and Mercer. I took several deep breaths of the cool October air, steadied myself between my friends-fortitude and patience-and headed off into the night for a bracing bit of cheer as our manhunt ended.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  “That’s no way to spend a Saturday night,” Luc said exactly a week later, when he returned from his trip. “I can’t let you sit in front of a television set eating popcorn with this great wine.”

  “It’s a whole lot better than the way I spent the last one. Besides, if you tell me you don’t want to watch my Yankees play a World Series game, we’ve got a real deal breaker here.”

  We had flown up to the Vineyard that morning, after all the drama of the past week had played out in court.

  Travis Forbes had been charged with the murders of Tina Barr and Karla Vastasi. His brother, Eddy, was indicted, too, for acting in concert with Travis on the Vastasi killing-proved by cell phone records and credit card receipts for gas and food.

  Travis had rolled over on Alger Herrick and implicated him in the deadly plot to find the twelve panels of the priceless map, though Battaglia hadn’t needed to promise any leniency. The detectives had continued to build a rock-solid case against the Englishman, who was indeed the illegitimate son of Jasper Hunt III.

  Luc and I had walked down the path from my Chilmark home to watch the sun set, sipping a glass of chilled Corton-Charlemagne that he had brought with him. We had made love in the afternoon, slowly and without any distractions this time, and I was dre
ssed in one of his shirts as I lay back in the sand, wiggling my toes in the cool water of Menemsha Pond.

  Luc had driven to the store while I napped fitfully, still not able to get images of this case out of my head.

  “Everything at Larsen’s Fish Market looked merveilleuse, darling. I decided on those sweet little bay scallops,” he said.

  “I adore them.”

  “Lemon, garlic, fettucine.”

  I looked at him and cocked an eye. “How do you eat food like that at a ball game?”

  I heard Mike’s voice in the back of my head ordering a hot dog and a cold beer.

  “Trust me. It will be better than anything you get at the stadium.”

  “For starters?”

  Luc stood up and dug his toes into the sand as the gentle waves receded. “Clams. Fresh ones.”

  “Let me help.”

  I sat up and we scratched below the surface until we filled a towel with a dozen quahaugs.

  “That lady at the library, the one you really liked,” Luc said, sitting beside me as a bright red ball of sunlight started to slip down behind the hills of Aquinnah.

  “Bea?”

  “So she was right about the places that the eccentric Mr. Hunt hid the panels of the map.”

  “She was dead on,” I said.

  “You think they will ever find the entire thing?” Luc asked.

  “So far we’re more than halfway there. Four that Hunt tried to take to the great hereafter with him, the one that Jane Eliot gave to Minerva, the other that Minerva had all along-in the Strassburg Ptolemy-and the one that Mike found inside the library, under the water tank.”

  “You said Bea found others?”

  “Yes, during the week, when the search continued, two of the curators discovered pieces tucked inside books from the Hunt Collection, just as Bea had predicted,” I said. “And Talbot Hunt is cooperating now.”

  The Friday morning we first met Talbot at the library, he had hinted at the fact that he was in the race to find the entire map. He had unearthed one not long ago in an atlas he inherited from his grandfather, which he’d ignored until Tina Barr began to work with him.

  “So that accounts for ten of the twelve,” Luc said. “What will become of the map, if it is ever put together?”

  I sipped at the wine, then stretched out again in the sand, watching the crown of the sun disappear.

  “The Hunts have finally agreed on something, after a lifetime of acrimony and unpleasantness. A substantial piece of damage control,” I said. “They’ve made a gift of the map to the New York Public Library, along with a sizable contribution for the restoration of the Hunt Collection. The money will also help the library try to find the last two pieces.”

  “Are you getting cold, darling?”

  “No, I’m fine. I don’t want to go in yet.”

  The involuntary chill that swept over me had nothing to do with the weather. There would be hearings and trials to follow, a system trying to make sense of the senseless deaths of two young women.

  “You can get this off your mind now, can’t you?”

  Judge Moffett had approved my application for the familial DNA search of Wesley the Weasel Griggs. A homicide case that had languished for eight years might now be solved by science, and I would have a new challenge to fill the fall days.

  “Tonight, yes,” I said, as Luc swept back my hair and put his lips against my forehead.

  “And tomorrow?”

  “Yes.” I laughed as he moved his lips to the tip of my nose.

  Months earlier, after Joan and Jim’s wedding, Luc had embraced me for the first time in this secluded cove. All the best memories of my life were connected to this peaceful, glorious island.

  “And Monday, after I’ve flown home to France?”

  “Hard to predict,” I said. “Au revoir, mon amour.”

  “Tuesday?” he asked, entwining his legs with mine in the shallow water that lapped at our feet.

  “Maybe.”

  “Only maybe? I’ve got some serious work to do before I leave,” Luc said.

  I put my arms around his neck and we kissed each other, over and over again. Then I pulled him to his feet and led him up the hill to the outdoor shower. I wanted to wash off the sand from the beach-and some of the grit I carried with me, always, from my job.

  “C’mon, Luc,” I said. “Time to play ball.”

  ***

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