The Bone Vault

by Linda Fairstein

  “Lays out what he wants to do and how he wants to do it. I’m telling you, he’s the perfect target for us. Wants her to suggest a meeting place where there are hotels in the area. He’ll bring the condoms, the marijuana, and some booze to relax her.”

  “And you’ve found out who he is?”

  “Faxed a court order to the ISP.” The Internet service provider had responded with information about the subscriber whose screen name was MonsterMan. “The response was sitting in my fax machine this morning. Just ran him through Faces of the Nation.”

  Ryan read to me from the background report he had pulled off the web. “Frederick Welch III. He’s a high school principal in Litchfield, Connecticut.”

  “The meet is a go. Let’s decide on a place that makes Joni comfortable and scout out some SROs that the squad has a relationship with.” The single-room-occupancy hotels were often hot-sheet operations, renting rooms by the hour. Plagued by prostitutes and junkies, they frequently looked to the NYPD when trysts and drug deals turned sour and became emergencies. Harry would call in a chit with some desk manager who owed him a favor.

  “You want to take it that far?”

  “I want him to sign in and ask for a room key. We lost one a month ago by grabbing the guy as soon as he showed up and gave Joni a kiss on the cheek. The judge said we couldn’t prove that the perp had any intention of following through with his screen banter.”

  Cyberspace had become a new kind of playground for pedophiles. Not only were there thousands of sites on which to buy, sell, and exchange child pornography, it was an easy and inexpensive way to correspond with children and adolescents all over the world. Parents who enforced rigid rules about playmates and curfews in their own neighborhoods sent their kids to their bedrooms for hours on end, without ever warning them that the dangers of talking to strangers were every bit as real on-line as on the street.

  Sarah Brenner came in with two mugs of coffee, one for her and a refill for me. “Got your message and came right upstairs. Hey, Ryan. Something good, no doubt.”

  “Maybe I’ll just skip the coffee and put toothpicks in my eyelids to keep them open. Good morning,” I said, reaching for the hot cup.

  “Don’t complain about sleep deprivation to the mother of three kids. Battaglia’s letting you run with this? You know you love it.”

  “If you can cover my back down here, Ryan’s Internet sting might heat up tomorrow. We’ve got three people on trial and a holiday weekend. The young and the restless are bound to start celebrating the rites of spring.” Our numbers always went up in warm weather.

  “Do I get to make command decisions?” she said, smiling.

  “You even get to suck up to McKinney, if you’re in the mood.”

  I reached for the ringing phone but Laura came in and grabbed it. She greeted all of us and told me Chapman was on the line.

  “I’m just setting things up with Sarah. I’ll be on my way.”

  “That’s not why I’m calling. Dr. K. isn’t even back from a domestic up in Chelsea. What do I need to seize someone’s passport?”

  “What you don’t have yet, in this case: probable cause. Why, has Pierre Thibodaux packed up his bags already?” I had worried that the soon-to-be ex-director would have no reason to stay in town, but figured that there would be a period of transition until his successor was named.

  “I just called Ms. Drexler to see when I could pick up a list of all the employees, and get a guided tour of the other Egyptian coffins from Timothy Gaylord, who left us so abruptly yesterday afternoon. Unfortunately, he’s leaving the country tonight.”

  “Business or displeasure?”

  “A rather special assignment, down in Chile. He’s going to the mummy congress.”

  12

  The morgue attendant at the loading dock on East Thirtieth Street was pushing an empty gurney through the entrance that Mike Chapman was holding open for him. I slammed the cab door behind me and squinted because of the bright sunlight. It was unusual to hear singing at the mouth of this gray tunnel where the night’s dead were brought in to tell their stories to the medical examiners.

  “See the pyramids along the Nile…,” Mike crooned softly, a more doo-wop version than Jo Stafford had recorded in 1956. Mike rested his arm against the opening, for me to pass under, pointing me out to the waiting ambulance driver as he got to the coda of the song, “she belongs tome. ”

  “I’ll bite. What’s the mummy congress?”

  “The Fourth World Congress on Mummy Studies. Now, that has got to be a totally happening group of scientists, don’t you think? You might be able to find some guest speakers for McKinney’s killer camp.”

  The DA’s office held an annual retreat that served as a training session on investigating and prosecuting homicide cases for the senior members of the trial division. It was Pat McKinney’s pet project, and he spent the better part of each year lining up the quirkiest experts and the worst lodging that a convention could promise.

  “This is the real deal?”

  “Ms. Drexler ranks it just below a papal consistory. Every three years, a lively group of paleopathologists and Egyptologists gather together for a serious study of issues related to mummies, old and new. They deliver papers, study techniques, compare hieroglyphics, walk like Egyptians. That kind of stuff.”

  “Serious subjects?”

  “DNA in mummies, human sacrifices at high altitudes in the Andes, parasites that inhabit mummified corpses.”

  “Can’t Gaylord skip a session? Pick it up on satellite? Alan Dershowitz does CNN interviews from the nude beach on Martha’s Vineyard; I’m sure we can hook something up for this guy.”

  “He’s delivering the keynote this weekend-‘Ethical Considerations in Studying the Ancient Dead.’ Apparently, he’s got the most serious credentials in the field. Drexler says it’s a big issue in museum work. Things that were tolerated fifty and a hundred years ago, digging up sacred graves and messing with the spirits, are taboo now.”

  “Why Chile?”

  “A stretch of road called the Atacama, about the most lifeless desert in the world.”

  “You knew that?” It must have been a battleground once.

  “Never heard of it. Miss Efficiency is my lifeline to the mummy man. There’s a little city in northern Chile called Arica, close to the desert. That one I know. Peru ceded it to Chile after the War of the Pacific. Treaty of Ancón, 1883.”

  “You know about wars I wasn’t even aware were fought.”

  “What I didn’t know is that it has the distinction of being so dry in the Atacama that the long-term preservation of the human body is practically guaranteed. Mummy heaven. Probably more of them there than in the entire Nile valley.”

  “Is Gaylord going there because of what he knows, or what he wants to learn?”

  “Seems obvious to me that he wouldn’t need to keep that appointment if he’s our killer. Whoever wrapped up Ms. Grooten must have already completed the course. Can we stop him, just to be sure?” Mike asked.

  “On what basis? We haven’t got a thing. Any sign that he’s not coming back?”

  “Eve Drexler says it’s business as usual come Tuesday.”

  “I’m more concerned about Pierre Thibodaux.”

  “She’s boxing up his entire office now to send off with him. Wanther DNA? Betcha there’ll be tearstains all over his belongings. I think Eve would like to follow Pierre home to Paris.”

  By the time we reached Dr. Kestenbaum’s office, he had arrived from the scene of the Chelsea stabbing and was changing out of his clothes into the scrubs he would wear in the autopsy room for the rest of the day.

  “So what do you two know about poison?”

  “Start at the top of the page, doc. We’re beginners.”

  “Katrina Grooten died of arsenic poisoning. I’ve submitted all the tissue and hair samples for toxicology and mitochondrial DNA analysis, but those results take quite a while, as you know.”

  “You were just guess
ing yesterday. But now you’re sure?”

  “Some very gross indications, Alex. Mee’s lines on her fingernails were rather telltale, the minute I saw her hands.”

  “What are they?”

  “White lines running straight across her nails, suggesting toxic levels of arsenic in the body. That strong, pungent odor you smelled when the coffin lid was opened. Remember when I asked you if it reminded you of anything and you told me it was pungent? Garlic, I thought. The alopecia I observed, hair coming out of her scalp and her eyelids-all those things are consistent with high levels of arsenic intake. I’ll have the complete report typed up by the beginning of the week, but those were my initial observations before we even started to cut.”

  “D’you ever see a body preserved like that, doc?”

  “Never. Not naturally. Nothing was done surgically to keep it intact, I’ve confirmed that.”

  “So we’ve gotta figure out whether the killer knew what he was doing when he hid the body, or whether it was an accident of the climate conditions where he hid it, right?”

  “I’ll tell you this, Mike. When I get the tox results back, I think we’ll see that Ms. Grooten’s murderer did nothing to disguise the fact that she was overdosed with arsenic.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That he didn’t expect her to be found for six months, if ever-”

  “Or a year later, a continent away-”

  “Even better for him. It’s not like he was giving it to Grooten in small, subtle doses. I think he was figuring she’d be long out of the way, undiscovered and decayed before anyone realized what had happened.”

  “Isn’t arsenic in our drinking water?”

  “It would take one thirsty broad to put out her lights this way, Coop. You gotta call my mother. She’ll be so proud of the way my education is paying off in this investigation. Day one, I come across an Incorruptible. Now I can add all the things I know Albertus Magnus-Saint Albert the Great-was good for. He was the first guy to produce arsenic in a free form. Right, doc?”

  “Exactly. It’s been a popular way of poisoning people since the Middle Ages, in fact and in fiction. At one time it was such an available means of killing that the Brits referred to it as ‘inheritance powder.’ Best way to do in the family member who controlled the purse strings.

  “And yes, Alex, arsenic is introduced into drinking water through the dissolution of minerals and ores on the earth’s surface. Sometimes aggravated by industrial waste. It’s in a lot of the fish and meat you eat. But if Grooten was exposed to a supply of contaminated water, where she worked or where she lived, she wouldn’t be the only one getting sick. The whole neighborhood would have been in bad shape after a while.”

  “What are you figuring, blondie? She drank too much tap water, fell into a limestone box and the lid dropped on it?”

  “You know Battaglia’s going to ask me if there’s any chance her death could have been accidental. I’m just trying to rule out the obvious.”

  “Of course there have been accidental poisonings. We had a case last year where a guy who did professional woodworking breathed in the fumes from some chemically treated lumber. Absorbed the stuff through his mucous membranes because he was just too stubborn to use a mask on wood that had been coated with an arsenic compound. You can inhale it, absorb it, and ingest it. None of those methods are recommended.”

  “Does it manifest any symptoms over time?”

  “Sure. If it were just a mild poisoning, I’d expect the patient to complain of nausea, chills, loss of appetite, intestinal upset, apathy. Small doses would make you sick, but they wouldn’t necessarily kill you. The more acute cases begin to show skin lesions, chronic headaches, the metallic taste which results in that garliclike odor, the liver damage apparent here at autopsy.”

  “Can you give me any idea how long this was going on, doc?”

  “The hair sample should be a big help with that. It will give us a poisoning time line.”

  “How so?”

  “Figure that the average growth rate for human hair is one and a half centimeters a month. Every millimeter sample represents about two days’ growth. I’d expect to be able to tell when Grooten was exposed to her first significant dose of arsenic once we get that result. And from the looks of things today, we’ll probably find a much greater concentration-five or six times as much-in the hair closest to her scalp.”

  “Did you find any trace evidence on the body or inside the coffin, anything that might link us to the guy who did this?”

  “I’ve saved the linen binding. Has some age to it. Probably was taken off some other antiquity and wrapped around Grooten. So you’re likely to have some transfer material or residue from the first subject. More likely that than from the killer.”

  “Prints?”

  “I never thought of you as an optimist, Mike. The lab can look it over. I’d think whoever had this much time to deal with a corpse had latex gloves on. You don’t have to be a doctor. Every drug and hardware store sells them.”

  “And where do you shop for arsenic?” I asked.

  “It’s in insecticides like Paris green. It’s in poison gases. Have you confirmed that she had a connection at the Metropolitan Museum, like you thought yesterday?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Arsenic is a very common ingredient in pigments, Alex. Any art museum would have a surprisingly good supply of deadly poisons. Lye and white lead and arsenic make for brilliant colors but a lousy diet, and they’re likely to be in any serious artist’s stash of pigments.” Kestenbaum turned to Chapman. “I’ve bagged her clothes for you, Mike.”

  He tossed us each a pair of latex gloves and pointed at a bunch of brown paper bags standing on the far end of the table at which we were seated.

  I stood up and opened the first of them, removing a bra. It was old and worn thin, and the writing on the label had been bleached off after many washings. It was a small size. The second bag held the deceased’s panties. Like the bra, they were a dingy shade of off-white, from age and repeated cycles of laundering. The third bag contained a pair of women’s slacks, size 6, poorly made of a coarse plaid wool. They were worn around the bottom of the pant legs and had pilling all over the seat. The brand name was that of one of the cheap mailorder companies.

  The fourth bag held a woman’s crewneck sweater.

  “What’s so fascinating, Coop?”

  “It doesn’t belong to the same shopper who bought the other pieces.”

  “How come?”

  “First of all, it’s cashmere. It’s also not her size.” I held the sweater up to examine it. It was much larger than the small-boned Grooten would have worn.

  “Third, the label is one of the most expensive shops on Madison Avenue. Where’s your Polaroid?”

  Kestenbaum pointed to the door. “Turn right, there’s one in the supply closet at the end of the hallway.”

  “Submit all this to the lab, but I want to do some checking on the sweater. Maybe we can find out whether she bought it herself, or if someone gave it to her as a gift.” I handed it to Mike to photograph, to record the detail of the cable stitching and the style of the collar and cuffs. The item had not been mass-produced. It was doubtful that many of these pale peach-colored knits had been sold. “This probably retailed for more than five hundred dollars.”

  “On a museum intern’s salary? I don’t think my entire wardrobe between the time I was born and the age of thirty cost that much,” Mike said.

  Kestenbaum picked up a white letter-sized envelope from his desk. “You’ll want to voucher this, too. I found it in the pocket of her slacks. Maybe it will tell you where Ms. Grooten left her belongings when she went for her last meal.”

  I lifted the flap and took out a square red ticket, one inch in size, bearing the number 248. It looked like the stub of a receipt from a coat-check concession, somewhere between the morgue and Cairo.

  13

  “See any Hessians?” Mike Chapman called out to Mercer Wallace, who
was leaning against the massive granite stones that formed a wall bordering the grouping of monasteries that had been moved from Europe to this rocky cliff three-quarters of a century ago. It was shortly after twelve on a sunny May afternoon, and we climbed the circular walk to join Mercer on the ledge overlooking the Hudson River.

  “You are standing, my friends, on the highest piece of land on the island of Manhattan, accessible by the deepest subway station in the city-not that you would give a thought to any form of public transportation, Coop,” Mike continued. “Almost lost to the Brits in the affair of the outposts.”

  Mercer turned to listen to the military history of this extraordinary piece of open public land on the northern end of Manhattan, his huge frame posed against the wide stretch of water below.

  “General Washington left the garrison here and headed north, while Cornwallis surrounded this place with warships, Highlanders, British troops, and Hessians. They took the fort, killed most of the Americans, and were encamped here until these heights were refortified. That’s why the Long Hill outwork was renamed for William Tryon, the last English governor of New York.”

  The Cloisters Museum stood on a spectacular hilltop in Fort Tryon Park, the last of the New York City parklands designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. John D. Rockefeller had given the city the buildings and more than sixty acres of unique urban land, with paved walks, terraces, and rocky terrain covering the area from the old ramparts of the original fort to the peak on which the imported ruins had been reset and enclosed in a contemporary setting.

  My eyes swept the vista, leaving the river to follow the pathway that led directly down from our perch through the densely wooded area. Katrina Grooten had set off from the museum along one of those sloping walks on an evening last June, into the hands of a modern-day highwayman who had pulled her into the thickets that shielded them from view while he assaulted her.

  “Hiram Bellinger is waiting for us inside.” Mercer led us around the impressive structure and down to the entrance that faced the parking lot. The Romanesque-style doorway, adorned with animals and birds, both real and imaginary, led to a series of arched steps. We were among only a handful of visitors, and I felt as though I had stepped back a few centuries into a medieval church as I made my way upward, passing the occasional window framed with tiny panes of leaded glass.