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[9]Chapter One
I spent a long afternoon at the morgue. I had left my desk at the
Manhattan district attorney's office shortly after lunch to review
autopsy results on a new case with the deputy chief medical
examiner. A nineteen-year-old, dressed in an outfit she had bought
just hours earlier, was killed outside a social club as she waited
on a street corner for her friends.
Now I walked a quiet corridor, again surrounded by death. I did not
want to be here. I paused at the entrance of an ancient tomb, its
painted limestone facade concealing the false doorway to an
underground burial chamber. The faded reliefs that decorated its
walls showed offerings of food and drink that would nourish the
spirit of the dead. I didn't harbor any hope that the young woman
whose body I had seen today would ever be in need of the kind of
good meal displayed before me.
I made my way past a granite lion and nodded at the uniformed
guard, who slouched on a folding chair beside the elegantly carved
beast, once the protector of a royal grave. Both were sleeping
soundly. The outstretched arms of the neighboring alabaster monkeys
held empty vessels that had no doubt been receptacles of the body
parts of some mummified dignitary of the Old Kingdom.
Voices echoing from behind me suggested that I was not going to be
the last arrival at this evening's festive dinner. I quickened my
pace and swept by cases filled with goddesses' stone heads, perched
on shelves holding jeweled sandals and golden collars that had been
buried with them for centuries. A sharp left turn brought me
face-to-face with the enormous black sarcophagus of a Thirtieth
Dynasty Egyptian queen, held open by two iron posts, so that
passersby could see the image of her soul portrayed on the inside
of the upper lid. The dark, heavy casket with a faint outline of
the slender body it once housed chilled me, despite the unseasonal
warmth of the late-spring night.
Then I turned the last corner, where the darkness of the funereal
rooms gave way to the glorious open space that housed the Temple of
Dendur. The northernmost end of the Metropolitan Museum of Art was
a sloping, glass-paned wall soaring above the sandstone monuments,
opening the vista into Central Park. It was almost nine o'clock,
and the streetlamps beyond the windows lightened the night sky,
giving definition to the leafy green trees bordering the great
institution.
I stood at the edge of the moat that surrounded the two raised
buildings in this stunning wing, searching the crowd for my
friends. Waiters in sleek black suits zigzagged back and forth
among the guests, stopping to dispense smoked salmon on black bread
and caviar blinis. They were trailed by others who carried silver
trays filled with glasses of white wine, champagne, and sparkling
water, dodging the elbows and arms of the assembled museum members
and supporters.
Nina Baum saw me before I spotted her. "You came just late enough
to miss most of the speeches. Smart move."
She signaled to one of the servers, and handed me a flute of
champagne. "Hungry?"
I shook my head.
"The morgue?"
"Not a very pleasant afternoon."
"Was she -- ?"
"I'll tell you about it later. Chapman thought he had a lead on a
case he's been handling that's reached a dead end, so I wanted to
get a clear understanding about the pattern of injuries and how
they'd been inflicted. That way, if he picked up a suspect and I
got a chance to question the guy tonight, I'd be ready for him.
Turned out to be a bad tip, so there's no interrogation, no arrest.
It's on the back burner for a while."
Nina looped her arm through mine and started to walk me toward the
steps. "Why didn't you bring Mike with you?"
"I tried. Once I told him it was black tie he sent me home to
shower and change. No penguin suit for him, not even to see you.
He'll catch you later in the week."
Mike Chapman was a homicide detective. Best one on the job, in my
view. Nina Baum was my closest friend, and had been for exactly
half my life. We were eighteen when we met, assigned to be
roommates at Wellesley College when we arrived freshman year. She
was married now, living in California with her husband and young
son. She had met Mike many times during the decade that he and I
had worked together on cases, and she looked forward to spending
time with him whenever she was in town.
"First we'll find Jake." She led me up the steps, past the lone
palm tree that stood on the platform below the great temple. "Then
I'll introduce you to my boss and all the museum
heavyweights."
"How's Jake behaving? You still have a job after tonight or is he
hounding everybody here, looking for scoops?"
"Let's say we've raised a lot of eyebrows around town. I keep
telling people that I've only borrowed him for the evening, but
when you read tomorrow's gossip columns, you might begin to wonder.
You must have a lot of friends here, 'cause they can't figure out
why I'm hanging on to him and why you're nowhere to be seen."
"'Who is that auburn-haired beauty who whisked in from the coast
and stole NBC correspondent Jake Tyler right out from under the
long arm of the law? Prosecutor Alexandra Cooper has a warrant out
for her arrest. And also for the return of the terrifically sexy --
and backless -- navy blue sequined dress that this interloper
slipped out of Alexandra's closet when she wasn't looking.' That's
what I'm likely to see in the tabs?"
"I figured you loaned me the guy for the evening, how sore could
you be about the sexy, backless gown?"
Nina had arrived in New York a day earlier. She was a partner in a
major L.A. law firm, where she had developed an expertise in
packaging large entertainment projects for big-screen and
television movies. Tonight's event was staged to announce an
historic occasion for two great New York institutions. The
Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural
History, with some help from Hollywood, would hold the first
cooperative exhibition in their histories.
The controversial mix of scholarship and show business had had a
difficult birth, struggling to overcome resistance from trustees
and curators, administrators and city officials. But blockbuster
shows like the Met's "Treasures of Tutankhamen" and the Costume
Institute's collection of Jacqueline Kennedy's White House clothing
filled the museum coffers and argued for the drama of a spectacular
twenty-first-century display of the two museums' collective
greatest hits.
Nina's California client, UniQuest Productions, had successfully
bid on all the media marketing rights to the new project. "A Modern
Bestiary," as the show had been titled, would feature all the
fantastic animals of the world, as represented in both collections,
from hieroglyphs, tapestries, and paintings to mounted specimens
and stuffed mammals. There would be dazzling, high-tech creations
and virtual dioramas, IMAX time trips to examine artists and
artifacts in their natural habitats, and commercial tie-ins for
souvenir sales in museum shops and on the web. There would be
Rembrandt refrigerator magnets, triceratops lapel pins, plastic
human-genome Slinkys to bounce down staircases across America, and
snow globes with endangered species of the Amazon being doused by
acid rain.
Nina steered me toward a short, dark-haired man with too much
facial hair and a collarless tux shirt. "Quentin Vallejo, I'd like
you to meet Alexandra Cooper. She's -- "
"I know, I know. The best friend." Quentin did the up-and-down
thing. My five-ten frame towered over him, so his eyes just focused
at the level of my breasts and worked their way south to my knees
before lifting back up to meet my glance. "The sex crimes
prosecutor. Nina talked about you for the entire flight yesterday.
That's an interesting job you've got. We ought to have a chat
sometime, just the two of us. Like to hear more about what you
do."
Quentin turned to exchange his empty wineglass for a full one, and
I gave him a nod as I walked away. Nina blew him a kiss and
followed me.
"That's the guy who's running this show?"
"Worked with Spielberg for twelve years. He's absolutely ingenious
at designing interactive materials and futuristic movie images.
Makes inanimate objects look like flesh and blood. He sees things
in ways that nobody else does."
"That much was obvious to me." I stood on tiptoes, looking over
heads and shoulders for any sign of Jake. "Did the big guns at the
Met and Natural History ever meet Quentin before today?"
"You think we wouldn't have done a deal if they had?"
"Have you lost your mind? This museum was founded by old men. Very
rich, very white, very Presbyterian. Natural History was pretty
much the same. The good old boys may be dead and buried, but this
place isn't exactly run by the most diverse crowd in town."
"Somebody on the project did his homework. Our advance group
managed all the hands-on work to get this event up and running.
Probably the preppiest-looking film team I've ever seen west of the
Mississippi. Hired a white-shoe law firm here to handle the
contract work. Saved the outing of Quentin for tonight's gala, the
big announcement."
"How'd that go?"
"Listen to the buzz. The trustees, the press, the upper crust --
whoever these people are, they seemed thrilled about the news."
Nina steered me to the small recess at the center of the taller
building, the gateway to the Temple of Dendur. She was looking for
a quieter place to tell me about the presentation that I had
missed.
"Do you know Pierre Thibodaux?" She pointed to the podium, where a
tall, dark-haired man was being led away from a small group of
museum officials. He motioned to his colleagues with a raised
finger and stepped into the adjacent corridor.
"Only by reputation. New guy in town." Thibodaux had replaced
Philippe de Montebello as director of the Met less than three years
ago.
"He's taken all the meetings with our advance crew himself. This
show is his baby. Brilliant, mercurial, handsome. You've got to
meet him -- "
"Ladies, you can't be leaning against the building, y'all hear me?"
a security guard said.
We walked out of the narrow opening and searched for another quiet
nook.
"Let's get out of this wing so we can have a normal conversation.
There are as many living, breathing jackals in here tonight as
there are limestone ones standing sentry over all the Egyptian
galleries. I somehow think poor Augustus didn't foresee when he
built these monuments that they would become the most prized
cocktail space in Manhattan."
I could tell that Nina was annoyed with me, as she tried to follow
me back down the steps.
"Who's Augustus? What the hell are you talking about? The temple is
Egyptian, right?"
I had been coming to the Met since my earliest childhood, and knew
most of the permanent exhibits pretty well. "Half right. It was
built near Aswan, but by a Roman emperor who ruled that region at
the time. Augustus had it erected in honor of two young sons of a
Nubian chieftain who drowned in the Nile. I hate to dampen your
enthusiasm, Nina. I've just been around too much death today not to
wonder why we find it appropriate to organize our festivities in
and around the tombs of all these ancient cultures. Wouldn't people
find it offensive to have the next cocktail party at Arlington
Cemetery?"
"Sorry they're not serving scotch tonight, Alex. Take it easy, will
you? We can leave any time you'd like. Who's the old dame hanging
on to Jake?"
He had spotted the two of us and was making his way to the foot of
the platform on which we stood. A silver-haired woman with lots of
dangling sapphires -- from earlobes, wrists, fingers -- had grasped
Jake by the arm and was bending his ear about something. I stopped
on the bottom step and fished in my purse for some coins to toss in
the moat.
"Look out for that crocodile, darling. The most dangerous creature
in Egypt, the embodiment of the essence of evil." Jake held out his
hand to lower me down as I tossed a few quarters in the water, for
good luck. The ebony croc mocked the gesture, his gaping mouth
posed for eternity, seeking something meatier than the quiche that
was being circulated around the room.
I kissed Jake's cheek, which was already covered with the shapes of
pursed lips in a variety of colors. "I don't mind that you're in
loco husband for Nina, but who's the rest of my
competition?"
"That last woman? Just one of the trustees. Didn't catch her name.
Gushing about how exciting the joint show is going to be and asking
whether the networks are covering the fireworks tonight."
"Fireworks?"
"There's supposed to be a preview, a five-minute sound-and-light
show to kick off the news about the bestiary exhibition. Here comes
Thibodaux. He'll do the honors."
Instead, the director walked straight toward us, smoothing his
jacket with one hand and his hair with the other. "Nina, may I have
a word with you? Do you know where Quentin is?"
"I'll find him for you. Pierre, I'd like you to meet my -- "
"Enchanté." He greeted us tersely but his eyes searched
the room over my shoulder. He and Nina broke away, retracing our
steps to look for the producer.
I glanced at my watch. "Soon as we tear her loose, think you'd
treat your two dates to burgers at '21'?"
"My chariot awaits you, madam."
Nina, Quentin, and Pierre had their heads together at the top of
the stairs. The director did a double take over his shoulder as
Quentin pointed down at me. Nina was shaking her head in the
negative and trying to block me from Quentin's line of sight.
You're right, pal. Whatever it is, keep me out of it.
Pierre Thibodaux didn't wait for the others to descend the two
tiers of steps.
"Miss Cooper? Mr. Vallejo just told me that you're a prosecutor.
May I have a moment with you, alone, for some advice? Do you mind,
Mr. Tyler?" This time, no guard admonished us as Thibodaux led me
back up to the platform, removed the rope between the two pillars
at the entrance of the Temple of Dendur, and stepped into the quiet
archway.
"You're a bureau chief in the Manhattan district attorney's office?
I need your help in dealing with the police tonight."
"Here, at the museum?"
"No, actually, in a freight yard. I'm going to make a few remarks
to close the evening and send all these people on their way. We'll
forgo the drama of the UniQuest Productions pyrotechnics. The last
thing we need tomorrow is any bad publicity linked to our splendid
new show."
"Perhaps I can make a call to the proper -- "
"There's a shipment of exhibits going abroad, stored in containers
for transit. It's a very routine occurrence for us. Crates go in
and out of the country all the time. Exchanges with other museums,
items we've deaccessioned or loaned to foreign institutions.
Happens regularly."
"I doubt there's anything that I can help you with. If you've got a
problem with Customs -- " I said, as Thibodaux continued to speak
over my objection.
"What doesn't usually happen is that one of the ancient sarcophagi
was opened for inspection a few hours ago. There was supposed to be
a mummified princess in the coffin, Miss Cooper. Twelfth Dynasty,
Middle Kingdom. A couple of thousand years old and quite valuable.
Instead, there's a corpse inside. Someone has substituted a body,
I'm afraid. A few centuries younger than my princess, no doubt, but
just as dead."
Excerpted from THE BONE VAULT © Copyright 2002 by Linda
Fairstein. Reprinted with permission by Pocket Star. All rights
reserved.
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