Eve Drexler heard the knock on the door and went to open it. I recognized the man who had been outside the truck at Newark last night, whom Thibodaux had said was in charge of shipping.

“Come in, Maury.” He rose and greeted the shipping manager, a short, chunky man with a round face and thick red hair.

“Miss Cooper, Mr. Chapman, this is Maury Lissen. He is going to assist you with everything you’ll need from his department.”

Lissen took one of the seats at the table and placed the clipboard he carried in front of him.

“I’ve been up all night going over my paperwork. I just can’t see any way this could have happened here.”

“Yes, but obviously it did, Maury, and we’re going to have to help the police as best we can.”

Chapman stood and reached for the photograph of Katrina Grooten and passed it to Lissen. He winced as he looked at it. “I got a weak stomach for this kind of thing, Detective. Don’t make me look at it, okay?”

Not exactly a response that resonates with a homicide detective. Mike and his partners rarely had the luxury of encountering a body that was not decomposed, or gaping with stab wounds or gunshot holes. “Take a good look, Maury,” he said, sticking the shot back under the guy’s nose. “She can’t bite. She’s dead.”

He wouldn’t pick up the photo but stared down at it and shook his head.

“Know her?”

“Should I? There’s probably no one in this whole museum who has less to do with human beings than I do. Frames, pots, swords, masks, instruments, artworks. I open boxes and close them up. I unpack them and send others off. Pretty young girls I don’t know.”

Chapman repeated her name and still Lissen was flat.

“You have anything to do with the Cloisters?”

“Is that where she worked?”

“Do you?”

“I’m responsible for everything that goes in and out of the place. I’ve got a crew on site to run it, day to day. I don’t spend any time up there myself. Small change compared to what we do here. Go to check on things two or three times a year.”

“This sarcophagus the body was placed in, where’s that been sitting since it got here last fall?”

“We’re trying to track all that for Mr. Thibodaux. You know how much floor space I got downstairs? It covers as much ground as thirty football fields.”

“I thought everything had a number and a tag and a tidy little home.”

“Two out of three, Detective. You gotta give me a few days. Stuff gets moved around all the time down there. We’ll get a handle on this as soon as we can.”

Thibodaux leaned in on his elbows. “Mr. Chapman, I don’t want to make the same mistake as I did earlier and risk insulting you. But there’s a simple fact very few people consider when they come to visit us here-in fact, when they go to any museum in the world.

“The Metropolitan collection includes more thanthree million objects and works of art. Three million. At any given time, the most that is ever on display in these vast halls is less than ten percent of that number. That means we’ve got literally millions of objects stored in our basement.”

He was right about one thing: I had never given any thought to that.

“Some are crated away because there will simply never be any room for them in our galleries and on our walls. Many are inferior and came to us as gifts, which will eventually be traded or sold off. There are hundreds of thousands that are far too fragile to ever be on display, and scores that scholars study, here or on loan at other institutions.”

Chapman and I exchanged glances. Where would we possibly begin?

“I guess we might as well take a look at your territory, Mr. Lissen. Get a sense of how things are organized and stored, what the situation is with your security force-”

“The system is superb, Mr. Chapman,” Thibodaux said. “It has all been upgraded since I arrived here. Every single section of the building has guards, and there are watchmen who patrol the museum all throughout the night, above- and belowground.”

“Surveillance cameras?”

“In the galleries, hallways, storage space, exits, and entrances.”

“Ever turn them on?” Several years before Thibodaux was appointed as director, I had handled the prosecution of a celebrated murder case in which a vibrant teenage girl had been killed by a drugaddicted prep-school dropout on the Great Lawn directly behind the museum. Because of construction that was being done on the rear wing that projected into Central Park, the cameras that would have captured the crime on videotape had been poised to shoot but never loaded with film. It haunted me that no one had been able to prevent the murder, nor had we had been able to reconstruct the crime for the trial jury.

“I-I just assume they’re working.”

Lissen knew the answer, I thought, from the glum look on his face, but was silent. “Is there a problem with the cameras?” I asked him.

“I don’t think anybody’s changed the film in the ones in the basement for more than a year.”

“Like those frigging ATMs,” Chapman said to me. A young uniformed cop had been shot and killed during an ATM stickup that Chapman had once investigated. The gunman looked directly into the camera lens, but the film had been used over again so many times that it had completely deteriorated and displayed only the grainy outline of a bearded face. As a result, the state legislature mandated that banking institutions change their film on a regular basis. No such requirement existed for museums.

“The detective and I would like to begin with you this afternoon, Mr. Lissen. If there’s a telephone I can use first, I’ll notify my boss that we’ve identified the deceased.”

“Of course, Miss Cooper. Please use the one on my desk. I’ll step out to Miss Drexler’s phone and call the gentleman who’s in charge of the Cloisters. He can pull up Miss Grooten’s file.”

I dialed Paul Battaglia’s direct line and hoped Rose Malone would answer. She sounded busy-or distant-and tried to patch me through to the district attorney before getting back on the line to tell me that he wouldn’t pick up my call. That hadn’t happened to me very often.

“Just tell him we think we got an ID. The deceased is Katrina Grooten, and she was working up at the Cloisters, on a special joint project that involved a few of the museums. ME thinks the cause of death is poisoning. Soon as I know any more you’ll have it.”

I handed the receiver to Chapman and moved out of his way. “Hey, loo. Got a tentative make on Saint Cleo. Some kind of art maven working in one of the museums. From South Africa, here on a visa. Coop and I’ll pop up to the Cloisters tomorrow, when we’re done in this joint, see if anyone knows why or when she quit her job.”

He put the phone down and picked up a photograph from Thibodaux’s desk. The handsome woman in the eight-by-ten frame was smiling back at him, dressed to the nines and standing in front of the glass pyramid in the courtyard at the Louvre.

“Mrs. T.?”

Eve Drexler nodded.

“She have anything to do with the museum, officially?”

“No, Mr. Chapman. She’s dead. Killed in a ski accident at Chamonix, winter before last. They had only been here at the Met for little more than a year. I was right here in the office with Pierre when he got-”

Drexler stopped talking when Thibodaux opened the door and reentered the room. “Hiram Bellinger, the director of the Cloisters, will see you anytime tomorrow that suits you. He didn’t know Miss Grooten well, but he’ll pull her file and be prepared to give you whatever you need.”

Chapman turned his back to the director and whispered to me, “Let’s get a gander at the setup here this afternoon, meet at the morgue in the morning to see what Kestenbaum has for us, then spend as much time as we need uptown, talking to the people she worked with.”

“Fine with me.”

He walked back to the conference table to pick up his steno pad. “Tell Bellinger we’ll be there about twelve tomorrow. Hasn’t he got anything he can fax over to you now?”