“Did you tell anyone else?”

“Sure. Pierre Thibodaux. He’s the boss. I put it right in his lap. I told him I thought one of our rising stars had a problem and needed our help if we were going to hang on to her.”

“What did he do?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all. You know what his response was? When I told him that she had been raped leaving work a few months earlier, he told me to forget about our telephone conversation. He told me that he wanted me to destroy any records I was keeping about the fact that she had been assaulted.”

“What?” Chapman asked.

I whispered to Mercer the same word that Bellinger spoke aloud: “Lawsuit. All he was concerned about was the museum’s potential liability. ‘Pierre,’ I said, ‘this girl is suffering. There’s something seriously wrong with her, and someone here needs to intervene.’ He refused to deal with that aspect of it. It’s all about money to him, all the time. He kept insisting that Katrina was probably setting up a case to sue the museum.”

“I don’t get it,” Mike said, looking at me.

“Sure you do. Cloisters employee working late, probably to make a deadline for a research project or exhibition.” Bellinger nodded in agreement as I talked. “Leaves the museum alone and is attacked, still on the grounds. No one is ever caught or charged with the crime. Victim suffers from generic psychological ailment. Maybe she’s going to feel better some day, after lots of expensive therapy. Maybe she’s not. Museum dangles half a million dollars in front of her nose to keep her quiet. Don’t scare the tourists, don’t upset the coworkers.”

“Did Thibodaux know the girl you were talking about was Katrina Grooten? I mean, did you mention her name?” Mike was clearly drawn back to the reaction when he had shown her photograph to the director, who claimed not to recognize her.

Bellinger thought for a few moments. “I’m not sure whether I did. Pierre had met her a couple of times. But that would have been at group meetings or large social occasions. I’m not sure I thought he would have known her. It shouldn’t have mattered who she was, frankly, once I brought the gravity of this to his attention.”

“Anyone else you told?”

“Yes. I tried two of the women next. Thought that might strike a responsive chord with the sisterhood.” Bellinger shook his head as he spoke. “They both knew her from the planning sessions for the big exhibit. Eve Drexler, who’s Thibodaux’s assistant, and Anna Friedrichs, who’s the curator in one of the other departments at the Met.”

“Yes, we saw both of them yesterday. How did they react?”

“I was foolish to think that Eve would do anything to cross Thibodaux. She listened to everything I told her and asked me to keep her informed. But she basically advised me not to worry about it. It was just a ‘woman’s problem’ and Katrina would get over it.”

“And Anna?”

“She was good. She’s the one who urged me to call the counselor. Anna had noticed the changes, too. She felt the phone call would have more weight coming from me, since Katrina worked directly for me. So I called.”

“What did Harriet say?”

“I told her my concern. I described the changes in Katrina since the summer. How she had lost weight and become listless. That lately, she had become apathetic about her work, which was very uncharacteristic of her.”

It not only sounded like post-traumatic stress, but also like the beginning of an overlay of arsenic poisoning.

“I asked Harriet whether she thought Katrina should see a physician, whether there was something medically wrong that might be causing this deterioration. You haven’t told me how Katrina died, of course,” Bellinger said, looking at Mike, “so perhaps my secondguessing is all irrelevant.”

Mike didn’t offer any assistance. “What did she say?”

“Harriet? That she could handle this herself. That counseling like this was her specialty. She had only been seeing Katrina since late summer, so the differences were not as startling to her as they were to some of us who had known her before she was assaulted. But she led me to believe that she was the expert, so I left it alone. Harriet told me all the symptoms I mentioned were consistent with rape trauma syndrome.”

“Did you and Katrina continue to talk about it, too?”

“Not really. By the beginning of November, she was already hinting to me that she was thinking about going home, to Cape Town. Her father was there-”

“Do you have a telephone number for him?”

“It’s in the personnel folder here. I don’t think it will do you much good. She told me her father was in a nursing home. Early-onset Alzheimer’s, if I’m not mistaken. I told her I thought it was crazy for her to go back there, for two reasons.”

“What were they?”

“I thought she needed to get well before she went home. Brought out that stubborn streak she had. She got all fired up about the medical care in South Africa and how advanced it was. That if there was something psychological impeding her recovery, it would do her good to get out of this environment, where the rape occurred. And that if it was medical as I suspected-and she doubted that, by the way, because she placed such faith in Harriet-then the best doctors in the world were in Cape Town.”

“And your second reason for thinking she shouldn’t leave?”

“The work she was doing.”

“They don’t have tombs in Africa?” Mike asked. “They don’t have museums?”

“Of course they do. But nothing like her specialty. She had already applied for a job. I’d written a letter of recommendation, which you’ll also see in the file.”

“For what kind of position?”

“The McGregor Museum. It’s in Kimberley, South Africa.”

“They’ve got a medieval art department?” I asked.

“Botany. Archaeology. Cultural history. Zoology. Natural history. Science, not medieval art. They’re what you do at the McGregor. That was my point, Ms. Cooper. Katrina was such a promising student in this highly competitive field. But all of the medieval studies programs are limited to the European and American institutions. She was throwing away ten years of her education.”

“But it was her home, Mr. Bellinger.”

“Her mother was dead. Her father didn’t know her any longer. She’d gone to university in England, so her friends were scattered all over the world.That wasn’t home, in South Africa. She was beginning to make herself a decent life here.” Bellinger was pacing now and was getting more agitated as he spoke about his efforts to stop Katrina from leaving New York. “Anna Friedrichs and I were hoping to restore her health and well-being. I’d talked to Eve about letting her transfer her work to the main branch of the Met so she didn’t have to deal with coming through Fort Tryon Park every day.”

“Sounds like you wanted to keep her around,” Mike said.

“Very much so. I even suggested a leave of absence. Go home for the holidays. Visit her father. See that there was nothing left for her in Cape Town. Now I can only imagine the pressure she was experiencing if someone here was trying to kill her all that time.”

Bellinger hesitated, then looked across his desk to Mike and Mercer. “Are you going to tell me? Am I entitled to know how she died?”

“Poison, most probably.”

He pulled out his chair and sat down, throwing his head back and studying a gargoyle in the arch of the ceiling. The last thing I expected to hear him do was laugh.

“I hope to hell it wasn’t arsenic. I’ve got enough of it here to do in all of us.”