Neither had I. I had always assumed that they were thousands of years old, specimens found in remote desert areas, abandoned caves, archaeological digs.

“Guess she never sawThe Flintstones, ” Mike said.

Clem was not put off by Mike’s humor. She had a story to tell and was determined to do it. “It was Native Americans who really rattled the cages. While Robert Peary and his cohorts were studying my people, anthropologists were doing the very same thing with American Indians out West. Not just collecting their artifacts and tools, but digging up skulls from graves and hauling them back East to study, too.”

“What became of them all?”

“Until a decade ago, the remains were in the collections of more than seven hundred museums, large and small, throughout your country. The bones of more than two hundred thousand American Indians arestill sitting in wooden boxes and drawers at these institutions. But your native people had an advantage that mine didn’t have, in terms of their numbers and their ability to organize.”

“What’d they do?”

“Demonstrated, agitated, got new laws passed.”

“Legislation?”

“Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, 1990. Guess if your ancestors’ brains had been diced up and studied, Mike, you’d have known about it, too.”

“Slim pickings, ma’am. Well preserved in alcohol, but very dense matter inside thick skulls.”

“You’re not telling me every skeleton can be linked to a tribe?” Mercer asked.

“No, no. That’s one of the biggest problems. Some of these museum collections are hundreds of years old. They’re not matched to any tribe or cultural affiliation. Never will be.”

Mike was still stuck on the Eskimos. “So if this law was passed here in 1990, how come your people-Qisuk and the others-still didn’t get home for a few more years?”

“The legislation only applied to Native Americans. Museums were required to repatriate all the Indian bones that tribes asked for, but that didn’t help my Eskimos a damn bit.”

“Why did Katrina care?”

“Take this girl whose scholarship field was funerary art, Mike. For the first time in her life she came face-to-face with the reality experienced by most cultures of color, all over the world. No churchyards, no headstones, no marked graves. Our ancestors are sitting in cardboard boxes, collecting dust on museum shelves.”

“In the name of science.”

“I got under her skin at first. How could she have been so blind to this? Think of what the situation was in South Africa, where she grew up. I told her Mene’s story, which mesmerized her. I told her about my own great-grandmother being shipped to the United States in a barrel. That got her riled up. Then she focused on the American Indians. I practically had to club her over the head before I could get her to understand her own country.”

“The skeletons found there?”

“Foundthere? Hey, Mike, I’m not talking aboutPithecanthropus erectus and the missing link. Those guys walked the earth thousands of years ago. Their remains werefound. The ones I’m referring to, like my own relatives, werestolen. ”

Mercer was standing behind Mike, with his enormous hands wrapped around Mike’s forehead. “His skull doesn’t slope quite as obviously as you’d think, Clem. It’s just impenetrable.”

The detective in Mike was skeptical when he heard Clem refer to human remains as stolen. “Explain that. The story of your Eskimos is a very unusual one. That’s not how all these bones got into collections.”

“Maybe you don’t want to hear me, but my colleagues and I have all the documentation to prove this.” Clem didn’t need a notebook to call up the facts she had mastered. “I told Katrina what had been happening all over Africa. In 1909, a black man named Kouw was dismembered and boiled just four months after he died. His widow and children watched and wailed, but the scientists won. Off to a museum with him. The diary of a famous anthropologist described how she kept vigil over a sickly woman till her death, in the 1940s, waited for her tribesmen to bury her, then dug her up and took her back to Cape Town.”

“No government protection?”

“First half of the twentieth century in Africa? The natives didn’t have a prayer. Only the missionaries tried to intercede for them. They kept some of the best records of plundered graves. These aren’t the relics of cavemen. They’re the remains of Khoisans-bushmen and Hottentots-many of whom have living descendants who have heard these stories all their lives.”

“You think this had anything to do with Katrina’s decision to go back to South Africa?”

“Everything. She had taken a job at the McGregor Museum.”

I remembered that from our conversation with Hiram Bellinger. He thought it was a waste of her education. The McGregor specialized in natural history but had no European art department.

“So,” Mike said slowly, “so you think you know why she wanted that job at the McGregor?”

“The bone vault, Detective. She wanted to get into their bone vault.”

“What’s a bone vault?”

“Nothing you’re going to find in any museum directory, Mike. It’s how Katrina and I referred to the stash of skeletons that every museum has in one hideaway or another. The South African Museum in Cape Town, they’ve got a locked storeroom with more than a thousand cartons full of somebody’s grandmothers and grandfathers.”

“And the McGregor?”

“Up in Kimberley. One hundred and fifty dusty boxes of bones, sitting under white fluorescent lights.”

“None on display?”

“No. The curators got wise to the controversy a few years later than the Americans. Took down the hanging skeletons in the late nineties.”

“So, where’s the McGregor vault?”

“That’s the trick. She was going to try to find it and help to get the remains identified. To return them to the families that have been asking for them.”

Mercer was fascinated. “Can they actually be identified at this point?”

“Some can. I think there’s a new DNA process.”

“Mitochondrial DNA,” I told her. Tracing genetic material through the maternal line, through bone and hair.

“Katrina was to replace a woman who used to work at the McGregor, a friend of mine who had actually started to catalog the remains when they were taken off display three years ago. She had been doing this as a personal measure, hoping the day would come when the indigenous communities would be able to win their return.”

“This friend of yours started to inventory them?”

“You didn’t know how dangerous museum work could be, did you? Shortly after she undertook her project, she began to get death threats. First mailed to her office at the museum, then on her answering machine at home. Vague, of course, and anonymous, but good enough to scare her. She left South Africa and moved back to Kenya. It was after she left that the skeletons were all moved into storage and locked up.”

“Why? What had she found?”

“Very specific information. Some of the entries had names of the bodies attached to the labels, even specifying the farms from which the corpses had been dug up. Bones that could be given to family members to help restore their dignity and validate their existence.”

“And the others?”

“Simply an acquisition tag that says ‘Bush-Hottentot’ or whatever their local tribe was. They were considered subhuman, Mike. Their bones were displayed just as if they were animals. These people were denigrated in death as they had been in life.”

“So you’ve got an organization to get into the locked rooms and retrieve the bones?”

“That’s a very formal word for it, Mercer. Might be more accurate to call it a cabal. If we organized, there wouldn’t be one of us to get inside the employment office of any museum.”

“You enlisted Katrina?”

“I awakened her. I opened her eyes.” Clem looked down at her notebook on the table in front of her. “These were atrocities committed in the name of science and education, and some of us feel we can do something to right them.”