“But Tina’s no longer working for Mr. Hunt,” I said. “That’s what Minerva told us.”

“I didn’t know anything about her current situation,” Jill said. I thought her voice was beginning to tremble. “I had no reason to, until she called me this week.”

“When did she call?” I asked, looking at Battaglia out of the corner of my eye.

“It was very early yesterday morning, the day after she was attacked. She awakened me, in fact, on Wednesday.”

No wonder Battaglia had known about Barr’s assault when he called me into his office a couple of hours later.

“What did she say? What did she tell you?”

“That she was terrified,” Jill said. “She told me she was going to take some time off, leave the city for a while. I guess Tina thought of me as an ally, from the old days when she was first hired at the library. She wanted to know if I would help her get her job back when she returned.”

“Did you agree?”

“Certainly. I told her to come in to see me that very day. I wanted to make sure she was all right. I even mentioned that I knew the district attorney and perhaps he could help with her case. I had no idea that you had been called out on the matter during the night.”

“And did she come in?”

“Tina said she’d be there yesterday,” Jill said, lowering her voice, “but she never showed up. Then Paul called me late last night to tell me about the woman who was murdered in Tina’s apartment. To ask if I knew her.”

“Did you?”

“No, no, no. Absolutely not.”

“I’m going to ask you again,” I said, trying to make eye contact. “Do you know where Tina is now?”

Jill pursed her lips and shook her head.

“Do you know whether she had taken another job? Was she working for someone else?”

This time Jill nodded, just as someone knocked on the door.

“Come in,” Battaglia said.

I turned my head to see Patrick McKinney, the head of the trial division, striding toward the table. He was senior to me, and although I reported directly to Battaglia on sex crimes, McKinney had oversight for all homicides and other felonies. The district attorney respected his investigative abilities, but McKinney was rigid, humorless, and small-minded, and made it his regular business to stab me in the back whenever an opportunity presented itself.

“Morning, boss. Sorry I’m late. Good morning, Jill,” McKinney said, shaking hands with her. Battaglia must have put him in charge of the library issues that Jill had brought to him. “Alex, I wish you had called me last night. I just spent fifteen minutes getting up to speed with the chief of d’s. He had to fill me in on the Vastasi murder himself. You talking about Tina Barr?”

“I was just explaining to Alex that she had recently left Jasper Hunt to start working for another one of our patrons,” Jill said.

“Who is he?” I asked.

“His name is Alger Herrick. She was quite happy,” Jill said. “It was actually a much better fit for her than Jasper Hunt.”

“Why is that?”

“Herrick is also a collector, with a special interest in cartography.”

Battaglia’s lips drew back again. “Maps.”

“Most conservators have a specialty, Alex. The work has increasingly become so technical that they usually develop an expertise in one area. For Tina, it’s been rare maps,” Jill said. “And Alger is much younger than Jasper Hunt. He’s in his mid-fifties-a very vibrant personality.”

“You’ve talked to him about Tina?” I asked, glancing from Jill Gibson to Pat McKinney.

“He’s as puzzled by her disappearance as the rest of us,” Jill said.

McKinney seated himself next to Battaglia. “I’m on it, Alex.”

“Did Tina tell you why she was terrified?” I asked.

“Well, given what had happened to her the night before, there wasn’t much reason to ask,” Jill said. “The attack made her even more anxious to get out of the apartment, too. Minerva Hunt was furious with her.”

“Did she tell you why?”

“Minerva hates Alger Herrick. They’ve crossed swords in some business deals, is all I know,” Jill said. “Tina couldn’t move out fast enough once Minerva knew she was working with Alger.”

“It’s crazy to double-team this, boss,” McKinney said to Battaglia. “Karla Vastasi’s death wasn’t a sex crime. Alex and I can sort this all out ourselves.”

I could almost feel the point of his elbow digging into my side from across the wide oak table. “I’d like to find Tina Barr before anyone causes her more distress, Pat. The woman is still my victim.”

“Tina Barr isn’t anyone’s victim, Alex. She’s a thief,” Pat McKinney said. “Don’t wrap your bleeding heart around her. She’s a forger-and a common thief.”

ELEVEN

“I disagree with Battaglia,” Mike said.

It was two-thirty on Thursday afternoon, and he was eating his second hot dog, leaning against the blue brick wall of the building that housed the morgue on First Avenue at Thirtieth Street.

“I was hoping you would.”

“Not about taking you off the murder case. About how you look when you pout.”

“Maybe you’ll ask the lieutenant to go to bat for me. Keep me on the team.”

“You should get your feelings hurt more often, Coop. Kind of cute. You look almost vulnerable.”

“All these years together and I thought you liked edgy and cool. You want to see vulnerable, watch McKinney try to undermine me.”

“Nah, that’s when you go all pit bull on me. Did Battaglia set ground rules?”

“For the time being, I can work with you and Mercer on Tina Barr. I guess setting up this interview with Alger Herrick, the man she’s been working for lately, is my consolation prize. Pat’s sitting on the larger matter of the library, and the DA may force him to let me in on it.”

“What’s McKinney ’s reason for bumping you off Vastasi’s murder?”

“I may be needed as a witness if there’s an arrest and trial, so I can’t be the prosecutor. What did we see during the surveillance?

Did I touch the body or the evidence? What did Billy Schultz and Minerva Hunt say to me? That’s why I thought we could get back to work on Barr. The two crimes can’t be unrelated.”

“Why did McKinney call Tina Barr a thief?” Mike asked.

“He interviewed Jill Gibson last week, before any of this happened. She was talking about some of the things that have disappeared from the library in the last couple of years. In order to get your hands on the most valuable items you’d really need to have special access to the best collections. That’s why the executives think most of the thefts had involved insiders.”

“This Gibson woman fingered Tina Barr?”

“No, she actually likes Barr. But it’s clear that the conservators work on materials from different parts of the library. Her name was one of the common denominators that kept coming up as the individual curators were interviewed. It’s McKinney who’s drawn a bead on her.”

“Stealing these priceless objects for herself,” Mike said, “and the best she could do was live in a basement in one of the Hunts’ buildings?”

“Thefts to order, Mike. That’s apparently the big scam. Rich collectors are all scrambling for the same limited goods. They know that thousands of these artifacts are shelved in stacks that nobody ever sees, or warehoused for decades, like the little book Karla Vastasi hid inside her jacket. And Barr was courted by many of these collectors because she’s so extraordinarily talented and had such unique access inside the building.”

“You have time to Google this Alger Herrick after Battaglia booted you from the inner sanctum?”

“Yes,” I said. “ McKinney only interviewed him by phone, last week when Herrick was still in England. That was about the problems at the library, so Barr’s name came up in the conversation, but I thought we should go deeper.”

“He was here in New York when Barr was attacked?”

“Yes, and for Vastasi’s murder, too,” I said. “He arrived last weekend.”