‘‘That’s certainly interesting. And you’re getting calls and E-mails about the murders?’’
‘‘I don’t know that they’re about the murders. Nei ther the E-mails nor the caller mentioned any of the murders.’’
‘‘I’ll trace the E-mail account for you tomorrow.’’ ‘‘Garnett’s working on it—I think.’’
‘‘I’ll have a look too.’’
‘‘The murders could be a coincidence, couldn’t they?’’ said Diane, not really believing it herself.
‘‘Not in a town this size.’’
His comment just hung in midair, effectively ending this part of the conversation. Diane returned to her measurements.
As she examined the postcranial skeleton, all the bones except the skull, Frank watched everything she did with a keen interest.
‘‘Red Doe may have been a ballet dancer,’’ Diane said, breaking the silence.
‘‘How’s that?’’ asked Frank.
‘‘She has very well-developed attachments from her calf muscles, greater than any other part of her body. That’s a major muscle used in ballet dancing.’’
‘‘Calf muscles, that’d be the gastrocnemius,’’ said Frank.
‘‘Very good. You know your muscles?’’
‘‘You have them on the chart over there.’’
‘‘You memorized the chart while I was laying out the bones?’’
‘‘I just saw a couple of names I recognize. Besides, anyone who ever lifted weights knows the names of the major muscle groups—you know, deltoids, pecto ral, biceps, six-pack.’’
Diane laughed and shook her head.
‘‘There must be more evidence than that—I mean, maybe she just did a lot of calf exercises.’’
‘‘Red Doe’s had some serious inflammation in her right flexor hallucis longus, probably due to the plan tar flexing involved in being en pointe.’’
Frank stared at her a moment, amusement dancing in his eyes. ‘‘Okay, she had sore muscles from dancing on her toes.’’
‘‘Frank, you surprise me. That wasn’t half bad.’’
‘‘Well, I know what flexing means, and jumping around on your toes can’t be good for you—besides, I’m a detective.’’
‘‘The hallucis longus tendon starts on the fibula, one of the lower leg bones, goes under the foot and con nects to the big toe. That constant hyperflexed posi tion can do damage to the tendons severe enough to leave lesions on the bones. You’re right—it’s not good for the toes or any of the joints. During a dance, the dancer can increase the forces on her joints as much as ten times her body weight.
‘‘Red Doe’s toes show signs of stress from that kind of pounding. That goes along with other lesions I found on the left femur, where she had chronic tendi nitis of her psoas tendon from the repetitive turn-out position of the leg. I suspect, but don’t know, that Red went en pointe too young.’’
‘‘Why in the world would anyone put their body through that?’’
‘‘Would you like to discuss football?’’
‘‘Yeah, well, that’s different.’’
‘‘Right.’’
Frank finally took her up on the offer to nap on her couch and Diane worked in silence, examining, measuring and recording each bone—along with any identifying characteristics that manifest themselves in the bones. She looked for nicks or perimortem breaks that might be associated with an injury inflicted by the murderer. She found none.
As she examined the vertebrae, she found a stress fracture on the pars interarticularis of the fifth lumbar vertebrae. More evidence that Red Doe had been a ballet dancer. The arabesque position places an inordi nate amount of stress on the lower spine, and fractures on one of the lumbar vertebrae are not uncommon.
Finally, Diane examined the cut end of the phalan ges under the microscope. Four bore the mark of the same tool that was used to cut off the fingers of the other two victims.
She was taking photographs when Frank came back, sleepy eyed. ‘‘Don’t you ever go to bed?’’
‘‘Is that an offer?’’
‘‘Yes, definitely.’’
‘‘Okay. Let me take a look at the rope and I’ll let you take me home.’’
‘‘Rope?’’
‘‘The rope they were hung with.’’
‘‘Oh.’’
Diane took Red’s rope to the table and laid it out. The red string that tied the cut ends together looked as if it had been dipped in fresh blood. She examined each of the knots again. They were identical to Blue’s and Green’s, down to the stevedore’s stopper knot. Definitely tied by the same hand.
She decided to leave the bones and the rope out on the table and get David to help her finish the photo graphs tomorrow. She looked at her watch. Today. Damn, she’d hardly get any sleep. As she started to leave, she saw the other box with the single piece of rope that they had found on the ground at the scene. She took out the rope and lay it on the table. It was full of kinks and covered with worn places. No knots for her to analyze. She laid it on one of the empty tables.
* * *
Diane fell asleep with her arm around Frank’s waist, his body nestled against hers. Despite the hot night, his body felt good and safe, like home. The last thing she thought of before going to sleep was the lone rope she left lying out on the table in the lab.
Chapter 21
When Diane arrived in the crime lab, Neva ap proached her anxiously and handed her drawings of Fred and Ethel. The drawings looked as if Fred and Ethel had sat for them. They were similar to the com puter graphics, but didn’t have that computer graphic look. Both were Caucasian. Diane noticed the noses right away. They had the most distinctive detail. Neva had taken to heart the lesson Diane gave her.
Ethel was young, midtwenties, with dark hair falling below her chin, oval face, slight nose, eyes wide apart. Fred was older, midforties. Neva had drawn his hair neither short nor long, but a median length for males. His face was square and his nose almost pug, with a prominent dip between the nasal bone and the frontal bone between the eyes. Their lips were neither thin nor thick. Fred and Ethel, who never knew each other in life, were now ‘‘married’’ skeletons, given a new life in Neva’s drawings.
‘‘Very good,’’ Diane told her. ‘‘This is exactly what I’m looking for. We’ll have to frame and hang these.’’ A museum exhibit had already begun playing out in the back of her mind.
Diane unlocked the lab and the vault for Neva. While she waited for David, she set up the camera equipment.
‘‘If this rate of mayhem keeps up, you’re going to have to hire a second crime scene unit,’’ said David as he came through the door.
‘‘Maybe we can put an ad in the paper notifying everyone that the county has reached its quota of mur ders for the year, so they can’t commit any more.’’
David took over the task of setting up the cameras, and Diane laid out the bones for the photographs. As he helped her photograph Red Doe’s bones, David briefed her on the crime scene and the latest gossip.
‘‘You certainly gave Neva a boost—sending her to process the car by herself, then assigning her to recon struct the faces.’’ He spoke in a low voice, even though there was no way Neva could hear them from inside the vault room. ‘‘She was much more confident—and friendly—at the crime scene.’’
‘‘She just needed experience—and someone to counteract Garnett. That Janice
year apparently touched all the
the department.’’
Warrick thing last women working in
‘‘Garnett asked us to take Raymond Waller’s collec tion to keep safe in the museum until Raymond’s fam ily could claim it. He didn’t want to leave it in the house. I took everything to Korey. I thought some of the items might need special care.’’
‘‘That’s fine. Korey will know how to care for them.
Nice of Garnett to take care of things for the family.’’ ‘‘He’s not a bad guy,’’ said David. ‘‘A little
too
political. Acts like he’s always looking over his
shoulder.’’
‘‘Probably is. Have you met the mayor?’’ ‘‘No, but I understand that you’ve had a conversa
tion with him.’’
Diane smiled as she placed Red Doe’s fourth lum
bar vertebra on the stand to be photographed. ‘‘Yes.
We had a conversation.’’
David laughed, snapped the pictures and removed
the camera from the stand. ‘‘That’s the last one, isn’t
it?’’ Diane nodded. ‘‘We’re processing the Waller evi
dence as quickly as we can. There wasn’t much there.
We collected fiber samples from the furniture that had
been ripped up. When we find the perp, he’s bound
to have gotten fibers all over him.’’
‘‘Someone was obviously looking for something,’’
mused Diane. ‘‘You don’t think it was the collection?’’ David shrugged. ‘‘Maybe. That seems the most ob
vious. It’s just that...’’
‘‘There are those other murders,’’ finished Diane. ‘‘Yeah, those other murders. And why would he rip
up the upholstery in search of baseball bats? Doesn’t
add up.’’
David cast a glance at the lone rope lying on the
table, the one found on the ground at the Cobber’s
Wood crime scene. ‘‘You going to be able to do any
thing with that?’’
‘‘I don’t know. It was tied in knots long enough to
leave kinks in the rope. I thought I might be able to
do something with those.’’
‘‘What can you possibly do? The knots are gone.’’ ‘‘But they were there.’’
‘‘So was my hair, but we can’t reconstruct where
the cowlick was.’’
‘‘It was on the front right side, opposite where your
part was.’’
David opened his mouth, then shut it, and stroked
his bald head as if feeling for something. ‘‘How could
you know that?’’
Diane took a rope she had purchased that morning and laid it beside the crime scene rope. ‘‘You forgot,
I’ve seen pictures of you as a kid.’’
David threw back his head and laughed one loud
Ha! ‘‘You had me going. Good thing you told me. I’d
have been thinking about that all day.’’
‘‘You’d have figured it out. The point is, there’s
always evidence.’’
David went back to the crime lab, shaking his bald
head, leaving Diane to study the rope. Near one end
was a cluster of six kinks about an inch to an inch
and a half apart—some kinks were more crimped than
others. Fifteen inches down, there was a larger kink
with significant wear on the inside of the curve. Two
and a quarter inches from there, another series of
worn places. The wear was not continuous, but in
patches down the rope.
She photographed the rope and measured all the
places where it was kinked and worn. Altogether,
there were eleven kinks of varying sizes and seven
places where the rope had been worn, some quite ex
tensively, some barely noticeable. Sometimes the wear
was inside the kink, other times it was alone. Diane lay her new rope beside the crime scene
rope—called the ‘‘lone rope’’ in her notes. She took
red and green Sharpies and began marking the new
rope to match the lone rope—green signifying a kink,
red signifying wear.
‘‘Okay, smarty,’’ she muttered to herself, ‘‘what
kind of knot was tied in this rope?’’
The obvious first choice—obvious to her, at least—
was a sheepshank. Perhaps the person wanted to use
the rope, but was worried the worn places had weak
ened it. A sheepshank is a method of strengthening a
rope by tying it in such a way as to take the strain off the weak areas. It shortens a rope, but is a good way
to use a damaged rope in a pinch.
She tied a sheepshank several times, each time try
ing to match the green kinks to the turn of the knots
and placing the red worn areas where they would be
strengthened by having good rope on either side. Even
after numerous attempts, she never got close to match
ing her red and green points to the turns of the
sheepshank.
The initial failure made her
Okay, the kinks are the turns of
more determined. the knots—or . . . where the rope looped around an object. And so where does the wear come from—from rubbing
object, or itself ? Diane fished a handful
against an of colored rubber bands out of a drawer and dropped them on the table next to the experimental rope.
First she located each green kink with no red wear on the inside, made a bight—a loop—and placed a yellow rubber band around it to hold it in place. She took the kinks with inside wear and did the same thing. Where the rope showed several kinks close to gether, she didn’t bother with how the knot was actu ally tied, but simply looped them together and held them with a blue rubber band. Okay, now it looks like a mess, but that’s all right.
Diane examined the crime scene rope again and studied the red wear marks on her experimental rope. She tried several ways of folding the rope so that the wear marks—the red marks on her experimental rope—touched each other. Each way was a tangle of rope with no significant pattern.
There was about a foot and a half where several spots of wear spiraled around the rope. She folded her arms and frowned at the two pieces of hemp lying on the table. The lone rope had been twisted in some way. She made a loop at the widest space between wear marks and then twisted the rope so that all the wear marks touched, securing it with a red rubber band. It now almost looked like something. But what?
Neva came out of the vault, stretching her arms. ‘‘I thought I’d break for lunch,’’ she said.
Diane looked at her watch. She’d been at this damn rope far too long, and what was it going to tell her anyway?
‘‘I didn’t realize it’s getting so late. How’s the recon struction going?’’
‘‘Good, I think. I’ll have something by the end of the day. If people will refrain from killing each other for a while, I’ll get all three done pretty quickly.’’
‘‘What’s your take on the most recent murder?’’ asked Diane.
‘‘We don’t have that many murders here, and now we have a cluster of five, maybe six. It doesn’t look like a serial killer to me. Not that I’ve had any experi ence with serial killers, but the last two killers seemed to be looking for something. I’m kind of thinking it may be Steven Mayberry. And he, Chris Edwards and Raymond Waller were involved in something.’’ She shook her head. ‘‘But none of them have any criminal record that we know about, and as far as I know, they were all decent, hard-working guys.’’
Diane nodded. Not a bad analysis, she thought. ‘‘Fortunately, the who and why are Chief Garnett and Sheriff Braden’s problem. We just uncover the evidence.’’
Neva looked at the tangle of rope. ‘‘What are you doing here?’’
‘‘I’m trying to figure out what kind of knot was tied in the rope.’’
‘‘You can do that?’’
‘‘So far, no. But that hasn’t stopped me. I’ll leave it alone for a while. Maybe something will come to me if I get my mind off of it.’’
Diane faxed her initial report on the analysis of the skeletons to Sheriff Braden, letting him know that photographs and copies of the report would arri
ve by messenger in the afternoon. By the time all that was taken care of, she was starved. She brought tomato soup in a Styrofoam cup and a chef salad back to her museum office. As she sipped the soup and ate her salad, her gaze rested on envelopes containing the mummy’s X-rays sitting in her in-box. It made her smile. Diane was getting into the mummy thing like the rest of her staff. She quickly finished her lunch, disposed of the remains and sat down at the light table.
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