Dead Guilty dffi-2

by Beverly Connor

  She needed to stay far enough away from him to stay out of his hearing but near enough to know the direction he was traveling.

  ‘‘I’ll make you a deal,’’ he shouted. ‘‘I give you my word—on my father’s grave, and I respected my fa ther. Turn on the flashlight and we’ll both get out of here and I’ll go my separate way.’’

  Yeah, right, thought Diane. She listened as he by passed her tunnel and kept going straight. She doubled back, always keeping her hand on the wall, walking as quietly as she could, trying to get behind him. Time was passing, and Mike and Neva didn’t have much of it. She was able to move more quickly than LaSalle. Even her effort to move quietly was faster than his stumbling, angry traverse through the cave.

  She had formed another plan. She didn’t like it, but she saw no other way. If she got close enough, she could hit him hard with a rock, turn on her light and take his gun.

  She was closing the distance behind him. He stum bled and stopped dead still. Had he heard her, smelled her sweat? Her apple-scented shampoo? Was he just resting?

  She stood still, holding her breath for long mo ments. When she did breathe, it was slow and silent. He still hadn’t moved. Was he formulating a plan? He had sensed her somehow. It was a reckless plan she’d come up with.

  He started walking again, but now back from where he had come. He was close now. She remained still and breathless. She heard him fumbling and jangling.

  Almost before it happened, Diane realized what he’d thought of, what she hadn’t thought of. A tiny light flickered, like the tail of a lightning bug. She was face-to-face with the most evil set of eyes she had ever seen.

  Chapter 46

  His breath was hot and angry, and the look in his eyes said he would like to cut her heart out. He put the gun to her head.

  ‘‘Don’t think you can bargain your way out of this. Let me tell you what’s going to happen. We are going to get out of this cave. I’m going to stuff you in the trunk of my car and drive to the museum, and when it’s dark you are going to get my diamonds. You know what happened to little Kacie. That’s nothing com pared to what I have planned for you. You’ll lick my shoes like a dog and beg me to kill you. Then I’m going back and shoot your friends in the head—if they’re not dead already. That is what is going to hap pen, and I’m going to enjoy every second.’’

  He held the gun barrel so hard against her temple it was digging into her flesh. Diane said nothing. Oddly, all her fear had vanished. The rock wall at her back was cold and she felt frozen to it. Her legs were too weak to carry her weight. She wanted just to sit down and wait.... Wait for what?

  He put his key light back in his pocket, grabbed the flashlight sticking from her pocket and switched it on. It flickered a moment, then went out.

  ‘‘Damn, you fucking bitch. Look what you’ve done.’’

  Her body was on some automatic will of its own. It knew what he was going to do before her brain did. She collapsed on her shaking legs just as he rammed his fist against the wall where her head had been. He yelled in pain. She grabbed the chin strap on her hel met, pulled it off her head, struck it hard against the rocks and heard the tinkling of her electric headlamp breaking.

  Diane grabbed the pant leg of his left ankle and stood up, using the power of her legs to lift with all her strength. As his foot came off the ground, he fell backward, grabbing her as he went down. The gunshot exploded loud near her ear and she felt the heat on her cheek. She tried to scramble away, but he pulled her legs out from under her. She felt a hand on her neck, squeezing fingers working their way to her throat. For all his previous grumbling, he was silent now, and that frightened her more. Diane reached out her hand, searching for a rock. They were all over the place—why couldn’t her hand find one?

  She grasped a sharp rock the size of a baseball and clutched it tight, trying to resist his efforts to force her on her back. He flipped her over and she struck with all her strength. He cried out and dropped the gun. She scrambled backwards walking crablike, trying to escape, still holding the rock. He’d let go of her throat, but he held on to her leg. He fished the key light from his pocket and flicked it on, illuminating a tiny area around them. She struck again hard on his temple and grabbed at the light as he fell over.

  Diane squeezed the tiny light to turn it on. He was stunned, but still trying to rise. She turned around, searching for the gun. She saw it, nose down between two rocks. She went for it at the same time LaSalle came around enough to realize he needed to act. He scrambled across the rocks toward her and the gun. Diane put out the light and grabbed the gun. LaSalle swore at the darkness—and Diane.

  ‘‘Okay, you got me,’’ he began, but Diane could hear him moving, trying to regain the advantage.

  She stepped back and squeezed the tiny key light. In the dim glow she could just make out LaSalle rising from the rocks like an evil demon that wouldn’t die. She aimed the gun and shot once—not in the foot, where he had shot MacGregor. She shot him in the ankle where the tibia and fibula joined with the tarsal bones and where several important tendons were bun dled together. He screamed and collapsed. She shot his other ankle, and his cries echoed throughout the chamber. She stood in the darkness listening, without emotion. When his cries died down to curses, she spoke.

  ‘‘Now, let me tell you what’s going to happen. You are going to sit here in the dark and wait for the police to come and haul you to jail. I suggest you don’t try to crawl anywhere, but wrap yourself into a fetal posi tion and stay until they arrive.’’

  ‘‘Don’t leave me here like this.’’

  ‘‘I have no choice. Even if I could carry you, I can’t trust you. I’ll tell them where you are. It shouldn’t be more than a few hours.’’

  Diane retrieved her damaged helmet and picked up the flashlight. She shook it and tried the switch. It came on, shining a beam of light on LaSalle.

  ‘‘Let that be a lesson to you.’’

  She left him there calling after her and worked her way through the passages to the mouth of the cave. She retrieved her phone from beneath her driver’s seat and punched in 911.

  Mike looked pale against the white hospital pillow. The bullet had nicked his intestines, but luckily did no organ or spinal damage.

  ‘‘You were caving in the dark? God. What were you thinking—that you could feel your way through the cave?’’ He grinned at her. ‘‘You got guts.’’

  ‘‘I thought I could negotiate in the dark better than he could,’’ Diane said. ‘‘It barely worked.’’

  ‘‘We could hear the gunshots. Didn’t know what to think.’’ He touched the bruise on her face left by the flashlight. ‘‘So how about it, Doc, willing to take care of a wounded friend?’’

  Diane grabbed his hand and held it. ‘‘I think the hospital’s doing a fine job.’’ She paused a moment. ‘‘Mike, I’m sorry.’’

  He put a finger on her lips. ‘‘Not your fault, Doc. It’ll make a good chapter in my caving journal.’’

  MacGregor wheeled in in his wheelchair. Both feet were immobilized in casts and his arm was bandaged. La Salle had shot him in the metatarsal portion of both feet. Bad enough, but they were injuries that were easier to deal with than had he hit the closely packed tarsal bones. Diane had expected MacGregor to be angry and never want to see them again. Instead, he’d bonded. He sat there and grinned at Diane, showing off the autographs on his casts.

  ‘‘The doctor says I’ll be in walking casts real soon. I’ll be ready to go caving with you again in no time.’’

  ‘‘We’ll keep a guard at the entrance next time,’’ said Diane. MacGregor cackled. ‘‘Take care,’’ she said. ‘‘I’m going to check on Neva.’’

  ‘‘She was a real trouper,’’ said Mike. ‘‘Hung on to that rope like you told her to, didn’t complain. That had to be scary.’’

  ‘‘I hope it hasn’t put her off caves,’’ said Diane.

  ‘‘We’ll get her back out there as soon as our wounds heal.’’
>
  Diane was silent for a moment watching Mike. ‘‘I’m glad you followed my instructions and stayed alive.’’

  ‘‘You were pretty firm about that,’’ he said.

  Diane left them and walked down the hall to Neva’s room. She was dozing. Jin and David were sitting in chairs by her bed.

  ‘‘How’s Mike and that fellow?’’ asked David.

  ‘‘Doing well. Mike’ll be back to work in about a month,’’ said Diane. She gestured toward the bed.

  ‘‘Good,’’ said Jin. ‘‘Neva’s doing just fine.’’

  Neva’s rescue had been complicated. The rescue team rigged a rope system for themselves so they would have the support needed to work in safety. Get ting a harness around her chest was a big step. It gave her arms a rest. One of the rescuers had to hang over the edge with Neva and chisel out the rock from around her to free her so she could be pulled to safety.

  Neva opened her eyes. ‘‘Hi,’’ she said. ‘‘How are Mike and Dick?’’

  ‘‘They’re doing fine. How about you?’’

  ‘‘Glad to be out of that crack.’’

  ‘‘Think you’ll want to try caving again?’’

  ‘‘I have to. I bought all that equipment—hard hat, backpack. I had five backup flashlights in my back pack.’’ Neva sobered a moment. ‘‘Jin was telling me they didn’t find LaSalle, just a trail of blood leading off to a wild part of the cave.’’

  ‘‘The police are going back in to look for him. Gar nett said a team of federal marshals who are also cav ers are coming down to join the search.’’

  ‘‘Jeez, that’s scary. What do you suppose happened to him?’’

  ‘‘I can’t imagine he got far, the way he was wounded. He couldn’t have stood on his feet. I think he probably crawled somewhere and got into trouble.’’

  ‘‘I can’t say I have much sympathy,’’ said Neva.

  ‘‘No, I can’t say I do either,’’ said Diane.

  Epilogue

  The museum was closing for the day. Diane stood in the new Egyptian exhibit, taking another look before its opening the next day. It was in a small room on the second floor that suited the few artifacts on display and made it seem like a larger exhibit than it was. Also more personal.

  The walls were painted in colorful but muted tones like the worn walls of an Egyptian tomb. The real star of the exhibit was Neva’s sculpture, sitting crosslegged in the middle of the room. The entire face and body were a 3-D reconstruction made using the measurements gained from the CT scan.

  Neva sculpted him from clay first. The museum then had experts from Madame Tussaud’s make a wax fig ure. He looked so real Diane expected him to unfold his legs, take the papyrus lying in his lap and walk off his pedestal. They had concluded he was a scribe. Jonas figured him to be a royal scribe because of the position of the hands and some of the amulets that belonged to him.

  Diane walked around the wax figure, viewing it from several angles. He had tan skin and a dark wig styled similar to figurines and wall paintings from the times. He wore a simple white linen loincloth, and a reed pen and pallette hung from his neck. An auto mated video beside the figure described his life and the process the museum used to research the mummy.

  The analysis of his tissue samples revealed that he had several bacterial infections common in ancient Egypt. Release of this information garnered Diane an other mountain of mail wanting access to the mummy. The analysis on his kidney tumor showed it to be be nign. When the report came in, Jonas and Andie were relieved, somehow glad that the scribe hadn’t died of cancer.

  The mummy himself was inside the anthromorphic coffin that they still were unsure was really his. The closed coffin was inside a glass case built just for the mummy. Diane decided to exhibit the actual mummy only a few times a year. But there were photographs of him on the walls. A video documented his rewrap ping by Korey and his assistants, beginning with his own wrappings and supplementing those with a sub stantial amount of modern linen.

  The amulets were displayed under glass, each high lighted on its own pedestal. They decided not to dis play the Victorian pickle jar. The rest of the exhibit included models based on life in twelfth-dynasty Egypt. In one end of the exhibit, there was an entire miniature Egyptian town, including a scribe’s house.

  Diane was pleased with the exhibit. From a small number of artifacts, Jonas, Kendel and the exhibit de signers had done a great job. The room dimmed as the daytime lighting went off automatically and the nighttime lighting came on. In the shadows of the dim light, the wax figure looked as if he might indeed come to life. She turned and left the room.

  DEAD GUILTY 387

  Diane walked out of the museum to her new SUV and, like she now did when she left the museum, or anywhere, she scanned the area looking for anything out of the ordinary or dangerous.

  Beverly Connor is the author of the Diane Fallon Fo rensic Investigation series and the Lindsay Chamber lain Mystery series. Before she began her writing career, Beverly worked as an archaeologist in the Southeastern United States specializing in bone identi fication and analysis of stone tool debitage. She weaves her professional experiences from archaeology and her knowledge of the South into interlinked sto ries of the past and present. One Grave Too Many was the first book in the Diane Fallon series. Five of her titles have been translated into Dutch and are available in countries of the European Union.

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