The Night Killer

by Beverly Connor

  “Afternoon, Miss Fallon. I usually ask people I interview to come to my office. Most people find that intimidating, but I reckoned that you wouldn’t, being in the business yourself, so to speak.”

  Diane raised her eyebrows. So, he was interviewing a suspect. Best not to show any fear, she thought.

  “No, I wouldn’t,” she said. “I used to work in human rights investigations in South America. You’d be hard-pressed to be more intimidating than some of the people I had to deal with down there.” Although Slick gave it a good go, she thought. And you’re not doing too bad a job, just walking in here.

  “That so? Interesting.”

  “Please sit down, Sheriff,” she said.

  He’d wandered over to the photograph of her dangling at the end of a rope, rappelling into a cave.

  “I like to get a look at where a person works. Tells me a thing or two about what makes them tick. What’s this photograph?”

  “It’s of me. I’m rappelling into a cave that has a vertical entrance,” she said.

  “Entering a cave. That right? Looks dangerous,” he said.

  “Not if you know what you’re doing. It’s really very relaxing. Strenuous, but relaxing.”

  “That what you do to relax?”

  It was more of a comment than a question. Diane was used to people thinking that caving was anything but relaxing.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Interesting,” he said. “Don’t look too relaxing to me.”

  Diane wondered what assessments he had made of her so far. He moved to the other side of the office and looked at her Escher prints: a castle with an endless ascending and descending staircase, an impossible self-filling waterfall, and a tessellation of angels and devils. It was the angels and devils he stared at.

  “You religious?” he said.

  “Depends on what you mean by it,” she said.

  “Simple question.”

  “I believe in God,” she said. “I sometimes go to church. When I do, I go to the Presbyterian or First Baptist, because I know and like the people who go there. I consider religion personal and private.”

  “Humm . . .” was all he said.

  Diane saw that he was trying to get to know her, trying to place her in perspective in his own worldview. Religion was important to him.

  “What does this mean?” he said, pointing to the angels and devils drawn in such a pattern that there were no overlaps of the individual angels and devils; nor were there any voids between them.

  “I suppose it means something different to whoever looks at it. For me, it’s like the work I do in forensics. It could be seen as the endless struggle between good and evil. It’s also an interesting interlocking pattern.”

  “It’s either an angel or a demon. I like it.”

  The way he said it left Diane with the impression that he was surprised that he could like a piece of art. It didn’t surprise her, however. He probably believed deep in his soul that there was a clear delineation between good and evil, and no overlapping or voids in between.

  “Let me show you the crime lab,” she said.

  “Not interested in your crime lab. Won’t avail myself of its services,” he said.

  “I’m not asking you to use it. You said you like to look at where a person works, to understand them. This is only part of the picture.” Diane gestured with a sweep of her arm. “There is a whole other part of what I do on the other side of the building.”

  “Have a point there,” he said.

  Diane led him out of the office wing and into the lobby of the museum. Several tour groups were looking at the Pleistocene Room just beyond the lobby. Andie stood near the mastodon. She appeared to be giving directions to a man dressed in Dockers and a golf shirt. Several of the collection managers were with her, probably going together for a meeting up in Archives. It was not uncommon to get sidetracked just walking through the lobby.

  Korey Jordan, her head conservator, was talking to one of the groups, with a docent standing beside him. His long dreadlocks were pulled back in a low ponytail that swung when he turned his head. He was probably explaining what they did to conserve some of the specimens. Visitors often enjoyed talking to the curators themselves, or in this case the conservator.

  Diane saw one of the docents glance over at her and watched a look of alarm spread over her face. Diane realized that Sheriff Conrad had been in the museum before. They’d had some visitors who were in church groups take exception to the ages of the dinosaurs and the rocks. On one occasion a woman even yelled at the docent who was giving them the tour.

  The sheriff, however, didn’t appear to recognize the docent. In fact, Diane thought he looked scared. Not of any particular person, certainly not of Diane. And it wasn’t that he had fright plastered on his face. But there was a subtle look of dread that changed his appearance from the overconfident man she had just had in her office.

  She frowned and looked around at the people going and coming, using cell phones, iPods. Some had laptops tucked under their arms. Some of the children held models of dinosaurs they had gotten from the museum shop. There was also a lot of noise. The lobby was usually noisier than the rest of the building. People tended to quiet down near the exhibits.

  With a flash of insight, Diane wondered if what he was afraid of was the world turning into something he didn’t understand. Here, amid all the colors of clothes and skin tones, amid the different accents and appearances, it was the opposite of the black-and-white picture of the angels and devils. And quite a different place from his kingdom in Rendell County.

  “Lot of chaos,” he muttered.

  “You should be here on a busy day,” said Diane, as they walked to the elevator. She decided she would take him to the third floor from this side of the building and walk across the third-floor overlook, which gave a wonderful view of the dinosaurs.

  Chapter 14

  The overlook was crowded with visitors looking down at the dinosaur skeletons. Sheriff Conrad seemed more interested in looking at the visitors than at the giant beasts. But for several moments he did look at one of the huge pterodactyls hanging at eye level. Diane wondered what he made of it all. After a moment he was ready to go and followed Diane across the overlook in the direction of the crime lab.

  He made no comment on anything he had seen on their trek through the museum. He was apparently a man with little curiosity. Or perhaps his curiosity was reserved for specific things, like sizing up the people who came into his sphere of influence.

  Beyond the overlook they went through a doorway and stepped into a hallway. One end housed a security guard in a room behind a glass partition. He waved at Diane as she keyed in her access and entered the lab.

  The crime lab was a maze of metal-and-glass-walled workspaces that were sparkling clean. Inside the workspaces were all kinds of wonderful equipment. At least, Diane thought it was wonderful. She wasn’t sure Sheriff Conrad was going to be impressed with it.

  She was pretty much on the mark about his interest. He observed without comment each piece of equipment Diane showed him. He listened politely as she explained how it worked. Normally, things like gas chromatography, spectral analysis, and electrostatic detection impressed visitors. He seemed indifferent. In the main, he looked as if he were visiting another planet.

  “We also have many national and international databases,” said Diane. AFIS for fingerprint identification, CODIS for DNA identification, of course. We also have databases for bullet casings, tire treads, fibers, glitter, shoe prints, cigarette butts, paint, hair, feathers, buttons, soil. . . .” She trailed off, feeling she had lost his attention. She didn’t mention the many computer programs that matched, categorized, imaged, mapped, and correlated all those database items.

  “Find all this useful, do you?” he said at last.

  “Extremely,” said Diane. “Data from evidence analysis is what physically links the criminal to the crime. Everyone leaves something behind or takes something away from a crime sc
ene.”

  “Can’t replace good old- fashioned talking to people, sizing them up,” he said.

  “It’s not meant as a replacement,” said Diane. “Interviewing and sizing up bring to bear your knowledge, your years of experience, and your judgment toward the solution of a crime. Data from analysis of physical evidence provides the hard proof that the law requires. It’s our job here to extract all the information that evidence can give us.”

  She saw David working in one of the cubicles on the other side of the room. He glanced at her and looked back down at whatever he was working on.

  Diane led the sheriff to the forensic anthropology lab, a large white-walled room with shiny tables, sinks, microscopes, measuring devices, and Fred and Ethel, the male and female lab skeletons standing in the corner. Whereas the crime lab was affiliated with the city of Rosewood, the osteology lab belonged to the museum. It was completely her domain.

  “What do you do here?” he asked, looking at the metal table. He touched it on the edge and gave it a slight shake, then took his hand away.

  “I’m a forensic anthropologist. I analyze skeletal remains in this room,” she said.

  He raised his eyebrows. “How many jobs you got?” he asked.

  “Three, you could say. I’m director of the museum, director of the crime lab, and I’m a forensic anthropologist. I’m sent skeletal remains from all over the world and I try to get as much information as I can about the people they were,” she said.

  “How’s that work out, having so many jobs?” he asked, looking around the room, his gaze resting on Fred and Ethel.

  “I work a lot. But I also have a lot of people working for me,” she said.

  “You do a good job at all of them?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  For the first time he almost smiled.

  Diane led him to her office, a room in the corner of the lab. This office was smaller than the one in the museum—and more stark. The walls were painted a pale off-white color. The floor was made of green slate. The furniture was spare and unimaginative—a dark walnut desk, matching filing cabinets, a burgundy leather couch and matching chair, and a watercolor of a wolf on the wall. That was it. As Diane sat behind her desk, she directed him to the stuffed chair nearby.

  “You know bones?” he said, sitting down in the stuffed chair and crossing his legs so that his left ankle was on his right knee.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You sure those were bones at Slick Massey’s place?” he said.

  “I have no doubt,” said Diane.

  “Slick and Tammy say it’s a plastic Halloween skeleton you saw,” he said.

  “It wasn’t,” said Diane. “I’m quite sure of what I saw.”

  “Slick’s no-account. His daddy wasn’t much better. This Tammy’s about the kind of woman his father usually took up with. Still, I need to see bones before I can do anything,” he said. “Got no missing persons.”

  “I understand,” said Diane.

  “Travis said you took some wood with you from that tree that fell on you,” he said.

  “I did. I wanted to see if a body had decomposed inside the hollow tree,” she said.

  He shrugged his shoulders. “Slick might say it was a deer,” he said. “Not that it would make a bit of sense. But you can’t know if it’s human, is what his lawyer would say.”

  “His lawyer would be wrong,” said Diane. “We can identify human antigens if they are there.” Diane didn’t explain immunochemistry to Sheriff Conrad. She would let him ask if he wanted a lengthier explanation.

  “You can tell if it’s human . . . even without the body?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Diane was a little surprised. She had worked with most of the surrounding county sheriffs, and they were amazingly up-to-date on forensics. Sheriff Conrad seemed like a throwback to another era. He must really hate scientific progress, she thought. Or really be uninterested in it.

  “Did you kill the Barres?” he asked.

  If he thought he was going to surprise her, he would be disappointed. Diane expected his question, expected it to be out of the blue, expected him to drill her with his small, dark eyes the way he was doing now.

  “No, of course not,” she said, meeting his eyes.

  “Travis told me about your trek through the woods. I’d like to hear it from you,” he said. “It’s a wild tale Travis told me. I’d be interested to know if he got it wrong, or you really did what he said.”

  Diane put her hands in front of her on the desk and began her narrative. She started with her visit to the Barres, about the good meal that Ozella Barre had on the table when she arrived, about all the stories that Roy Barre told of his grandfather over dinner. Diane told him how she said good-bye to the Barres and tried to find her way back to the main road in the downpour.

  Sheriff Conrad was a patient listener: He never interrupted; he just watched her as she spoke. Diane told him about finding her way to the Massey house, only to have a tree fall on the hood of her SUV and break apart.

  She was about to talk about the skeleton when she was interrupted by a knock on the door. David poked his head in.

  “I have some results for you,” he said. “All of the analysis that you asked for.”

  The sheriff seemed not to like the interruption. He frowned slightly, first at Diane, then at David.

  Diane was surprised. “You guys must have worked all night.”

  “We did,” he said.

  “Come in,” Diane told him.

  David entered with Detective Hanks close behind.

  “Hello, Diane,” said Hanks. “I’ve had quite a time here. You guys do some detailed work.”

  Diane stood up and introduced them. “Sheriff Conrad, this is David Goldstein, he’s my assistant director of the crime lab,” she said. “Detective Hanks is with the Rosewood Police Department.” She gestured to each of them.

  “Hanks has been observing,” said David.

  Not rising, the sheriff nodded to the two of them. David nodded back and put a box on Diane’s desk and began to unload several boxes and envelopes out of it.

  The sheriff looked more annoyed, but Diane could see he was trying to hide it. She didn’t explain that the boxes had to do with his case. That explanation was going to be tricky, and she didn’t look forward to it.

  David picked up a small box, like the kind she used in the osteology lab. He looked at her and winked.

  “We found a little surprise under the hood of your SUV,” he said, giving Diane a whisper of a smile.

  Diane opened the box. It was indeed a little surprise.

  Chapter 15

  In the box on cotton batting lay the distal and medial phalanges of a right hand.

  As Diane looked at the bones, David and Hanks slipped out the door, leaving her alone in her office with Sheriff Conrad.

  “I have your body,” Diane said to the sheriff.

  Leland Conrad jumped as if his chair had shocked him.

  “What?”

  He leaned forward with his hand outstretched.

  Diane rose from her desk, walked around to his chair, and handed him the box with the two small bones.

  “They are finger bones from the right hand,” she said.

  He peered into the box and looked up at her. “You sure they’re human?” he said. “Mighty small.”

  “Quite sure,” said Diane. “They’re human. When the skeletal hand hit my windshield and broke apart, these two bones fell down into the recess behind the windshield wipers. And that’s where my people found them. The smallest one is the tip of the finger.” She held up her hand and pointed to the tip of her own finger. “Finger bones can be very small.”

  “Looks like they’re from a baby,” he said.

  “They’re from an adult. Infant bones are tiny indeed, and they wouldn’t be ossified—hardened into bone.”

  “Why would anyone put a body in a tree?” he asked.

  “They proba
bly thought that sealing it up in a hollow tree was a clever way to hide the body. It worked for a while,” said Diane.

  She directed her attention back to the bones in the box, pointing out the significant properties.

  “The bones show marked deterioration at the joints. The distal end of the third distal phalanx is almost eroded away. It could be for a number of reasons—diabetes or arthritis, for starters. There are other diseases that erode the bone in that way. I’d have to examine it more closely to know.”

  She told him the details she had observed about the skull. She backed up a couple of steps.

  “I doubt that Miss Taylor and Mr. Massey could have gotten all the bones out of the mud. There are two hundred and six bones in the human body, give or take. A hundred and six of them are the small bones in the hands and feet. You might want to send someone out to look for more bones. They will need a wire mesh to wash the mud and dirt through.”

  “I’ll go myself and get Slick to tell me what he did with them and who they belong to,” he said with a moderate amount of vehemence.

  Now, thought Diane, the first tricky part. She walked back to her desk and sat down. She picked up one of the reports and handed it across her desk to the sheriff. She started with what she figured would offend him the least—her clothes.

  “I had the lab process the clothes I was wearing at the time,” said Diane.

  “Says here there was no blood on them. Could have washed off in the rain, I suppose,” he said.

  “No, it’s more stubborn than that. It would take bleach or kerosene to get blood out,” said Diane. “I came directly here to the museum and changed clothes in my office. There were half a dozen people here. I didn’t have the time or the facilities to wash them.”

  He nodded and waited, apparently suspecting that she had more.