“I will try.”
“I have a bone I’d like to have a stable-isotope analysis performed on.”
“I see. Tell me about this bone.”
Diane explained to him about the bone Frank had brought to her. “I know this is a long shot. . ”
“But interesting. I’d like to see if it helps you in your investigation. Perhaps there is a paper in it. Do send it along. I only need two grams for the test.”
“Is there any chance you can do some oxygen and hydrogen ratios?”
“I was about to ask if you would like those too.”
“Do you think they would be useful?”
“I think it would be useful to try. Send another gram.”
“I’ll do that. Thanks, Ran.”
“If you find the rest of him, send along some teeth. Not much work has been done in this area with teeth. Incredible, since they are a protected environment in the skeleton, so to speak. You will do this?”
“I will. I hope we do find the rest of him. Thanks.”
She hung up the phone and focused on the bone again. She sniffed it. It wasn’t ancient, but she knew that; too much of the internal structure was still intact. She grabbed her hand lens and looked into the opening in the shaft, down into the marrow cavity. Something odd about the shape inside caught her eye, something that didn’t look like the lattice structure of cancellous bone-the internal part of bone where the red marrow is housed. Using a set of long tweezers, she pulled gently at the object. A wire-thin curved wisp of bone came out easily. It was almost invisible lying on the white sheet of paper on her desk.
Diane rummaged through her drawers until she found a glass vial for the tiny bone, dropped the bone inside and snapped on the cap. She gathered her bone specimens and her notebook and headed across to the faunal lab, located off the zoological exhibits, where there was a dissecting microscope and a respectable reference collection of numerous species of animal skeletons.
The animal room, as they called it, was a large room that once had rows of iron beds along each side from when it was a hospital. The beds were now replaced by glass enclosed dioramas of animals native to the South-east. A display of two mounted coyotes in their wooded habitat guarded the door leading to the faunal lab.
A slim, athletic woman in her thirties sporting cutoffs and a tee shirt, with her brown hair haphazardly piled and clipped on her head, stood just inside the lab, blocking the entrance. “Excuse me, but do you know who’s in charge here? I need to speak to someone about my office.”
Diane remembered Andie telling her about the various complaints of the new arrivals. “Are you our geologist?”
The woman glanced around the room at the animal skeletons lining the room, waiting to be placed with their stuffed counterparts. “No.”
Not the geologist. Another who was dissatisfied with her office space. Diane paused a moment, eyeing the woman from head to toe. “How do you do? I’m Diane Fallon, the director. You must be Dr. Mercer, the zoologist.”
“Yes. Dr. Sylvia Mercer. What gives? How am I supposed to use an office the size of a shoe box and open to public view?” She pointed to a large window on the left side of the lab that framed one side of her office-ample office space, Diane thought. But then, she was accustomed to having an office in a tent for weeks on end. “Whose office is that?” She pointed to an office across the lab. Also with a picture window, but obviously larger.
“That’s the collection manager’s office. She’s here all day.”
“I really need an office larger than this one.”
“The arrangement I made with your university was to provide office and lab space to supplement what your department provides you. Your office is off this lab and near the zoology exhibits. The lab isn’t open to the public, so you have complete privacy. You’re free to put bookcases or storage here in the lab if you have any spillover from your office. I think you’ll find the convenience outweighs any problem of size. I also understand you will be spending a few hours a week here, and that the bulk of your time will be spent at the university.” Diane kept her voice calm and even. She hoped the smile on her face didn’t look fake.
“That’s just it. Since I was getting an office here, the department head took my office and put me in another broom closet of an office space. Now I have two places to keep my brooms.”
“Oh. That wasn’t supposed to happen. I was hoping to add to what the faculty who come here had, not take away.”
“You’re not familiar with universities, are you?”
“Not since I was a student.” Diane looked around the room, searching for a compromise.
“I’ve got this research I’m working on. I really need more room. I’m sharing space at the university, and they want me to move my research here, but it looks like I’ll be sharing lab space with everyone here too. Taking this position has cut my resources more than in half.”
Diane turned back to her. “No, this is your lab.”
“Mine? This is my lab?”
“And the collection manager’s. He has to use it too. But as curator of animal collection, you’re in charge.”
“What about the geologist?”
“She has her own lab.”
“And the entomologist?”
“All the collections have their own labs.”
Sylvia looked around the room again. “I. . that’s different. I thought I had to share this space with everyone. They said this was a small museum.”
“It is, in terms of the number and variety of collections, but it’s a big building. It was decided that providing lab space would make a smaller museum desirable.”
“Don’t tell my department. They’ll want to send over some of the tenured faculty to replace me.”
“It’ll be our secret.” Diane handed her the vial. “This looks like a fish rib to me. Is it?”
Dr. Mercer took the vial and peered at the thin bone inside. “Yes, it is. I can’t tell you what kind of fish. Ribs are not really distinguishable among fish. Possibly bass or trout. Where did it come from? Sometimes that’s a clue.”
“Inside the marrow cavity of a broken human clavicle.”
Sylvia Mercer glanced at Diane and back at the fish bone. “How odd. Is it some ritualistic burial practice? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“No. This is a modern suspicious death.”
Sylvia silently looked at Diane, her brow creased in deep furrows. Diane felt some explanation was warranted.
“Before I became director of the museum, I was a forensic anthropologist.” Diane took the bag containing the section of clavicle from her blazer pocket. “A detective asked me to look at this bone that was found by someone. The fish bone was inside it.”
“Yes, I think I heard someone say you’re an osteologist. I must say, you were thorough if you found it inside that bone.”
Not thorough enough, thought Diane, or I would have found it the first time around.
“I appreciate the identification. Choose any type of window treatment for your office that will work best for you. Tell my assistant, Andie Layne, and she’ll order it.” Diane stepped past Dr. Mercer and sat down at a dissecting microscope. She removed the broken clavicle from its bag, placed it on the stage and focused on its surface.
“Will you be using the lab for your forensic work?” Sylvia had come up behind Diane and was looking over her shoulder.
“No. This is a onetime thing.”
“Where was it found?”
“That’s a good question. It was given to the detective without provenience.”
“Is there anything you can tell from just that one piece?”
Diane briefly described what she knew about the bone as she examined its surface under the microscope.
Having missed the fish rib the first time stung, and she wasn’t going to miss anything else. But she found nothing on the weathered surface that hadn’t been evident with the hand lens. She tore off a piece of butcher paper from a roll hanging on the wall
and gently shook and tapped the bone over it. A few flakes landed on the paper, along with a tiny brown oval that looked like a dark flake of popcorn shell. She put the paper on the microscope stage and examined the objects.
“What is it?” Sylvia leaned over Diane’s shoulder, looking at the microscope stage with interest.
“I’ll have to check with the entomologist, but I believe it’s a cap from a blowfly puparium. Its presence inside the bone cavity is as unusual as the fish rib. At this stage of development, the blowflies have moved away from the carrion and burrowed underground. Because this is a cap, we know that the adult blowfly did emerge.”
Diane looked at her watch. She had a board meeting in just a few minutes.
The faunal lab, like all the labs in the museum, had a specimen photography setup-a maneuverable camera stand with lighting that allowed the object to be photographed from different angles. Before proceeding with her analysis, she placed the bone on the camera stage and snapped pictures of it from several views.
She found another vial in the lab supply cabinet for the new material. After placing the new material in the vials and labeling them, she took the bone saw, put in a new blade and cut a sample of bone that was more than enough for her friend to test.
Sylvia Mercer looked on as Diane found a specimen bag and box to ship it in. “What kind of test are you going to do on it?”
“Stable isotope. It’ll be interesting to see if I can find any useful information.”
“It will. I’d think that modern diet wouldn’t lend itself to a test like that.”
Diane finished addressing the package and started for her office. “I’ve got to run. Andie has catalogs of office furniture, curtains and blinds and things. She’ll help you find whatever you need.”
In her office, she locked the vial in her filing cabinet and was putting stamps on the package when she heard Andie go into her office. Diane retrieved the budget figures and the fax information and opened the door between their offices. “I know you just came back from some errands, but I really need you to overnight this package for me.”
Andie stood with her keys still in her hand. “Sure. I’ll do it now.”
“Thanks.” Diane looked at her watch again. It was almost time for the meeting. She wondered if Donald had gone up to the conference room yet.
With file folders in hand, Diane locked her door and walked around the corner to Donald’s office. When knocking brought no response, she turned the knob. It was locked. Few people in the museum had master keys, but she was one of them. She opened his office and walked in, closing the door behind her.
To Diane, Donald’s office did not reflect his personality. His thinking, as well as his work, often seemed disorganized to her ordered sensibilities. But his office was something else, better organized than hers. It didn’t seem like him at all. Framed National Geographic covers decorated his walls, along with shadow boxes displaying rocks and minerals. A faux zebra-skin rug covered the area in front of his desk. Animals carved from a variety of exotic woods stood between books on his shelves. She would never have thought that Donald had decorated it, had she not seen him carefully measure and hang the pictures and place the books and carvings on the shelves.
She remembered when he had come to her with the catalog showing the desk he wanted-one of the few times his interaction with her was cordial. The polished dark walnut desk with the black ebony inlaid top was one of the most expensive pieces of office furniture they were ordering. The choice defied his characteristic argument for thrift. He had wanted that desk, and she’d agreed to purchase it partly because she hoped it would help their future interactions.
Diane wasn’t sure what she was looking for in his office. Some evidence she could confront him with. She didn’t approach his desk or his walnut filing cabinet. She didn’t intend to rifle though his things. Pangs of guilt gnawed at her for venturing without permission this far into his office.
Nothing stood out to point to his guilt. Maybe it wasn’t him. Then who? Not Andie. It could have been Andie, though. Maybe she simply did not remember ordering the duplicate exhibits. No, that was absurd.
Diane assumed that someone ordered the items to make her life difficult. Perhaps she was just paranoid. That thought made her feel better. It would be easier to deal with her own paranoia than with some secret mischief-maker in the museum. Feeling ashamed for her trespass, she turned and put her hand on the doorknob. As she started to turn it, a stack of magazines caught her eye.
On top of the stack was an issue of U.S. News and World Report. The cover photograph was of a mass burial. She picked up the magazine and thumbed through the pages. They opened automatically, as if the magazine had been laid open at that point, to an article about a mass burial site she had excavated in Bosnia. There were no pictures of her, nor was she mentioned in the article, but it was her site. She picked up the other magazines and flipped through them-Newsweek, Time, more U.S. News and World Reports-all had articles about places she’d been.
Only one photograph actually showed her, but she was unrecognizable with the bill of her cap pulled down over her eyes. She and the team always kept a low profile. They avoided mentioning their names for journalists, hid their faces when photographs were taken. No team members went out of their way to make themselves a target. But there were plenty of pictures of open burials in the process of being excavated-skeletonized bodies piled on one another. It made her stomach turn.
So Donald had been reading about her. He knew the places she’d been with her team. How much else did he know? The articles talked about the mass graves, the politics of the region, the United States’ and world response to atrocities, but never any personal details about the field crew. Never anything that the forensics team chose to keep private.
Who knew about the last year in Puerto Barquis? Only the people she’d worked with. Only members of World Accord International. Quite a few people, but all were good at being circumspect. She hadn’t confided in anyone here. Did someone know? Did someone know what “In the Hall of the Mountain King” meant to her? It wasn’t exactly a secret, but to find out, you had to know one of her team-know them well enough for them to trust you.
She returned the magazines to the shelf and looked back over the room, her cheeks burning with anger. She’d a mind to search it, go through his desk drawers, his filing cabinet. But she didn’t. This job was her return to a civilization where tyrants are kept in check. She wasn’t going to become one after she’d spent the past ten years working to bring them to justice.
She shouldn’t have come into his office. First, the mistake she’d made with the bone, and now this. She was getting sloppy. If she couldn’t do a good job for Frank, she shouldn’t have said she would look at the bone. If she couldn’t control her employees without invading their privacy, then she didn’t need to be museum director. She left Donald’s office and locked the door behind her, got on the elevator and rode to the second floor.
As Diane walked down the hallway to the large conference room, she heard murmurs of restless conversation. Turning the corner, she saw the board members standing in the hallway. Half were looking very unhappy. Donald was deep in conversation with Madge Stewart. He looked up when Diane approached, then down at his watch.
“It’s locked,” said Madge, tapping her foot, her springy gray hair bouncing with each tap. Madge had missed the contributors’ party because she had marked it wrong on her calendar, and she blamed Diane. It appeared to Diane that Madge often blamed whomever was available for everything that the vagaries of life made her do.
“I have other meetings. If I ran my restaurants like. .” Craig Amberson was fidgeting with his briefcase. Laura had told Diane he was quitting smoking. He had actually asked the doctor if he could wear two nicotine patches in the beginning.
Kenneth Meyers was working on his Palm Pilot. “Get yourself one of these,” he told Craig. “You can work anywhere.”
Diane looked at her watch. Three minutes late. �
�I’m sorry. I had some unexpected business to attend to.”
Even Harvey Phelps appeared curt. “Where’s Andie? Doesn’t she have a key?”
“Laura went to look for her, just before you got here, Harvey,” said Mark Grayson, looking at his watch. “Look, Diane, if this is the way you intend to run things. .”
Laura rounded the corner. “Couldn’t find Andie or Diane. . Oh, there you are.”
“Andie’s running some errands,” said Diane. “I have three minutes after eleven. Why is everyone so impatient?”
“Because we’ve been waiting for more than twenty minutes,” said Mark.
“Donald reminded us last night that the meeting was rescheduled for 10:45,” said Laura.
Diane had the key in her hand, ready to unlock the door. She spun around and faced Donald. “Why did you do that?”
He took a small step back. “You said to change the meeting to fifteen minutes earlier.”
“No, I did not.”
“I have your E-mail.”
“I didn’t send it. This is going to stop.” She thrust the key in the lock. Before she turned it, the door opened, almost knocking her backward.
Chapter 9
Diane and every one of the museum board members took a step backward at the startling sight of a disheveled, droopy-eyed Signy Grayson stumbling into the hallway and almost to the floor, if Diane hadn’t held on to her arm. The heavy aroma of metabolized alcohol and perfume wafted over the small crowd.
“I must have fallen asleep. It’s, uh, been a long day.” She looked at them in confusion.
No one said anything for several beats, shifting their gazes from Signy to Mark, who stood strangely silent and surprised. Diane broke the silence. “Are you all right? Were you here all night?”
“Signy?” Mark found his voice and pushed his way to the door and took her by the arm. “Sweetheart, are you ill?”
“Just feeling a little tired. What does she mean ‘all night’?” Signy put her hands to her face and rubbed her eyes.
“Because it’s Wednesday,” said Diane. “The party was last night.”
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