One Grave Too Many dffi-1

by Beverly Connor

  “Here,” said Frank, squatting next to a place where someone had dug into the ground.

  Diane squatted beside him, scanning the area. “This is where they found the bullet?”

  “I believe so.”

  The sun was sinking behind the tree line; however, a remaining flicker of sunlight reflected on something. She took a pair of tweezers from her pocket, along with an evidence bag and picked up the object.

  “What is it?” asked Frank, looking at the curled piece of clear plastic about the size of two postage stamps.

  “Plastic.”

  “Is it important?”

  “Might be.” Diane put the fragment into the bag and planted a ribbon and nail in the ground. “The pictures aren’t clear about which direction the body lay.” Frank stood, hesitating for a moment before he spoke. “I know this is hard,” said Diane.

  “Yeah. I just remembered, today’s Louise’s birthday.” Frank pointed to the house. “Jay’s head was pointing toward the house.”

  “Do you know if they found any gunpowder residue on his jacket? I didn’t see any, but. .” She let the sentence hang as she backed up from where Jay had fallen. “If Detective Warrick’s saying he was coming home and was surprised by his sister, why was he shot in the back?”

  “I guess she’d say she couldn’t face her brother.”

  “But she’d just killed her parents in their bed.” Diane looked around the grass where she stood. She squatted and scrutinized the area again. Just a couple of feet in front of her she found another plastic fragment smaller than a postage stamp. She bagged it and marked the place.

  “Did the crime scene find more of these pieces? I don’t see any tags. . ”

  “I don’t know what they found. I’ll see if I can find out. You think it means something?”

  “Possibly.” She handed him the bag and he put it in his jacket pocket. “We need to have it analyzed.” Diane glanced over at the guard sitting on the porch, watching them. The cost for Star’s defense was mounting and it had just begun. Unless the murders were solved soon, there wouldn’t be much for Crystal McFarland to fight over.

  Diane examined the tree trunk, but saw no obvious blood spatters. She also looked around for more pieces of plastic, but found none.

  “OK. Let’s go to the house now.”

  “I think I’ll tell Harry he can take a break. How long will we be here?”

  “All night.”

  Chapter 13

  Diane stood in George and Louise’s bedroom and stared at the bare bloodstained mattress. It had been new; now it was ruined. Before it was a crime scene, their bedroom probably had an airy brightness, with its light pine furniture, green iron garden bench at the foot of the bed, and floral-patterned wallpaper. It was the wallpaper that drew her attention away from the bed and created a frown on her forehead.

  Frank stood next to her, his gaze darting from the chest of drawers to the dresser covered with family photographs, to a new green wrought iron headboard still in its box leaning against a wall, and finally to the bed and the bloodstained wall next to it.

  “Louise was redecorating the bedroom. You should have heard George complaining on poker night. Said he had to win big just to pay for the new headboard. It’s all unfinished. Jay’s too-unfinished.”

  Unconsciously, she grasped Frank’s hand and squeezed it. He squeezed back.

  “This is going to take all night?” he asked.

  She nodded, her thoughts focused on the scene before her. The room smelled of death. It emanated from the mattress, the curtains, the walls. And the house was hot. She felt her scalp prickle with sweat, and she hadn’t even begun yet. It was going to be an unpleasant night. She took two pairs of latex gloves from her kit and handed one pair to Frank. He took the gloves but looked at her quizzically.

  “You think we still need to protect the crime scene, after all the people that have trampled through here?”

  “The gloves are not to protect the crime scene,” she said. “They’re to protect us from the crime scene.”

  “It is pretty ripe in here,” he said.

  “You’ll get used to it.”

  She looked in dismay at the wallpaper as she pulled on her gloves. Antique red roses, gold buttercups, baby’s breath and green leaves against a background of tiny flecks of color-and overlain by blood spatters.

  She gestured to an area of fine spattering. “See this fine mist pattern here?”

  Frank studied the wall, squinting. “Yes.”

  “This is high-impact spatter from a gunshot. But where the drops are larger-here-these are places of medium impact. And this line of spattering that leads upward to the ceiling. That’s castoff from whatever was used to strike them.”

  “I sort of see. Kind of hard to see on top of that wallpaper.”

  “That’s going to be a problem. It’s difficult enough, but the pattern on the wallpaper makes it like a hidden-picture illusion.”

  “You saying they were shot and beaten?” He asked, as if he had just realized what she had said.

  Diane nodded.

  “The autopsy will give us the details of that,” he said.

  “But the autopsy can’t tell us what this spatter can. Up on your trig?”

  “Trig?”

  “Trigonometry.”

  “Oh. Yes, math I understand.”

  “Analyzing blood spatters is mostly geometry-you take the two-dimensional pattern from the wall and project to three dimensions.”

  Diane looked over at Frank. This was the blood of his friends that she was at the moment being so dispassionate about. He was already getting a five o’clock shadow and, though most of the time it made him look sexy, it now made him look more melancholy. “Are you all right with this?” she asked.

  “I’m fine.” His voice was a little too sharp, but Diane took him at his word and continued.

  The only way to do a good job is to find your objectivity and hang on to it like an anchor. That was one of the things that Santos took away from her-for a while.

  “What I’ll be analyzing is the medium-impact spatter, and I have to measure the two axes-the length and width-of the drops.”

  Frank turned his face to her, his dark eyes startled. “You’re kidding. All of them?”

  “Not all, but a significant enough number to make sure I get reliable results.”

  “I guess that will take all night and then some. Damn, how can you even see them?”

  “It’d definitely be easier if she’d chosen plain white wallpaper. I’ll use a magnifying glass.”

  She picked up the glass from her case and showed Frank magnified spatters of blood that had hit the wall.

  “A spatter that hits the wall head-on at a perpendicular angle will be round. As the angle of impact gets smaller, the more elongated the drop becomes. See the little tail on most of these drops here?”

  “If I hold my head just right and put my tongue between my left molars.”

  “Now you’re getting the idea. The drop goes in the direction of the tail, like a comet. If you’ve ever spilled anything that has any viscosity at all, you’ve noticed that phenomenon. Ever have a bottle of ketchup blow up on you and spatter across the table?”

  “As a matter of fact, that happened in a restaurant once. Covered me and the people at the next table. I impressed that date. But I don’t recollect observing the shape of the drops of ketchup.”

  Diane watched his face as he smiled. He was trying hard. The thing she had remembered most about Frank was his smile-it made his eyes squint with a mischievous twinkle that made you think he was sharing a joke with you, and it never failed to make her smile back at him. This one was short-lived. She wished she was someplace else, doing anything else.

  “If I were to draw a line along the longest axis of the drops, I’d have the two-dimensional point of convergence.”

  “Which tells you what?” he asked.

  Diane hesitated a moment, biting her lower lip.

  “Go ahead
and tell me. I’ll have to explain it to Star’s lawyer-or maybe throw it in Warrick’s face. No way you can make it any harder for me than the fact that they’re dead.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. OK. When the perp strikes a blow on a victim, blood is spattered on whatever surface is near. All of those drops in that spatter are part of a set that defines that particular blow. For analysis purposes, they all belong together. When the perp swings his. . his weapon, it will have blood on it, and that blood will be cast off, making a trail across the wall, the ceiling or whatever, depending on how he swings it. The victim, if he isn’t unconscious with the first blow, will move around. When he is hit again, it will leave another set of spatters, but at a different angle, with a different point of convergence. Finding the different lines of convergence can tell me how many times the victim was struck and where the victim was located at the time of each blow.”

  Frank nodded. “That makes sense. So if you know that the more elongated the drop, the more acute the angle of impact, then you can compute the angle. What is it? Something like, the sine of the angle equals the width over the length?”

  “You are good at trig.”

  “I was going to get a degree in math until my father asked what kind of job I could get with it. I went into accounting instead.”

  “And that led to crime?”

  “I was determined to make as little money as possible.”

  Diane took out a calculator, a protractor, and a roll of trajectory string.

  “What’s that? Fishing line? What else you got?”

  Diane watched as he poked around in her blood-spatter analysis kit.

  “I’ll attach this string to one end of a drop with a push pin, compute the angle, align the string to the angle, and anchor the other end of the string. After I do several drops that way, the strings will cross at the point of origin of the blood source. I’ll probably end up with several points of origin, all at different heights and distances from the wall. I should be able to do a fair job of reconstructing the scene when I’m finished.”

  Diane hoisted her case up on the nightstand and opened it. “I’ll start by marking off sections of the wall and taking pictures of each section. After that, I’ll start measuring and recording.”

  She took out a small laptop computer. “Kenneth Meyers says he’s going to give me a new laptop. Some top-of-the-line model he has.”

  “Ken’s as much a go-getter as Mark Grayson, though not as obnoxious. He’s been trying to get me to recommend his computers to the Atlanta PD,” said Frank.

  Diane shook her head as she reached down and plugged in her computer. “Are you going to do it?”

  “I told him I’m not the one to ask. I have a tough time just getting pencils.”

  “Hand me that flashlight,” she said.

  “You find something?”

  Diane took the light from his hand, wondering if the batteries still worked. “This is new carpet, you said. When was it laid?”

  “George started complaining about it about a month and a half ago. About that long ago, I guess. What did you find?”

  “A round imprint in the carpet between the nightstand and the bed.”

  She angled the flashlight until it showed the depression. It was hard to see, barely there. In another day or so the new carpet would spring back up and it would be gone.

  “Hold the light and let me take a couple of pictures.” Diane laid a small ruler next to the depression and snapped several photographs with her digital camera. She checked the images in the viewer to make sure she had gotten a clear picture.

  “Did George keep a baseball bat by his bed?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll ask Star. That does look as if the business end of a baseball bat stood there, doesn’t it? I wonder if Warrick found it.”

  “I’m having a difficult time grasping the idea that she was so completely incompetent here.” Diane took a pair of calipers, measured the indentation, and recorded the information on her computer.

  “I’m not saying she doesn’t have potential. She just doesn’t have the experience.”

  “But letting McFarland in the crime scene. Even inexperienced criminalists know better.”

  “I know. I got the impression Warrick knew Crystal-that they were friends or something. Hell, maybe Crystal did her hair.”

  Diane used her digital camera and markers and began the process of photographing the bloodstained wall.

  “While you’re in here, I’m going to search Jay’s room. I’d like to examine his computer, if Warrick didn’t take it. Maybe I’ll find some clue as to what he was doing out late that night.”

  Diane had prepared a small maze of string when she realized it was getting dark outside. Subconsciously, she heard muted sounds of Frank in a far bedroom moving things around. Other than those muffled noises, she was aware of nothing but numbers. Tuning out the grimness, the gore on the walls, the smell of the room-there was nothing but the silent crunch of numbers creating lines of trajectory.

  “How about a break?” Diane started at the sudden voice coming from the doorway.

  “Oh, hey. I lost track of time.” She looked at her watch. “A break’s probably a good idea. I could use a couple of minutes out of this room.” She anchored the end of the string she was holding and the two of them went downstairs and out on the porch.

  It had gotten dark and there was only a sliver of a moon. Out here the stars shone bright in the night sky. The light from the living room windows gave off only a dim glow, so the two of them sat mostly in the dark on the top step. Diane watched the fireflies and listened to the crickets.

  Beside her, Frank patted his pocket. “Wish I hadn’t given up smoking. I could use a cigarette about now.”

  “Did you find anything in Jay’s room?” she asked.

  Frank didn’t say anything for a moment, and Diane looked over at him. She could see his eyes were misty with tears.

  “His fishing gear, soccer uniform, his CD player-all the things left of his life. Jay and I used to go fishing a lot. George liked to hunt, but Jay really didn’t like the idea of shooting things. But he liked fishing. He was good at fly-fishing, too. You know, that’s not easy. On weekends during the summer, me, George and Jake Houser would take our sons and go up to my cabin. George, Jake and Dylan would go hunting. Jay, Kevin and I would fish. I was thinking as I went through his things, at least it’s easier on George and Louise. I’d go crazy if I lost Kevin-especially like this.”

  Diane hugged her legs to her and lay a cheek on her knees, listening to an owl in the distance.

  “They’d taken his computer,” Frank continued. “I guess I should be glad that Warrick at least made like she was collecting evidence. But I’d sure like to take a look at his hard drive.”

  “Maybe your cop friend-Izzy-can tell you what’s on it.”

  “I’d like to examine it myself. It’s like you and blood spatters-you have to know about computers to be able to extract all the evidence that’s on them. You have to know where to look and how to look. Besides, Izzy’s a uniform cop and there’s a limit to what he can get for me from Warrick’s investigation. Izzy’s gone out on a limb as it is.”

  Diane didn’t say anything for a moment. She imagined that the police department had somebody who could look at the hard drive. Then she remembered that Frank was an expert in computers and computer fraud. “Maybe they’ll let you look at it.”

  Frank looked over at her. “Yeah, right.”

  “You can ask.”

  “I searched Star’s room too. Nothing helpful. Except it seemed to be empty of current personal things-it was more like looking at her past. I’ve been thinking about George and Louise being both shot and beaten. That usually means two perps, right? Two different weapons.” Frank seemed to be struggling for words. “I can’t help but wonder. . I mean, there’s Star and her boyfriend. . on drugs. It’s just, I can’t imagine Star with that much hate. . You have to have a lot of pent-up hate to overkill. Isn’t that right?”


  “Don’t go reconstructing the crime scene before we’ve collected the evidence. We don’t know anything right now. We know that they were shot. The coroner did say that at the scene, didn’t he?” Frank nodded. “And at least one was also hit. We don’t know if both were beaten, and we don’t know how many people were involved. Now we just have a crime scene. Let me finish processing it. Tomorrow we’ll sit down and talk about it.”

  “You’re right.” Frank stood up and pulled Diane up with him. “Look, neither of us has had anything to eat. There’s a Krystal down the road. You like those little square cheeseburgers, don’t you? Why don’t I go get some food and bring it back.”

  “Sure. . that’s a good idea.” Diane stretched the kinks out of her back. “And bring back plenty of coffee too.” She opened the screen door and started back inside. “I’ll be upstairs, working.”

  Chapter 14

  Before Diane began again with her grim work, she picked up a silver framed photograph sitting on the dresser and looked at it. It was a studio shot of the family. Family portraits rarely tell the whole truth. They always show a happy family. That’s their job, and they do it so well that all who look upon the smiling faces of a family touched by tragedy never fail to be astounded that this terrible thing could have happened to them.

  The Boone family portrait was like that. They all looked happy-and so different from the only other photos she had seen of them. George and Louise were in the center of the picture, their bodies slightly facing each other and their faces turned toward the camera.

  George’s tanned face testified that he spent time outdoors. His short dark brown hair was receding slightly. His dark eyes, staring at Diane from the picture, looked friendly. Louise had what might be called a perky face. Her smile was big and crinkled the corners of her hazel eyes. Her shoulder-length brown hair and bangs made her look carefree and young.

  Jay’s forearm rested on his father’s back, as if casually leaning against him, a broad smile illuminating his face. He looked so young. He and Star looked alike-dark hair, dark eyes, same slender straight noses. Star’s hair was a short cut with one side combed over and longer than the other. A blond streak on each side framed her face. She had the same charming grin as her brother. It was hard to imagine that Star could turn on her family. But family portraits aren’t meant to show the dark side.