One Grave Too Many

by Beverly Connor

  “I would have been glad to drive you home.”

  “The couch was very comfortable.”

  Diane didn’t press further, but she found the whole thing very odd. They met Mark just outside the staff lounge. He was frowning and didn’t automatically light up when he saw his wife. When he finally did smile, it looked forced.

  “I’d better get you home,” he said. “You must be exhausted.” He nodded to Diane, took Signy by the arm and led her across the emerald green tile floors toward the elevators.

  Diane headed toward the elevators herself, but was stopped by Donald. The way he was frowning, she thought she was in for another quarrel with him.

  “Diane, I didn’t make up that message.”

  “What?” For a moment she didn’t understand what Donald was talking about, for her hearing picked up Mark and Signy’s background conversation as they waited for the elevator. Their voices were not much more than a loud whisper, but the words swept her way as if on a breeze.

  “Can’t you do anything right?” said Mark.

  “If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t even know about them. I’ll drive myself home.”

  Diane glanced at them in time to see Mark take Signy by the arm. She jerked it out of his grasp and hurried into the open elevator.

  “I really didn’t. I wouldn’t do that,” Donald was saying, “and I’m really disturbed that you think I would.”

  Diane turned her attention back to Donald. “I don’t think you did, Donald. I think we both were innocent victims of some prankster.” His frown dissolved into a lopsided smile. What she didn’t say was that she doubted he would do something that so obviously pointed to him.

  “Who do you think it was?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Do you have a printout of the E-mail?”

  He slipped a page from the folder he was carrying and handed it to her. “It was sent from your computer,” he said.

  “Looks like it. Will you forward me the message?”

  “Sure. I’ll do that.”

  When Donald left, Diane headed for her office. As she crossed the lobby, the guard standing by the intercom stopped her.

  “A Frank Duncan wants to see you, Dr. Fallon.”

  “OK. You can let him in.”

  The guard opened the door and Frank walked in carrying a large envelope.

  “Frank, I didn’t expect to see you today. Any news about what happened to your friends?” She gestured toward the hallway that led to her office. They walked through the glass doors labeled ADMINISTRATION and continued down the corridor.

  “I know you don’t like being involved in any investigation, but I would really like to talk to you.”

  “Is this about their deaths?” Diane fished her door key from the pocket of her jacket.

  “Yes. The detectives have picked up their daughter, Star.”

  Chapter 10

  Diane held her key so tightly in her hand, her knuckles were white. She stopped and turned to face Frank, not even realizing she also held her breath until she spoke. “She’s alive, then? She’s all right? That’s good news. I . . . well, I feared the worst.”

  “So did I. She’s alive, but the kid’s in a world of trouble. Her parents and brother are dead, the detectives think she killed them, and I’m afraid the whole thing’s being mishandled by the Rosewood police department.”

  They entered Diane’s office by her private entrance, and she sat down at her desk. “Mishandled how?”

  Frank drew up a chair and laid his envelope on her desk. “Do you know anything about Rosewood politics these days?”

  “Some ongoing disagreements involving the mayor and the city council?”

  “And the county commissioners thrown in, just to further complicate everything. It’s a hell of a mess.”

  “I don’t know much about local politics. I try to stay out of it as much as my job will allow.”

  “The short version is that there’s a power struggle between Mayor Sutton and the city council. He thinks Rosewood is Atlanta.” Frank made a face. “He wants to be governor one of these days and he’s using our little city to build his empire.”

  “A lot of people are moving here. We’ve had to do demographics for the museum.”

  Frank waved his hand. “I work in Atlanta and live here. There may be only sixty-three miles in between, but there’s a big difference. The city council’s just as bad in the other direction as the mayor is. They don’t want any change that might shake up their little kingdom. They have their own fish to fry.”

  Diane leaned back in her chair. “What does all this have to do with the murder of your friends? Are you saying it was some kind of political hit?”

  “No, of course not. That’s not what I’m getting at.” Frank fidgeted in his chair, moving it closer to her desk. “We finally get a new police commissioner. We needed one. But the mayor wrestled his choice from the city council. The commissioner’s been pushing out people who don’t support the mayor and hiring new people—most of them old buddies of his, who will, like the chief of detectives, keep a low profile and do what they’re told. The chief of detectives, in turn, has been putting his men in. The upshot is that it’s all political cronyism, and nobody knows what the hell they’re doing.”

  “The main thing is the crime scene, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation know what they’re doing.”

  “The GBI didn’t work the crime scene. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. The chief refused to call them. He’s got this hair up his butt that Rosewood police can handle our crime without outside help.”

  “Can they?”

  “No. The best homicide cop was Jake Houser, but he wasn’t one of the commissioner’s men. Now that he’s gone to a desk job, the homicide squad is a bunch of new people hardly older than Kevin.”

  Diane made an effort not to smile, wondering if Frank was just feeling estranged from officers half his age. “But they might still be competent.”

  “Whose side are you on?”

  “Yours, of course. I think you ought to contact the president of the city council and tell him they were right all along, that the mayor’s pricks . . . I mean picks . . . the mayor’s picks are screwing up an investigation.” Diane didn’t know the girl, but she felt a giddy relief upon learning that she hadn’t been killed. Jails and trials could be dealt with. But not death.

  “This isn’t funny.”

  “No, it isn’t. What is it they’re doing wrong?”

  “Warrick. Janice Warrick—she’s the detective in charge—allowed George’s mother and stepfather in the house. She let the stepfather tramp around the bedroom before anything was processed.”

  Diane pressed her lips together. “Did you mention to Detective Warrick that letting anyone on the crime scene was contaminating the evidence?”

  “I mentioned it. I hammered her over the head with it. She asked me how a paper detective could possibly know anything about crime scenes. She was going to let them take things out of the house. When I objected, she tried to make me leave. I told her that I was executor of the will, and if anything was missing from the house, I’d sue the department and her personally.”

  “Were you in the crime scene?”

  Frank stared at her a moment. “I stayed mostly on the front porch. Do you have anything else on the bone?”

  “Yes.” She pulled out a sheet of paper from her desk. “Here’s the report. It’s on the standard form.”

  He took the page and glanced it up and down. “Find anything new?”

  “Yes.”

  “You mean you missed something the first time?”

  Diane nodded. “Yes, I did.”

  “Well, does this make us even for me throwing away the spiderweb? What’d you find?”

  “A fish rib and a cap from a blowfly puparium in the marrow cavity.”

  “What? A fish rib and a what?”

  “A cap from a blowfly puparium. Do you know about the life cycle of blowflies?”

  “
Oh, sure, everyone knows about that. . . . All I know about flies is that they’re a damn disgusting nuisance.”

  “If it weren’t for them, and a host of other disgusting creatures, the world would be littered with dead, undecayed animals. After the third instar of a blowfly . . .”

  “Third instar? That sounds like Star Trek.”

  “Bug speak. You know that flies are attracted to dead bodies.”

  “Yes, I do know that.”

  “There’s a point in the life cycle of a blowfly at which it moves away from the corpse and burrows into the ground. This third skin shedding, or instar, hardens into a capsule and becomes the puparium. From this, it emerges after a period of time in the ground as an adult fly by popping off a cap at the end of the puparium. This cap is what I found. My identification has to be verified by an entomologist, but the significance of these finds is that neither the fish bone nor the puparium cap should be found inside the bone.”

  “Okay. So, how did they get there?”

  “My guess is they washed in. But there are other scenarios. The bone could have already been underground and decomposed, and this fly came from something decomposing on top of it or near it. When the blowfly moved underground, it wound up burrowing into the cavity in the bone. Later the bone was eroded, or dug up for your friends to find.”

  “Does this help us?”

  “It says something about the environment the bone was in—”

  “Like in a river?”

  “No, the blowfly wouldn’t be underwater. Suppose that your friend George thought it was a deer bone because there were antlers, or hooves, or whatever present. So, we have deer bone and fish bone in the same place. I think you might look for the rest of the body—the remaining bones—in a place where animal bones are processed. A hunting camp, somewhere that processes meat . . . something like that.”

  Frank nodded. “That’s something—a good place to start. How is it that you know so much about bugs?”

  “Part of my old job. Bodies, bones, bugs and blood.”

  “All that?”

  “It’s all connected. Besides, it’s hard to find a crime lab in the places I had to go. Those countries often don’t want us there in the first place, and their cooperation doesn’t extend to lending expert personnel and lab facilities. The team learned how to do everything ourselves.”

  “So you’re familiar with crime scenes?”

  “Yes.”

  Frank stood and walked over to a photograph on her wall of the inside of a cave. He didn’t turn around, but spoke to the photograph. “Warrick’s finished with the crime scene. I wonder if you’d take a look at it?”

  “Frank, I . . .”

  He turned in her direction. “They matched the gun with the bullet that killed Jay. It was Louise’s gun. Star’s just sixteen. Sixteen, Diane. I don’t think she did it. I’m getting her a lawyer, but I need to get a handle on the crime scene.”

  “It’s already been contaminated.”

  “I know, but you said ‘bodies, bones, bugs and blood.’ You know about blood spatters?”

  “Yes. Like other crime scene evidence, blood spatters can be an important element in human rights cases, but . . .”

  “That’s a place to start. There are spatters. Diane, for now, I’m Star’s guardian, until she’s eighteen. I’ve known her since she was a baby. She’s like a daughter, and I know she didn’t do this, but I need help proving it.” He was silent a moment, turning back to the picture. “It looks like you in this cave.”

  “It is.”

  “It looks like you’re hanging from a rope.”

  “I am.”

  “Why?” He turned around and faced her with a puzzled frown.

  “The entrance to that particular cave was from above. You knew I was a caver?”

  “Well, yeah, you mentioned it, but I thought you visited as a tourist—like Ruby Falls or Mammoth Cave, you know—with a bunch of other people.”

  She gestured to the photograph. “That cave’s in Brazil. I was mapping it.”

  “Mapping it? Why?”

  Diane shrugged. “It hadn’t been mapped.”

  “So that’s what you do for fun?”

  She leaned forward with her elbows on the desk. “It’s very relaxing. Caves are beautiful. The line from Frost’s poem—‘lovely, dark and deep’—fits caves better than woods. It’s like being in the center of a velvet black universe—often as silent as the vacuum of space must be.”

  “You say it like that’s a good thing.”

  Diane laughed at him standing there with that curious look on his face. “It’s a very good thing.”

  Frank picked up a geode paperweight sitting on her dark walnut desk and turned it over in his hand. “We need to get reacquainted. We hardly knew each other before.”

  “It seems there’s a lot we don’t know about each other.”

  Diane’s private line rang and she picked it up, still holding his gaze in hers.

  “Diane, how about letting Dylan Houser come down and make an assessment of your interactive computing needs.”

  Diane hesitated a moment, pulled her attention away from Frank and focused on the caller. “Ken, hi. How are you? You don’t waste time, do you?”

  “This isn’t a business where you can waste time—not like real estate, apparently.” He laughed so loud Diane had to pull the phone away from her ear.

  “What’s up with Mark anyway?” asked Diane.

  “Damned if I know. Makes no sense to me, unless he’s got his money tied up in it somehow and needs the deal to cover his losses or something. I can’t believe he’d put us through all this trouble for commission. How about Dylan? It was his idea. I think his girlfriend wants to work there. He’s a smart kid. Already figured out how much money I can make if he talks you into it.”

  “His father, Jake, is one of our evening security guards. Sure, why not make it a family affair? It won’t hurt to see what he comes up with.”

  “Good. I’ll tell him. If I figure out what Grayson’s up to, I’ll let you know.” He hung up. Ken rarely cluttered up his conversations with hellos and good-byes.

  As she placed the phone back in its docking station, her gaze shifted to the envelope on the desk. “Is that the crime scene information?”

  “Yes.”

  Diane regarded the yellow-brown envelope for a moment before she reached for it. She held it tentatively, like it might morph into a snake if she moved too quickly. She knew the envelope held the photographs of a mother, father and their son—dead. Not peacefully asleep, like some people describe the dead, but lifeless, possibly covered in blood, probably limbs lying at odd angles where they fell, stilled when their efforts to defend themselves failed.

  Opening the envelope would be opening a door she thought she’d closed and locked for good.

  Chapter 11

  Diane stared at the envelope.

  “Are you all right?” Frank asked after a moment.

  “What?” Diane looked from the envelope to Frank as if she had forgotten he was there. “Yes. I was just thinking.” She snatched up the envelope, opened it and pulled out the crime scene photos.

  Frank dropped into the chair, loosened his tie and leaned forward.

  “Have you seen them?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s hard looking at people you know, murdered. How did you come by the photos? Who called you to the crime scene?”

  “A uniform cop friend with the department. Izzy Wallace. He doesn’t like the new guys any better than I do. He got them for me. George was his friend too.”

  “Another poker buddy?”

  “Yes. And we all belong to the same hunting club.”

  Diane grimaced. “Do you know the time of death?”

  “Just generally—the coroner thinks somewhere between two and four in the morning. They’ll know more after the autopsies.”

  “Can you get the autopsy reports?”

  “Yeah, Izzy can get them.”

/>   “Tell me, why do they suspect the daughter? Do they have more evidence than that she may have been a drug user and may have had access to the gun?”

  Frank bowed his head a moment, and Diane looked up from the photograph.

  “They caught her trying to sell a coin collection. It’s one George inherited from his father—very valuable.”

  “How do the detectives know the collection was in the house at the time the Boones were killed?”

  Frank looked like he had just tasted something bitter. “George’s mother and stepfather, Crystal and Gilroy McFarland, said they were.”

  “You don’t believe them? They wouldn’t deliberately incriminate their granddaughter?”

  “You’ve got to know Crystal. She was a piece of work, even when George and I were kids. Not what you’d call the nurturing type. Nothing like Louise.” He paused a moment and glanced down at the spread of photos lying on the desk in front of Diane. “Crystal didn’t call Star or Jay her grandchildren. They were adopted, and that didn’t count with her.”

  Diane clenched her teeth and began examining the first photo. Fourteen-year-old Jay lay crumpled on the ground near a large oak tree. He was on his stomach, one arm under his body, the other at his side and bent at the elbow. One leg was straight; the other was bent at the knee. He was wearing a light blue jacket, jeans, and white Nike running shoes. A close-up of his back showed the bullet hole in the jacket and just a small amount of blood. Possibly small-caliber gun, she thought. Just a kid. She shivered. Even with her experience excavating massacres, it still astonished her that the architects of such atrocities included children in their plans.

  “What does Detective Warrick think happened?” Diane asked.

  “That Star and maybe her boyfriend came into the house while the parents were sleeping and shot them, stole the coins and jewelry, and on their way out they ran into Jay coming home and shot him. I need to mention that Jay and Star are natural siblings. George and Louise adopted them together when Jay was two and Star was four. She wouldn’t have killed her little brother.”

  “But her boyfriend might?”

  Frank shrugged. “I don’t know her boyfriend.”