Dead Hunt dffi-5

by Beverly Connor

  ‘‘Why did you do that?’’ asked her landlady. ‘‘What’s wrong?’’ The fear in her dark blue eyes made Diane feel guilty.

  ‘‘It’s all right,’’ said Diane, although she knew it sounded rather stupid under the circumstances.

  ‘‘I demand to know what’s going on,’’ said Ramona.

  ‘‘It’s all right,’’ she said again, and it still sounded idiotic. ‘‘He is just someone the police want to speak with.’’

  ‘‘About what?’’ said Ramona. ‘‘You tell us what this is about. We have a right to know. What are you into?’’

  ‘‘My job,’’ said Diane.

  ‘‘I have connections in the police department,’’ said Loyal, her husband. ‘‘They say some escaped convict died in your apartment. It wasn’t in the papers because of who you are,’’ he said.

  ‘‘Your contact is not keeping up with current events,’’ said Diane. ‘‘Chief Garnett will be here shortly and will probably want to ask all of you questions about 1-D. Please answer him as truthfully as you can. In the meantime just stay calm. This is nothing to worry about.’’

  ‘‘He said the U.S. Marshals questioned you,’’ persisted Loyal.

  ‘‘Of course they did. It was my apartment,’’ said Diane.

  ‘‘He said nothing bad is ever written about you in the newspaper because you have connections high up that threaten the newspaper.’’

  Loyal was just a fountain of misinformation. She wondered who his informant was.

  ‘‘If you’ve been reading the paper lately, you know that’s not true,’’ said Diane. She never thought she would have to bring up bad publicity to defend herself.

  ‘‘Are you calling the police because we voted you out?’’ asked one of the tenants, a man who owned a small jewelry store in Rosewood. He twisted his ring on his finger nervously.

  ‘‘No, of course not. I can’t get a warrant and mobilize the chief of detectives for something like that. This is an ongoing investigation into the events in my apartment. I can’t give you any details, but your cooperation will help a great deal.’’

  ‘‘Would everyone like some tea and cookies?’’ said her landlady. ‘‘I made some fresh in the kitchen.’’

  Diane stayed until Garnett arrived so no one would be tempted to leave, though she didn’t know what she would have done to stop them. She was afraid the more nervous ones would leave home just to avoid talking to Garnett. Being interviewed by a detective sometimes makes the most innocent feel guilty of something. But this collection of people probably felt so guilty for asking her to move out that they would do what she asked.

  When Garnett arrived and took over her landlady’s living room, Diane left and went upstairs. As she opened the door to her apartment, the smell of decomposing blood hit her in the face. She covered her mouth and stood in the entrance for a few moments. Looking at the stain and smelling the aroma, she didn’t think she could live here again anyway. Even after the cleaning crew got rid of the odor, she would still think she smelled blood.

  There was a walkway of boards across the dried blood. Jin and Neva must have put it there after they processed the scene. Diane went into her bedroom and looked in her closet. Neva had taken most of her clothes. Diane took a metal box of photographs from the top shelf. Her caving gear was neatly piled in the corner. She began carrying things to her car. She went back and checked out her refrigerator. Fortunately she didn’t have much in it. She poured the milk out and threw the container away. She checked her pantry. It was pretty skimpy. She had been meaning to get to the grocery store. Now she didn’t have to.

  Diane checked out the bathroom. Neva had been thorough there as well. She had also taken Diane’s jewelry box and the picture of Diane and Ariel that sat on the nightstand. Neva had done a good job of collecting the important things. There were her CDs and stereo, of course, but Diane would hire someone to move those and all the large things. She thought she might just dump the sofa and stuffed chairs. She couldn’t imagine ever getting the smell out. She found a bottle of Febreze in the cupboard and sprayed herself down.

  By the time she left, Diane had already removed herself psychologically from the apartment. It didn’t feel like home anymore. But she wasn’t sure where home was going to be.

  She met Leslie and her husband as she was locking the door.

  ‘‘I’m so sorry,’’ said Leslie. ‘‘I don’t know what to say . . . just that not everyone voted to ask you to leave.’’

  Diane smiled. ‘‘Just the majority,’’ she said.

  ‘‘They can’t enforce it,’’ said her husband.

  ‘‘It doesn’t matter. It’s pretty messed up in there anyway.’’ Diane didn’t want to say bloody.

  ‘‘We are going to miss you,’’ said Leslie, suddenly hugging her.

  ‘‘Me too,’’ said Diane. Though in truth, she hardly ever saw them. ‘‘How’s little Bella?’’

  Leslie suddenly smiled. ‘‘Growing so fast. She already weighs fourteen pounds.’’

  ‘‘She’s going to be a tall girl,’’ said Leslie’s husband. ‘‘She’s already twenty-five inches.’’

  ‘‘When she’s two,’’ said Diane, ‘‘she’ll be approximately one half her adult height. So you’ll be able to estimate about how tall she is going to be.’’

  ‘‘You’re kidding, at two?’’ said Leslie.

  ‘‘Come by and see me at the museum sometime,’’ said Diane.

  ‘‘We will. We’ve visited the museum and loved it. I’m glad there’s something like that in Rosewood.’’

  Leslie looked like she was going to get teary eyed again. Diane could see she was very tenderhearted. It’s always uplifting to be around nice people when your job is to hunt so many bad people.

  ‘‘This is all right,’’ said Diane. ‘‘There have been a lot of... well, events. And I imagine they’ve scared some people.’’

  ‘‘Maybe,’’ said Leslie, ‘‘but to blame you for the explosion. That was ridiculous.’’

  ‘‘Ramona just wants your apartment. She thinks it has two bedrooms. She’s the one who spearheaded this,’’ said Leslie’s husband. ‘‘We just now heard her talking to the landlady’s nephew.’’

  ‘‘She’s going to be in for a surprise,’’ said Diane. ‘‘It’s just one bedroom and has a very small kitchen. I believe it’s one of the smaller apartments.’’

  Diane said good-bye and walked downstairs with a few more items she wanted to take with her. She met Garnett on the first floor. Several of her neighbors were leaving the landlady’s apartment. Some were going back to their places; others went out the front door. Only a few met her eyes. Diane guessed those were the ones who’d voted to keep her.

  ‘‘I didn’t get much information from this group. I think Bobby Banks kept a low profile—by the way, he is a he,’’ said Garnett.

  ‘‘Oh, he had an Adam’s apple?’’ said Diane.

  ‘‘A penis,’’ said Garnett. ‘‘The men’s room has urinals.’’

  ‘‘Okay, that’s also mainly a male characteristic,’’ said Diane.

  Garnett coughed and laughed at the same time. ‘‘I thought you were on to something,’’ he said.

  ‘‘So did I,’’ said Diane. ‘‘He still may be associated with Clymene and company in some way.’’

  ‘‘I think so too. I heard these folks are running you out of your apartment.’’

  ‘‘My life is a little too eventful for them,’’ said Diane. ‘‘This episode was the last straw, I think.’’

  ‘‘I’m real sorry to hear that,’’ said Garnett. ‘‘Anything I can do to help?’’

  ‘‘No. I appreciate your offer. I’ll be fine. I’m staying at Frank’s since the event the other night. I’ve been sort of toying with the idea of buying a house. This might push me into it.’’

  Neva came out into the hallway and walked toward Diane when she saw her. ‘‘Did they really ask you to leave?’’ she said.

  ‘‘News travels
fast,’’ said Diane.

  ‘‘Your neighbors were talking about it when David and I arrived,’’ said Neva. ‘‘That’s just... just plain mean.’’

  ‘‘I’m apparently a hard neighbor to live with. Finding anything?’’ she asked.

  ‘‘Blood,’’ said Neva.

  Chapter 36

  ‘‘You found blood?’’ said Garnett. ‘‘So this kid . . . Bobby Banks is involved with Clymene?’’

  ‘‘We’ve found a few drops on the bed frame. And a couple of drops in the bathroom. It’s not much. He could have had a nosebleed, but...’’

  ‘‘But what?’’ said Garnett.

  Diane noticed the landlady watching them behind her partially closed door.

  ‘‘Is there a clear path in the apartment?’’ Diane asked, meaning, had David and Neva processed a place in the apartment where they could walk and not contaminate evidence.

  ‘‘Sure,’’ said Neva.

  Neva led the two of them back to 1-D. Diane heard the landlady’s door close softly behind them. Once inside, Diane glanced around at the apartment. It wasn’t much different from hers in layout, larger perhaps. The sofa, chairs, table, and lamps were new but very cheap. There were no paintings or photographs or accessories of any kind.

  ‘‘Spartan,’’ said Garnett.

  ‘‘Isn’t it?’’ said Neva. ‘‘Bed and bath’s the same. Nobody really lived here. He just stayed here.’’

  ‘‘You had a but you were going to tell us about,’’ said Diane.

  ‘‘We found an IV needle wedged in the floorboards,’’ said Neva. ‘‘I think this is where they donated the blood and rested up afterward. I think Clymene and her sisters were in the bedroom when David came to the door to ask if the guy in the apartment had heard anything.’’

  David entered from the kitchen. ‘‘Neva tell you what we found?’’ he said. ‘‘They were here. Right here. I talked with that kid there in the doorway. He told me he’d been studying and didn’t hear a thing.’’

  ‘‘I wonder why he didn’t just say he heard a ruckus, to bolster the image that Diane was doing something in her apartment,’’ said Garnett.

  ‘‘Then he would be the only witness,’’ said David, ‘‘and we would have come back to him and found him missing. This way, he’s like everyone else in the building.’’

  ‘‘Smart group of people,’’ said Garnett. ‘‘I wonder where they’re from.’’

  ‘‘I’m going to find out,’’ Diane said as she turned to leave. ‘‘You guys are doing a good job, by the way.’’

  She left Neva, David, and Garnett and went back to the museum and made an appointment for movers to pack everything up in her apartment after the cleaning crew finished.

  Since Frank wasn’t coming back to Rosewood this evening, she thought she might stay at the museum on one of her couches. Perhaps she could just move into the museum. Maybe create a small apartment in the basement somewhere in the east wing. She shook her head of the thought. She was mentally creating a life where she would never leave the museum.

  When she got back to the museum, she had a note from Kingsley saying he was sorry to miss lunch, that he had to go back to Atlanta but would return tomorrow. Jacobs was probably somewhere in the building trying to find out if they were thieves. Which reminded her that she needed to bring the board up-to-date on the disposition of the artifacts. She sent an e-mail to the members asking them to come to a board meeting at the end of the day.

  After sending the e-mail, she started searching the Internet to find out how to contact estate planning attorneys and family lawyers. There were several professional organizations that had lists of attorneys in estate planning, or family law, but only addresses were listed, no e-mail addresses.

  She picked up the phone and called the museum’s attorney and asked about lists of lawyers from professional organizations and their e-mail addresses. She told him what she wanted to do, carefully explaining that this was a woman who was stalking and preying on wealthy clients of attorneys. He suggested that if she left the message and photograph on various attorney Listservs, it might reach a broader audience.

  Diane found a fairly good photograph of Clymene on the local newspaper’s Web site. After getting permission to use it, she created a message asking for help in identifying the woman in the attached photograph. She went back and forth on how much she should reveal, and decided to give a moderate amount of information, but mention that she was thought to have preyed upon men with large estates. She then e-mailed the owners of the Listservs and asked if they would post the message for her, explaining to them in greater detail the importance of finding Clymene. She expected to be turned down by half. She was surprised when none did.

  With that out of the way, she told Andie she was going over to the crime lab for a while. She used the back way to avoid meeting anyone that might slow her down. The downside was that she missed seeing most of the exhibits and she enjoyed that, even in passing.

  No one was in the crime lab. Jin, she assumed, was down in his DNA lab. Neva and David were still at her apartment building. She had been trying to convince the police commissioner and the mayor that she needed to hire more personnel, but they always turned her down. Right now she was stretched thin, but she couldn’t use this as an example of why she needed another person. The police commissioner would just tell her that catching Clymene was the responsibility of the U.S. Marshals. And he would be right. But Clymene had targeted her, and in doing so had targeted the lab.

  Diane entered one of the warren of rooms in the crime lab that housed one of the many computers. This one had face recognition software and a capacity for long searches.

  Sophisticated face recognition software can pick a face out of a crowd—a clever thing for a computer to do. It has to recognize that a face is not a gourd, or a bole of a tree, or a rock, or a cloud, or anything else that happens to look similar to a face. After that bit of cleverness, the software then can compare that face with images that are stored in a database.

  A photograph could be scanned into the software and it would search a database for a match. Diane scanned Clymene’s mug shot, which would work just fine because the software didn’t look at expressions. It took measurements between various landmarks on the face and created an index number. It then looked for faces with similar indexes.

  When Clymene was on trial, the DA didn’t bother looking for who she really was. He said he didn’t need to know ancient history to convict her. So a deep background investigation was never done. Diane would correct that error now. She decided to search both American and international databases.

  With a second computer Diane sent the mug shot to Colonel Alex Kade. Diane had become acquainted with him when he matched a missing child’s photograph with a facial reconstruction Neva did of a skeleton found in the woods near Rosewood. In his retirement he searched, with the blessing of the FBI, for missing children in a

  pornography sites on the

  database he created from Web. His daughter disappeared when she was fifteen. They found her years later but not before she had suffered severe abuse and had contracted a fatal disease that took her life. He said if he could have just found her earlier he could have saved her. Now he tried to save other children.

  Diane explained to him in an e-mail that this wasn’t a child and it was too late to save her, but that the woman might have been separated from her family as a child and that it was critical for Diane to find out who she was. She didn’t tell him Clymene’s name.

  He e-mailed back almost immediately and said he would look. Diane thought that he must be at his computer all the time looking for lost children. He had software whose algorithm could account for the age difference so that an adult Clymene could be matched to a child Clymene or a teenage Clymene. Software just gets more and more clever, she thought.

  Next she called David. He and Neva were on their way back.

  ‘‘I’d like to use Arachnid,’’ she said.

  David di
dn’t say anything for a long moment. ‘‘I suppose this is what it’s for,’’ he said.

  Chapter 37

  Arachnid was David’s baby. He compared it to Rosemary’s Baby.

  ‘‘It’s essentially evil,’’ he said.

  ‘‘No,’’ Diane had told him. ‘‘It is not evil. Someone could put it to evil use, but then the evil would reside in the use of it, not in the system itself.’’

  Her argument fell on deaf ears because David was paranoid. He admitted it and embraced it. The irony of Arachnid was that David had created what he was afraid of. Big Brother. This was not lost on him, and he felt guilty about it. But there it was, sitting in the basement, the ultimate spider.

  Diane wanted carrels in the museum for people to rent and work on scholarly things. The entire basement and subbasement were being renovated for storage vaults and work areas. The DNA lab and David were the first occupants. David rented space for his photography. He occasionally taught classes in photography in the museum, so it made sense that he should have space. He had a darkroom, a workroom, and a study. All very small, but big enough for David’s needs. Arachnid was in the study.