The Night Killer df-8

by Beverly Connor

  “Did your father pay up?” asked Ben.

  “With what? You can’t get blood out of a turnip. Daddy accused Roy of making the map up hisself. Then Daddy died and Roy tried to collect from me. Something about the debt being part of Daddy’s estate. Like I was going to have that kind of money, and like Daddy had an estate anyway.”

  “Were you still having the feud with him when he was killed?” asked Frank.

  “You thinking maybe I killed him? I was thinking about giving him some of that stuff that makes you forget, but Tammy said it don’t work that way,” he said.

  “Incredible,” muttered Agent Mathews.

  “I was out with my dogs looking for that woman when the Barres was getting killed,” said Slick.

  “Can the dogs verify that?” asked Ben.

  Slick looked at Ben, squinting his eyes. “Well, no, but I didn’t kill the Barres,” he said. “The sheriff ain’t been out asking me about it. Only the deputy, one time when he come over with that woman.”

  That woman, thought Diane. She needed to have a T-shirt with That Woman written on it.

  “If the sheriff don’t think I did it, then I guess I didn’t,” Slick said. “Look, I really need to go to the bathroom. And I’m not going to talk any more. I want a lawyer and I want to go to the bathroom.”

  “Just one more thing,” said Frank.

  “You been saying that. My bladder’s about to bust, man,” Slick said.

  “How are things with your debt to Roy Barre?” asked Frank.

  “Well, I reckon I owe his kids now, so I ain’t any better off. Now I’m getting up and going to take a piss.”

  He stood up. Frank and Ben stood up with him.

  “Damn it,” Slick said, and before they could do anything, he had his fly open and was peeing on the wall in the corner of the interview room.

  Diane put her head in her hands.

  After watching the interviews, Diane drove back to the museum, hoping there would be something dramatic going on so she could get the image of Slick urinating on the interview room wall out of her head.

  However, they had been fruitful interviews. Ben and Frank had gotten Tammy and Slick to admit quite a lot-more than Slick and Tammy probably realized. Frank had asked about the Barres. That was something he didn’t have to do, and it pleased her that he had.

  Diane pulled into her parking place and surveyed the lot as she exited the vehicle. There was only one tour bus and much of the lot was empty. Not completely unusual at this time of day, but she preferred to see a full lot.

  She walked to the administrative wing and into Andie’s office, making a dead stop in the doorway. She was hit in the face immediately, both visually and aromatically. Andie’s office was filled with bouquets of red roses, violets, and daisies.

  “I guess he wasn’t taking any chances,” Diane said, looking at all the flowers.

  Andie was sitting at her desk working on the computer. She grinned at Diane. “So far he’s doing pretty well with the groveling,” she said.

  “Certainly very lovely in here,” said Diane. “And it smells so nice.”

  “You want to take some back to your office?” asked Andie.

  “No, I think you should keep them up here. Looks very dramatic. How are you feeling?”

  “Better. Not because of the flowers. I just got my head together. Chocolate does that for me. Also talking things over with you. Thanks,” she said.

  “I thought you would do fine,” said Diane. “Anything going on I should know about?”

  “I put all the items you have to look at on your desk. This here”-she pointed at her computer screen-“I can handle. You know, we are still getting requests to examine our mummy.”

  “I imagine they will never stop,” said Diane.

  “You have a fund-raiser in Atlanta at the end of the month,” said Andie, frowning.

  “And this is a problem how?” asked Diane, studying her face.

  “I’ve gotten e-mails from several board members wanting to go,” said Andie. “You know how some of them are.”

  Diane smiled. “I think we can trust them not to embarrass us in public. I can’t very well keep my board away. It’s appropriate that they go. It’ll be fine.”

  Andie was concerned, Diane knew, because Thomas Barclay, one of the board members, tended to be a little heavy-handed with prospective donors. Diane shared Andie’s concern, but she wasn’t aware that Barclay had ever cost them donations. Madge Stewart was another matter. She was just as likely as not to say something like, “The museum is better now that they stopped receiving stolen artifacts.” Leaving Diane to explain what Madge meant and that the museum was not a receiver of stolen antiquities.

  As museum director, Diane had a lot of power. The governance of RiverTrail was different from that of many museums. Most of the power rested with the director, which was Diane. The board was only advisory. But one thing she had no power over was who was on the board, and there were a couple she would like to have sent packing.

  “I’ll be in my office,” she said, going through the adjoining door, closing it behind her.

  Diane called Beth, one of the archivists, and asked her about the speed-readers Sierra had recommended.

  “I need someone to read through the diaries we have of Roy Barre’s grandfather. I’m looking for a reference to a lost gold mine. It will probably be in the early diaries, but may be mentioned in later ones,” said Diane.

  “How many diaries are we talking about?” Beth said.

  “I’m not sure. There are three pretty good-sized boxes of them. The grandfather started keeping a diary when he was a teenager and kept it up until he died in his seventies,” said Diane.

  “How interesting,” Beth said. “You don’t find many diarists. Mikaela and Fisher will be happy to do it. They’ve been wanting a. . ah, to be more helpful to the museum.”

  Diane knew Beth started to say they’d been wanting a patch. Someone on the museum staff had designed a small patch to give to whoever did consulting with what they called the Dark Side-meaning the crime lab. Diane had never seen one. She suspected they kept it from her. She shook her head. The museum staff was always up to something.

  “I appreciate their help. The boxes of diaries are in Jonas’ office. Thanks, Beth,” said Diane.

  Diane called up her e-mail. She scrolled down to look at the senders. Several were from other museum directors asking about diverse topics, from the RiverTrail’s educational webcam project, to requesting tissue samples of the mummy, to asking if Diane had used radio-frequency identification for special tours. Diane answered all their questions.

  The last e-mail was from her own head of conservation for the museum-Korey Jordan. Diane had delivered to him for analysis the piece of weathered paper Liam discovered at the campsite of the missing girl and her boyfriend. In Diane’s entire operation, Korey had more experience than anyone else with recovering images from paper. He had e-mailed her the results.

  She had thought that bringing out the words would be difficult because of the weathering of the paper, but Korey had used the electrostatic detection apparatus, an elegantly simple procedure. He had only to sandwich the paper between a glass plate and clear Mylar, place it on the machine, charge the whole thing with an electric field, and coat the Mylar with electrically charged black powder. The powder settled over the indentations in the paper and, voilà, there were the words.

  Diane glanced at the photograph of the newly exposed words, then read what Korey had transcribed. It was indeed a list, as Liam suspected. The part that was visible to the naked eye said, get Barre’s diary. The beginning of the sentence was, Break in and.

  Well, hell. The unnamed missing couple went to the top of Diane’s list of suspects.

  She silently read the list over several times.

  Break in and get Barre’s diary.

  Diane wondered if their break-in was at the time she was lost in the woods and things got out of hand. She also wondered if there was so
me reason the couple might have thought the Watsons had the diary. She was still trying to fit the Watsons in. It was a hard fit.

  Talk to CND’s-The rest of that sentence was torn away, but it had to refer to a person. Talk to some person. Who? Who was CND? Diane thought a moment, thinking back to her discussion with Liam. Cora Nell Dickson-the woman in the nursing home whose father was a friend of LeFette Barre’s. The note had to mean a relative, hence the possessive punctuation.

  Buy book on spelunking.

  Jeez, that wasn’t good. Perhaps Liam was right after all, and they went caving when they shouldn’t have.

  Find equipment-Here, too, the rest of the sentence was torn away. But Diane could guess what it was about. She imagined it was caving equipment. This wouldn’t have a good end. Diane was familiar with many of the caves in North Georgia. Most were hard caves to explore. And the mines were particularly treacherous. Caves had their own stability, being carved out by nature as they were-removing the weaker materials, leaving the stronger. Mines, on the other hand, were dug out by man-taking what was considered valuable, leaving behind what was not. Mines required supports to hold up the ceilings of tunnels, and those supports-usually timber-weakened over time and collapsed. Not that cave tunnels were immune to collapsing. On the contrary, they could be very dangerous. But nature tended to be a better mining engineer than man-that was Diane’s observation.

  It appeared that the two young people had more spirit of adventure than they had good sense.

  Could they have been so frustrated that Barre wouldn’t share his grandfather’s diary that they killed him and his wife in a rage? Then, the next evening, had the same rage and killed the Watsons? Still the problem with the Watsons.

  Perhaps it was simply a serial killer. In which case there might be more to come. Diane shook her head. Or perhaps either the Barres or the Watsons were a decoy, a red herring. It could be that all the analysis she had been doing about the Barres was completely useless and it was the Watsons she should be concentrating on. Or maybe she could leave the Watsons out of the equation completely and look further into the Barres’ history. Diane was looking forward to the coming Sunday. She was still deep in thought when Andie put through a caller.

  “Diane, Lynn Webber. I’ve finished the Barre and Watson autopsies. I cleared out my morning and afternoon so I could get all four done. I thought you’d like to have my preliminary findings.”

  Chapter 39

  “Lynn, yes, I am anxious to hear what you found,” said Diane. “Thank you for doing this. I’m sure you had to do a lot of rearranging of your schedule and I appreciate it.”

  “Just a little changing. I didn’t mind,” Lynn said. “I have to tell you, Hector and Scott are so precious. And such a hoot. They even made Grover laugh, and you know how hard that is.”

  Diane smiled. Grover was Lynn’s very solemn diener in the morgue.

  “They can be very entertaining,” agreed Diane.

  “I was very interested in the research they are doing. They gave me a bang-up proposal,” said Lynn.

  Hector and Scott were interested in taphonomy. Their particular interest at the moment was the postmortem interval-the length of time between death and whenever the body was discovered. Knowing when a murder victim died was one of the main pieces of information authorities needed in order to help find and convict the perpetrator.

  Taphonomy for forensic scientists was the study of what happened to a body from the time of death to discovery. Mike, Diane’s geology curator, also used the word in his discipline. For him it meant the study of the movement of an organism from the biosphere to the lithosphere-from organism to fossil. Forensic scientists didn’t have that long to wait.

  When a person died-unless normal decomposition was prevented by embalming, freezing, dehydration, or a few other rare circumstances-bacteria began to liquefy the organs, muscles, and skin. Chemicals found in the various organs and soft tissue during this process showed predictable changes over time. If you knew the temperature surrounding the body during the decomposition process, you could determine postmortem interval to within hours-certainly days. David called it an elegant use of data and mathematical formulas.

  Hector and Scott wanted to wind the clock a little tighter. They proposed that Lynn Webber and other area medical examiners allow them to collect tissue samples from cadavers that came to the MEs for autopsy, and compare data from the samples to known times of death-or nearly known.

  Their research would not help Diane determine precisely when the Barres were killed, but she hoped it would help in future cases. The current standard procedure of sampling the potassium concentration in the vitreous humor of the eye might help in the Barre case, but Diane feared that too much time had passed since their deaths. Moreover, the standard error of two hours for that indicator still wasn’t what she needed. She needed a tighter time line.

  Diane wanted to know what the time interval was between Ozella Barre’s death and the death of her husband, Roy. She was equally anxious to know whether there was a similar time difference between the deaths of Joe and Ella Watson.

  That was one of the things that bothered her, the time difference between the two Barres. Why? What was the killer doing after he killed Ozella Barre? Did he get interrupted by someone or something after Ozella’s death? Was the killer trying to get information, and thought Roy would be more forthcoming if he knew up close and personal what the stakes were? Did he think Roy would tell him anything after seeing the woman he had devoted his life to killed in such a terrible way?

  “Hector and Scott share Jin’s and David’s love of research,” said Diane. “We’ve converted one of the museum basement rooms to house their project.”

  “Well, I’m going to study their proposal. I’m very interested in their ideas,” said Lynn. “Now, about the autopsies. I know you were interested in the time intervals for the Barres, but I’m not going to be able to help you much.”

  “I was afraid too much time had passed for a close estimate,” said Diane.

  “They didn’t do a liver temp at the scene for them,” said Lynn. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to go with your photographs of the crime scene. You know, I’ve never worked with Rendell County. Which is just as well; I don’t think I would get along with them.”

  “I’ve been barred from entering the county,” said Diane.

  “What? Why?” asked Lynn.

  “I offended Sheriff Conrad,” said Diane. “He thinks I’m stepping on his authority, and in a way, I am. But the Barre children want me to investigate. And besides, I found the Barres and I feel like I owe them.”

  “I understand,” said Lynn. “I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t let it go either.”

  “What can you tell me about the Watsons?” asked Diane.

  “Well, at least a liver temp was done at the scene. It indicates both died within minutes of each other,” said Lynn.

  “That’s interesting,” said Diane. “A departure from the Barres.”

  “It looks that way,” said Lynn.

  Diane was waiting for Lynn to drop the other shoe. So far she hadn’t added anything that Dr. Linden didn’t notice, and she knew that wouldn’t do for Lynn. Diane also heard something in Lynn’s voice. She had a surprise. Diane didn’t spoil it by asking, but let Lynn draw it out.

  “There is one thing I found,” Lynn said.

  “Oh?” said Diane.

  “They were all killed by the same person.”

  Diane was speechless for a moment. Not because of the revelation that they were killed by the same person; she suspected it. She didn’t think the Watsons were killed by a copycat. What surprised her was that Lynn had evidence of it.

  “Are you still there?” asked Lynn.

  Diane could hear in her voice that she was pleased. Lynn loved to show off.

  “Yes, I’m here. I’m just speechless,” said Diane. “Tell me about it.”

  “I spent a great deal of time examining the neck wounds. Same angle,
same depth. All four of their throats were cut down to the vertebra with one slice of the knife,” said Lynn. She paused.

  Diane knew what it meant. A strong arm with a long and very sharp knife-as sharp as a scalpel. An expensive knife. Only the highest-quality blades could be as sharp as needed for what Lynn described. Diane had learned all about blade quality when she herself was stabbed. But Diane didn’t offer that conclusion. She knew from experience that Lynn hated to be upstaged in the middle of a story. Diane catered to Lynn’s personality because she used her expertise a lot. Lynn, however high-maintenance a friend she was, was very good at her job.

  “It would take a very expensive sharp knife,” she began, and told Diane all the things she already knew about what kind of knife it had to be and the kind of strength it took to cut through muscle and tendons in one slice.

  “I made molds of the cuts in the vertebrae,” she said. “Same cut on all of them.”

  “Excellent,” said Diane. “Excellent. This is the first real clue I can use.”

  “I thought you would like that,” said Lynn. “I sent the report to your e-mail.”

  “I can always depend on you to do good work,” said Diane, wondering if she was laying it on a little thick. If she was, Lynn didn’t seem to notice. She took the praise with delight and hung up after they agreed to meet for lunch sometime in the near future.

  Diane left her office about the same time Andie was closing up her office. Andie had chosen a vase of roses to take home with her.

  “You know, you may get home and discover roses, violets, and daisies all over your front porch,” said Diane.

  Andie grinned. “That would be fun.”

  “I’ll see you on Monday,” said Diane.

  “Nope,” said Andie. “I’ll see you at church on Sunday. Liam asked me to go with him and I agreed.”

  Diane raised her eyebrows. That made Frank, Izzy and his wife, and now Andie and Liam. Well, at least she would be surrounded by people she knew. All this was probably arranged by David. She was also sure he would be up to something himself. She thought David was perhaps being a bit too paranoid in this instance. Sheriff Conrad wouldn’t arrest her at church, even a rival church.