Dead Past

by Beverly Connor

  “I need to know the name of the woman you chatted with,” said Garnett.

  “Do you have to? I mean . . . I don’t really know her name. She called herself Justforkicks. And that’s all it was. Besides, it’s over now.”

  “I see,” said Garnett. “Doing any more online dating?”

  He shrugged again. “Occasionally. Nothing serious. It’s like safe sex. It’s all cartoons, anyway.”

  “Cartoons?” asked Garnett. Diane didn’t know what he meant, either.

  “Webcam. It’ll make you look like a cartoon character. It’s the software. Like anime—the Japanese stuff.”

  Diane was completely lost and she suspected that Garnett was, too.

  “I tell you what,” said Garnett. “Will you let us have a look at your computer?”

  “I don’t know. This is just personal stuff. I don’t even leave my room. I don’t meet anyone.”

  “Someone might have taken you seriously and thought your wife was competition to get rid of.”

  “That’s crazy. It’s just . . .” He looked at Diane again. “It’s nothing more than what it is. The people I talk to don’t even know who I am.”

  “What’s your screen name?” asked Diane.

  “Do I really have to say?” he asked Garnett.

  “Where are you staying?” asked Garnett.

  “I have an apartment on Applewood Street, four seventy-two. I room with two other students. They just went home after exams.”

  “You staying in town during the break?”

  “Yes.”

  “We may want to talk with you again,” said Garnett.

  “Where is she?” Gil asked. “Can I see her?”

  “She’s with the medical examiner,” said Garnett. “We need for you to make a positive ID. I can have a police officer take you there.”

  He nodded, the realization of what he was being asked to do suddenly reflected in his face.

  Garnett released Gil Cipriano to one of the officers at the scene to be driven to the morgue. Diane and Garnett watched out the window of the breakfast nook as he walked down the sidewalk in the direction of the patrol car, his shoulders slumped, his hands in his pockets, his head bent down.

  “What do you think?” asked Garnett.

  “He always speaks of her in the present tense,” said Diane.

  “Yes. I noticed that,” he said.

  “His knuckles were clean and unmarked,” she said.

  “I noticed that, too,” he said. “What were all those drug questions? Did you find something to link her to the meth lab explosion?”

  “No, not really, just a chain of thoughts.” Diane explained her results on finding words that rhyme with book. “Thin thread, I know, but worth a shot at asking.”

  Garnett gave a slight laugh. “Slim, indeed. But you’re right. Mrs. Bowden could have heard wrong.”

  Garnett’s phone rang. Diane stood up to go back to helping David finish processing the crime scene. Garnett put a hand on her arm.

  “She’s been here at this crime scene for several hours,” he said. Garnett listened for several moments. “Yes, I can. I’ve been here, too.” Pause. “I understand. We have other staff who can come.” He paused again.

  Diane wished she could hear the other side of the conversation. She was beginning to feel that she was the she he was talking about.

  “Of course it won’t be compromised.” He paused for several seconds.

  Diane could hear someone on the other end but couldn’t make out the words. She could tell they were excited.

  “I don’t give a rat’s ass what she wants.” Garnett snapped the phone shut and turned toward Diane. “Things just keep getting worse.”

  “I know I shouldn’t ask, but how have they gotten worse?”

  “Someone just murdered Blake Stanton, the kid who tried to jack your car the other night. The mother thinks it was you.”

  Chapter 23

  “That kid? Someone killed him?”

  Blake Stanton wasn’t her favorite person, but he was still just a kid who had a great many decades ahead of him.

  “What happened?” She asked Garnett.

  “I don’t know yet. The commissioner didn’t give any details.” Garnett shook his head at some unspoken thought and stood up. “I’ve got to go on this one. I’ll take Jin and Neva. They can process the scene. I can’t have you anywhere near it.”

  “I understand that. David and I will finish up here. After that, I’m going home and turning off my telephones.”

  “I hear you there.”

  Diane refocused her attention on the Joana Cipriano crime scene. David had finished the living room and kitchenette and was now working on the bathroom. It wasn’t a big apartment—one bedroom, bath, living room, kitchenette with the small nook for a table. It was probably one of the less expensive apartments in the Applewood complex.

  She and David went over all the surfaces in detail. They checked for fingerprints on the walls, the door-jambs, the bathroom fixtures, inside, outside, and the underside of everything that might have been touched. Thankfully, it was not a cluttered apartment. They vacuumed the entire house, using a new bag for each grid they had laid out on the floors. When they finished, Diane was confident they had all the evidence the scene would yield. They packed up the books and took them to the lab where they would be examined for any clue as to the motive for Joana Cipriano’s murder or who had murdered her.

  It was the early hours of the morning when Diane arrived back at her apartment. She could get perhaps four hours’ sleep if she went to bed now. Jin and Neva probably wouldn’t get any sleep.

  Blake Stanton. What was that about? The meth lab explosion? Was someone afraid he would make a deal with the DA for a lighter sentence on the carjacking, so they killed him to shut him up?

  Diane tried to put the whole thing out of her mind when she crawled into bed. Before she fell asleep, her last thought was the hope that she would be awakened only by her clock. Before she even dozed off completely, her phone rang. For a whole second she gave serious consideration to not answering it.

  “Fallon here.”

  “Don’t think you are going to get away with what you did. I will never let you go. For the rest of your miserable life I intend to haunt your every waking moment. You will never get another minute of peace, you hear? Are you listening to me?”

  Diane hung up the phone. Great, now Patrice Stanton had become her stalker. The phone rang again. This time Diane looked at the caller ID. Unknown. She unplugged the phone from the wall and went to sleep.

  The clock went off too soon, awakening her from a dream in which she was plummeting toward earth with no parachute. It can’t possibly be four hours since I went to sleep, thought Diane as she struggled out of bed. She looked at her unplugged telephone and decided not to plug it in. She dragged herself to the shower and turned it on cooler than her usual setting.

  “Shit!” she screamed when the cold water hit her.

  Diane finished her shower and dried off, shivering the entire time. It would be warmer to lie naked in the snow, she thought as she slipped on her clothes. Well, at least she was wide-awake.

  She forced herself to eat a bowl of cereal before she dashed out the door to the museum. When she got to the curb where the museum loaner was parked she stopped cold. Someone had spray-painted in bright red letters the words MURDERER, KILLER, BITCH, and assorted obscenities all over the white Crown Victoria. Diane could guess who it was. The car was left driveable, she noticed. Diane took out her cell and dialed Andie.

  “Andie,” she said to the perky voice that answered. Andie was always perky in the morning. Diane bet she didn’t have to take a cold shower to get that way. “Are you at the museum or are you en route?”

  “En route. What’s up?”

  “Can you swing around by my place and give me a lift?”

  “Sure, something happen to the museum car?”

  “Patrice Stanton, trying to work through her grief,” said D
iane, before flipping her phone shut.

  Diane stamped her feet trying to keep warm as she waited for Andie. She called Neva to come and photograph and print her car ASAP. Then she called a mechanic she often used and asked him to pick it up after Neva finished and take it to his brother’s shop for a paint job.

  “Sure thing,” he said. “You want flames?”

  Diane could see him grinning into the phone. “No, it got those last night. I want it like it was. Can he resist making it a canvas?”

  “Sure thing. Somebody vandalize your car?”

  “Indeed they did. They weren’t very poetic about it, either.”

  “I’ll get it right away,” he said.

  “It’s in front of my apartment building. You can’t miss it,” she said.

  Andie pulled in front of the museum car, stopped and got out, and looked at it.

  “Who is Patrice Stanton and why did she do this?” said Andie, her Orphan Annie curls bouncing as she shook her head.

  “I’ll tell you on the way.” Diane got in Andie’s Honda and closed the door.

  “OK, what happened? Why does this woman think you are a murderer?” said Andie.

  Diane explained about Blake Stanton.

  “The kid with one hand who held a gun on you and tried to take your car?”

  “Yes, the same,” answered Diane.

  “And this chick thinks you did him in and is harassing you about it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Bummer.”

  When they were almost to the museum, Diane asked Andie to take the gravel access road that led around to the loading dock.

  “You think she is waiting on you out front?” asked Andie.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. She’s a woman with a mission.”

  Her son was dead. Diane tried to remember that. Grief takes many forms. Mrs. Stanton’s form was certainly destructive.

  Andie turned in the gravel access road, drove to the back of the museum, and stopped.

  “Thanks, Andie.”

  Diane hopped out of the car and entered the museum by the back way, which was actually a quicker way to her office. She let herself in by her private entrance, locked the door behind her, set her coffeemaker to chugging, sat down, and began sorting through paperwork on her desk. The phone rang and she picked it up.

  “RiverTrail Museum of Natural History,” she said automatically.

  “I want to speak with that killer, Diane Fallon.”

  Diane recognized Patrice Stanton’s voice. It crackled with hatred.

  “May I take a message?”

  “Yes, you can take a message. Before I’m through, everyone is going to know what a cold-blooded killer they have working for them at the museum.”

  “May I say who’s calling?”

  Patrice Stanton was quiet a moment.

  Startled by the polite response? On to me? Wondering if she should reveal herself? Thinking of a snappy comeback?

  “Tell her it’s the mother of the son she murdered,” Patrice said. “Murdered in cold blood.”

  “In cold blood, got it.” Diane replaced the receiver.

  In a few minutes she heard Andie come into her office. Diane rose and opened the adjoining door.

  “Andie, we’re going to be getting some harassing phone calls today from Patrice Stanton.”

  “Can’t the woman be stopped? Isn’t there anything we can do?” asked Andie.

  “Yes, there is. I know she is suffering and is trying to vent her anger, but we have to exercise caution and protect the museum from whatever imprudent thing she might do.”

  “So, what should I do?”

  “I’ll have Chanell make necessary security arrangements. If you receive any calls from her, field them as best you can. Keep a log and a brief summary of them and notify Chanell. Check discreetly with the heads of the museum departments; instruct them to let me know immediately if any of them receive abusive calls from her, and I’ll have our attorneys get a restraining order against her.”

  “OK, will do.”

  Diane walked to the office of Chanell Napier, her chief of museum Security. She brought Chanell up to date on the situation, including calls at Diane’s home and the vandalizing of the museum car.

  “I feel sorry for the woman,” said Chanell, “but she better get a grip on herself. I can record all the calls coming into the Director’s Office in the event that we take legal action. My people will have that set up within the hour. If she’s already been arrested once, I can get a mug shot of her and provide all of my security people with her picture. I think we better keep her off museum property until this whole thing is cleared up, don’t you?”

  “All those sound like sensible precautions, Chanell. Thank you.”

  “You don’t need to thank me, Dr. Fallon. You know I take the protection of you and this museum seriously. We’re not going to have any more of the kind of thing that’s happened around here in the past. We’re going to stop trouble at the door.”

  Diane informed Andy of the security precautions being put into place, then returned to her office, her paperwork, and her e-mail—thankfully, Patrice hadn’t thought of e-mail yet. With any luck, perhaps she would be computer illiterate. Diane called the hospital and asked about Darcy Kincaid. The nurses station asked her for the family code word that would allow them to give out the information.

  “Golden,” said Diane, looking at the note on her desk from the Kincaids.

  “She’s out of her coma and drifting in and out of consciousness. Her condition has been upgraded from critical to serious.”

  “Thank you,” said Diane. She went to the door between their offices and told Andie.

  “That’s good, isn’t it?” said Andie

  “Yes, it is. I’m going to my other office,” she said. “If there are any problems, give me a call.”

  Andy, clearly unnerved by the situation, asked, “Is there anything else we can do about Patrice Stanton?”

  “I can find out who killed her son,” replied Diane.

  Diane left her east-wing office and took the less visible route across the Pleistocene room, through the mammal room, and to the bank of elevators near the restaurant. Fortunately, she didn’t meet Patrice. She felt silly when she got on the elevator and just a little paranoid. She got off in front of the exhibit preparation room—where Darcy worked. She went in and updated Darcy’s coworkers on her condition.

  From there she went to the crime lab. She hoped that Neva and Jin had found something that would lead them to Blake’s killer. Patrice’s harassment had just started, but Diane was already sick of it. As she passed the lounge, she ran into Madge Stewart, one of the museum board members, on her way out.

  Madge was a small woman, several inches shorter than Diane. Her springy gray hair surrounded her head like a messy halo. She was quite a busybody, and Diane just knew she was in for an interesting run-in.

  “I was just looking for you, Diane,” she said.

  “Hello, Madge. Did you try my office?”

  “Oh, I just came in here to get a Coke and some peanuts.” She held them up for Diane to see.

  “What did you need to see me about?”

  “I got this strange call. Some woman said you killed her son. Did you?”

  “No, Madge, I didn’t kill her son. If I did, I’d be under arrest, wouldn’t I?”

  “Well, I thought it might have been in the line of duty, that kind of thing.” She cast a furtive glance toward the crime lab just a few feet away. Many in the museum referred to the top floor of the west wing as the dark side. Apparently Madge did, too.

  “No, Madge, I had nothing to do with his death.”

  “Why does his mother think you did?” Madge made it sound like an accusation. It probably was. Her small dark eyes bore into Diane like she was looking for any kind of deception.

  Because she’s nuts, thought Diane. Her words were kinder. “This just happened to her son last night. She’s in deep grief.”

  “How did yo
u hear about it?” said Madge.

  From the look on her face, Diane could see that she thought she had caught Diane in a slip of the tongue. If you didn’t kill him, then how did you know when he died?—she knew Madge was dying to say.

  “I was working another crime scene when the detective in charge got the call,” said Diane. Madge looked disappointed and Diane wanted to laugh.

  “You know, if you would get rid of that crime scene stuff, this wouldn’t happen,” said Madge.

  “Madge, the crime lab didn’t have anything to do with his death. Now excuse me, I need to go.”

  Diane walked across the dinosaur overlook and into the hallway that represented the border between the museum and its dark side.

  Chapter 24

  “OK, I need to know who killed the Stanton kid,” Diane said as she came into the crime lab.

  David looked up at her from his computer, Jin from his microscope; Neva was gone—processing her car, she hoped. However she saw a drawing she had been doing that looked like a picture of the back of a man. The Cipriano case, Diane guessed. She wondered about the usefulness of back view, but who knows? Someone may have seen him hanging around.

  “Garnett said Stanton is a priority?” asked David. “Because they’re rich, I’ll bet. You know, just because Joana Cipriano’s not wealthy . . .”

  “Garnett hasn’t said anything,” interrupted Diane. “I have.” She explained about Patrice Stanton and Patrice’s new goal in life.

  “The woman who attacked you at the hospital?” asked Jin. “Nervy.”

  “The woman is a bottomless well of nerve,” said Diane, “She’s already driving me crazy and she hasn’t even gotten started. I want her off my back. In particular, off the museum’s back. Tell me what you found.”

  “We aren’t supposed to talk with you about it,” said Jin. “Garnett told us not to. But I will if you ask me.”

  “No, I won’t ask you. He’s just protecting the evidence,” she said.

  Too bad he didn’t do a better job protecting the evidence of the explosion, she thought.