Dead Secret dffi-3

by Beverly Connor

  “I saw Veda Odell this morning. She said she showed you their collections. They seemed to have taken to you.”

  David looked somber. “You don’t know how that disturbs me to hear that.” Jin laughed, and David shot him a stern look. “Do you know what they collect?” he said.

  “No, and I’m not sure I want to,” said Diane.

  “Go on, tell her,” said Jin.

  “The more innocuous of their collections is mourning jewelry-rings, lockets, brooches that people wore in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to commemorate dead loved ones. Most of them have the deceased’s hair in little compartments. Some of the hair-work jewelry has scenes made from bits of hair. Most of it is actually very good. They had a lock of woven hair that was supposed to have belonged to one of the Hapsburgs-Empress Elizabeth, I think they said.”

  “Tell her about the other stuff,” urged Jin, leaning forward on his forearms and grinning at Diane. “You’re not going to believe this, Boss.”

  “The jewelry was kind of nice, and I made the mistake of showing an interest. That’s when they brought out their other collection.”

  “Dare I ask?” said Diane.

  “They have a collection of daguerreotypes of dead children.”

  Diane opened her mouth and shut it again. “What?” she said finally.

  “Can you believe it?” said Jin.

  “Dead children?” repeated Diane. “Who would take pictures of dead children? You mean like autopsy photos, funeral shots?” She wasn’t sure she wanted to hear any more.

  “As nearly as I can understand it, it was the rage in the eighteen hundreds to photograph the dead-mostly children, but adults too. They would frame the photos in these velvet-lined gold-and-leather frames. Sometimes they would set the dead up in fancy chairs like they were alive. The Odells had a whole collection of them. I can’t tell you how depressed I was when I left.”

  “You didn’t tell her the worst part,” said Jin.

  “They had albums of their own children’s funerals. Seven of them, and they all died in the fifties before the age of ten. I’m telling you, Diane, someone needs to investigate these people.”

  “My landlady mentioned something about their children once. How did they die; did you ask?”

  “Some hereditary illness, they said, but jeez, you’d have thought they would have stopped after, say”-he made an exaggerated shrug with his shoulders-“four.”

  “That was the forties and fifties,” said Diane. “I imagine birth control wasn’t as good.”

  “Neither was forensics,” said David.

  “Maybe all this death stuff is just their way of dealing with grief,” said Jin. “You know, like making death commonplace so it looks like their children’s dying was just a common part of life. Supposing they didn’t help their children into the afterlife; it must have hurt big-time to lose so many. That’d make you go crazy. Maybe that’s their way of being close to them.”

  “I still think Diane ought to move,” said David.

  Diane shook her head. That was a little more than she wanted to know about her neighbors. She had thought they were odd before. Now they were downright creepy. “Okay, let’s change the subject. David, you said the bodies were piling up. Fill me in.”

  “Jin and Neva worked a crime scene yesterday-two men found drowned in a quarry lake north of here just at the county line. One was a scuba diver. It’s Sheriff Canfield’s jurisdiction, and he thinks the diver got tangled up underwater in some brush and old fishing line. The other guy tried to help him, fell in and drowned too. Some fishermen found both of them. We don’t have the medical examiner’s report. We’re calling the scuba diver Scuba Doe and the other guy Quarry Doe.”

  Jin jumped up, went to his desk and came back with a folder. “I have photographs and drawings. Like David said, Sheriff Canfield thinks it was an accident.”

  Diane pulled the papers over to her. “What do you think?” She stopped, wrinkled her nose and looked up.

  “What is that smell?” Her gaze shifted to the garbage bag that Jin had put in the corner..

  “You’re not going to like this, Boss,” said Jin, looking like he clearly didn’t want to say anything more. Unusual for Jin.

  “Give it to me,” she said.

  “It’s one of the bodies.”

  She raised her eyebrows and looked over at the bag. “One of the drowning victims?”

  “No. One of the bodies that David said is piling up. Do you remember Deputy Singer, that guy who was so mad because he had to wait for us to come out of the cave?”

  Diane cocked an eyebrow. “Yes. That’s not him, is it?” Jin laughed. “You’re going to wish it was. Some Boy Scouts out in the woods in Lumpkin County came across some bones-well, not completely bones. They still had some flesh on them-looks like a couple of months’ decomposition, maybe. Anyway, they called Sheriff Burns, who sent Deputy Singer. He gathered up the bones and stuffed them in that garbage bag and brought them to the daytime reception desk an hour ago.”

  Jin laced his fingers together, apparently waiting for her to react. Diane stared at him for a long moment, hoping that this was some joke of Jin’s.

  “He stuffed them in the garbage bag?” she said slowly.

  “I told you that you weren’t going to like it, Boss.” He and David exchanged glances. David looked as if he were stifling a chuckle.

  “I don’t suppose Deputy Singer has had a single course in crime scene protocol?” said Diane.

  “Probably thinks they’re a waste of his valuable time. It only took him a few minutes to gather them up. Think of how much time he saved,” Jin said sarcastically.

  Diane put her head in her hands, then looked up. “I’ll call Sheriff Burns and tell him to get the deputy to take you and. . ” Diane looked around the lab area. “Where is Neva?”

  “Mike’s getting out of the hospital today,” said David. “She’s gone to get him settled in at home.”

  “Is she doing okay?”

  Jin nodded. “Since her house was trashed? Yes,” he said. “But she’s been running on anger. The detectives think it was some teenagers in the neighborhood that she had a run-in with, but they can’t prove it. We’ve accounted for all the prints. Whoever it was wore gloves.”

  Diane shook her head. “The MO doesn’t sound like teenagers,” she said. “It was too deliberate.”

  “I agree,” said David. He stroked the fringe of dark hair he still had around the sides and back of his head. Diane wondered if he read somewhere that massaging the head made hair grow. “Unfortunately,” he continued, “we don’t have much to give the detectives. We know the route he took through the house breaking things. We know he came in and left through the back door. He left the front door open, probably so his vandalism would be found, if not by Neva, then by someone noticing the open door. We know the paint was bought at Kmart, but we couldn’t trace who bought it. The perp wore rubber gloves that left a powder residue. And we know it’s someone who is really pissed off at Neva.”

  “Powder residue?” asked Diane.

  “Not the same kind as in your lab breakin. Gloves are from a different company,” said Jin. “But that’s not to say it couldn’t be the same guy.”

  Diane chewed her lower lip. “Too bad, though. I’d like to connect some of these things.” She sighed. “No one in the neighborhood saw anything, I suppose?”

  “No,” said David.

  Diane sat in silence for a moment, organizing her thoughts on how to proceed. “Okay. Jin,” she said, “when Neva returns, I want you and her to go work the crime scene in the woods. I’ll call Sheriff Burns and ask him to tell Deputy Singer to take you to where the body was found.”

  “Deputy Singer’s going to like that,” said Jin.

  “I’m sure he will,” said Diane, hoping that Jin and Neva could somehow salvage the crime scene in the woods that Deputy Singer had messed up. “And, Jin, be careful.”

  “Always, Boss.”

  “And put
that sack in my isolation closet.”

  “Sure.” He grabbed the sack and made for her lab.

  In Diane’s osteology lab she had two small rooms sealed off from the rest of the lab for the purpose of keeping and cleaning bones that still had flesh. They were so small that Diane referred to them as her closets. One room had a dermestarium similar to the one in the faunal lab, a old chest-type freezer converted to house a colony of dermestid beetles-the insects that stripped bones of flesh. The faunal lab used their beetles to clean animal skeletons for the reference collection and museum display; Diane used her colony for cleaning human bones. She preferred dermestid beetles and hydrogen peroxide, rather than boiling, which made a greasier bone.

  Diane used one room to keep contaminated remains isolated from the rest of the building and the other to keep the insects confined. Nothing could be more devastating to a museum than to have dermestids get loose. They loved to eat all the things that museum collections were made of. The isolation room also had a sink for washing the finished bones in hot water to kill any beetles hiding in cracks or openings. Diane didn’t usually clean bones that had a lot of flesh still attached, like Caver Doe, or decomposing bodies. She let the medical examiner’s assistant clean those. She cleaned up only bones that were almost completely skeletonized. She guessed that the bones in Jin’s garbage bag were of that type.

  Diane turned her attention to the folder that Jin had given her for the quarry bodies. She looked at each of the photographs in turn and placed them on the table along with Jin’s drawings and notes of the scene.

  Jin returned from the isolation room and sat down. “Sorry, Boss. I should have put the bones away immediately.”

  “That’s all right. Tell me about these guys.” She gestured at the array of photographs.

  Jin pointed to one of the photographs. Diane picked it up and examined the scene. It showed a body dressed in jeans and a T-shirt lying facedown in the water next to a log. It was labeled QUARRY DOE.

  “The fishermen first found the body of just one man,” said Jin. “When Sheriff Canfield came, they found the scuba diver in the water caught under the brush. The sheriff speculated that the first man slipped and fell trying to help the scuba diver.”

  “Who’s the ME on this?” she asked.

  “Rosewood’s ME,” said David. “Rankin.”

  “What does he say about them?”

  David looked to Jin. “He hasn’t finished the autopsies, but at the scene he said they’d been dead about three or four days. The skin, hair and nails were loose, and the bodies were that greenish-black-purple color they get. He was talking like he agreed with Sheriff Canfield that it was an accident.”

  Diane looked at the photograph labeled SCUBA DOE. The scuba diver’s black-and-yellow suit barely showed through the tangle of branches that covered him.

  “What do you think, Jin?”

  “I have questions. Like where’s the other diver?”

  “Other diver?”

  “Scuba diving is like caving. You don’t do it alone. It’s very dangerous. There has to be another diver. If the other diver was Quarry Doe, then where’s his equipment?”

  “You tell this to the sheriff?”

  “Yes. He had the deputies search near the lake. But, see, if the other diver had his weight belt on and got into trouble, he may be at the bottom of the quarry. And that’s another thing. I asked the sheriff how deep it is and he said a hundred feet or more. In that case, where’s the descent line? You go that deep, you have to descend slowly and stop at intervals to adjust for the pressure changes. You use a marked descent line to do that. I looked and didn’t find one.”

  “What did you get from the crime scene?”

  “It’s all laid out on the table,” Jin said, pointing to one of the analysis rooms.

  “Let’s go have a look.” Diane rose, scooped up the papers and put them in the file.

  Scuba gear and an assortment of evidence bags were arranged on the metal table. The room had the aroma of death from pieces of the victims stuck to their clothes. Diane had never really gotten used to that aroma.

  “I checked out the tank,” said Jin. “Nothing hinky about it. No tampering. It’s out of air, and one of the hoses was punctured. There was a small twig stuck in it. That may have been what punctured it. Part of the wood is still lodged in the hose. I haven’t examined the hole itself yet.

  “I checked his goggles for prints. Found one set,” Jin added. “David ran them and they didn’t show up. The ME’s going to try to get prints from the body.”

  “I have Scuba Doe’s prints.” Neva walked through the door and waved a large envelope at them. “I just came from the ME’s, where I got to wear the skin from the dead scuba guy’s fingers. I can’t tell you how much fun that was. I think this Halloween I’m going to borrow one of his cadavers and wear a cadaver suit.” She wrinkled up her face-so did Diane. Jin and David laughed. “Quarry Doe-he’s the floater by the log-had his fingertips nibbled off. No prints there.”

  “Neva,” said David, “I thought you were with Mike.”

  “I was. I got him into his apartment, fixed him something to eat, made him promise to rest and went to the ME’s office.” She handed the envelope to David. “Grist for your algorithm machines.” Neva looked happy and rested. Her camel-colored slacks and wine silk blouse looked new. She and Star must have gone shopping to replace some of her clothes. Diane liked seeing her in good spirits.

  “I’ll go run these right now,” said David, heading out the door.

  Neva pushed her hair behind her ears. “Dr. Fallon, it’s good to have you back. I had a lot of fun at Frank’s house. His daughter, Star, is a hoot. We played Monopoly, ate ice cream and looked at fashion magazines. Frank’s a really nice guy.”

  “He’s pretty decent, I have to admit,” Diane said with a smile.

  “That’s nice what you’re doing for Star. Makes me want to go to the university. Of course, you’re going to be broke by then. You should see the things Star is looking at.”

  Diane rolled her eyes. “I always say, if you’re going to resort to bribery, make it good.” She shook her head thinking of Star, then refocused her attention on work. “I’m glad you’re here. We need you.”

  Neva grinned. The last time she saw Neva she had been crying over the shambles the vandal had made of her home.

  “You’re going to have to change clothes. I need you and Jin to go to the woods.”

  “You know that deputy we had the pleasure of meeting when we brought Caver Doe out of the cave?” said Jin. She nodded, and he told her about the garbage bag of bones.

  Neva cocked her head to one side. “Why am I not surprised?”

  “I’m sure he didn’t get all the bones,” said Diane.

  David stuck his head in the door.

  “Found a match already?” asked Diane.

  “No, not yet. It’s still running. But you’re not going to believe this.” He jerked his thumb back toward his desk. “I called Sheriff Burns to get Deputy Duck to take Jin and Neva out to the woods, and found out that he’s in the hospital.”

  “What happened?” they all asked together.

  “After delivering the bones, he was driving back and had an accident. He told the sheriff that a swarm of bugs crawled all over him as he drove down the road.”

  Chapter 28

  Jin and Diane looked each other, then at David, with their mouths agape.

  “A swarm of bugs?” Neva wrinkled her nose. “In his car?”

  “That’s what Sheriff Burns told me. Said it was right out of a horror movie.”

  “I believe our deputy must have been drinking,” said Neva.

  “That’s not what I’m thinking,” said David.

  “Ah,” said Jin. “It’s a good thing we put the bag in isolation.”

  “We need to make sure none escaped,” said Diane, horrified. “Dermestids are terrible museum pests. If they get into the taxidermy displays or the insect collection. . or, God fo
rbid, the mummy. .”

  “Maryanne downstairs told me the deputy came in and handed her the garbage bag with a smirk. It smelled so bad, she tied off the top of the bag with string. It was plenty tight. As I brought it up the elevator, I checked for holes. There weren’t any, so I think we’re safe.”

  “I’ll make sure Maryanne has a bonus in her next pay-check,” muttered Diane. “What else do we have here?”

  Diane picked up and examined each evidence bag. One contained the clothes of Quarry Doe. Another had the scuba diver’s underclothes. Others held assorted things found at the scene-one spent shotgun shell casing. .

  “Were they shot?” asked Diane.

  “No,” said Jin. “At least, the medical examiner on the scene said they weren’t, but we don’t have an autopsy yet.”

  There were also two cigarette boxes and thirteen cigarette butts.

  “This is interesting,” said Diane. She held up a clear plastic bag containing a soiled photograph. The picture was a blur.

  “I thought we might get some prints from it,” said Jin.

  All Diane could see were murky shapes and shades of a nondescript gray-green color. “Can you tell what it is?” she asked.

  “Bad photograph. Whoever took it probably threw it away,” said Jin.

  Diane stared at the picture, squinting her eyes, looking at the shapes in the foreground.

  “You see something, Boss?” asked Jin.

  “I don’t know.” Diane paused, studying the print through the plastic, turning it different directions. The others looked over her shoulder. “You know, I think this is a photo taken underwater.”

  “You think so?” said Jin. “Maybe.”

  Diane turned to David. “Okay, Mr. I-love-a-good-algorithm, you think you can clear this up?”

  David took the evidence bag and studied the photograph. “The various pieces of software I use essentially reverse the blurring process, so the formula for sharpening it depends on how the image was blurred. For example, in simple out-of-focus pictures, the blurring is equal in all directions.” He made an oval of his hands, touching the tips of his fingers together.