Dead Secret dffi-3

by Beverly Connor

  “On a pixel level that means one pixel expands into a circle of pixels of a different color value. But if the blur is caused by motion, like a moving car, then the blurring is in only one direction, hence pixel expansion is in one direction. And, of course, digitizing and scanning have their own formulas, which can cause a blurred image of a different pixel pattern.”

  “TMI,” said Neva, swiping her hand over the top of her head.

  “Can you clear it up?” repeated Diane.

  “Well, it may be that underwater shots simulate out-of-focus shots in the directionality of the blurring effect. I have some new NASA software that does well with hazy-”

  “David, can you do it?” said Diane.

  “I’ll give it a try.”

  “Good, thank you.”

  David took the photograph to his workstation.

  Diane spread the photos of the quarry crime scene out on the table and looked them over again, this time paying more attention to the woods that surrounded the quarry, looking for anything that her crew or the sheriff’s people might have missed.

  “Did you notice that this is an old roadway?” She put her finger on a less-dense avenue through the woods, with trees shorter than their neighbors on either side.

  “No, I didn’t notice that,” said Jin.

  “Is it relevant?” said David. “It’s overgrown now.”

  “Not through here.” She pointed to a place that, if one looked closely, might have been a deer trail.

  “How are you seeing this?” said Jin.

  “Something my archaeologist friend Jonas Briggs taught me,” said Diane. Archaeologists are good at finding old house sites and roadways after they are all grown over.

  “Want me to go back and take a look?” said Jin.

  Diane nodded. “Interview the deputy and the Scouts. Get them to draw how the bones were positioned.”

  “Okay, Boss.”

  “I want you to do something else, too.” She pulled out the photo showing the scuba diver’s body underwater. “I want a sample of the underwater twigs and tree limbs in which the diver was entangled. Bring them to the lab, and have Korey examine them. He’s an expert in submerged and waterlogged wood.”

  “Oh, so you’re thinking that maybe he didn’t get tangled and run out of air,” said Jin. “Your thinking that the wood was put on top of him after he was dead?”

  “I don’t know. I’d like to examine the possibility. Okay, everyone has their assignments. Jin and Neva, find out where in the woods the bones were discovered and work the scene. Deputy Singer pretty much messed it up, but look for more bones. After that, go to the quarry, take a look along the trail and get samples of submerged wood. Maybe the perp came from that direction and dropped something. David, you said you want to collect a bug or two from the deputy’s car?”

  “Neva and I can stop by and do that too,” said Jin. “I’ll find out where they took his car.”

  “Then David, you start on the evidence here,” said Diane. “I’m going to examine the bones in the garbage bag. Caver Doe will have to wait for a while.”

  Diane headed for her lab, and David stayed and watched the computer screen as the AFIS software looked for a match between fingerprint from the quarry crime scene and fingerprints from the AFIS databases.

  “Diane, wait,” David said just as she reached the door. “I have a possible match on our scuba diver-Scuba Doe.” She walked back to the computer and looked over his shoulder.

  “Okay,” he said, “let me see if this really matches.” David examined each print, overlaid them, then separated them back out. “It’s only a six-point match, but it’s a place for the sheriff to start. It’s a Jake Stanley-arrested five years ago for vandalism. He would be twenty-two right now. I’ll give Sheriff Canfield a call.”

  “This is good. We’re making progress.” Diane shrugged her shoulders. “Is it just me, or are we suddenly overwhelmed with work?”

  David put a hand on the telephone. “It’s not just you. I’m having a hard time figuring out which sheriff to call for what crime scene. Are we in a full moon or something?”

  “Or something,” she said as she walked back to the door.

  “After I call Canfield, I’ll come over and brief you on the other investigations,” said David.

  With all the dead bodies, Diane had momentarily forgotten about his investigations of Dr. Lymon and Alan Delacroix. “Like I said, too many things going on.”

  Diane changed to lab clothes in her office. The last thing she wanted was the smell of death clinging to her good clothes. She put a disposable cap over her hair, donned a pair of latex gloves and went into the isolation room.

  She cut the string and opened the garbage bag the deputy had delivered. An unpleasant aroma wafted out of it. She looked in, frowned and swore at Deputy Singer under her breath. Bones with black flesh clinging to them stuck out through a bag filled with leaves and other forest litter.

  Diane pulled a long sheet of butcher paper off the roll, put it on the table and placed the garbage sack on it. She turned down the top of the sack, like rolling down a pair of socks. Several bugs scurried among the leaves.

  The first bone she pulled from the jumble was a femur-a thigh bone. There was a fresh cut in the shaft. She would bet Deputy Singer had shoveled the bones up and deposited them in the bag. She swore at him again.

  There was also another cut, shallower, a scratch partway down the bone. But that one was not fresh. Examination under her hand lens showed it not to be a continuous line. There were gouges, like hesitations or missteps, followed by slices. A knife, she thought. She forced herself to think of the bone, not the victim. Impossible, but she always tried.

  The ilium of a pelvis peeked out from behind a clump of dirt and leaves. As she took it out of the bag, the other half hung by a thread of skin. She saw immediately that it was a female pelvis.

  Removing the pelvis had uncovered the dome of the skull. She lifted it out with both hands and set it on the table. Dried skin held on to the lower jaw and clung to the cheeks, in the eye sockets, and on part of the skullcap. Several clumps of gray-white hair stuck to the skin on the skull. Enough of the top of the skull was exposed that she could see the sutures were almost gone. This was an old individual.

  Other marks were visible where the bones of the face showed through the remnants of flesh-striations cut into the bone on the forehead, cheeks and chin, as though someone had sliced her face with a knife.

  Diane dipped her hand in the sack, recovering bone after bone, placing them in position on the table. Even with the brief inspection of the bones as she laid them out, several charistics stood out. The bones were thin and brittle, exhibiting signs of arthritis and osteoporosis. In addition they had been damaged by animals-and sliced by a knife. The ends of the long bones showed the identifiable destructive pattern left by the gnawing of dogs. The shaft had been cut by something sharp, probably a knife. The ribs on each side, the femora, tibias, humeri, and radii and two cervical vertebrae all showed the same marks.

  She caught a glimpse of a bit of pink fabric among the leaves in the bag. She gently moved the leaves and dirt away, uncovering a larger and larger piece. It was cotton, faded pink and stained by the body fluids from the decomposing corpse. The dress was thin and handmade and buttoned up the front with small white buttons. She hadn’t been a large woman at all. Diane put the remains of the dress in a paper evidence bag and labeled it.

  David opened the door and came into the room, sporting a disposable cap, gloves and a glass container. “Thought I would help you with the insects. Good heavens,” he said, looking into the sack filled with litter. “What did he do, shovel the body in?”

  “From some of the markings I’m seeing, yes, that is exactly what he did.”

  “I called Sheriff Canfield. He was happy we were able to tentatively identify one of the quarry victims. I told him we will process the evidence as soon as we can.”

  Diane nodded. “What did you find out about
Dr. Lymon?”

  “She has an alibi for the time of the graveside attack. I spoke with several of her geology graduate students. I didn’t find any hint that she has ever sexually harassed any other student. Most of the gossip was about her teaching methods. She isn’t well liked. In fact, Mike seems to be one of the few who got along with her. In her classes she’ll zero in on a particular student and verbally quiz them during the lecture. The more they don’t know, the more she focuses in on them. Geology has lost several students because of her.”

  David stopped to scoop up several bugs and put them in his container. “Dermestes maculatus. Nice little scavengers,” he said.

  “We need to be sure we get them all. I don’t want any infesting the museum colony of beetles,” said Diane, staring at the dark beetles running around in David’s jar.

  “I’ll get them all. You know, there are a lot of them.” he said as he peeked into the bag. “And I’m seeing a lot of bug parts.”

  “What do you mean?”

  David shook his head. “I don’t know. It just looks like more beetles than usual, if you think about all the bugs left behind and the ones that scared the deputy.”

  Diane pulled another bone out of the sack and held it in her hand. It was cleaner than the others, a long bone, a humerus, but not human.

  “What is this?” She said out loud and put paper out on another table and set the bone on it. “I’ll get Sylvia Mercer in here to identify this. Go ahead with what you were saying about Lymon.”

  “Not a lot more. The students were aware that Mike lost his assistantship, but no one knew why. They thought maybe it was because she was angry over his changing his dissertation research to crystallography, which is out of her field. But she apparently encouraged him and helped him pick someone in crystallography to replace her on his committee. That doesn’t sound like anger. I’m thinking maybe this harassment was a onetime thing, and her anger came later.” He stopped talking a moment and stared at the bones Diane was laying out on the table.

  Diane turned to look at him. “You look like you have something else to say.”

  “Just trying to think it out. From what I can find out, her husband’s leaving hit her hard. I think she wanted to get some self-esteem back and thought Mike would be receptive.”

  “Because he worked for her?”

  “Because she knew he was attracted to another older woman.”

  “You mean me. Is there something I should know about that?”

  David looked up at her, surprised. “About you? No. I’m just thinking out loud. You said she thought you and Mike were having an affair. Everyone knows you and Mike go caving and that you’re friends. Some even know Mike would have liked to go out with you. She probably thought that Mike would be a safe place for her pride to land. She was wrong, and that’s why she got so angry.”

  Diane noticed that David was tiptoeing around calling her an older woman, like Dr. Lymon-they were about the same age. She smiled. “You may be right. I guess the question is, how angry was she? If she didn’t stab us, could she have gotten one of her students to do it?”

  David leaned with his back against the wall and folded his arms. “I don’t think so. Not the ones I talked to. I didn’t find evidence of any students who liked her well enough to carry her briefcase, much less kill for her.”

  “How did you get all this information, if I may ask?” said Diane, looking in the garbage bag again and finding a foot bone.

  David grinned. “The students were pretty easy to talk to. I pretended to be a father checking out the department for his kid.”

  She looked up at him. “The students didn’t think that was funny?” Diane remembered when she was a young student, and she would have thought that strange.

  “I’m sure they did, but what was really funny was that several of them seemed to like the idea that I would care enough to do it.”

  “I’m relieved about Dr. Lymon. Thanks, David.” She let out a deep breath. “What about Alan?” She really didn’t want to talk about Alan, but she needed to find out if David had discovered anything.

  “You know, I’m having trouble visualizing you married to someone like that,” said David.

  Diane didn’t like to think about their marriage either. He now made her shiver, and not in a good way. “Yeah, me too.”

  “I think he’s in the clear. He had a dental appointment that day. I talked to his dentist.”

  “That’s a relief, too. Frankly, I didn’t want the complications his guilt would bring.”

  “How’s your mother?”

  “I’m not sure. As you can imagine, this had quite an effect on her. She’s usually strong and opinionated, but she was cowed when we brought her back. I think it will take time.”

  Diane pulled out a cluster of bones with a long tail. “Got any idea what this is?” She put the bones on the table with the other animal bone.

  “From the tail it looks like an opossum.”

  “Why, David, I didn’t know you knew animal bones.”

  “I’ve seen enough roadkill to be able to ID the tail.”

  “It looks like we have several animals mixed in with Jane Doe.” She pulled out another animal long bone and a cheap walking shoe.

  David picked out the beetles as Diane fished around in the leaves. She found several more bones of some kind of mammal.

  Most of the human hand and foot bones were missing, as was her left femur. Oddly enough, the hyoid bone, which was often missing in decomposed corpses because it was so small, was there, but only because it was stuck to flesh. It was broken.

  “The hyoid is a bone in the neck that is often broken in strangulation,” said Diane. “It looks like someone strangled her, slit her throat and sliced her up-and I’m not sure in that order.”

  “Overkill?”

  “Maybe. The woman was old, weak and vulnerable. Why do this-and why do I keep asking questions like that?”

  “Looking for a rational killer, I guess. You think it may be a serial? The way she was killed suggests a pattern.”

  “Maybe. Have a look at the database. I’m not sure Sheriff Burns has the access or the manpower to do the searches we do.”

  David collected all the live bugs he could find, as well as several bug parts. “Quite a collection,” he said.

  “I’ll put the rest of the bag contents on the screen, spray out the dirt and pick out the leaves. I’ll let you have a look at the detritus to see if there are any other kinds of bugs.”

  David nodded. He took his jar of bugs and left Diane alone with her bones. In the screen she found three bones of the hand and a thin gold wedding band. Unfortunately, it wasn’t engraved.

  Chapter 29

  Diane took the scope and viewer into the isolation room to examine the bones for telltale fibers and any other small thing that might be revealed. She ran the scope along the bones and dried flesh and watched the magnified image on the monitor. She found several fibers, lifted them out with tweezers and placed each one in an envelope and labeled it.

  The magnified image showed several cuts on the ribs similar to the cuts on the long bones. The killer had sliced down her torso, leaving nicks on both sides of her rib cage. God, thought Diane, how do people get disturbed enough to do this to a person?

  Diane left the room and came back with the handheld metal detector from the crime lab. She moved it slowly a couple of inches above Jane Doe’s bones. It would be a long shot, but-The detector went off in the middle of her thought. The area was the upper part of the left femur, the greater trochanter, a prominence where the gluteals, iliopsoas, and piriformis muscles attached to the bone. The bone was covered with dark dried skin. When she put the scope over it, she could see it was sliced.

  With a scalpel she gently cut the dried flesh away. In the scope image she saw something embedded in the exposed bone. She grasped it with a pair of forceps and pulled. It came out easily and was what she had expected and hoped for-the tip of a knife blade. With this, if they found the
knife, they could identify it as the weapon. She put the metal fragment in an evidence bag and labeled it.

  She used the scope again and examined the face, the teeth and the eye sockets for the minutiae that criminalists looked for-something caught in the teeth, a shred of something that had taped her mouth shut or her eyes closed-anything that might provide a clue to who she was and what had happened to her.

  Jane Doe had most of her teeth, and they were in good condition-just a few old fillings. The pattern of wear on the adjacent teeth said that she’d had a bridge anchored to her upper back molars. But the bridge wasn’t present. Perhaps Jin and Neva would find it.

  Something in the left eye socket caught Diane’s attention-a very small, light-colored object stuck to the dried skin. Diane pulled gently on it with her tweezers until it came free. The object had a piece of something else attached to it. Diane put it in a tray and gently rinsed it.

  She stepped out of the small room, taking the tray containing the tiny something with her. Mounting the object on a glass slide, she slipped it on the microscope stage and looked through the eyepieces, moving the focus until she could see it. It looked plastic and translucent-almost like a head with a tail. She moved it with her tweezers. It was some kind of tube with a rounded something attached to one end. Diane turned it over, trying to figure out what it could be. The other side was marred by an imperfection. She twisted the focus knob. Not an imperfection, but something stamped or engraved into it. She increased the magnification and refocused. It was a string of digits-a number.

  Diane wrote down the numbers, then attached the digital camera to the microscope and photographed the tiny object. When she finished taking several shots on each side and at different magnifications, she took the memory stick from the camera to the vault where her computers were.

  The vault was a secure, environmentally controlled room where she stored skeletal remains. It was also where she kept her special computer equipment and software. With her forensic software, using a few bone measurements from a skeleton she could make accurate predictions about a victim’s race, sex and a host of other variables. She could enter skull and facial measurements into another program and it would predict with a fair degree of accuracy what country or demographic region the individual came from.