Dead Secret dffi-3

by Beverly Connor

  Diane looked at her watch. Jin still had fifteen minutes before he and the other divers had to come up, according to the chart he showed her. She occupied herself by comparing the scene around her with the notes and reports that her team had created. The long-overgrown avenue through the woods was more evident in person. The road that led to the quarry consisted of two parallel dirt tracks with its middle grown up with tall grass.

  The quarry lake was a pretty place, a place that would have been a good swimming hole. The water was clear and it was relatively private. A thick wood grew around the whole area. Diane was told by the local historians that a hundred years ago granite had been mined here. She’d probably seen buildings made from its stone and didn’t know it.

  Rocks made her think of Mike. She wondered how he was getting along. Neva said he had been busy making notes of what he wanted to do in his new job. Her mind wandered to Annette Lymon. Andie had told her that Dr. Lymon was looking for her. She dreaded that encounter.

  The sun was warm on her face. She closed her eyes. She would like to go swimming right now. She’d been fighting a mild feeling of depression for the past few days, brought on, no doubt, by what had happened to her mother, seeing her ex-husband again, and what he did to Susan and Gerald. And not to mention getting stabbed. She rubbed her arm.

  It was as if a dark mist were settling around her. She couldn’t see it, but she felt it, and it gave her a sense of dread. Frank was good; he was her anchor. He’d come over the evening before and brought one of her favorite meals-Chinese. And he had made her laugh. She touched the locket around her neck, pushing the heart shape into her chest, feeling the metal, remembering that Ariel had touched it. Yes, a swim right now would be good.

  She was brought out of her reverie by a splash and voices. She opened her eyes. Jin was back up, bags and camera tied to his body. One after another, minutes apart, divers popped up after him. Four in all, each carrying bags. Jin was swimming to shore rather than getting in the boat. The second group of divers started putting on their gear. For them it was time for the real show-bringing up the car.

  “Hey, Boss. It’s nice down there. A little chilly, but nice. I got some good pictures and a lot of evidence.” He pointed to the bags hanging from his body weighing him down. “Damn, these weren’t so heavy underwater.” He grinned.

  “It’s an old Plymouth, maybe 1935-ish or something. David will probably know. It’s in pretty good condition, considering. No license plates on it. Too bad. That might have helped.” Diane walked with Jin to the museum van, where he took off his diving gear.

  The van was one the groundskeepers used and had been stripped of carpeting. Korey came trotting over to help transfer the bones Jin had brought up into tubs of distilled water in the van.

  Diane held the dripping skull in her hands. It was almost pearlescent, the way the saturated white bone reflected the sunlight. Right away she knew it would probably be a young female. It was too gracile to be otherwise. The wisdom teeth were just about to erupt. There was nothing on the face that suggested how she died. No broken face bones or broken teeth that suggested a car accident. But at the back of the head there was a depression fracture. She put the skull in the water with the other bones and replaced the cover.

  “You know, Boss,” said Jin, stripping off his wet suit. “When you look at the bones, it doesn’t really matter if they dry out too fast and crack. You’ll just be burying them after you finish.”

  Korey looked scandalized.

  “We don’t know what we’ll find, when we’ll find it or how long it will take to identify her,” Diane said. “We may have to store her for years, and we want her in the best condition possible.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Korey. “Always err on the side of conservation.”

  Jin laughed. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to climb in the van a minute and close the door to change clothes.” He slammed the door shut after he was inside. “We searched the bottom for another diver,” he yelled as he was changing clothes. “Nothing.”

  While he put on dry clothes, Diane looked at the special slates he had used for writing underwater. He had made a grid of the scene and a drawing of where everything was found. What had the scuba diver, Jake Stanley, and Quarry Doe been looking for? she wondered, staring at Jin’s drawing. What besides an ancient skeleton could be in an old car that probably had been at the bottom of the quarry for who knew how long? For that matter, what was the relationship of Quarry Doe to the diver, Jake Stanley?

  Jin had made notes of a few things found outside the car on the quarry bottom: old tires, cans, bottles, several unidentified pieces of metal. Because the time the divers could spend at that depth was limited, he had concentrated most of his time inside the car itself.

  The van door opened and Jin jumped out, dressed in cutoffs and a T-shirt. “You’re not going to believe what we found.”

  “Probably not,” said Diane. She half expected them to come up with something of value-like a suitcase full of money.

  “Vintage men’s magazines.”

  “What?” said Korey.

  “Really. From the thirties and forties. You know, Boss. .”

  She could see Jin’s mind working. “No, we aren’t going to do a museum display of them.”

  “How did you know that’s what I was going to ask?”

  Diane simply looked at him.

  “The difference between what people thought was beautiful then and now is really interesting. I mean, with all the plastic surgery and exercise and. .”

  “Jin, move on,” said Diane.

  “We can get some dates off the mags.”

  “Good.”

  The other divers on Jin’s team came to the van with their booty-mostly bones. They also brought clothes-a yellow gingham dress, a white apron, black shoes, and a sweater. Diane and Korey placed all of it in containers of distilled water.

  While Diane and her team were packing up the evidence, the recovery team got to work. Diane heard them calling orders to one another in the background. A large tow truck sat near the edge of the water. Men wearing life jackets stood in the water on the underwater shelf near where Jake Stanley was found. The shelf was about six feet wide and four feet deep. After that, there was a dropoff all the way to the bottom of the lake. The salvagers were letting orange material down into the water, readying the lift bags for the divers to take down to the car.

  The museum crew stayed well away from the operation, unlike an Atlanta news crew, who were taking pictures up close. Korey and Jin got on top of the museum van to observe the process. Diane sat in the van and studied Jin’s map of the underwater crime scene. After several minutes she put it away to watch with the others.

  At the moment there was nothing much to see. The boat that anchored the descent line that Jin and his people used was gone, and the lake was calm and empty. Then, like a whale surfacing and spouting water, the car suddenly surfaced surrounded by orange lift bags, and everybody clapped. That must be one of those things, Diane thought, that you never got tired of seeing if you did this kind of work-large objects suddenly popping up out of the water. She grinned as if she’d just seen a circus act.

  The divers tied a line to the car, and the men on the bank began winching it in. Jin got off the top of the van and retrieved his camera to take more photographs. At the depth the car was submerged, they had been unable to see true colors. Diane could see that the dark gray car had maroon seats. When the recovery team had the car secure on shore, Jin took a picture of the dark gray humpbacked Plymouth that was in remarkably good condition. Diane heard one of the men say he thought it was a 1938. For Diane, looking at the old car brought up from the depth of the lake was like looking back in time.

  Plymouth Doe, as Jin had christened their newest skeleton, lay on the table in Diane’s osteology lab. The next day Diane had come in early to get started on the skeleton. The bones were wet and shining like pearls that had been molded into the shape of a skeleton. Korey had told Diane to keep the
bones wet as she worked, so she had a spray bottle for that purpose. Korey had mixed a bath of fifty percent alcohol and fifty percent distilled water that the bones would be submerged in after Diane’s examination of them.

  Plymouth Doe was female. Her pelvis was clear on that. It was broad and shallow like a cradle-and it had held at least one infant in her lifetime. Her wisdom teeth were just starting to erupt. The medial end of the clavicle was just beginning to unite with its epiphysis. There was no complete epiphyseal union on her femora or her humeri. Plymouth Doe was young-between sixteen and twenty-two, Diane guessed. Too young to die.

  The newest magazine found in the car with her was dated 1942. If, for sake of argument, they could say that was the date Plymouth Doe died, she would now have been around eighty. Plymouth Doe could still be alive had someone not cracked her skull. Diane examined the rod-shaped fracture with a hand lens. The edges were smooth except for one nick in the bone. It looked like whatever object made the fracture had some small protrusion on it, like a burr or imperfection on whatever weapon was used.

  There were no healed fractures on any of her bones. One curious characteristic Diane discovered when she was looking for evidence of right-or left-handedness-the beveling on her right glenoid fossa, the right shoulder socket of the scapula, was greater than on her left. This usually indicated that there had been more rotation in the right shoulder socket-a common sign of right-handedness. Greater beveling usually went hand in hand with larger muscle attachments on the dominant arm and shoulder. But Plymouth Doe’s left muscle attachments on her arm and shoulder were larger than her right. Her glenoid fossa said she was right-handed, but her muscle attachments said she was left-handed.

  One occupation Diane had read about that could cause this was waitressing. Having to balance a heavy tray with the less-dominant hand left the dominant hand free. A right-handed waitress balanced a tray on her left hand. Had Plymouth Doe been a waitress in her relatively short life? She thought about the white apron found with her clothes.

  Diane moistened the skull with the spray bottle and began taking the tedious measurements on the face just as Neva entered the lab with a folder tucked under her arm.

  “I have some drawings of Quarry Doe-Jake Stanley’s partner in death,” she said. Quarry Doe had been dead in the water long enough for his face to become distorted. Diane wanted Neva try to make his face look alive to help identify him. “I also scanned Caver Doe’s skull,” Neva continued, “since he was sitting there right beside it. Remember that photo we found with Caver Doe? Even though it had been soaked in Caver Doe’s blood and fluids, David got me an image from it by using the computer and some of his fancy lights. It was a photograph of a girl, and I drew her picture too.”

  “That photo wasn’t stolen?” she asked.

  Neva looked a little embarrassed. “I had taken it from the evidence box and had it in the desk in the vault. That’s where I’ve been working on the drawings.”

  “That’s a relief. I thought we had lost it in the burglary,” said Diane. She walked over to the table, where Neva laid out the drawings.

  The modern body, Quarry Doe, had a seventies shag haircut. With some guys that cut had never quite gone out of style. To be so young-the ME estimated his age at twenty-five-his face had a rough edge to it. Quarry Doe was aging fast. He had thin lips, wide eyes, black hair and a crooked nose that was slightly pug.

  Beside the drawing was an autopsy photograph of Quarry Doe’s back. It was covered with tattoos-tigers, snakes, knives, fangs, guns, roses, crosses, swastikas and more-filling every square inch. Some were well-done; others were crude.

  “These are prison tattoos,” said Diane. “That will make it easy for the sheriff to identify him. Did you give Sheriff Canfield a copy of your drawing of his face?” Neva nodded. “Prison tattoos are forbidden, so having them is a sign of rebellion; the more you have, the more time you had to spend getting them, and the greater the risk of getting caught. It’s a kind of prestige to have a lot of them. Probably says something about our vic.”

  Diane went to the next set of drawings. Neva had placed the last two portraits together-Caver Doe and the girl in his photograph-possibly his sweetheart? Caver Doe looked young. His bones told her that he was, but his portrait really showed his youthful, graceful face-quite a contrast to the face of Quarry Doe. The face of the woman from the photograph was equally pretty. Short wavy hair, bright eyes, full lips with corners turned into a hint of a smile. Her dress had a crocheted collar. There was something about her that looked vaguely familiar.

  “These are good,” said Diane. “Poignant to put a face on our caver.”

  Diane was pleased with the way Neva was able to draw faces from skulls. Diane had taught her what a fleshed-out face would look like given specific underlying bone structures. She’d shown her how to calculate skin depths on the face, how to use the size of the nasal opening to find out the length of the nose, how to define the eyes. Neva picked up forensic art quickly. Diane also showed Neva how to use the sophisticated scanning software to have the computer draw the face. The computer drawing wasn’t as life-like as Neva’s drawings, but combining Neva’s artistic ability and the computer’s scanning ability made the work a lot quicker.

  “Yes, it is sad. His girlfriend too-I’m guessing it’s his girlfriend. I wonder what happened to her. She must not have known what became of him.”

  “Probably not.”

  “Unless she conspired to leave him in the cave,” said Neva.

  Diane laughed. “You’ve been in crime too long. You’re getting a cynical, suspicious mind.”

  “It does come with the territory, doesn’t it?”

  “When I finish Caver Doe, we’ll do a newspaper article and run it with the drawings. Maybe there is someone around who will recognize them or remember them.”

  Diane looked over at Plymouth Doe. “There’s another lost soul. When I’m finished with these measurements, you can take this skull to the vault and let the laser scan her features and start building a face. When you finish, put her skull in that tank sitting on the counter.” Diane looked at all the drawings again before walking back to Plymoth Doe’s bones. “Really nice work,” she told Neva. She sprayed them down again with water.

  “It’s really interesting to listen to Korey tell how he’s going to preserve the stuff from the car,” said Neva. “Do you know he froze all the magazines in a little battery-powered freezer he had in the van at the site?”

  Diane nodded. “That immediately stopped any destructive chemical or biological processes going on. In his lab he’s using a process called vacuum freeze-drying. He’ll put the frozen magazines in a chamber and pump the air out and form a vacuum-that will dry them at freezing temperatures. It’s a method that changes the ice directly into gas so it never goes through a liquid state. The magazines will be dry documents when it’s finished.”

  “That’s amazing.”

  “Sometime when we have some downtime-if we ever do-you might enjoy spending some time in the conservation lab. They do interesting work.” Diane measured and recorded all the craniometric points on Plymouth Doe’s skull as she and Neva talked. The laser would do the same, but Diane still liked to take the measurements herself-as with caving, she liked to get to know the bones.

  “You know,” said Neva, “I like the older crimes better than the new ones.”

  “Less blood and putrid flesh,” said Diane.

  “Yeah. And the tragedy is farther away.”

  “I know what you mean,” Diane agreed.

  Neva gestured toward the skeleton. “How is Korey handling her clothes?”

  “There are several methods for working with waterlogged fabric, but I think he’s going to use a process that impregnates the material with silicone oil. Jin’ll have to look for trace and blood before any processing is done. I think he and Korey have come up with an experiment to see how much these methods affect the ability to do blood analysis. I know Korey wants to go to the fabric store to get
different kinds of textiles for the experiment. He and Jin are writing a paper together.”

  Diane finished measuring the skull and began her examination of the other bones. She started by feeling along the ribs with her fingers, searching for nicks.

  “I can see how that kind of information helps us,” said Neva. “But what are Korey and the museum going to get out of the experiments?”

  Diane looked up from the skull. “For one thing, archaeologists also look for blood residue. Even after thousands of years, they can still find protein markers from different kinds of animals on arrowheads. Same thing with ancient textiles they run across. It would be good for them to know how preservation techniques affect blood or other kinds of stains that might be on artifacts.”

  “How do you know all this stuff?”

  Diane looked up from the rib she was examining and paused a long moment, grinning. “I’ve got this really big museum connected to the crime lab and it knows all kinds of stuff.”

  Neva hit her forehead with the heel of her hand.

  “Speaking of the museum, how’s Mike doing?” asked Diane.

  “Antsy and a little obnoxious about having to rest, if you can imagine Mike being obnoxious.”

  Diane couldn’t. “He’s only been out of the hospital, what-two, three days?”

  “That’s what I keep telling him. He wanted to come in to the museum today. I think I talked him out of it. But he’s really excited about his new job.”

  “So is Shelly, the collection manager for Geology. She’s so glad Dr. Lymon is gone that I’m expecting her to be doing cartwheels down the halls. She and Lymon have gotten into it a few times.”