Dead Secret dffi-3

by Beverly Connor

  “You’re worried? Really?”

  “Yes, and so is Neva.”

  “If it were up to her, she’d tie me to the bed-not that that doesn’t hold a certain appeal-but really, if I’m going to get stronger, I have to be up and about.”

  “Driving? Coming to work? Look, Mike, this is really none of my business, but as a friend, I do worry that you are pushing it too soon.”

  The elevator doors opened, and they stepped out into the lobby in front of the staff lounge and headed toward the osteology lab.

  “I know my limits.”

  “No, you don’t, Mike. You don’t know your limits until you exceed them. And that’s what I’m concerned about.”

  “It’s just that I have so many ideas. Shelly and I have talked about a lot of things, but Dr. Lymon never wanted to listen. There are so many ways we can really improve the geology exhibits.”

  “And I’m looking forward to hearing those ideas. I’m also looking forward to going caving again, and I’d like you to be well so you can go too. You can’t do any of those things if you reinjure yourself.”

  “Okay, I take your point,” Mike said. “I’m really sorry about Dr. Lymon. She’s not taking her husband’s leaving well, is she? Did she really think I was her husband? We don’t even look alike.”

  “I believe she was mixing up the two rejections. Anyway, have you been to the osteology lab?”

  Diane was anxious to get away from Dr. Lymon’s problems. She kept thinking that she should call the university, but she didn’t want to make Lymon’s problems any more public than they were.

  “No, I haven’t,” said Mike.

  “Neva is reconstructing a face from one of the skulls; you can watch her if you like. I also have a comfortable couch in my osteology office, and you can rest there if you need to.”

  “You are so good to me, Doc.”

  Diane unlocked the lab door. Plymouth Doe, covered with the wet cloth and sans head, was lying on the table.

  “Yes, I am.”

  She unlocked the bone vault. Neva was there. The skull was turning on the stage of the laser scanner, shafts of red lasers measuring the contours of the facial bones.

  “Mike,” Neva said. “You doing okay? Was that Dr. Lymon?” She came over to him. He hugged her and kissed the top of her head.

  “I’m fine. I’ll tell you about Lymon later. Show me what you’re doing. Looks high-tech and flashy.”

  Diane left them and went back into the outer lab to the bones of Plymouth Doe. She uncovered them and resumed her examination of the ribs. She found no nicks on them; nor did she find anything on the long bones. She did find that the feet showed evidence of bunions. Her toes had a marked deformity where the big toe drifted toward the smaller ones. Diane guessed that Plymouth Doe during her young years had spent a lot of time on her feet in tight shoes.

  Neva, followed by Mike, came out of the vault carrying the skull, put it in the alcohol tank and washed her hands. Mike held the picture generated by the software from the laser scan.

  “I haven’t drawn her yet, but I thought you’d like to see the face generated by the computer.” She took it to the table where the other drawings were still laid out and put it beside the drawing of Caver Doe’s snapshot.

  The computer image showed Plymouth Doe with a wide jaw and forehead, a straight nose and wide, almond-shaped eyes. Both Plymouth Doe and the woman in the unidentified snapshot were very pretty women, but they were not the same.

  “Okay, not Caver Doe’s girlfriend,” said Neva. “So what is the connection? Black-market button seller?”

  Diane shrugged. “Maybe the trace evidence will tell us something. Nice job, Neva.”

  “When I do the drawing of her it’ll look better. Let’s do a newspaper article soon. I’d like to find out who these people were and why they have the same rare button.”

  Diane smiled at her. “That’s the first thing we’ll ask the next of kin.”

  When Neva and Mike left her lab, Diane went back to the bones, examining them one more time under a magnifying glass, making sure she hadn’t missed something that might help identify Plymouth Doe or indicate what happened to her. She found nothing more. Diane put the Plymouth Doe bones in the alcohol bath and walked to the crime lab.

  David was on the phone and taking notes. Neva was at the light table working on her drawing. Jin came bouncing in, still elated over the buttons.

  “We have a name,” said David, waving a piece of paper. “That was the eye surgeon who implanted the shunt you found in Jane Doe. I traced him from the number on the shunt. Her real name is Flora Martin. I was about to call Sheriff Burns.”

  “Do we have all of her evidence processed?” said Diane.

  “Yes. I have a report ready to fax him.”

  “Excellent. When the dermestids are finished with her bones and I have a chance to take one more look at them, that case will be closed for us.” Diane felt a wave of relief go through her, and it surprised her.

  “We’re making some progress. Look, guys, you all have been working very hard and doing a good job. It’s almost quitting time-I realize we often don’t pay any attention to that, but why don’t we knock off for the evening? I’ll stay on call, and if anything comes up, I’ll phone you,” Diane said.

  “I’d kind of like that,” said Jin. “The thing about this job is that it’s hard to have a love life-of course, I could be like Neva and just bring mine to work with me.”

  Neva punched him gently in the arm with her fist. David looked lost-as if the prospect of going home early were confusing to him.

  “David,” said Diane. “Why don’t you go home and work on that proposal we talked about for teaching photography?”

  His face brightened. “I could do that.”

  “You could come over to Mike’s for dinner,” Neva said to David. “I’m sure we’re having some variation on tofu. Didn’t you say you like tofu?”

  “Good idea,” said Jin. “And tomorrow we can work on lesson two of how to have a life.”

  “You guys are really funny,” said David.

  “I was serious about dinner,” said Neva.

  “Get out of here,” said Diane. “I’ll call you if I need you.”

  Diane cleared out her team just as the night receptionist came on duty. He was new. Garnett had suspended the former one while the crime lab breakin was being investigated. So far the former receptionist hadn’t admitted to anything; nor had any money shown up in his accounts. Maybe he was innocent, but Diane had a gut feeling that the breakin was at least partly an inside job. She called Garnett from her osteology office to get an update. As she expected, he was still at work.

  “Just curious about the breakin here,” she said when he answered.

  “Not much to tell you. We’ve questioned the ladies-the Wiccan and the Druid. They indignantly deny having anything to do with it. Their coven members alibi them, but I imagine that’s what covens are for. I just don’t understand that stuff. In my day, covens were witches, but this woman denies being a witch. I tell you, I don’t know what to make of them.”

  “And my receptionist?”

  “Nothing there either. The little trace evidence you’ve found hasn’t been helpful either. We just don’t have a thing. I agree that the women don’t seem like the type who could pull off something like this, but I can’t think of a reason why anyone else would want the bones that were stolen. Whoever it was is liable to be disappointed-you say they were actually deer bones?”

  “That’s what the owner says was in the box. We never got a look at them.”

  “Well, deer bones or human bones, it doesn’t matter. When we catch them they’re going to do jail time for breaking into a crime lab. How’s your arm doing?”

  Diane stretched it out in front of her and moved it around. “It’s gradually getting well.”

  “And that student? I hear he’s home from the hospital.”

  “Yes. Mike’s doing fine too. Neva’s staying with him while
she gets her home in order.”

  “Neva?”

  “Mike’s her boyfriend.”

  “Oh, I didn’t know that, or did I? I tell you, I feel overwhelmed here some days.”

  Diane knew how he felt. She stared at the watercolor of the wolf and wished she were out somewhere in the wild. “Do you have anything on Neva’s breakin?” she asked.

  “Not a thing. I guess that’s why I’m feeling overwhelmed. I’m not able to clear any of these cases that involve the department. Makes us look pretty incompetent.”

  “I know how you feel.”

  “That mold of the perp’s fingers Neva found was a break. At least if we find a suspect, we can identify him. The mold didn’t match any of the young hoodlums in her neighborhood.”

  Diane was disappointed. She was hoping for at least a break in Neva’s case. The attack on Neva’s home worried her. “Thanks for the update,” she said, and sighed as she cradled the phone.

  Diane locked up, said good-bye to the evening receptionist and started to close the door when Korey came down the hall rolling a trolley loaded with several boxes.

  “Got your new microscopes,” he said.

  Diane opened the door and helped him put them on a counter. “We’ll set them up tomorrow. What else you have there?”

  Another box twice as large as the microscopes sat on the trolley.

  “A messenger brought it a few minutes ago. The label says it’s from Great Britain.”

  “Ah, the witch.”

  “Another one?”

  “The real one. The first one was a decoy.”

  Korey shook his head. “You know, sometimes it’s hard to keep up around here.” He carried the witch to the osteology lab.

  “It’s awfully big,” said Diane.

  “The first one, if I remember correctly, had an outer and an inner box.”

  Korey cut open the top with his knife. Inside they found a smaller box surrounded by bubble wrap and the words Moonhater Cave Bones written on the top. Diane took it out of the bubble wrap and locked it inside the vault.

  “Thanks, Korey. I understand you had dinner with Neva and Mike last evening.”

  “Yes. Had a good time. Mike seems to be getting along pretty good. I have to tell you, I was worried. That was scary at the funeral.” He shook his head, then smiled. “I’m glad you hired him. That was a good choice. He works hard around here.”

  Diane locked up the lab again and walked down the hall with Korey.

  “You going home or back to the lab?”

  “Home. I was in Andie’s office when the stuff came and I offered to bring them up.”

  Diane arched an eyebrow and smiled. Korey laughed out loud.

  “I can’t pull anything off around you, can I, Dr. F.?”

  They reached the elevators. “Spill it, Korey. What is it you want?”

  “I’d like to go the International Conference of Museum Conservators.”

  “Where is it going to be?”

  “Glasgow this year.”

  Diane thought for a moment. “Let me see what we have in the budget for conferences. But assuming we have the money, sure, pack your bags.”

  “Thanks, Dr. F.” He punched the elevator button. It opened and Frank got off.

  “Diane. Just coming to see you. Hello, Korey.”

  “Hey, Frank. How’s it going?”

  They shook hands and all of them rode down in the elevator together. Korey said good-bye, and Diane walked with Frank to her office.

  “I was about to go look at some paperwork and then call it a night.”

  “Good timing. How about you take your paperwork home and let me take you to dinner? We can eat here in the restaurant if you like.”

  “Actually, I can leave the paperwork. I let the crime staff go home early-well, early for us, anyway. I’ll get on it tomorrow. You look happy.”

  “I’m celebrating,” Frank said.

  “Good.” Lately everything had been about her-all her problems. It would be nice to spend an evening talking about Frank for a change. “You catch that guy you were looking for?”

  “Yes, I did, and I’m celebrating.”

  Over a dinner of steak and baked potato in the museum restaurant, Frank told her about the embezzler that everyone, including the FBI, had been looking for.

  “He hit some Atlanta companies; that’s why my unit was involved. I noticed that in one of his hotel rooms our guys discovered a small glassine envelope. I thought that might mean he was a stamp collector, but that was a long shot. There are lots of uses for glassine envelopes. I gave the info to the FBI. They checked out stamp conventions that corresponded to places he’d visited and didn’t find a correlation, so they dropped it.”

  His eyes twinkled in the candlelight as he spoke. Diane absolutely loved his eyes. “But you didn’t.” She took a bite of her steak. It occurred to her that she hadn’t eaten all day, except for an energy bar for breakfast.

  “I’d been studying the guy. He collected Matchbox cars, rocks, coins and comic books as a kid-he was a collector. Stamps are nice for someone who moves around a lot. No, I didn’t let it go. The FBI had hacked into some of the places he shopped online and saw that he used the password ‘ironage’ on one site, ‘lavaroad’ and ‘tigerail’ on a few others.”

  “Tiger ale? What is that, some kind of drink?”

  Frank shook his head. “The FBI didn’t think anything about his passwords, but I got to playing around with them. They’re anagrams for Noriega, Alvarado and Galtieri.”

  Diane stopped eating and stared at him. “How did you possibly come up with that?”

  “I’m a detective-one who deals with lots of numbers and words. What can I say?”

  “So what did you make of these anagrams?”

  “The FBI thought it was interesting, but still didn’t make anything of it. I was betting that was his stamp interest-dictators of small countries, something like that. I looked again at the places he’d been and got the catalogs of the ones that had stamp conventions. They all had stamps of the kind I thought he might collect if my hunch was right. As a check, I looked at some of the stamp convention catalogs at places he didn’t go-sure enough, none of them had the kind of stamps I thought would interest him.”

  “Pretty slick,” said Diane. “How did you find him?”

  “The FBI at this point had come to my way of thinking, and they tried to set a few traps, but they couldn’t lure him in. Then the thing about Pitcairn Island came up in the news-the mayor and his buddies convicted for multiple rapes. The mayor served as a de facto dictator on the island for years. It turns out, too, that the basis of Pitcairn’s economy is stamps. It was a long shot, but I thought maybe it might appeal to him. So I picked out a set of stamps that he would find interesting-and rare-and set my own trap.

  I put them up for sale-called them a rare collection from the realm of Pitcairn’s petty dictator-he bit and we got him.”

  Diane laughed and clapped her hands. “Frank, I’m impressed. I really am.”

  “Sometimes it comes down to paying attention to words.”

  “You certainly went a long way with a few jumbled words.”

  Diane took a bite of her potato and kept her fork in her mouth so long that Frank put his own fork down and looked at her.

  “I know that look,” he said. “You thought of something.”

  “I did. It was the word. You’re right: Sometimes it comes down to words.”

  Chapter 35

  Frank’s eyes sparkled in amusement as he watched Diane.

  “Okay, what’s the word?”

  “Cave. You know about the break-in here?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve been assuming that the real target of the break-in was the Moonhater Cave witch bones-but it wasn’t.”

  “It wasn’t?”

  “No, I don’t believe it was. It was a sleight-of-hand kind of thing-you watch one thing while something else is really going on. John Rose sent a decoy box of bones
because he expected that an attempt would be made to steal the Moonhater witch bones somewhere in transit or after they arrived here.”

  She explained to Frank about the controversy over the Moonhater Cave witch bones and about the Wiccans and Druids.

  “He expected the bones to be stolen by the Druids or by someone they hired to do it. The bones were stolen, and that’s what fooled me. It was a natural conclusion that his expectation had come true. The thieves also took a couple of microscopes, but I thought that was a distraction meant to hide their real intent. They stole a box of Caver Doe evidence too, and I thought maybe that was also for show.”

  Diane punctuated her sentences with her fork. “The real Moonhater witch bones arrived today. They’re in a box packed and labeled identically to the box of bones that was stolen. It was a plain box cushioned with bubble wrap inside the shipping box. On the box containing the bones, John Rose wrote the words ‘Moonhater Cave Bones’-didn’t say ‘Moonhater Witch Bones,’ which is the way we’ve been thinking about them. It said ‘Moonhater Cave Bones.’ You see?”

  Frank squinted at her. “Spell it out.”

  “The thieves came looking for the bones we found in a cave. They saw a box lying in plain sight that said ‘cave bones’ and probably thought, ‘How many could there be?’ They were after Caver Doe. They thought they got him. And that’s why they also took the box of evidence labeled Caver Doe.”

  “It makes sense,” said Frank. “But why? Caver Doe’s bones are, what. . about fifty, sixty years old?”

  “I don’t know yet.” She reached for her cell. “I need to call David.” She dialed his number and he answered on the first ring.

  “Hey, Diane, what’s up?” David sounded hopeful.

  “Something just occurred to me.” She told him about her theory.

  David was silent a moment. “That makes more sense to me than that the Druids did it.”

  “You know what that means, don’t you? It means the Caver Doe death, the crime lab break-in and the quarry murders are linked. If Caver Doe is linked to the quarry by the buttons, and the break-in was about Caver Doe, then the break-in and the quarry murders are linked.”

  “Interesting,” said David. “Of course, it depends on your scenario being right.”