DF02 - Dead Guilty

by Beverly Connor

  ‘‘I hope it hasn’t put her off caves,’’ said Diane.

  ‘‘We’ll get her back out there as soon as our wounds heal.’’

  Diane was silent for a moment watching Mike. ‘‘I’m glad you followed my instructions and stayed alive.’’

  ‘‘You were pretty firm about that,’’ he said.

  Diane left them and walked down the hall to Neva’s room. She was dozing. Jin and David were sitting in chairs by her bed.

  ‘‘How’s Mike and that fellow?’’ asked David.

  ‘‘Doing well. Mike’ll be back to work in about a month,’’ said Diane. She gestured toward the bed.

  ‘‘Good,’’ said Jin. ‘‘Neva’s doing just fine.’’

  Neva’s rescue had been complicated. The rescue team rigged a rope system for themselves so they would have the support needed to work in safety. Get ting a harness around her chest was a big step. It gave her arms a rest. One of the rescuers had to hang over the edge with Neva and chisel out the rock from around her to free her so she could be pulled to safety.

  Neva opened her eyes. ‘‘Hi,’’ she said. ‘‘How are Mike and Dick?’’

  ‘‘They’re doing fine. How about you?’’

  ‘‘Glad to be out of that crack.’’

  ‘‘Think you’ll want to try caving again?’’

  ‘‘I have to. I bought all that equipment—hard hat, backpack. I had five backup flashlights in my back pack.’’ Neva sobered a moment. ‘‘Jin was telling me they didn’t find LaSalle, just a trail of blood leading off to a wild part of the cave.’’

  ‘‘The police are going back in to look for him. Gar nett said a team of federal marshals who are also cav ers are coming down to join the search.’’

  ‘‘Jeez, that’s scary. What do you suppose happened to him?’’

  ‘‘I can’t imagine he got far, the way he was wounded. He couldn’t have stood on his feet. I think he probably crawled somewhere and got into trouble.’’

  ‘‘I can’t say I have much sympathy,’’ said Neva.

  ‘‘No, I can’t say I do either,’’ said Diane.

  Epilogue

  The museum was closing for the day. Diane stood in the new Egyptian exhibit, taking another look before its opening the next day. It was in a small room on the second floor that suited the few artifacts on display and made it seem like a larger exhibit than it was. Also more personal.

  The walls were painted in colorful but muted tones like the worn walls of an Egyptian tomb. The real star of the exhibit was Neva’s sculpture, sitting crosslegged in the middle of the room. The entire face and body were a 3-D reconstruction made using the measurements gained from the CT scan.

  Neva sculpted him from clay first. The museum then had experts from Madame Tussaud’s make a wax fig ure. He looked so real Diane expected him to unfold his legs, take the papyrus lying in his lap and walk off his pedestal. They had concluded he was a scribe. Jonas figured him to be a royal scribe because of the position of the hands and some of the amulets that belonged to him.

  Diane walked around the wax figure, viewing it from several angles. He had tan skin and a dark wig styled similar to figurines and wall paintings from the times. He wore a simple white linen loincloth, and a reed pen and pallette hung from his neck. An auto mated video beside the figure described his life and the process the museum used to research the mummy.

  The analysis of his tissue samples revealed that he had several bacterial infections common in ancient Egypt. Release of this information garnered Diane an other mountain of mail wanting access to the mummy. The analysis on his kidney tumor showed it to be be nign. When the report came in, Jonas and Andie were relieved, somehow glad that the scribe hadn’t died of cancer.

  The mummy himself was inside the anthromorphic coffin that they still were unsure was really his. The closed coffin was inside a glass case built just for the mummy. Diane decided to exhibit the actual mummy only a few times a year. But there were photographs of him on the walls. A video documented his rewrap ping by Korey and his assistants, beginning with his own wrappings and supplementing those with a sub stantial amount of modern linen.

  The amulets were displayed under glass, each high lighted on its own pedestal. They decided not to dis play the Victorian pickle jar. The rest of the exhibit included models based on life in twelfth-dynasty Egypt. In one end of the exhibit, there was an entire miniature Egyptian town, including a scribe’s house.

  Diane was pleased with the exhibit. From a small number of artifacts, Jonas, Kendel and the exhibit de signers had done a great job. The room dimmed as the daytime lighting went off automatically and the nighttime lighting came on. In the shadows of the dim light, the wax figure looked as if he might indeed come to life. She turned and left the room.

  Diane walked out of the museum to her new SUV and, like she now did when she left the museum, or anywhere, she scanned the area looking for anything out of the ordinary or dangerous.

  Beverly Connor is the author of the Diane Fallon Forensic Investigation series and the Lindsay Chamberlain Mystery series. Before she began her writing career, Beverly worked as an archaeologist in the Southeastern United States specializing in bone identi fication and analysis of stone tool debitage. She weaves her professional experiences from archaeology and her knowledge of the South into interlinked sto ries of the past and present. One Grave Too Many was the first book in the Diane Fallon series. Five of her titles have been translated into Dutch and are available in countries of the European Union.