Dead Secret (19 page)

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.

She also had three-D facial-reconstruction equipment—a laser scanner that mapped skulls, and a dedicated computer with software for building a face from the data. When she discovered that Neva was an artist, she had taught her how to use the equipment, and they had been able to get identification of several victims from Neva’s artistic reconstructions. Neva had also given a face to the mummy that the museum inherited—all with the help of the equipment. It was a pretty high-tech room.

The vault also had a plain, ordinary office computer. As she entered the room she saw Caver Doe on a table in the corner, waiting for his examination to be finished. She looked at her watch. Not today, maybe tomorrow.

Diane booted up the computer, put in the memory stick and looked at the pictures she had taken of the object from Jane Doe’s eye socket. She sat back in the chair and stared at the image—a tube attached to something round, with a number, and found in the eye socket. Something medical? What medical thing would be in the eye?

She logged on to the Internet and ran a Google search on medical devices and eyes. As she browsed through the hits, several words and phrases kept appearing dealing with glaucoma, eye pressure and drainage devices. She searched on those terms, and the first hit contained a diagram of a device that looked remarkably like what she had found—a tube shunt. She searched again using the terms
eye shunts
and
glaucoma
and came up with over eight hundred hits. She clicked the Images button in Google, and pictures of eye shunts scrolled across the screen. She didn’t even have to enlarge the pictures to see that she was right. What she was looking at were many variations on the device she had found—an eye shunt, a treatment for glaucoma. If the number on the shunt was a serial number, could it be traced? Diane smiled to herself with satisfaction. She loved unexpected discoveries.

Diane turned off the computer. As she locked the vault behind her, the thought of the thieves crossed her mind, and she shivered with a combination of fear and relief that they hadn’t broken into the vault containing all that expensive equipment—and data.

She secured the shunt in an evidence bag and took it to the lab, along with the gold ring and pieces of clothing. David was there looking for fingerprints on the photograph.

“I found something interesting,” she said as she put the memory stick in the lab computer and called up the pictures.

“What is that?” said David. “Looks sort of like a robotic sperm, or perhaps an android tadpole.”

“It’s an eye shunt. It’s used in glaucoma patients to drain the eye fluid and relieve pressure.”

“Where did you find it?”

“In Jane Doe’s eye socket. The best part is, this little deal has a serial number.” Diane looked at him and grinned broadly.

“Well, damn, I wonder if we can track her from the number?”

“We can try.”

“I’ll get on it when I finish here. I took a swab of the photograph before I dusted it for prints. Besides dirt, there was some other stuff on it.”

“Work’s piling up, isn’t it?”

“Have you thought about hiring an extra person?” said David.

“I’ve thought about it. What I haven’t thought about is how to approach Chief Garnett. Let’s get through this. We’ll do a time audit on ourselves and I’ll make a proposal to him. When he finds out we all have to work overtime just to get the normal work done, perhaps he’ll let me hire additional criminalists.”

“It would be good. You’re only supposed to be part-time. If I’m not mistaken, you work full-time in both your jobs. Not much time for a life away from the office.”

“Frank has to work long hours too, so we’re well suited in that respect.”

“Why don’t you two get married?”

“Why don’t you mind your own business?” she said without rancor. “Things are good the way they are.” Diane wondered why everyone wanted her to marry. Things were just fine.

David opened his mouth and shut it again. “You and Frank seem like a good match to me,” he said finally. “You are always happy together. At least move away from those neighbors.” He looked at the photograph. “No prints, just smears.”

“I
have
been thinking about a house,” said Diane.

“It’s good to have goals outside of work,” said David. “Dead bodies can start weighing on your psyche . . . as you know.”

“How about you? What would you like to do?”

“I’ve been considering teaching some photography courses at the tech school.”

“We have workshops at the museum. Why don’t you work up a plan and submit it to me—like bird photography?” suggested Diane. “You can make an exhibit of your bird photographs.”

David looked up from his work, surprised. “That’s a good idea. I’d like that. I would. There are a lot of nice places on the nature trail to get pictures. Thanks. I’ll do that.” He nodded his head up and down. “Yeah. Good idea.”

“Unless you have any more suggestions about my private life, I need to finish Mrs. Doe.”

“Mrs.?”

“A guess. There’s a wedding band among the detritus. No engraving.” Diane put the evidence in one of the drawers and labeled it JANE DOE.

Diane went back to the lab and worked on Jane Doe.
A sad-sounding name
, she thought.
Jane Doe lying dead in the woods, and no one knowing where you are or who you are.

She examined the pelvis and discovered that Jane had probably given birth. She had arthritis in the knees, hands, shoulders and back. Her pelvis was thin, and so were several of her vertebrae. Her left radius was broken, and there was no sign of healing. Deputy Singer hadn’t done it with his shovel. It had happened around the time she died. The deputy had broken two of her ribs, however.

Jane Doe was Caucasoid, in her eighties, and was about five feet, two inches tall and stooped when she walked. She was left-handed. She was a small, elderly woman, and someone broke her arm, strangled her, cut her with a knife from head to toe and dumped her body in the woods for Deputy Singer to come along and violate with his shovel.

Diane hoped it wasn’t a serial killer. She didn’t want to think about more anonymous people lying alone in the woods waiting to be found. She took Jane Doe’s bones in the other room, where she had a colony of dermestid beetles. Nothing could clean bones like they could. Their mouth parts were enormously strong for their small size, and they loved dried flesh. The dermestarium was kept separate from the room where the bodies were examined to reduce the chance the colony would be contaminated by mites that lived on beetles from the wild. A mite infestation could wipe them out. The museum’s colony came from a supply house and were free of pests.

In just a few days Jane Doe’s bones would be rendered almost white, clean and unaltered—the beetles didn’t damage even the smallest bones. Then Diane would check again for stray marks she might have missed from things like knives or bullets.

Diane changed out of her lab clothes. Her museum clothes felt good, and it was a relief to get away from the smell. After she was dressed she walked down to the lab, where she found David hard at work on the quarry crime scene.

“How is it going?”

“Sure but slow. Right now I’m collecting all the trace from the evidence. When I’m finished I’ll start analyzing. How about you? You must be finished if you changed clothes.”

“I put Mrs. Doe with the dermestids.”

David laughed. “Every time I see a beetle now I’m going to think of Deputy Singer.”

“That must have been frightening for him.”

“I’m sure it was. Sheriff Burns told me Singer loves those horror movies about insects and spiders out of control. Talks about them all the time. Says his favorite is one called
They Crawl
. Can you believe it? There’s got to be thousands of those B-grade movies, and apparently he’s seen every one. Then suddenly he’s in one. God, I almost feel sorry for him.”

“Did anyone else get hurt?”

“No, and he wasn’t hurt badly. He ran into a fire hydrant. They’re keeping him overnight for observation. He’ll be going home tomorrow.”

“From the insects you found on her, can you give me a time line for Jane Doe?” asked Diane.

“I need to know more about the place where she was found. From the look of the forest litter it was damp. I’ll talk to Jin when he returns. I may have to go out there myself.”

“Keep me informed. I’m going to grab something to eat.” Diane left David working in the lab and took the elevator down to the first floor. She intended to go to the restaurant, but she decided to go to her office and check in with Andie first.

“Dr. Fallon. Just in time. You’ve got a phone call. He’s called a couple of times. I didn’t want to disturb you in the lab. He won’t say who he is.”

Probably someone wanting access to their Egyptian mummy. There was a steady stream of scientists who wanted tissue samples, X-rays, body parts or MRIs for their research ever since the museum had inherited him, and they would usually speak only with Diane herself.

Diane sighed. “I’ll take it in my office. Andie, could I get you to run down to the restaurant and get me a sandwich?”

“Sure. What kind?”

“Oh, how about a BLT and a glass of iced tea.”

“You got it.”

Andie went off to the restaurant. Diane sat down at her desk and picked up the phone.

“Diane Fallon.”

“Diane, what the hell are you trying to do to me? Just what the hell are you playing at?”

Diane didn’t say anything. For a second she didn’t recognize his voice. “Alan, is that you?”
Great
, she thought.
I’d rather speak to the mummy researchers.