Dead Secret (30 page)

“You can plug it in here,” he said. He and David set up the laptop on the dining table and connected via wireless network to the museum server. Diane was glad Frank was here to lend his expertise. She resolved to learn more about her own computer—not only the software.

David sent an instant message to Jin to start the download. It took several minutes. When it finished, he sat down at the computer and logged on to his system in the lab. He started the search on the DNA sample taken from Diane’s left ear, hair and the left side of her jacket—Deviated Septum. Diane was surprised when he got a hit. She realized that she hadn’t expected either of them to be in the system—she didn’t know why, just that she wasn’t feeling particularly lucky.

“Neil Valentine. The name doesn’t ring a bell, but I’m not surprised,” she said. Diane looked at his face. She didn’t recognize it. “Let’s try the other one.” She was feeling luckier now. But there wasn’t a match.

“I have other databases I can look in,” said David, “but I’d like to reserve those as a last resort, if you know what I mean.”

Diane did. They were databases that they didn’t legally have access to, and therefore any information they got from them couldn’t be used in court.

“Let’s look up Valentine’s record again,” said Frank.

“Look for known associates.” He took a piece of paper from his pocket. “This is a list of hackers—some were juveniles when they were caught, so their records would be sealed, but we can find the arresting officer and talk to him.”

They looked at the Neil Valentine record again. He’d served eighteen months in prison for assault. David pulled up a list of five known associates on the screen. None matched Frank’s list.

“Go to each of Valentine’s associates and pull up their associates,” said Frank.

They got nothing on the first one, but the second had a name that was on Frank’s hacker list.

“Randy MacRae,” said Frank. “He was busted for hacking into some corporate systems when he was a teenager. I’ll contact the arresting officer and get the info for you.”

“Okay, we’re getting somewhere,” said Diane, rubbing her hands together.

She looked at Frank and saw how fresh he looked. She ran her hands through her hair. “I don’t suppose I can get a shower?” she asked.

“If it’s very—and I mean
very
—quick. There’s not much water.”

“I can do quick. I had to take quick showers in the jungle all the time.”

“Oh,” said Frank. “I thought those jungle waterfalls ran day and night.”

“Cute,” she said.

Diane got in the shower, let the water run over her for a second, then shut it off. She lathered up her body and hair and rinsed almost as quickly. She dried off and put on fresh clothes that she’d gotten from her car. Neva was just waking when Diane finished touching up her face.

“Hey. Are they finished?” Neva sat up and yawned.

“I’m about to find out. I’m going over to see what they turned up,” said Diane.

“Wait. Do you have some scissors?” asked Neva, grinning at her.

“In my purse. They’re small; will that do?”

“Yes. Jin’s not real good at hairstyling. Let me kind of trim you up. Good thing you wear your hair short anyway.”

Neva took the scissors and evened up the sides of Diane’s hair. She stepped back to take a look, then made a few more snips. “There. That’s better.”

Diane looked in the mirror. “Yes, that does look better. Thanks, Neva. I must have looked a fright all day yesterday.”

Neva didn’t say anything, and Diane laughed. Neva started giggling. Her staff probably thought she was nuts for sure.

“Neva, I’d like to get these cases finished up. Let’s go ahead and send your drawings of Caver Doe and Plymouth Doe to the newspaper and the TV stations. Ask Canfield and Burns first; we can’t cut them out. On second thought. I’ve already told them that’s what I might do, and they okayed it. Let’s not give them a chance to say no.”

“Why would they?”

“I don’t think they would, but I’m just feeling a little paranoid. Go down and take care of it this morning, will you?”

David cleared his throat. “If you don’t mind a little helpful advice,” he said.

Diane stared at him with a question on her face. “What?”

“There is no need in this modern day and age to actually
go down
to the newspaper,” he said, pointing to his computer.

Diane and Neva looked at each other. Both of them started to laugh again. Diane was starting to feel giddy. That happened when she didn’t get much sleep.

David and Frank looked at each other and shrugged.

“We must all be very, very tired,” said Neva.

“Of course. Neva, scan your drawings of Caver Doe and Plymouth Doe as soon as we can get back into the lab.”

“I’ve already scanned them. They’re on my computer in the crime lab.”

“I can get them through the network connection from here,” said David. “Why don’t I write a press release, then e-mail it and Neva’s drawings to the Rosewood paper, the
AJC
, and all the Atlanta TV stations? It’ll probably get picked up by the AP and be on every TV screen in the state by noon, and every newspaper in the country by tomorrow. You’ll be famous, Neva.”

“And,” said Diane, “if there is anyone alive who knows these victims from so many years ago, there is a strong chance they’ll see the drawings and make the connection. Good thinking, David.”

“Oh, nothing special,” he said. “Am I getting paid extra now for being the crime lab publicist?”

Diane started to respond when her cell phone rang. It was Garnett telling her they were finished.

Diane had a chill in her gut as she walked to the Pleistocene room to meet Garnett and his team. He was waiting by the mammoth, still looking well dressed in his tailored suit, even after being up all night. She’d have to ask him how he did it. She ran a hand through her own hair, glad Neva had trimmed it for her.

Sergeant Remington and his shepherd stood beside Garnett. Remington was playing with his dog. Some of the search teams were there; others were just coming through the doors. Diane walked over to the mammoth. At least they all looked happy.

“Good news,” said Remington. “We didn’t find a thing. And we gave the place a thorough search.”

Diane closed her eyes and let out a breath. “That felt good. I’d been holding my breath all night. Thank you. Sergeant, please give me the names of your men. I’m going to give each of them and their families passes to the museum.”

“That’d be just real nice. I’d kind of like to see it when I have time to stop and look.”

“I appreciate all of your hard work.”

“Glad we didn’t find anything.”

As the bomb sniffers were packing up to leave, Diane turned to Garnett. She started to tell him about the DNA results when her cell phone rang. It was David.

“I checked Randy MacRae. It’s his DNA. You can’t use this ID, if you know what I mean. You’ll have to get a known sample from him to compare to the sample Jin got from your clothes to make it official.”

“I gotcha. Thanks.”

Diane handed Garnett a card with Neil Valentine’s and Randy MacRae’s names on it.

“These are the two who kidnapped me. The DNA matched Valentine, although we need to get a legal sample of MacRae’s to test against, since he wasn’t in CODIS. MacRae’s a hacker and is an associate of an associate of Valentine. I will also recognize their voices when I hear them.”

Garnett looked surprised as he took the card and looked at the names. He tapped the index card on his hand.

“Good work. I’ll have them picked up. You want to be in on the interrogation?”

“You couldn’t drag me away. Will you let me have a gun?”

Chapter 42

Garnett leaned against the wall. He was doing the questioning. Diane sat across the interrogation table from Randy MacRae. He probably had been a pimply faced runt of a teen, because he was now an acne-scarred adult. He was buffed up, but he still had the look of a runt about him. He wasn’t wearing the museum T-shirt, and she wasn’t blindfolded, but she recognized his arrogant voice. He sat smirking at her with his arms folded—still cocky.

“You got nothin’ on me. I’m not saying anything without my lawyer. That means this is over.”

“You don’t have to say anything,” said Diane. “We have you and Valentine. How else could we have found you? And when I say we have you, let me assure you I mean we have you. We have your code of life.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“She means your DNA, you stupid little twit,” said Garnett. “We also know you did time as a juvenile.”

“Juvi records are sealed.”

“Not from me,” said Diane. “You were caught hacking into people’s computer files, changing information, trying to mess their lives up. You didn’t learn, did you?”

He was having to force his smirk now. “I’m not talking without my lawyer.”

“Fine by me,” Garnett said. “You want to wait for your lawyer, that’s your legal right. Maybe you think your lawyer can cut you some kind of deal. We don’t need a deal. We’ve got everything we need to put you away for the rest of your natural life. Your lawyer can’t even get you out on bail. Not after you made terroristic threats.”

“You can’t prove nothin’.”

Garnett banged his hand on the desk. Randy jumped.

“You can’t talk without your lawyer. You have to shut up now.”

“I don’t think he’ll talk even with his lawyer,” said Diane. “I think he and Valentine have what they think is job security. All they have to do is a little jail time and they get a lot of money. It’s like a job, except instead of going to work every day, they stay in jail every day. They were probably told they’d serve only a couple of years if they got caught. These aren’t the kind of guys who keep up with current events.”

“No,” said Garnett. “They don’t know that the kind of threats made against you, the museum and the crime lab will put them away for twenty-five to life. Before they get out, we’ll have them for the murders. We’ll turn them over to the Feds for kidnapping you, and they’ll get another twenty-five years under federal mandatory sentencing.”

“Besides,” said Diane, looking Randy in the eyes. “You really think the Taggart family is going to pay you, knowing you gave them up?”

Randy’s fake smirk vanished, his eyes widened and he looked from Diane to Garnett, clearly surprised, clearly scared. She’d made a hit, all of it. He was promised money if he kept his mouth shut, and it was the Taggart family.
Shit.
She had followed her instinct and she was right. But proving the connection was going to be a problem unless Randy MacRae or Neil Valentine folded.

“Well, I suppose I’ll be going now,” said Diane. “When his lawyer comes, I wonder who he’ll be working for, this skinny little twit or the Taggarts.”

Diane rose and left the room. Garnett followed on her heels.

“Okay.” Garnett was almost in a frenzy. “You want to tell me what that was about? The Taggarts? The ones who own Taggart Industries? The guy running for senator? The best-known do-gooder in the state?”

“The same,” said Diane.

“You have some kind of proof the Taggarts are involved? Because if you don’t, I’m not going to stick my neck out. Why didn’t you tell me ahead of time?”

“I don’t have proof. We aged a snapshot of a young woman we found with Caver Doe—it looks amazingly like Rosemary Taggart. I saw her at the funeral of Vanessa Van Ross’s grandmother. It all just came together for me.”

“That’s it?”

“I was playing a hunch.”

“That’s what we do,” said Garnett. “We play hunches. You find the evidence.”

“When the crime scene unit processed Valentine’s and MacRae’s apartments, they found navy wool caps that match the fibers from the lab break-in and from the quarry murders of Jake Stanley and Donnie Martin. They also found a box of surgeon’s gloves containing the same type of powder present at both of those scenes. It’s circumstantial, but put that with their DNA on my clothes and the same powder on the duct tape that bound me, and the evidence is more than coincidental.” Diane let out a breath. “I know—without a confession I have nothing against the Taggarts, but you saw his face.”

Garnett raked his hands through his hair. “Dammit. Yes, I saw his face.”

“I don’t know which family member. It’s a large family. And you don’t have to interrogate them until we have substantially more evidence to go on.”

“And I won’t.” He paused and gave her a long look. “Okay, let’s see what the other one has to say. Go ahead and play your game on him and we’ll see how he reacts.”

They didn’t get much more information from Neil Valentine. He started out just like MacRae, cocky, calling for a lawyer, and ended up with the same surprised look on his face. He’d done jail time before. Diane was betting he didn’t want to do any more without the payoff he had been promised. She had hoped that putting a wedge of doubt in might get one of them to talk. But the bottom line was, neither said anything.

The only plus was that they came away with a cup Randy MacRae had drunk from. Now she had a legitimate sample of his DNA the crime lab could compare with the sample they had from her abduction. She had also gotten a good look at their hands. Neither had the badly damaged finger that showed up in the clay from Neva’s break-in.

As Diane was leaving the Rosewood police station, she heard her name called out.

It was Police Officer Janice Warrick, with whom Diane had a bumpy history. Officer Warrick was dividing her attention between motioning to Diane and watching the TV monitor. Diane walked across to the TV area.

“Have you seen this?”

Janice Warrick was all smiles, without a trace of any unpleasantness between them. Diane looked at the TV screen where Janice was looking, along with eight or ten other police officers.

“Those are Neva’s drawings, aren’t they?” Janice said. “Look, Bud,” she said to a fellow officer, “Neva did those.”

All of Neva’s drawings were on the TV screen. The news anchor was basically reading the press release sent to them by David, urging anyone who recognized the people in the drawings to contact the Rosewood Police Department.

Diane read the lettering printed on the screen below the portraits: ROSEWOOD 1942 COLD CASES. DO YOU KNOW THESE PEOPLE?

Officer Warrick put her arms around Diane and hugged her. Diane wasn’t sure why. Perhaps celebrity hysteria was sweeping Rosewood.

Diane drove back to the museum feeling oddly depressed. She believed the museum was safe, the thugs who threatened to burn it down were in jail and she had solid evidence against them. What nagged her was that she was afraid the real orchestrator was beyond her reach—and would stay out of reach. Even with a mountain of evidence against them, the rich and powerful often weren’t convicted—and she had no evidence whatsoever. Even if Valentine and MacRae rolled over on their benefactors, she had no corroborating evidence. The snapshot from the cave didn’t mean anything. It was just an old picture Caver Doe had in his pocket, and the resemblance to Mrs. Taggart could be a coincidence.

She pulled into the parking lot of the museum. Few cars were there—mostly her crime lab people. She recognized Mike’s SUV. The RV was gone. She smiled to herself. That was a nice thing Frank had done.

As she entered the building a woman who looked to be in her forties and an older man somewhere between sixty and seventy were arguing with the security guard. The woman was dressed in an inexpensive dark blue pantsuit that fit snugly on her slightly overweight frame. The man wore jeans, a plaid short-sleeved shirt, and a cap that hadn’t been conditioned to put a curve in the bill. The woman was shaking a large manila envelope she held in her hand.

“We don’t want to see the museum; we want to see this Fallon woman. It’s about the people they’re asking about on TV,” the woman almost shouted at the security guard.

Diane’s spirits lifted. Already there was a bite.

“I’ll see them.”

They turned toward her.

“I’m Diane Fallon.”

“I’m Lydia Southwell. This is my father, Earl Southwell,” said the woman. “We think the woman they’re asking about may be my grandmother Jewel Southwell.”

“Come inside, please,” said Diane.

She led them inside to her office lounge and sat them down at the table. She offered coffee, tea or a soda. Each took a Coke. Diane took one as well from the small refrigerator.

“You recognize someone in these drawings?” Diane had copies of the originals lying on the table.

The woman touched the drawing of Plymouth Doe with her fingertips.

“That looks like my mother,” Earl said. “The TV said she worked at Ray’s Diner. My mother worked there a long time ago before she disappeared.”

The woman still held the large brown envelope in her lap. “We have these pictures.” She pulled the photographs out and they spilled over the table.

“Lydia,” said her father sharply, “you didn’t need to bring all our pictures.”

“I didn’t want to take the time to hunt through them.”

Lydia picked out a large portrait of her grandmother. One corner was singed.

“My daddy tried to burn the pictures,” said Earl Southwell, “but my granny—Mama’s mother—pulled them out of the fire.”

“Do you have any dental records or X-rays?”

“No. That was a long time ago,” said Lydia. “I don’t think they had that stuff then.”

Diane looked at the photograph. It was a woman smiling into the camera. She looked very much like Neva’s drawing of Plymouth Doe.

“Can you tell me about her?” said Diane. “What happened to her?”

“We thought she left us,” said Mr. Southwell. “I was just a little bit of a thing, only five years old. My daddy was working in Atlanta, coming home on weekends. Those days it took longer to get from here to there. Mama was a pretty woman and kind of forward, if you know what I mean.”

He paused and took a long drink of Coke. “My daddy was angry. I remember that more than anything. He wanted to burn everything that had anything to do with Mama.”

“Why did he think she left?”

“The story was, she ran off with Dale Wayne Russell,” he said. “That was a cussword at our house. The two of them just up and left. Mama left my daddy and me when I was just a young’un, and Dale left a sweetheart.” Mr. Southwell was quiet for a moment. “You think she’s been dead all these years?”

Tears welled up in Lydia Southwell’s eyes. “Grandpa was a bitter man because of it—so was Daddy.” She looked at her father almost accusingly. She turned back to Diane. “Can you tell us if it’s really her?”

Diane nodded.

“Right now? Can we know right now? Please, we need to know.”

“Come with me.” Diane helped Lydia gather up her photographs and she led them up to her osteology unit office.

As they walked through the museum, Diane got whiffs of an unpleasant odor. It wasn’t strong, like something that had lingered, a little like something rotting, or decaying tissue.
I hope it’s not that damn snake, crawled up and died in the wall,
Diane thought. Maybe it was something in a garbage bin. She’d have to ask janitorial services to check.

“Grandma was a hard worker,” said Lydia. “My great-granny said Grandma worked at the diner and took in laundry and sewing to give Daddy a better life. Great-granny never believed she’d run off and left him.”

“Sit right here. I’ll be back,” said Diane. She stopped at the door. “Sewing? Did you have a relative in the military—a quartermaster?”

They looked at her, puzzled. “Her daddy was a quartermaster in the army,” said Earl Southwell.

“Thank you,” said Diane, smiling. “Please wait here. This won’t take long.”

Diane almost skipped her way to the crime lab. David, Jin and Neva were there packing up the evidence to move it to the vault in the archives to keep it out of harm’s way.

“We may have someone who knows Plymouth Doe.”

“Already?” said David.

Diane showed them the photograph of Jewel Southwell.

“Wow, Neva, you nailed it,” said Jin.

“I looked at her dress,” said Neva. “The way it was sewn, where the darts were. It was hand-stitched and made to fit real well. I thought she might be someone who would look right into a camera and smile at whoever was looking.”

“That’s good, Neva,” said Diane. “Very intuitive.”

Neva had taken to heart the lessons on facial reconstruction Diane had given her.

“David,” she said, “Did we do an X-ray of Plymouth Doe’s skull?”

“Yes. I took all the skeletal remains to Korey and he X-rayed everyone.” David went to the filing cabinets, pulled open a drawer and found a file with the X-ray, which he gave to Diane.

She carried the X-ray to the copy machine. She measured the head of the woman in the photograph between two craniometric points—the nasion, where the nose met the forehead, and the gnathion, the tip of the chin. She made the same measurements on the X-ray of Plymouth Doe’s skull and calculated the percent difference between the photograph and the skull. She put the photo on the copier and increased the size by a small amount and measured the result at the same points.

When she had the heights of the faces the same on the measurement points, she took the X-ray and the copy of the photo to the light table and laid one on top of the other.

“I thought you did that with a projection screen so you could fiddle with it,” said David.

“I do, but right now this is quicker, and if it’s the same person, it should fit dead on.”

It did. Plymouth Doe was Jewel Southwell.

Just to make sure, Diane used a loupe and examined Jewel Southwell’s teeth in her portrait. Plymouth Doe had an overlapping upper incisor. Jewel Southwell’s portrait showed the same overlap, one incisor slightly forward, casting a shadow on the incisor next to it. To compute how far forward, Diane used one of David’s esoteric photography databases to provide some of the numbers she needed, based on the shadow length in the photo. She retrieved Plymouth Doe’s skull from the vault and took a few tooth measurements. It wouldn’t be exact, but the measurements from the offset teeth in the skull should be very close to the computed value from the photograph. Again, dead-on.