Dead Secret (31 page)

She took two DNA sampling kits from the supply cabinet and walked back to the father and daughter waiting in her office.

“Could I ask each of you to give me a DNA sample for comparison with DNA we took from the remains? It’s nothing invasive. I just need to take a swab from inside your cheek.”

As Diane talked, she opened the DNA test kits and showed them a swab. Earl and his daughter Lydia both opened their mouths. Diane took the samples and sealed the swabs in their envelopes and labeled them. She sat down across the table from the two and looked into their eyes. Their faces showed a cross between expectation and dread.

“I can tell you that the photograph is a match with the remains. It’s her, almost beyond a doubt. The DNA results will give us the final confirmation.”

“It is Grandma then?” asked Lydia.

“Yes.” Diane nodded. “It is Jewel Southwell.”

Earl Southwell began sobbing. “All these years, the things we all thought about her, and she was at the bottom of that quarry. I swam there when I was a kid, and my mother was down there.” His shoulders shook with his sobs.

Diane noticed that his daughter didn’t reach over to comfort him.

“How did she die?” he asked when his sobs subsided.

“From a blow to the head.”

“You mean, like deliberate, or an accident?” asked Lydia.

“It appears to have been deliberate,” said Diane.

“You think you can find out who killed her, after all this time?”

“There’s a good chance.”

“When can we have her for burial?” Earl asked.

“We’ll need to wait for the DNA results to confirm the match. That should take about ten days. After that we can release the remains.”

Lydia’s face had grown angry. “I want you to find out who did this. Grandpa could’ve been happy.” She looked at her father, Earl Southwell. “We all could’ve been happy. Bitterness poisoned our family. I want to know who did this to us.”

Earl Southwell didn’t say anything. The vacant look in his swollen eyes said that he had lapsed into deep introspection, or grief, or remorse. Probably a combination of all those emotions and more. The two of them, the father and the daughter, each suffering in their own way.

“Is your grandfather still alive?” Diane asked the daughter.

Lydia nodded, her eyes downcast. “But he has Alzheimer’s and don’t know anybody anymore.”

Diane put her hand on Lydia’s. “The brain’s a funny thing. Tell him that his wife didn’t leave him after all. It might get through to him.”

Lydia looked dubious. Diane wished she could say something comforting.

“When we have DNA confirmation, I’m sure the TV and newspapers would like a follow-up on this story. Tell them your story and the impact this has had on your life. It will make the authorities more interested in pursuing it.”

Lydia nodded. “You’ll let us know when you get the DNA test back?”

“Of course. Give me your phone number and address. When everything is done, I’ll return the photograph and all the effects we found with your grandmother’s remains. There are some clothes and things.”

Lydia wrote down the information for Diane.

“Did you happen to recognize anyone else in the drawings?”

“No.” Both shook their heads.

“When did she disappear?” asked Diane.

“June fourteenth, 1942,” said Earl Southwell, as if the date were branded on his brain. It probably was.

“Did she own an automobile?” asked Diane.

“No, she didn’t,” said Earl. “Daddy’s Ford pickup was all the car we had.”

Diane made some notes in her notebook.

“Do you have a photograph of Dale Wayne Russell?”

“Are you kidding?”

Diane walked them to the museum exit and let them out. She watched them as they slowly made their way to their vehicle, an old pickup, keeping their distance from each other. Each might as well have been alone.

There was no doubt in Diane’s mind that the DNA would be a match. She turned and walked back toward the lab to fill out her report and send the samples to the GBI lab.

Chapter 43

Diane and her crew sat around the table in her museum office waiting for their pizza. She told them about the father and daughter and their story about Jewel Southwell.

“Jewel’s father was a quartermaster,” said Diane.

“So the buttons came from her, probably,” said David. “You think Caver Doe is Dale Wayne Russell, the guy Jewel Southwell was supposed to have run off with?”

“Maybe. She did sewing for people. Whoever left the button in the cave could be someone she did sewing for, or someone who knew her father. Or it may all be coincidental and the two deaths may be totally unconnected.”

“Too many coincidences,” said David.

“That’s my feeling too,” said Diane. “But we still don’t have anything that ties it all together, so that it all makes sense.”

“Still, we’re making progress,” said Neva. She was very pleased with herself for the drawing she had made of Plymouth Doe.

“Yes, we are,” said Diane. “The identification of Plymouth Doe as Jewel Southwell is a big step forward.”

She told them about the interviews with Valentine and MacRae and their reaction to the mention of the Taggart name.

“The Taggarts have always been associated with good things,” said Neva. “I really find it hard to believe any of them is involved in”—she threw up her hands—“all of this.”

“I don’t know that they are involved,” said Diane. “But someone is behind it. Valentine and MacRae don’t have the intellectual talent to think it up by themselves. And look at their ages. They weren’t even born when Caver Doe died, so what interest would they have in wanting Caver Doe’s crime scene evidence destroyed? Do we have anything that points to the involvement of anyone besides the two of them?”

“You going for a unified field theory, Boss?” asked Jin. “Everything is connected to everything?”

“I agree with David,” Diane said. “Too many coincidences. Let’s follow the evidence. What key evidence do we have that is not matched to a suspect?”

“We have Valentine and MacRae linked to the Donnie Martin crime scene,” said David. “But we don’t have anyone directly linked to the Flora Martin murder. We do have the knife tip you found in Flora Martin’s bone. If we find the knife, we can match it. That might point to Valentine and MacRae, or it might point to someone else.”

“We have the unknown fingerprint in the bug terrarium,” said Jin.

Diane looked at him for a moment, puzzled. “Oh, the break-in at the dermestarium on the university campus?”

“Yeah, that,” said Jin. “We got that one fingerprint inside the bug box that doesn’t match any of our known exemplars. But that could be a long shot. Lots of people come and go from a university lab. The print could have come from almost anyone.”

Diane looked at David. “I don’t suppose you can match the stolen bugs with the Flora Martin crime scene?”

David shook his head. “They’re all
Dermestes maculatus,
wild and domestic. I can’t tell the wild ones from the others. I don’t really know if the dermestids stolen from the university are the same ones found on Flora Martin’s remains—just that she had more beetles than are usually found with a body in the wild. And speaking of bodies and beetles, has anybody noticed a smell in the museum?” asked David. “Kind of bad.”

“I did,” said Diane.

“Me, too,” said Neva. “I think a couple of the dogs took a dump somewhere.”

“More like that snake crawled up somewhere and died,” said Jin.

Diane laughed. “That’s the first thing that came to mind to me too.”

“I just get a whiff and then it’s completely gone,” said David.

“I’ll have the custodial staff go through the place when this is over,” said Diane. “And I hope it’s over soon.” She looked at her watch.

“We have a bet going,” said Jin. “I say your suspicions about the museum break-in are wrong. David says you’re right—but he’s paranoid and doesn’t trust anybody. Neva’s with you, only because you have a good track record of being right. So I hope you’re wrong about Emery and I win a lot of money.”

“So do I, Jin,” said Diane. “Is that all the information we have on any of this? Have we exhausted all leads?”

“The sheriff brought diaries that belonged to Flora Martin and I took them to Korey,” said Jin. “He said it would take a while. They’re pretty bad off. Saturated with mud.”

“Speak of the devil,” said David. “Here he comes in dreadlocks.”

Korey came in carrying a folder, followed by Mike carrying several flat boxes.

“Anybody order pizza?” said Mike.

Korey and Mike pulled up chairs. Diane got everyone soft drinks from her refrigerator and they passed slices of pizza around the table.

“I ran your samples, Doc,” said Mike. Diane looked blank for a moment. “The ones Neva gave me. She said they’re from England.”

“The dirt samples, yes. What did you find out?”

“Sample one, the dirt from the cave, and sample two, the dirt from the bones, are the same. Sample three, the mineral deposits on the bones, is sodium chloride.”

“Salt?”

“Salt.”

“So the bones did come from the cave,” mused Diane.

“According to the dirt,” said Mike.

“I appreciate your analyzing them so quickly.”

“As a show of your appreciation, can I stay here tonight, Doc? Don’t get me wrong, David; I really like your condo, and it was good of you to let me stay there. But I’m going to get a concussion banging my head against the wall,” said Mike.

“MacGregor?” said Diane.

“I like Mac, I really do, but in smaller doses. When we were cleaning David’s kitchen, he sang ‘Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall’—all the way to the end. And then started over again.”

Neva collapsed into giggles with the others and patted him on the back. “Poor baby.”

“Okay, you can stay here,” said Diane.

“Oh, thank you, Doc. You don’t know how I appreciate it. Does your evidence tell you who’s been making the prank calls to us?”

“No.” Diane didn’t say she wasn’t sure the police were looking. She was suddenly filled with guilt. She hadn’t thought about the crank calls since she heard about them. “Did the police tap your phone?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“I’ll check into it.”

“Someone want to tell me what’s going on?” said Korey. “Why did you empty out the museum? Nobody believes we have a critical environmental system failing. I mean, what exactly would that be?”

“I’ll tell you about it tomorrow,” said Diane.

“Does it have something to do with what happened to you and Mike?”

“I don’t know.” She didn’t. They had not been able to match any of the evidence of the knifing or Neva’s break-in to the murders they were working on. Valentine and MacRae had a whole boxful of those surgeon’s gloves they used. Why would they have used another brand to break into Neva’s apartment?

“So it’s a maybe,” said Korey.

“Possibly, but that’s all I’m going to say right now. I know this is terribly inconvenient for you and all the curators.”
Especially for botany,
she thought. All in all, she had missed three readings on their experiment because of the search.

“I don’t mind the inconvenience.” He shrugged. “Is everything going to be all right?” Both Korey and Mike were looking intensely at her; both wanted reassurance.

“Yes,” said Diane. “That’s my job.”

Korey nodded and smiled. He set down his slice of pizza and grabbed up the folder he had laid on the desk behind him.

“I don’t know why you even bothered to build a crime lab. I can do everything in my conservation lab that you all can do.” He opened the folder and took out a piece of paper that looked like a photograph of an electrostatic copy of . . . something.

Diane craned to see the page. “What is it?”

Korey held it to his chest out of her sight. His dreadlocks fell forward, shielding his face.

“All in good time. You know those magazines found in the submerged Plymouth?”

“Yes,” said Diane cautiously. “This had better not be Miss October, 1942.”

“Just wait,” Korey said, motioning with his hand. “Most of them were pretty much pulp. When we dried them, what we got was very thick handmade paper . . . impossible to separate into pages.”

Jin looked disappointed.

“But,” continued Korey, “it was good practice for my technicians.”

“You got something, though?” said David.

“On one of the magazines that we could separate from the rest, there was a shape just under the cover, which was translucent by this time. It looked like a piece of paper—something I recognized—was stuck in the magazine. I used various lighting, even X-rayed the thing. That didn’t work, by the way. But light did, and by slicing the magazine paper off what was under it, I was able to bring out writing on the piece of paper inside the magazine.”

“You’re going to stretch this out, aren’t you?” said David.

“As long as I can,” said Korey.

He handed the photograph to Diane. She was audibly startled when she looked at the page.

“What is it?” said Jin.

“It’s a receipt,” said Diane. “From Cash or Casher General Store, made out to D. W. Russell for a carbide lantern, forty feet of rope, and two Moon Pies—three dollars and sixty cents.”

Neva’s eyes grew wide and she sucked in her breath. “You have got to be kidding.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” said David.

“Way to go, Korey.” Jin pounded the table with the flat of his hand. “You’re right: What do we need the crime lab for?”

“When I read the list,” said Korey, “it rang a bell, since I’d seen all of Caver Doe’s things. It was the Moon Pie wrappers that cinched it for me. You think maybe this D. W. Russell is Caver Doe?”

“The probability is high,” said Diane.

“Has to be,” said David. “Jewel Southwell and Dale Wayne Russell disappeared at the same time, supposedly ran off together. Here is a receipt made out to D. W. Russell in the car with Jewel Southwell for the very items we found with the body of Caver Doe, which we know to have been there since that time period. Caver Doe has to be Dale Wayne Russell.”

Diane could still hear the dominoes clicking against one another as they fell. “Korey, this is excellent work. I don’t know what to say. I’m just amazed.”

A scenario was forming in Diane’s mind. Actually, several, but she kept weeding them out when one or the other piece of evidence didn’t fit. But what it looked like to her was that a crime of opportunity had led to a crime of premeditation.

Diane sent the others home for a breather. David went to check his condo. Neva went to help Mike pack a few clothes. Jin and Korey went to the conservation lab so that Korey could show Jin how he had revealed the writing on the receipt.

She looked at her watch. In just three hours, security of the museum would be turned over from Chanell’s personnel to Emery’s people. In the woods the police were watching the building. Everything was calm. She went up to her lab with Mike’s notes. She had just enough time to call John Rose and give him a preliminary report on his bones.

She entered her osteology lab to find it dark, but not so dark that she couldn’t see a gun in her face.