The Night Killer

Diane pulled into her parking place and surveyed the lot as she exited the vehicle. There was only one tour bus and much of the lot was empty. Not completely unusual at this time of day, but she preferred to see a full lot.

She walked to the administrative wing and into Andie’s office, making a dead stop in the doorway. She was hit in the face immediately, both visually and aromatically. Andie’s office was filled with bouquets of red roses, violets, and daisies.

“I guess he wasn’t taking any chances,” Diane said, looking at all the flowers.

Andie was sitting at her desk working on the computer. She grinned at Diane. “So far he’s doing pretty well with the groveling,” she said.

“Certainly very lovely in here,” said Diane. “And it smells so nice.”

“You want to take some back to your office?” asked Andie.

“No, I think you should keep them up here. Looks very dramatic. How are you feeling?”

“Better. Not because of the flowers. I just got my head together. Chocolate does that for me. Also talking things over with you. Thanks,” she said.

“I thought you would do fine,” said Diane. “Anything going on I should know about?”

“I put all the items you have to look at on your desk. This here”-she pointed at her computer screen-“I can handle. You know, we are still getting requests to examine our mummy.”

“I imagine they will never stop,” said Diane.

“You have a fund-raiser in Atlanta at the end of the month,” said Andie, frowning.

“And this is a problem how?” asked Diane, studying her face.

“I’ve gotten e-mails from several board members wanting to go,” said Andie. “You know how some of them are.”

Diane smiled. “I think we can trust them not to embarrass us in public. I can’t very well keep my board away. It’s appropriate that they go. It’ll be fine.”

Andie was concerned, Diane knew, because Thomas Barclay, one of the board members, tended to be a little heavy-handed with prospective donors. Diane shared Andie’s concern, but she wasn’t aware that Barclay had ever cost them donations. Madge Stewart was another matter. She was just as likely as not to say something like, “The museum is better now that they stopped receiving stolen artifacts.” Leaving Diane to explain what Madge meant and that the museum was not a receiver of stolen antiquities.

As museum director, Diane had a lot of power. The governance of RiverTrail was different from that of many museums. Most of the power rested with the director, which was Diane. The board was only advisory. But one thing she had no power over was who was on the board, and there were a couple she would like to have sent packing.

“I’ll be in my office,” she said, going through the adjoining door, closing it behind her.

Diane called Beth, one of the archivists, and asked her about the speed-readers Sierra had recommended.

“I need someone to read through the diaries we have of Roy Barre’s grandfather. I’m looking for a reference to a lost gold mine. It will probably be in the early diaries, but may be mentioned in later ones,” said Diane.

“How many diaries are we talking about?” Beth said.

“I’m not sure. There are three pretty good-sized boxes of them. The grandfather started keeping a diary when he was a teenager and kept it up until he died in his seventies,” said Diane.

“How interesting,” Beth said. “You don’t find many diarists. Mikaela and Fisher will be happy to do it. They’ve been wanting a. . ah, to be more helpful to the museum.”

Diane knew Beth started to say they’d been wanting a patch. Someone on the museum staff had designed a small patch to give to whoever did consulting with what they called the Dark Side-meaning the crime lab. Diane had never seen one. She suspected they kept it from her. She shook her head. The museum staff was always up to something.

“I appreciate their help. The boxes of diaries are in Jonas’ office. Thanks, Beth,” said Diane.

Diane called up her e-mail. She scrolled down to look at the senders. Several were from other museum directors asking about diverse topics, from the RiverTrail’s educational webcam project, to requesting tissue samples of the mummy, to asking if Diane had used radio-frequency identification for special tours. Diane answered all their questions.

The last e-mail was from her own head of conservation for the museum-Korey Jordan. Diane had delivered to him for analysis the piece of weathered paper Liam discovered at the campsite of the missing girl and her boyfriend. In Diane’s entire operation, Korey had more experience than anyone else with recovering images from paper. He had e-mailed her the results.

She had thought that bringing out the words would be difficult because of the weathering of the paper, but Korey had used the electrostatic detection apparatus, an elegantly simple procedure. He had only to sandwich the paper between a glass plate and clear Mylar, place it on the machine, charge the whole thing with an electric field, and coat the Mylar with electrically charged black powder. The powder settled over the indentations in the paper and, voila, there were the words.

Diane glanced at the photograph of the newly exposed words, then read what Korey had transcribed. It was indeed a list, as Liam suspected. The part that was visible to the naked eye said, get Barre’s diary. The beginning of the sentence was, Break in and.

Well, hell. The unnamed missing couple went to the top of Diane’s list of suspects.

She silently read the list over several times.

Break in and get Barre’s diary.

Diane wondered if their break-in was at the time she was lost in the woods and things got out of hand. She also wondered if there was some reason the couple might have thought the Watsons had the diary. She was still trying to fit the Watsons in. It was a hard fit.

Talk to CND’s-The rest of that sentence was torn away, but it had to refer to a person. Talk to some person. Who? Who was CND? Diane thought a moment, thinking back to her discussion with Liam. Cora Nell Dickson-the woman in the nursing home whose father was a friend of LeFette Barre’s. The note had to mean a relative, hence the possessive punctuation.

Buy book on spelunking.

Jeez, that wasn’t good. Perhaps Liam was right after all, and they went caving when they shouldn’t have.

Find equipment-Here, too, the rest of the sentence was torn away. But Diane could guess what it was about. She imagined it was caving equipment. This wouldn’t have a good end. Diane was familiar with many of the caves in North Georgia. Most were hard caves to explore. And the mines were particularly treacherous. Caves had their own stability, being carved out by nature as they were-removing the weaker materials, leaving the stronger. Mines, on the other hand, were dug out by man-taking what was considered valuable, leaving behind what was not. Mines required supports to hold up the ceilings of tunnels, and those supports-usually timber-weakened over time and collapsed. Not that cave tunnels were immune to collapsing. On the contrary, they could be very dangerous. But nature tended to be a better mining engineer than man-that was Diane’s observation.

It appeared that the two young people had more spirit of adventure than they had good sense.

Could they have been so frustrated that Barre wouldn’t share his grandfather’s diary that they killed him and his wife in a rage? Then, the next evening, had the same rage and killed the Watsons? Still the problem with the Watsons.

Perhaps it was simply a serial killer. In which case there might be more to come. Diane shook her head. Or perhaps either the Barres or the Watsons were a decoy, a red herring. It could be that all the analysis she had been doing about the Barres was completely useless and it was the Watsons she should be concentrating on. Or maybe she could leave the Watsons out of the equation completely and look further into the Barres’ history. Diane was looking forward to the coming Sunday. She was still deep in thought when Andie put through a caller.

“Diane, Lynn Webber. I’ve finished the Barre and Watson autopsies. I cleared out my morning and afternoon so I could get all four done. I thought you’d like to have my preliminary findings.”