ever have time to see him again. She wondered if she’d ever have time to get back to the museum again. She sighed as Whit went out the door.
Neva came marching up the steps just as Whit drove away. She stopped in front of Diane. Diane had seen her drive up and waited for her on the porch.
‘‘I heard it on the scanner. Were you going to call me?’’
‘‘No. I try not to overload new people with death the first week on the job.’’
‘‘I can handle it.’’
‘‘It wasn’t aimed at you. It’s just my policy. How ever, I’m glad you’re here. It’s going to be a long night, and I fear we may have another crime scene soon.’’
Diane assigned Neva the kitchen. ‘‘Jin’s taking fin gerprints. David’s taking photographs, and you and I are doing evidence searches. Start with the back door. We believe he entered through the front door. He may have left through the back.’’
Neva nodded. ‘‘Vic let him in?’’
‘‘Probably got the key from under the mat. The victim may have been in the shower. He’s one of the guys who found the hanging victims in the woods.’’
Neva’s eyes widened. ‘‘Oh, my God. What’s going on?’’
‘‘I don’t know. Hopefully, by the time we finish, we’ll have enough evidence to at least know if they are connected.’’
‘‘They have to be connected, don’t they?’’
‘‘Coincidences do happen.’’
‘‘Yeah, but . . .’’ Neva glanced into the bedroom, where Jin and David were working. ‘‘This is some coincidence.’’
Diane began a spiral search of the living room be ginning at the tree trunk coffee table. As she worked, the house made noises. Beyond the creaking of the floors and the sound of wind against the windows, the refrigerator turned on and off; so did the airconditioning. Things that were normal now seemed odd, almost ghostly, with Chris Edwards dead.
Jin came from the bedroom. ‘‘I need to turn the lights out,’’ he said. He was carrying a filter and black light to check for fingerprints.
‘‘You’re going to like this, Boss,’’ said Jin. ‘‘I found the infamous bloody glove in the bedroom—at least its print. It looks like the index finger on the glove had a tear on the surface of the leather.’’
‘‘Leather?’’ asked Diane.
‘‘Looks like it. We can ID this baby if we find it. There’s a lot of prints on the coffee table here, but I bet they belong to the victim and his girlfriend. You think maybe they were involved in some kind of kinky stuff that got out of hand? I heard what you guys said about the time of death.’’
‘‘You think she also hit him with a hand weight?’’
‘‘I did a crime scene in New York where the victim suffered an astounding amount of consensual abuse. What is it that happens to a person in childhood that wires the brain to like that kind of stuff?’’
‘‘I don’t know, and we don’t know what happened here.’’
They worked all night and into the morning— searching, dusting, collecting. The smell of fingerprint powders and reagents mixed with the smell of death that always lingered.
‘‘Heard we have a mummy.’’
Despite the fact that the crime unit wasn’t techni cally connected to the museum, David and Jin claimed the museum as theirs. So did the technicians Diane had hired to work in the lab. Neva was the only one who didn’t appear to feel any connection with the mu seum yet. Diane didn’t know if that was good or bad.
‘‘We apparently inherited one while my back was turned.’’
‘‘Know anything about it?’’ asked Jin.
‘‘Kendel said the mummy case appears to be from the twelfth dynasty. But that doesn’t mean the occu pant is from that time. From what Kendel and Jonas have told us, there was a flourishing trade in mummies in the 1800s, and European adventurers and Egyptian entrepreneurs were eager to supply the tourist trade. That included taking stray mummies and playing musi cal mummy case.’’
‘‘They also made new mummies for customers,’’ said David. ‘‘Are you sure it’s even ancient? It could be just a couple hundred years old.’’
‘‘Right now, we don’t know anything about it.’’ Diane found a smear of blood on the metal base of the desk lamp. ‘‘I need a photograph in here, David. I believe it’s Jin’s bloody glove.’’
David took several shots of the smear using lighting in various positions to enhance the pattern.
‘‘What are you going to do with the mummy?’’ said Jin, who was waiting to lift the print when David finished the photographs and Diane collected the sample.
‘‘After Korey cleans it up, it goes for a CT scan,’’ said Diane.
‘‘Cool. I’d like to see that.’’
Most of the night they worked in silence, occasion ally interrupted by small bits of conversation about the museum, Jin’s music, and David’s bird photo graphs. Neva said very little, and Diane realized that they didn’t know much about what she did outside of work. They did discover that she liked to model small animals from polymer clay.
