‘‘I think so too. I heard these folks are running you out of your apartment.’’
‘‘My life is a little too eventful for them,’’ said Diane. ‘‘This episode was the last straw, I think.’’
‘‘I’m real sorry to hear that,’’ said Garnett. ‘‘Anything I can do to help?’’
‘‘No. I appreciate your offer. I’ll be fine. I’m staying at Frank’s since the event the other night. I’ve been sort of toying with the idea of buying a house. This might push me into it.’’
Neva came out into the hallway and walked toward Diane when she saw her. ‘‘Did they really ask you to leave?’’ she said.
‘‘News travels fast,’’ said Diane.
‘‘Your neighbors were talking about it when David and I arrived,’’ said Neva. ‘‘That’s just... just plain mean.’’
‘‘I’m apparently a hard neighbor to live with. Finding anything?’’ she asked.
‘‘Blood,’’ said Neva.
Chapter 36
‘‘You found blood?’’ said Garnett. ‘‘So this kid . . . Bobby Banks is involved with Clymene?’’
‘‘We’ve found a few drops on the bed frame. And a couple of drops in the bathroom. It’s not much. He could have had a nosebleed, but...’’
‘‘But what?’’ said Garnett.
Diane noticed the landlady watching them behind her partially closed door.
‘‘Is there a clear path in the apartment?’’ Diane asked, meaning, had David and Neva processed a place in the apartment where they could walk and not contaminate evidence.
‘‘Sure,’’ said Neva.
Neva led the two of them back to 1-D. Diane heard the landlady’s door close softly behind them. Once inside, Diane glanced around at the apartment. It wasn’t much different from hers in layout, larger perhaps. The sofa, chairs, table, and lamps were new but very cheap. There were no paintings or photographs or accessories of any kind.
‘‘Spartan,’’ said Garnett.
‘‘Isn’t it?’’ said Neva. ‘‘Bed and bath’s the same. Nobody really lived here. He just stayed here.’’
‘‘You had a
‘‘We found an IV needle wedged in the floorboards,’’ said Neva. ‘‘I think this is where they donated the blood and rested up afterward. I think Clymene and her sisters were in the bedroom when David came to the door to ask if the guy in the apartment had heard anything.’’
David entered from the kitchen. ‘‘Neva tell you what we found?’’ he said. ‘‘They were here. Right here. I talked with that kid there in the doorway. He told me he’d been studying and didn’t hear a thing.’’
‘‘I wonder why he didn’t just say he heard a ruckus, to bolster the image that Diane was doing something in her apartment,’’ said Garnett.
‘‘Then he would be the only witness,’’ said David, ‘‘and we would have come back to him and found him missing. This way, he’s like everyone else in the building.’’
‘‘Smart group of people,’’ said Garnett. ‘‘I wonder where they’re from.’’
‘‘I’m going to find out,’’ Diane said as she turned to leave. ‘‘You guys are doing a good job, by the way.’’
She left Neva, David, and Garnett and went back to the museum and made an appointment for movers to pack everything up in her apartment after the cleaning crew finished.
Since Frank wasn’t coming back to Rosewood this evening, she thought she might stay at the museum on one of her couches. Perhaps she could just move into the museum. Maybe create a small apartment in the basement somewhere in the east wing. She shook her head of the thought. She was mentally creating a life where she would never leave the museum.
When she got back to the museum, she had a note from Kingsley saying he was sorry to miss lunch, that he had to go back to Atlanta but would return tomorrow. Jacobs was probably somewhere in the building trying to find out if they were thieves. Which reminded her that she needed to bring the board up-to-date on the disposition of the artifacts. She sent an e-mail to the members asking them to come to a board meeting at the end of the day.
After sending the e-mail, she started searching the Internet to find out how to contact estate planning attorneys and family lawyers. There were several professional organizations that had lists of attorneys in estate planning, or family law, but only addresses were listed, no e-mail addresses.
She picked up the phone and called the museum’s attorney and asked about lists of lawyers from professional organizations and their e-mail addresses. She told him what she wanted to do, carefully explaining that this was a woman who was stalking and preying on wealthy clients of attorneys. He suggested that if she left the message and photograph on various attorney Listservs, it might reach a broader audience.
Diane found a fairly good photograph of Clymene on the local newspaper’s Web site. After getting permission to use it, she created a message asking for help in identifying the woman in the attached photograph. She went back and forth on how much she should reveal, and decided to give a moderate amount of information, but mention that she was thought to have preyed upon men with large estates. She then e-mailed the owners of the Listservs and asked if they would post the message for her, explaining to them in greater detail the importance of finding Clymene. She expected to be turned down by half. She was surprised when none did.
With that out of the way, she told Andie she was going over to the crime lab for a while. She used the back way to avoid meeting anyone that might slow her down. The downside was that she missed seeing most of the exhibits and she enjoyed that, even in passing.
No one was in the crime lab. Jin, she assumed, was down in his DNA lab. Neva and David were still at her apartment building. She had been trying to convince the police commissioner and the mayor that she needed to hire more personnel, but they always turned her down. Right now she was stretched thin, but she couldn’t use this as
