Rikki seemed to ignore him. She continued with her story the way she was telling it. She had the stage and was enjoying her part.
‘‘They were real happy to get the crime lab. Bryce didn’t want to be head of it, but they must have told him he had to. You know in movies how the goodlooking guys will have a dweeb for a sidekick, and maybe he’ll be smarter than them, but he’s still a dweeb? Well, that was Bryce. He was the dweeb. But they told him the crime lab was the most important job of all. And I think they meant that. They weren’t aware that the bone lab didn’t come with it. At first they didn’t pay much attention to it anyway. Then Bryce found out that it had all kinds of fancy equip ment and he realized he could hire their own forensic anthropologist, so he started looking for one.
‘‘But what Jefferies really wanted was the DNA lab. He knew it was owned by the museum, but he and the others had an idea of how to get it. They were first going to get Curtis on the inside to do all their DNA analysis. But Diane Fallon got in the way of that and they decided they had to get rid of her. They hired Harve Delamore to do it. He hated her anyway. Harve was always bragging about how he could have gone semipro. Well, that’s what he was—semipro and not pro. He bungled it. When that didn’t work out, they were going to frame her for his murder.’’ She laughed. ‘‘Then it turned out that the GBI had juris diction. It was starting to get funny. Diane was like the Road Runner and they were Wile E. Coyote.’’
Diane was shocked that Rikki could talk about mur dering someone with such ease, even laugh about it. She shivered. Life meant nothing to this woman. Nothing to Jefferies and his cronies either.
‘‘Jefferies and Bryce drew up plans for what they would do with the whole third floor of the museum building,’’ said Rikki. ‘‘But they had to get Dr. Fallon out of the way.’’
Diane was startled to hear that. How did they ex pect to get the whole third floor? she wondered.
Rikki leaned forward as if Riddmann and Janice could hear her better if she did.
‘‘When Harve failed to kill her, Bryce smuggled a gun into the museum and hid it. It was easy because Bryce had his own guard at the door from the crime lab into the museum. They were planning to kill Dr. Fallon in the museum. They thought that might make it easier to close it down.’’
Diane sucked in her breath. Frank grabbed her hand and squeezed. The chief of police looked over at her, frowning himself, startled.
Rikki looked up at the two-way mirror as if she knew Diane was watching, and delighted in the shock of the revelation.
‘‘You were just going to let that happen?’’ said Janice.
‘‘What could I do? By this time I was thoroughly scared by these guys. If they were going to kill her, they wouldn’t give a second thought about doing me.’’
‘‘How did they think that would get them the DNA lab?’’ said Janice. ‘‘The museum would still own it.’’
‘‘But Dr. Fallon was the force behind the crime as pect to it. They figured the next director wouldn’t be a forensic anthropologist and wouldn’t be interested in the labs. They knew some of the museum’s board of directors didn’t like the forensic stuff being there.’’
‘‘How were they planning to take over the whole third floor?’’ asked Janice. ‘‘Killing Diane wouldn’t get them that either.’’
Diane could see that Janice was skeptical. Ridd mann looked like he was getting impatient with Ja nice’s questions. Diane wanted Janice to continue. She wanted the answers to those questions.
‘‘That wasn’t all they had planned. I heard them say that little old ladies could get mugged and what a trag edy that would be. They had planned to take out Vanessa Van Ross too.’’ She sat back in her chair. ‘‘See, Mr. Riddmann, I told you this was a good story and worth a little time off for good behavior,’’ said Rikki.
Diane stepped back and leaned against the back wall. She felt a strange retroactive fear of what might have happened. Frank put an arm around her shoulder and she leaned into him.
‘‘How did we let this happen?’’ said Chief Monroe. ‘‘How did we miss all of this?’’
He didn’t really expect an answer and Diane didn’t give him one. She didn’t have one. She hadn’t voted for Jefferies. With her it was just a vague mistrust, something she couldn’t put into words, a gut feeling that she acted on at the voting booth. But he had appealed to a lot of people.
Diane could see that the three sitting in the room with Rikki were just as stunned. She couldn’t see Ridd mann’s and Janice’s faces, but she saw them straighten up and exchange glances. She saw the shock on Patsy LaCroix’s face. She had been periodically patting Rikki on the hand, encouraging her. She took her hands away and put them on the table in front of her. Patsy LaCroix and Vanessa were friends.
Rikki saw their reaction, delighted in it for a mo ment, then straightened her own face to reflect the seriousness of the situation.
‘‘That’s one of the reasons they were so furious with Bryce when he gave Dr. Fallon the ammunition to get the crime lab out of the museum building. They could see all their carefully laid plans just collapsing. That’s when they started fighting with each other. They tried to get Garnett to help them but he wouldn’t. And that really pissed them off.
‘‘They were trying to get rid of him anyway, and had planned to frame him for Dr. Fallon’s murder. Bryce came up with the idea of substituting one bullet for another. He said it would be tricky. Bullets some times ricochet around in the body and you don’t know where they might end up, but if it’s done right, Bryce thought he could make it work by short loading the bullets, or something like that. He said he could re duce the energy of the bullet when it entered the body. He was just full of fun ideas.’’ She laughed again.
‘‘You think all this is funny?’’ said Janice.
‘‘I do,’’ said Rikki. ‘‘Do you want my story or not?’’
‘‘Please go on,’’ said Riddmann.
Rikki nodded. ‘‘Just in case that didn’t work—or they couldn’t get the bullet out—they got a gun that couldn’t be traced back to them. They also took Garnett’s bullets from the Ballistics Department and were going to use them, but those were all in perfect shape and Bryce thought it would look suspicious. So they collected Garnett’s bullets from the gun range.’’
