His tone of voice caught Faye’s ear. He sounded like maybe he didn’t think his forensics people were any good, and this was the first time she’d heard him even suggest such a thing.
He jogged a few more steps, then stopped short. Turning around and walking back toward Faye, he said, “The evidence here is a grave full of old bones. That’s what you do for a living. That’s my forensic archaeologist over there, telling me to hurry, but two heads are better than one. Would you like to come with me and take a look at this skeleton she dug up?”
Faye was pretty sure that Dr. Margaret Broome did not appreciate her presence. Professional jealousy was the norm in their business, and it probably was the norm in everyone’s business, but Dr. Broome truly had nothing to worry about. Faye did not want her job. She most certainly did not play the one-upmanship games that would prompt her to make her colleague look stupid in front of Detective McDaniel. To signal that she was no threat, she stood by quietly as Dr. Broome spoke, trying to ignore the fact that the woman was a nitwit.
Dr. Broome was nervous. She moved too fast. She spoke too fast. Faye admired scientists who were deliberate and imperturbable, and Dr. Broome was neither.
Nervous scientists forgot things. This could be forgiven if they took careful notes, so they could backtrack when they needed to jog their memories. Dr. Broome didn’t even do that. Her field notebook had been dangling unused at her side since Faye first laid eyes on her.
Nervous scientists also missed things. While Dr. Broome blathered on and on to McDaniel, repeating herself and even contradicting herself, Faye’s attention was focused on a small object a few feet behind the nervous archaeologist. It was barely dime-sized, protruding from the side of the spoil pile of soil removed from the old grave. The spoil pile was only light dirt-brown. The object was dark dirt-brown and it called to her.
Faye walked over to the spoil pile, careful to touch nothing and to step in areas already networked with footprints. She could feel Dr. Broome’s eyes boring into her back, but she was only going to stop what she was doing if McDaniel said so. He kept his silence.
Pulling a magnifier out of her pocket, she crouched down to look at the object.
McDaniel’s curiosity finally got the better of him. He called out to her. “Whatcha got, Faye?”
“A flower. Dried. About two centimeters in diameter. Maybe a little less.”
Dr. Broome’s gray eyes raked across the ground around them. It was dotted with the lavender flowers of horsemint, growing in dappled woodland shade. “There are flowers everywhere around here. Your point is…?”
“My point is that this looks like a flower you’d buy from a florist. There’s only a stub of a stem, but it’s stiff, and you can see that there was a substantial crown of petals. And it’s still showing a lot of red, like maybe it was dyed. It looks like a chrysanthemum to me.”
Dr. Broome’s lips pursed in…what? Tension? Anger? Frustration? Embarrassment?
Faye couldn’t tell, but she was relieved to hear the woman’s response, which was the correct one. “We’re going to need to sift that backdirt. Pronto.”
Chapter Thirty-one
It was too much to hope that Dr. Broome would let Faye or her crew help with the backdirt-sifting. She had insisted on doing it herself, as if determined to atone for something that truly could have happened to anybody. The flower she had missed was, after all, very small, and it was the color of dirt.
Faye might not be welcome to help but she sure as hell wanted to watch, and McDaniel had said okay. They had settled themselves in two folding chairs several feet away from the slowly dwindling spoil pile, and they were watching the warring emotions on Dr. Broome’s face as she found one tiny object after another. The woman obviously hated herself for dropping the ball. Rightly or wrongly, she almost certainly hated Faye. If Faye hadn’t found the chrysanthemum, she would have never known that she had failed.
The finds that were embarrassing Dr. Broome so much were all flowers, tiny ones that anyone could have missed. Every one of them was dwarfed by the faded red chrysanthemum that, after years of withering, was now smaller than the end of Faye’s pinkie finger. They looked to Faye like individual blossoms of baby’s breath, a flower usually seen as a cloud of tiny white blooms. Like the dyed red chrysanthemum, babies’ breath would almost certainly have come from a florist.
“You’re going to hate me.” McDaniel’s eyes stayed on Dr. Broome, but he was talking to Faye.
“For what?” She also kept her eyes on the forensic archaeologist, because she, too, could do the play-it-cool-and-don’t-make-eye-contact thing.
“I told you that I’d try to fix it so that your people could keep working. There’s a lot of territory between this body and the creek. It made sense that you could be doing archaeology over by the creek while we did our work way back here. But now—”
“Now you’re thinking that you didn’t cast a wide enough net after Frida died and you can’t afford to do that again.”
“Yeah.” Still no eye contact. “I need to throw everything I’ve got at this, and I need everybody out of this part of the park. I’m sorry, Faye. I made a mistake last time and, because of that, I missed this burial. I can’t afford to make the same mistake again. What if I miss clues that will nail the person who did this? Or the one who killed Frida?”
“You don’t think it might have been the same person?”
“I can’t jump straight to that conclusion. I know you love
