gone to a desk job, the homicide squad is a bunch of new people hardly older than Kevin.”
Diane made an effort not to smile, wondering if Frank was just feeling estranged from officers half his age. “But they might still be competent.”
“Whose side are you on?”
“Yours, of course. I think you ought to contact the president of the city council and tell him they were right all along, that the mayor’s pricks. . I mean picks. . the mayor’s picks are screwing up an investigation.” Diane didn’t know the girl, but she felt a giddy relief upon learning that she hadn’t been killed. Jails and trials could be dealt with. But not death.
“This isn’t funny.”
“No, it isn’t. What is it they’re doing wrong?”
“Warrick. Janice Warrick-she’s the detective in charge-allowed George’s mother and stepfather in the house. She let the stepfather tramp around the bedroom before anything was processed.”
Diane pressed her lips together. “Did you mention to Detective Warrick that letting anyone on the crime scene was contaminating the evidence?”
“I mentioned it. I hammered her over the head with it. She asked me how a paper detective could possibly know anything about crime scenes. She was going to let them take things out of the house. When I objected, she tried to make me leave. I told her that I was executor of the will, and if anything was missing from the house, I’d sue the department and her personally.”
“Were you in the crime scene?”
Frank stared at her a moment. “I stayed mostly on the front porch. Do you have anything else on the bone?”
“Yes.” She pulled out a sheet of paper from her desk. “Here’s the report. It’s on the standard form.”
He took the page and glanced it up and down. “Find anything new?”
“Yes.”
“You mean you missed something the first time?”
Diane nodded. “Yes, I did.”
“Well, does this make us even for me throwing away the spiderweb? What’d you find?”
“A fish rib and a cap from a blowfly puparium in the marrow cavity.”
“What? A fish rib and a what?”
“A cap from a blowfly puparium. Do you know about the life cycle of blowflies?”
“Oh, sure, everyone knows about that. . All I know about flies is that they’re a damn disgusting nuisance.”
“If it weren’t for them, and a host of other disgusting creatures, the world would be littered with dead, undecayed animals. After the third instar of a blowfly. .”
“Third instar? That sounds like
“Bug speak. You know that flies are attracted to dead bodies.”
“Yes, I do know that.”
“There’s a point in the life cycle of a blowfly at which it moves away from the corpse and burrows into the ground. This third skin shedding, or instar, hardens into a capsule and becomes the puparium. From this, it emerges after a period of time in the ground as an adult fly by popping off a cap at the end of the puparium. This cap is what I found. My identification has to be verified by an entomologist, but the significance of these finds is that neither the fish bone nor the puparium cap should be found inside the bone.”
“Okay. So, how did they get there?”
“My guess is they washed in. But there are other scenarios. The bone could have already been underground and decomposed, and this fly came from something decomposing on top of it or near it. When the blowfly moved underground, it wound up burrowing into the cavity in the bone. Later the bone was eroded, or dug up for your friends to find.”
“Does this help us?”
“It says something about the environment the bone was in-”
“Like in a river?”
“No, the blowfly wouldn’t be underwater. Suppose that your friend George thought it was a deer bone because there were antlers, or hooves, or whatever present. So, we have deer bone and fish bone in the same place. I think you might look for the rest of the body-the remaining bones-in a place where animal bones are processed. A hunting camp, somewhere that processes meat. . something like that.”
Frank nodded. “That’s something-a good place to start. How is it that you know so much about bugs?”
“Part of my old job. Bodies, bones, bugs and blood.”
“All that?”
“It’s all connected. Besides, it’s hard to find a crime lab in the places I had to go. Those countries often don’t want us there in the first place, and their cooperation doesn’t extend to lending expert personnel and lab facilities. The team learned how to do everything ourselves.”
“So you’re familiar with crime scenes?”
“Yes.”
Frank stood and walked over to a photograph on her wall of the inside of a cave. He didn’t turn around, but spoke to the photograph. “Warrick’s finished with the crime scene. I wonder if you’d take a look at it?”
“Frank, I. .”
He turned in her direction. “They matched the gun with the bullet that killed Jay. It was Louise’s gun. Star’s just sixteen. Sixteen, Diane. I don’t think she did it. I’m getting her a lawyer, but I need to get a handle on the crime scene.”
“It’s already been contaminated.”
“I know, but you said ‘bodies, bones, bugs and blood.’ You know about blood spatters?”
“Yes. Like other crime scene evidence, blood spatters can be an important element in human rights cases, but. .”
“That’s a place to start. There are spatters. Diane, for now, I’m Star’s guardian, until she’s eighteen. I’ve known her since she was a baby. She’s like a daughter, and I know she didn’t do this, but I need help proving it.” He was silent a moment, turning back to the picture. “It looks like you in this cave.”
“It is.”
“It looks like you’re hanging from a rope.”
“I am.”
“Why?” He turned around and faced her with a puzzled frown.
“The entrance to that particular cave was from above. You knew I was a caver?”
“Well, yeah, you mentioned it, but I thought you visited as a tourist-like Ruby Falls or Mammoth Cave, you know-with a bunch of other people.”
She gestured to the photograph. “That cave’s in Brazil. I was mapping it.”
“Mapping it? Why?”
Diane shrugged. “It hadn’t been mapped.”
“So that’s what you do for fun?”
She leaned forward with her elbows on the desk. “It’s very relaxing. Caves are beautiful. The line from Frost’s poem-‘lovely, dark and deep’-fits caves better than woods. It’s like being in the center of a velvet black universe- often as silent as the vacuum of space must be.”
“You say it like that’s a good thing.”
Diane laughed at him standing there with that curious look on his face. “It’s a very good thing.”
Frank picked up a geode paperweight sitting on her dark walnut desk and turned it over in his hand. “We need to get reacquainted. We hardly knew each other before.”
“It seems there’s a lot we don’t know about each other.”
Diane’s private line rang and she picked it up, still holding his gaze in hers.
“Diane, how about letting Dylan Houser come down and make an assessment of your interactive computing needs.”
Diane hesitated a moment, pulled her attention away from Frank and focused on the caller. “Ken, hi. How are you? You don’t waste time, do you?”
