The terrace was an open patio in the rear of the museum looking out onto the nature trail. She spread their meal on a wrought iron table. It was hotter outside than she’d realized, but the sun was going down and the table was in the shade. The air had a sweet, hot fragrance of some shrub. She made a mental note to find out its name. Here in the rear of the museum it was quiet. Road noise sounded so distant they could have been deep in a glade.
Neither spoke about murder or autopsy reports. Diane didn’t tell Frank about the break-in or her talk with the mayor or her uncertainties about his friend Izzy Wallace. Instead, they looked out at the nature trail, and she told him about the various plants located on the trail and the pond with a family of swans. He laughed as she told him about Jonas Briggs, ape archaeology and elephant fine arts.
“Elephants actually make music?”
“Apparently. Jonas is going to look into it. Speaking of music, what’s this karaoke thing you and Andie have going? You’re a crooner?”
“Was last time. I might be Elvis next time. It’s just a fun thing I do occasionally. Turns out Andie’s a big karaoke fan, too. You’ll have to come sometime. Do you sing?”
“Not for any amount of money.”
“Oh, we don’t get paid.”
Diane laughed and looked out into the woods. It was getting dark-and late-and she hated the idea of going back to her office to examine what awaited her there. But better to get it over with.
“I think that’s about all I can eat.” She looked over the quantity of leftovers. “How many carts do you fill up when you do your grocery shopping? Why do you always buy so much food?”
“Actually, I don’t keep much in my house-except when Kevin comes over. I’m in Atlanta most of the time, working. Which I’ll be getting back to in a few days.”
Diane thought that getting back to his job would probably be a relief for him. It would be hard enough if he only had to arrange the funerals of his friends, but all the crime scene analysis must be hard for him to handle.
Frank helped pack up the leftover food and pick up the trash. “Have any idea what we can do with the leftovers?” he asked.
“We’ll put it in the refrigerator in the staff lounge. You can take it home with you when you leave.”
In Diane’s office Frank handed her an envelope from his jacket pocket. The autopsy report. She opened the envelope reluctantly and removed the contents slowly, as if there might be the possibility that if she just held off long enough, some intervening event would make it unnecessary for her to look at them. But there they were. Autopsy reports for young Jay and his parents.
Jay was shot once. The bullet went though his spine and lodged in his heart. There was no gunpowder residue on his clothing. Melted plastic was present in the wound. Diane stopped for a moment and thought about the pieces of plastic she had found in the grass. It’s what she had suspected. Attached to Jay’s autopsy report was a mention of other plastic pieces. They lifted a partial fingerprint from one, but the expert was of the opinion that they couldn’t make a match, especially with the new federal court ruling that fingerprinting didn’t meet the U.S. Supreme Court’s standards for scientific evidence.
George and Louise’s were more complicated. Just as the blood spatters showed, they both had been bludgeoned and shot. The bullet entered his upper chest, went through his spleen, traveled downward through the small and large intestines and out his lower back. The presence of gunpowder and smoke on his clothes indicated that it was a close shot.
There were contusions on the left side and front of the scalp, depression fractures in the left parietal and frontal bones. His left zygomatic bone was crushed, and his nasal bone was fractured.
The left parietal bone of Louise’s skull was fractured, and she was shot through the same part of the head at close range. Jay, George and Louise had no alcohol or drugs in their systems. From the drawings by the medical examiner, Diane noted that the fractures were consistent with a baseball bat.
While she read over the autopsy reports, Frank was looking at the computerized 3-D pictures pinned on the corkboard. He held the photo of Jay lying face down in the grass in his hand.
“I’ve talked to Jay’s teachers, his friends, his soccer coach. . I have no idea what he could have been doing out that late.”
“I don’t think he was,” said Diane. “That is, I don’t think he had left their property.”
In her hand she had a stack of index cards which she laid on the table along with the photographs she had taken of the crime scene. She sat down at the table and motioned for Frank to take the seat beside her. He eyed her a moment as he sat.
“You think Detective Warrick’s scenario is wrong?”
“Yes, I do, and so will she when she examines the evidence closely.”
“What do you think happened?”
“Warrick thought Jay was shot last because she believed that George would’ve been awakened and armed himself, and therefore would not have been shot in his bed. I think he was awakened, armed himself with a bat, but simply did not have time to get out of bed.”
Diane laid Jay’s autopsy report on the table. “First of all, Jay had no alcohol or drugs in his system,” she continued. “Though it’s certainly not automatically true, a kid who sneaks out of the house at night often will at least drink a few beers. But the important thing is the plastic. We’ll see when the report comes back on the plastic pieces I found, but I believe it was a silencer.”
“A silencer? Out of plastic?”
“I asked Star’s boyfriend, Dean, if he knew how to make one. He didn’t. He may have been lying, but he did seem puzzled by my question. You can take a plastic liter soft-drink bottle and put it over the muzzle of a gun and have a onetime-use silencer that is moderately effective. Jay had plastic embedded in his skin. I think the killer used a plastic bottle silencer and Jay was killed first.”
Diane took the card with a sketched picture of Jay being shot by someone holding a gun with the silencer and pinned it as the first in the line of pictures.
“Since it doesn’t completely silence the noise, George and possibly Louise may have heard enough to wake up, but it was not loud enough to get them out of bed. They may not have even known why they woke up. But when the intruder came up the stairs to their bedroom, George was roused to action.”
She took her photos of the string reconstruction of the blood spatter trajectory lines and laid them in front of Frank.
“Where the strings cross is the origin of the blood spatters.”
“Amazing,” said Frank.
“Math,” said Diane. “The computer program drew these 3-D depictions. I fed the spatter measurements into the program and it computed the origin of the blood source, just as the trajectory strings do. The pictures are crude because I was rushed, but the math is right. I’ve placed the head of the victims. .”
She glanced briefly at Frank. She hesitated to use their names because it made it too personal, but she hated to call them
“It’s all right,” he said, putting a hand on her arm and squeezing it.
“The different positions of their heads are the sources of the blood spatters.”
She was glad now that the drawings were of crude artist-doll figures. It helped keep things distant.
“I don’t have the blood analysis that will help me know which blood belongs to Louise and which to George, and the superimposition of the spattering is difficult to determine at best, so new information may change things slightly. However, this is what I think happened: “George was partially awakened by the muted noise of the gunshot outside. When someone came up the stairs and into their bedroom, he became fully awake, probably put one foot on the floor, grabbed the bat by the bed and swung at the intruder. At the same time, the intruder fired the first shot, hitting George in the chest and traveling downward. George hit the intruder, possibly knocking the gun out of his hand. The intruder grabbed the bat from the injured George and hit him on the left side of his head. This is that first strike.”
Diane pointed to the crossed collection of strings closest to the side of the bed George was on. She then pointed to the picture of the figure partially raised up in bed.
“See this castoff here that hits the chest of drawers? The intruder swung the bat again, hitting Louise before she could get out of bed.”
Diane pointed to the farthest crossed string and matching picture on the storyboard. The picture showed that
