“I told you that you weren’t going to like it, Boss.” He and David exchanged glances. David looked as if he were stifling a chuckle.
“I don’t suppose Deputy Singer has had a single course in crime scene protocol?” said Diane.
“Probably thinks they’re a waste of his valuable time. It only took him a few minutes to gather them up. Think of how much time he saved,” Jin said sarcastically.
Diane put her head in her hands, then looked up. “I’ll call Sheriff Burns and tell him to get the deputy to take you and. . ” Diane looked around the lab area. “Where is Neva?”
“Mike’s getting out of the hospital today,” said David. “She’s gone to get him settled in at home.”
“Is she doing okay?”
Jin nodded. “Since her house was trashed? Yes,” he said. “But she’s been running on anger. The detectives think it was some teenagers in the neighborhood that she had a run-in with, but they can’t prove it. We’ve accounted for all the prints. Whoever it was wore gloves.”
Diane shook her head. “The MO doesn’t sound like teenagers,” she said. “It was too deliberate.”
“I agree,” said David. He stroked the fringe of dark hair he still had around the sides and back of his head. Diane wondered if he read somewhere that massaging the head made hair grow. “Unfortunately,” he continued, “we don’t have much to give the detectives. We know the route he took through the house breaking things. We know he came in and left through the back door. He left the front door open, probably so his vandalism would be found, if not by Neva, then by someone noticing the open door. We know the paint was bought at Kmart, but we couldn’t trace who bought it. The perp wore rubber gloves that left a powder residue. And we know it’s someone who is really pissed off at Neva.”
“Powder residue?” asked Diane.
“Not the same kind as in your lab breakin. Gloves are from a different company,” said Jin. “But that’s not to say it couldn’t be the same guy.”
Diane chewed her lower lip. “Too bad, though. I’d like to connect some of these things.” She sighed. “No one in the neighborhood saw anything, I suppose?”
“No,” said David.
Diane sat in silence for a moment, organizing her thoughts on how to proceed. “Okay. Jin,” she said, “when Neva returns, I want you and her to go work the crime scene in the woods. I’ll call Sheriff Burns and ask him to tell Deputy Singer to take you to where the body was found.”
“Deputy Singer’s going to like that,” said Jin.
“I’m sure he will,” said Diane, hoping that Jin and Neva could somehow salvage the crime scene in the woods that Deputy Singer had messed up. “And, Jin, be careful.”
“Always, Boss.”
“And put that sack in my isolation closet.”
“Sure.” He grabbed the sack and made for her lab.
In Diane’s osteology lab she had two small rooms sealed off from the rest of the lab for the purpose of keeping and cleaning bones that still had flesh. They were so small that Diane referred to them as her closets. One room had a dermestarium similar to the one in the faunal lab, a old chest-type freezer converted to house a colony of dermestid beetles-the insects that stripped bones of flesh. The faunal lab used their beetles to clean animal skeletons for the reference collection and museum display; Diane used her colony for cleaning human bones. She preferred dermestid beetles and hydrogen peroxide, rather than boiling, which made a greasier bone.
Diane used one room to keep contaminated remains isolated from the rest of the building and the other to keep the insects confined. Nothing could be more devastating to a museum than to have dermestids get loose. They loved to eat all the things that museum collections were made of. The isolation room also had a sink for washing the finished bones in hot water to kill any beetles hiding in cracks or openings. Diane didn’t usually clean bones that had a lot of flesh still attached, like Caver Doe, or decomposing bodies. She let the medical examiner’s assistant clean those. She cleaned up only bones that were almost completely skeletonized. She guessed that the bones in Jin’s garbage bag were of that type.
Diane turned her attention to the folder that Jin had given her for the quarry bodies. She looked at each of the photographs in turn and placed them on the table along with Jin’s drawings and notes of the scene.
Jin returned from the isolation room and sat down. “Sorry, Boss. I should have put the bones away immediately.”
“That’s all right. Tell me about these guys.” She gestured at the array of photographs.
Jin pointed to one of the photographs. Diane picked it up and examined the scene. It showed a body dressed in jeans and a T-shirt lying facedown in the water next to a log. It was labeled QUARRY DOE.
“The fishermen first found the body of just one man,” said Jin. “When Sheriff Canfield came, they found the scuba diver in the water caught under the brush. The sheriff speculated that the first man slipped and fell trying to help the scuba diver.”
“Who’s the ME on this?” she asked.
“Rosewood’s ME,” said David. “Rankin.”
“What does he say about them?”
David looked to Jin. “He hasn’t finished the autopsies, but at the scene he said they’d been dead about three or four days. The skin, hair and nails were loose, and the bodies were that greenish-black-purple color they get. He was talking like he agreed with Sheriff Canfield that it was an accident.”
Diane looked at the photograph labeled SCUBA DOE. The scuba diver’s black-and-yellow suit barely showed through the tangle of branches that covered him.
“What do you think, Jin?”
“I have questions. Like where’s the other diver?”
“Other diver?”
“Scuba diving is like caving. You don’t do it alone. It’s very dangerous. There has to be another diver. If the other diver was Quarry Doe, then where’s his equipment?”
“You tell this to the sheriff?”
“Yes. He had the deputies search near the lake. But, see, if the other diver had his weight belt on and got into trouble, he may be at the bottom of the quarry. And that’s another thing. I asked the sheriff how deep it is and he said a hundred feet or more. In that case, where’s the descent line? You go that deep, you have to descend slowly and stop at intervals to adjust for the pressure changes. You use a marked descent line to do that. I looked and didn’t find one.”
“What did you get from the crime scene?”
“It’s all laid out on the table,” Jin said, pointing to one of the analysis rooms.
“Let’s go have a look.” Diane rose, scooped up the papers and put them in the file.
Scuba gear and an assortment of evidence bags were arranged on the metal table. The room had the aroma of death from pieces of the victims stuck to their clothes. Diane had never really gotten used to that aroma.
“I checked out the tank,” said Jin. “Nothing hinky about it. No tampering. It’s out of air, and one of the hoses was punctured. There was a small twig stuck in it. That may have been what punctured it. Part of the wood is still lodged in the hose. I haven’t examined the hole itself yet.
“I checked his goggles for prints. Found one set,” Jin added. “David ran them and they didn’t show up. The ME’s going to try to get prints from the body.”
“I have Scuba Doe’s prints.” Neva walked through the door and waved a large envelope at them. “I just came from the ME’s, where I got to wear the skin from the dead scuba guy’s fingers. I can’t tell you how much fun that was. I think this Halloween I’m going to borrow one of his cadavers and wear a cadaver suit.” She wrinkled up her face-so did Diane. Jin and David laughed. “Quarry Doe-he’s the floater by the log-had his fingertips nibbled off. No prints there.”
“Neva,” said David, “I thought you were with Mike.”
“I was. I got him into his apartment, fixed him something to eat, made him promise to rest and went to the ME’s office.” She handed the envelope to David. “Grist for your algorithm machines.” Neva looked happy and rested. Her camel-colored slacks and wine silk blouse looked new. She and Star must have gone shopping to replace some of her clothes. Diane liked seeing her in good spirits.
“I’ll go run these right now,” said David, heading out the door.
Neva pushed her hair behind her ears. “Dr. Fallon, it’s good to have you back. I had a lot of fun at Frank’s
