Neva had always been a little intimidated by Garnett. “You found it,” said Diane. “And it’s an identifying characteristic.”
Neva nodded, then smiled. “Sure.”
Diane turned to Jin. “What did the two of you find at the Jane Doe crime scene?”
“A running shoe, a pair of socks, several small plastic buttons,” said Jin. “But I may have missed something.”
“Get over it, Jin,” said Diane.
“Yeah, Neva was there,” said David. “She would have found anything you didn’t.”
Jin shrugged and continued. “We found some of the bones of her hands and feet and a few others we couldn’t identify. We photographed the place, but didn’t find anything but the bones. The deputy did a number on the site. Oh, I did get a bug out of his car. It’s a dermestid, just like we figured.”
“Did you find a femur?” asked Diane. “Our Jane Doe is missing one.”
Jin and Neva looked at each other. “No,” they said, shaking their heads.
“Are there any nursing homes in the area?” Diane asked.
“The closest one is ten miles. Sheriff Burns said no one is missing that he’s aware of,” said Jin. “The sheriff took us to the site. He’s pretty steamed at Deputy Singer, especially when he saw all the shovel marks in the ground and we told him how the bones arrived. Singer was supposed to have called us to photograph the scene and collect the bones.”
“I got the impression,” said Neva, “that he won’t be having a job when he gets out of the hospital.”
“Whenever that is,” said Jin. “Sheriff Burns said that besides his injuries, he developed some kind of rash thing.”
“Urticaria, probably,” said David. He rubbed his arm unconsciously. “It’s a skin condition brought on by an allergic reaction to insect bites. He probably looks pretty bad about now.”
“Poor guy. Is that all the crime scenes we have at the moment?” said Diane. She hoped that the murderers in the area would hold off killing anyone until her team got caught up.
“I believe that’s it, Boss,” answered Jin. “Except Caver Doe.”
“Caver Doe has waited fifty years. He can wait a little longer. Let’s get the analysis of these cases done as quickly as we can. Neva, when you have time, I’d like to see some sketches of the faces of the victims. First up, get the autopsy photos of Quarry Doe and draw him a presentable face-preferably with his eyes open. We need to identify him. You okay with that?”
Neva wrinkled her nose. “Sure. If I can slip on their fingers to get a print, I can draw their decaying faces.”
“Jane Doe’s skull from the woods will be ready in a couple of days. It’s in with the dermestids now. And it looks like we’ll be getting another skeleton from the deep.”
Chapter 32
Diane spent the next day working only on museum business. Jin and Sheriff Canfield were arranging for a salvage company to raise the car from the bottom of the quarry lake. Most of the evidence from the various crime scenes had been processed. She’d checked Jane Doe’s bones. They were nearly ready for her to examine again. Things were going smoothly, and that always made her a little nervous. She went to bed that evening waiting for the other shoe to drop. Frank told her that she was turning into a pessimist.
Early the next morning Diane stood on the bank of the quarry waiting for Jin to surface. A salvage crew was waiting with her. They had their own divers. Once Jin and his team came up, they would begin the job of raising the car from the bottom. The depth had been measured at 120 feet. The divers had to descend and ascend in increments to adapt to the changes in pressure.
The plan in operation was for Jin to work the inside of the car and collect the bones and anything else that could get damaged or lost during the recovery. Diane had brought Korey with her. He stood talking to the salvagers and Sheriff Canfield.
Korey had told Jin that when he put anything in a bag, to make sure he sealed enough water in to protect the evidence inside. Everything wet had to stay wet to prevent decomposition from exposure to the air-at least until they got all the information they needed from it.
“As soon as the bones and artifacts come out of the quarry,” Korey said, “they’ll go into tubs of distilled water. Then we’ll dry the bones and prevent them from cracking with a series of alcohol baths, increasing the concentration until we reach a hundred percent alcohol. You can go ahead and analyze the bones if you want to. It won’t hurt to take them out of the water for a short amount of time if you keep a spray bottle handy to keep them damp.”
Diane looked at her watch. Jin still had fifteen minutes before he and the other divers had to come up, according to the chart he showed her. She occupied herself by comparing the scene around her with the notes and reports that her team had created. The long-overgrown avenue through the woods was more evident in person. The road that led to the quarry consisted of two parallel dirt tracks with its middle grown up with tall grass.
The quarry lake was a pretty place, a place that would have been a good swimming hole. The water was clear and it was relatively private. A thick wood grew around the whole area. Diane was told by the local historians that a hundred years ago granite had been mined here. She’d probably seen buildings made from its stone and didn’t know it.
Rocks made her think of Mike. She wondered how he was getting along. Neva said he had been busy making notes of what he wanted to do in his new job. Her mind wandered to Annette Lymon. Andie had told her that Dr. Lymon was looking for her. She dreaded that encounter.
The sun was warm on her face. She closed her eyes. She would like to go swimming right now. She’d been fighting a mild feeling of depression for the past few days, brought on, no doubt, by what had happened to her mother, seeing her ex-husband again, and what he did to Susan and Gerald. And not to mention getting stabbed. She rubbed her arm.
It was as if a dark mist were settling around her. She couldn’t see it, but she felt it, and it gave her a sense of dread. Frank was good; he was her anchor. He’d come over the evening before and brought one of her favorite meals-Chinese. And he had made her laugh. She touched the locket around her neck, pushing the heart shape into her chest, feeling the metal, remembering that Ariel had touched it. Yes, a swim right now would be good.
She was brought out of her reverie by a splash and voices. She opened her eyes. Jin was back up, bags and camera tied to his body. One after another, minutes apart, divers popped up after him. Four in all, each carrying bags. Jin was swimming to shore rather than getting in the boat. The second group of divers started putting on their gear. For them it was time for the real show-bringing up the car.
“Hey, Boss. It’s nice down there. A little chilly, but nice. I got some good pictures and a lot of evidence.” He pointed to the bags hanging from his body weighing him down. “Damn, these weren’t so heavy underwater.” He grinned.
“It’s an old Plymouth, maybe 1935-ish or something. David will probably know. It’s in pretty good condition, considering. No license plates on it. Too bad. That might have helped.” Diane walked with Jin to the museum van, where he took off his diving gear.
The van was one the groundskeepers used and had been stripped of carpeting. Korey came trotting over to help transfer the bones Jin had brought up into tubs of distilled water in the van.
Diane held the dripping skull in her hands. It was almost pearlescent, the way the saturated white bone reflected the sunlight. Right away she knew it would probably be a young female. It was too gracile to be otherwise. The wisdom teeth were just about to erupt. There was nothing on the face that suggested how she died. No broken face bones or broken teeth that suggested a car accident. But at the back of the head there was a depression fracture. She put the skull in the water with the other bones and replaced the cover.
“You know, Boss,” said Jin, stripping off his wet suit. “When you look at the bones, it doesn’t really matter if they dry out too fast and crack. You’ll just be burying them after you finish.”
Korey looked scandalized.
“We don’t know what we’ll find, when we’ll find it or how long it will take to identify her,” Diane said. “We
