“That mold of the perp’s fingers Neva found was a break. At least if we find a suspect, we can identify him. The mold didn’t match any of the young hoodlums in her neighborhood.”
Diane was disappointed. She was hoping for at least a break in Neva’s case. The attack on Neva’s home worried her. “Thanks for the update,” she said, and sighed as she cradled the phone.
Diane locked up, said good-bye to the evening receptionist and started to close the door when Korey came down the hall rolling a trolley loaded with several boxes.
“Got your new microscopes,” he said.
Diane opened the door and helped him put them on a counter. “We’ll set them up tomorrow. What else you have there?”
Another box twice as large as the microscopes sat on the trolley.
“A messenger brought it a few minutes ago. The label says it’s from Great Britain.”
“Ah, the witch.”
“Another one?”
“The real one. The first one was a decoy.”
Korey shook his head. “You know, sometimes it’s hard to keep up around here.” He carried the witch to the osteology lab.
“It’s awfully big,” said Diane.
“The first one, if I remember correctly, had an outer and an inner box.”
Korey cut open the top with his knife. Inside they found a smaller box surrounded by bubble wrap and the words
“Thanks, Korey. I understand you had dinner with Neva and Mike last evening.”
“Yes. Had a good time. Mike seems to be getting along pretty good. I have to tell you, I was worried. That was scary at the funeral.” He shook his head, then smiled. “I’m glad you hired him. That was a good choice. He works hard around here.”
Diane locked up the lab again and walked down the hall with Korey.
“You going home or back to the lab?”
“Home. I was in Andie’s office when the stuff came and I offered to bring them up.”
Diane arched an eyebrow and smiled. Korey laughed out loud.
“I can’t pull anything off around you, can I, Dr. F.?”
They reached the elevators. “Spill it, Korey. What is it you want?”
“I’d like to go the International Conference of Museum Conservators.”
“Where is it going to be?”
“Glasgow this year.”
Diane thought for a moment. “Let me see what we have in the budget for conferences. But assuming we have the money, sure, pack your bags.”
“Thanks, Dr. F.” He punched the elevator button. It opened and Frank got off.
“Diane. Just coming to see you. Hello, Korey.”
“Hey, Frank. How’s it going?”
They shook hands and all of them rode down in the elevator together. Korey said good-bye, and Diane walked with Frank to her office.
“I was about to go look at some paperwork and then call it a night.”
“Good timing. How about you take your paperwork home and let me take you to dinner? We can eat here in the restaurant if you like.”
“Actually, I can leave the paperwork. I let the crime staff go home early-well, early for us, anyway. I’ll get on it tomorrow. You look happy.”
“I’m celebrating,” Frank said.
“Good.” Lately everything had been about her-all her problems. It would be nice to spend an evening talking about Frank for a change. “You catch that guy you were looking for?”
“Yes, I did, and I’m celebrating.”
Over a dinner of steak and baked potato in the museum restaurant, Frank told her about the embezzler that everyone, including the FBI, had been looking for.
“He hit some Atlanta companies; that’s why my unit was involved. I noticed that in one of his hotel rooms our guys discovered a small glassine envelope. I thought that might mean he was a stamp collector, but that was a long shot. There are lots of uses for glassine envelopes. I gave the info to the FBI. They checked out stamp conventions that corresponded to places he’d visited and didn’t find a correlation, so they dropped it.”
His eyes twinkled in the candlelight as he spoke. Diane absolutely loved his eyes. “But you didn’t.” She took a bite of her steak. It occurred to her that she hadn’t eaten all day, except for an energy bar for breakfast.
“I’d been studying the guy. He collected Matchbox cars, rocks, coins and comic books as a kid-he was a collector. Stamps are nice for someone who moves around a lot. No, I didn’t let it go. The FBI had hacked into some of the places he shopped online and saw that he used the password ‘ironage’ on one site, ‘lavaroad’ and ‘tigerail’ on a few others.”
“Tiger ale? What is that, some kind of drink?”
Frank shook his head. “The FBI didn’t think anything about his passwords, but I got to playing around with them. They’re anagrams for Noriega, Alvarado and Galtieri.”
Diane stopped eating and stared at him. “How did you possibly come up with that?”
“I’m a detective-one who deals with lots of numbers and words. What can I say?”
“So what did you make of these anagrams?”
“The FBI thought it was interesting, but still didn’t make anything of it. I was betting that was his stamp interest-dictators of small countries, something like that. I looked again at the places he’d been and got the catalogs of the ones that had stamp conventions. They all had stamps of the kind I thought he might collect if my hunch was right. As a check, I looked at some of the stamp convention catalogs at places he didn’t go-sure enough, none of them had the kind of stamps I thought would interest him.”
“Pretty slick,” said Diane. “How did you find him?”
“The FBI at this point had come to my way of thinking, and they tried to set a few traps, but they couldn’t lure him in. Then the thing about Pitcairn Island came up in the news-the mayor and his buddies convicted for multiple rapes. The mayor served as a de facto dictator on the island for years. It turns out, too, that the basis of Pitcairn’s economy is stamps. It was a long shot, but I thought maybe it might appeal to him. So I picked out a set of stamps that he would find interesting-and rare-and set my own trap.
I put them up for sale-called them a rare collection from the realm of Pitcairn’s petty dictator-he bit and we got him.”
Diane laughed and clapped her hands. “Frank, I’m impressed. I really am.”
“Sometimes it comes down to paying attention to words.”
“You certainly went a long way with a few jumbled words.”
Diane took a bite of her potato and kept her fork in her mouth so long that Frank put his own fork down and looked at her.
“I know that look,” he said. “You thought of something.”
“I did. It was the word. You’re right: Sometimes it comes down to words.”
Chapter 35
Frank’s eyes sparkled in amusement as he watched Diane.
“Okay, what’s the word?”
“Cave. You know about the break-in here?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve been assuming that the real target of the break-in was the Moonhater Cave witch bones-but it wasn’t.”
