breath. “Neva?” he said.
“No. It’s me, Diane.”
“Hey, Doc. How’s everything going?”
“Going well. I need a favor.”
“Sure,” he said.
“Don’t be so quick to agree. You aren’t going to like it.”
“I’ll do it anyway.”
Diane smiled at his eagerness to please her. “We called MacGregor. He’s been getting the same crazy phone calls about rabbits and the food chain.”
“You’re kidding. What you think that’s about?”
“I think it has something to do with the cave, but I have no idea what. It’s just that a lot of things have been happening since we found that body in the cave.” She paused and took a breath. “MacGregor’s cousin’s trailer burned down.”
“Damn. Was anybody hurt? Is that connected with the calls, you think?”
“No one was hurt, but I understand they lost everything. I don’t know if that is connected to the calls, but I told MacGregor to stay in David’s condo for a few days.”
“Oookay.” Mike was sounding cautious now.
“I told him you would be staying there too. Presumptuous of me, I know.”
“Sure. I’ll do it. Is Neva staying at Frank’s?”
“She’s decided to stay in the museum. All the crime unit are. I’ve sent the rest of the staff home until next week.”
There was silence on the other end of the phone for several moments. “Look, Doc, I need to know if Neva is in danger. I should be with her.”
“Neva is a police officer, as well as a criminalist, and she’s doing her job. She’ll be fine. We have an army of security, I assure you.”
“Are you expecting a raid or something? What the hell is going on?”
Diane could hear the frustration in Mike’s voice. She was tempted to confide in him. But she thought it better that as few people as possible know what she was up to. “Mike, I need you to trust me.”
“I do, Doc, but you know, this sounds like it involves me too.”
“It does. I won’t lie to you. I’m not giving you the cover story that I gave the rest of the staff. The danger is why I’m trying to get you and Mac both out of harm’s way. Please, Mike, trust me.”
“When you put it that way. .”
“Thank you.”
“Either Frank or David will be by to pick you up. As I understand it, David’s condo’s a fort. He’s inclined toward paranoia.”
“It sounds like an exciting evening. I’ll collect some books and some DVDs. He does have a player, doesn’t he?”
“Oh, yes. I think you and Mac will enjoy his entertainment system.”
“You know this is weird, don’t you?”
“Yes, I do. Just try to make the best of it.”
The museum was clearing out. The restaurant owner was not happy when Diane told him he had to close for two of his busiest days. Fortunately, the contract with them specified that sometimes the museum would have to close and so would the restaurant. When she had had that clause put in, she’d thought of things like fumigating, but nothing like this.
In a few minutes, the museum would be completely empty except for her security personnel and her crime scene crew. Diane sat down to collect her thoughts. Neva was digitizing her drawings. She looked up from the scanner and smiled at Diane.
“David’s gone to take care of MacGregor and Mike. I talked to Mike. He says you owe him big-time for making him room with Mac.” Her grin turned into a chuckle. “Poor Mike.” Neva seemed much happier now that Mike was taken care of.
Diane looked at her watch. It would be about an hour before Garnett and his crew arrived. She decided to pass the time by looking at the Moonhater Cave bones.
“I’ll be back in the osteology lab seeing what the witch has to say.”
“I thought I’d get my drawings ready to transfer to the newspaper when we decide to advertise them. When I finish, I’ll come back and map the witch’s skull.”
“I think John Rose will be tickled to see what she looked like.”
In her lab, Diane opened the box from the Rose Museum of Antiquities. The bones were carefully protected in bubble wrap. The small pieces were in separate boxes. Diane took the fragile bones from the box and laid them out on the table the way they would have been in her body. If it was a
An amazing number of the bones were present. More than Diane expected from a set of bones handed down with only an oral provenance that could be mythical. There were a couple of vials of dirt packed with them. Diane smiled as she thought of Gregory and his wife surreptitiously collecting the dirt from the cave. She took the dirt samples and set them aside. She’d ask Mike to analyze them when the museum opened again.
She surveyed the bones laid out on the table. They were fragile but in good condition. She’d ask John Rose if he wanted her to have Korey stabilize them. They were an amber color-a sort of mottled gold-red-brown-and had a patina that, though it wasn’t shiny exactly, did have a vague sheen. Around the skull and some of the bones was a crust of minerals-probably salt.
The first thing Diane did was to take samples. She scraped the mineral deposit into a separate vial and labeled it. She looked inside the skull and other orifices and found samples of dirt, which she put in another labeled vial.
Rose had given her permission to take samples of the bone and teeth for testing. She would take a piece out of a long bone and a couple of teeth. Isotope analysis of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, strontium and lead from her teeth could give interesting results about where she was actually from. These elements were taken into the body through the food that was eaten, the air that was breathed, and the water that was drunk as a person was growing, and became a fixed part of their chemical makeup. The proportions of the chemicals deposited in the teeth were different in different locales throughout the world. The chemical analyses would tell where she grew up.
Diane could see the appeal of archaeology. There was something satisfying and calming about looking at the bones of the ancient dead, trying to figure out not just how they had died, but what their lives were like.
Time was short, so Diane decided to look over the bones quickly and go back for a more thorough examination later. She focused on the ribs-on something she had spotted when she laid out the bones.
The right eighth rib was in two pieces that had been glued back together. She would ask Korey the best way to dissolve the glue. The seventh and ninth ribs on the right side were a quarter and a half cut through, respectively. The cut on the seventh was on the bottom of the rib. On the ninth the cut was on the top. She did a quick calculation on her notepad. That would encompass a width of about two inches.
A glance at the sternum-the breastbone-revealed about a half-inch chunk missing on the left side. Diane looked again at the cuts in the seventh and ninth ribs. The cuts were V-shaped, and the bone displacement went from back to front.
It looked like she had been stabbed in the back with a double-edged sword. The blade had cut through the eighth rib, slicing the edges of the two adjacent ribs, passed though and nicked a chunk out of the breastbone. The sword would have gotten the heart and liver, and possibly several other organs. It was a blow that killed instantly.
Diane didn’t know much about swords, but a two-inch-wide blade struck her as a rather sizable weapon. She would measure the width of the cuts and other variables that the bones showed and come up with a rough facsimile of the blade. Maybe John Rose could discover what kind of sword it was.
