Garnett leaned against the wall. He was doing the questioning. Diane sat across the interrogation table from Randy MacRae. He probably had been a pimply faced runt of a teen, because he was now an acne-scarred adult. He was buffed up, but he still had the look of a runt about him. He wasn’t wearing the museum T-shirt, and she wasn’t blindfolded, but she recognized his arrogant voice. He sat smirking at her with his arms folded-still cocky.
“You got nothin’ on me. I’m not saying anything without my lawyer. That means this is over.”
“You don’t have to say anything,” said Diane. “We have you and Valentine. How else could we have found you? And when I say we have you, let me assure you I mean we have you. We have your code of life.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“She means your DNA, you stupid little twit,” said Garnett. “We also know you did time as a juvenile.”
“Juvi records are sealed.”
“Not from me,” said Diane. “You were caught hacking into people’s computer files, changing information, trying to mess their lives up. You didn’t learn, did you?”
He was having to force his smirk now. “I’m not talking without my lawyer.”
“Fine by me,” Garnett said. “You want to wait for your lawyer, that’s your legal right. Maybe you think your lawyer can cut you some kind of deal. We don’t need a deal. We’ve got everything we need to put you away for the rest of your natural life. Your lawyer can’t even get you out on bail. Not after you made terroristic threats.”
“You can’t prove nothin’.”
Garnett banged his hand on the desk. Randy jumped.
“You can’t talk without your lawyer. You have to shut up now.”
“I don’t think he’ll talk even with his lawyer,” said Diane. “I think he and Valentine have what they think is job security. All they have to do is a little jail time and they get a lot of money. It’s like a job, except instead of going to work every day, they stay in jail every day. They were probably told they’d serve only a couple of years if they got caught. These aren’t the kind of guys who keep up with current events.”
“No,” said Garnett. “They don’t know that the kind of threats made against you, the museum and the crime lab will put them away for twenty-five to life. Before they get out, we’ll have them for the murders. We’ll turn them over to the Feds for kidnapping you, and they’ll get another twenty-five years under federal mandatory sentencing.”
“Besides,” said Diane, looking Randy in the eyes. “You really think the Taggart family is going to pay you, knowing you gave them up?”
Randy’s fake smirk vanished, his eyes widened and he looked from Diane to Garnett, clearly surprised, clearly scared. She’d made a hit, all of it. He was promised money if he kept his mouth shut, and it was the Taggart family.
“Well, I suppose I’ll be going now,” said Diane. “When his lawyer comes, I wonder who he’ll be working for, this skinny little twit or the Taggarts.”
Diane rose and left the room. Garnett followed on her heels.
“Okay.” Garnett was almost in a frenzy. “You want to tell me what that was about? The Taggarts? The ones who own Taggart Industries? The guy running for senator? The best-known do-gooder in the state?”
“The same,” said Diane.
“You have some kind of proof the Taggarts are involved? Because if you don’t, I’m not going to stick my neck out. Why didn’t you tell me ahead of time?”
“I don’t have proof. We aged a snapshot of a young woman we found with Caver Doe-it looks amazingly like Rosemary Taggart. I saw her at the funeral of Vanessa Van Ross’s grandmother. It all just came together for me.”
“That’s it?”
“I was playing a hunch.”
“That’s what we do,” said Garnett. “We play hunches. You find the evidence.”
“When the crime scene unit processed Valentine’s and MacRae’s apartments, they found navy wool caps that match the fibers from the lab break-in and from the quarry murders of Jake Stanley and Donnie Martin. They also found a box of surgeon’s gloves containing the same type of powder present at both of those scenes. It’s circumstantial, but put that with their DNA on my clothes and the same powder on the duct tape that bound me, and the evidence is more than coincidental.” Diane let out a breath. “I know-without a confession I have nothing against the Taggarts, but you saw his face.”
Garnett raked his hands through his hair. “Dammit. Yes, I saw his face.”
“I don’t know which family member. It’s a large family. And you don’t have to interrogate them until we have substantially more evidence to go on.”
“And I won’t.” He paused and gave her a long look. “Okay, let’s see what the other one has to say. Go ahead and play your game on him and we’ll see how he reacts.”
They didn’t get much more information from Neil Valentine. He started out just like MacRae, cocky, calling for a lawyer, and ended up with the same surprised look on his face. He’d done jail time before. Diane was betting he didn’t want to do any more without the payoff he had been promised. She had hoped that putting a wedge of doubt in might get one of them to talk. But the bottom line was, neither said anything.
The only plus was that they came away with a cup Randy MacRae had drunk from. Now she had a legitimate sample of his DNA the crime lab could compare with the sample they had from her abduction. She had also gotten a good look at their hands. Neither had the badly damaged finger that showed up in the clay from Neva’s break- in.
As Diane was leaving the Rosewood police station, she heard her name called out.
It was Police Officer Janice Warrick, with whom Diane had a bumpy history. Officer Warrick was dividing her attention between motioning to Diane and watching the TV monitor. Diane walked across to the TV area.
“Have you seen this?”
Janice Warrick was all smiles, without a trace of any unpleasantness between them. Diane looked at the TV screen where Janice was looking, along with eight or ten other police officers.
“Those are Neva’s drawings, aren’t they?” Janice said. “Look, Bud,” she said to a fellow officer, “Neva did those.”
All of Neva’s drawings were on the TV screen. The news anchor was basically reading the press release sent to them by David, urging anyone who recognized the people in the drawings to contact the Rosewood Police Department.
Diane read the lettering printed on the screen below the portraits: ROSEWOOD 1942 COLD CASES. DO YOU KNOW THESE PEOPLE?
Officer Warrick put her arms around Diane and hugged her. Diane wasn’t sure why. Perhaps celebrity hysteria was sweeping Rosewood.
Diane drove back to the museum feeling oddly depressed. She believed the museum was safe, the thugs who threatened to burn it down were in jail and she had solid evidence against them. What nagged her was that she was afraid the real orchestrator was beyond her reach-and would stay out of reach. Even with a mountain of evidence against them, the rich and powerful often weren’t convicted-and she had no evidence whatsoever. Even if Valentine and MacRae rolled over on their benefactors, she had no corroborating evidence. The snapshot from the cave didn’t mean anything. It was just an old picture Caver Doe had in his pocket, and the resemblance to Mrs. Taggart could be a coincidence.
She pulled into the parking lot of the museum. Few cars were there-mostly her crime lab people. She recognized Mike’s SUV. The RV was gone. She smiled to herself. That was a nice thing Frank had done.
As she entered the building a woman who looked to be in her forties and an older man somewhere between sixty and seventy were arguing with the security guard. The woman was dressed in an inexpensive dark blue pantsuit that fit snugly on her slightly overweight frame. The man wore jeans, a plaid short-sleeved shirt, and a cap that hadn’t been conditioned to put a curve in the bill. The woman was shaking a large manila envelope she held in her hand.
“We don’t want to see the museum; we want to see this Fallon woman. It’s about the people they’re asking about on TV,” the woman almost shouted at the security guard.
Diane’s spirits lifted. Already there was a bite.
