“Him?” said Mike, and started to walk toward the body. A policeman held him back. “Why?”
“I don’t know. He babbled something about you trying to steal his rabbits.”
Neva slid her arm around Mike’s waist and he put his arm around her. Anchoring each other from evil, it seemed to Diane.
“That’s him too?” said Mike. “Who is he? Damn. What is he?”
“A demon from hell, as near as I can tell,” said Diane.
“We now know where that strange smell came from,” said David.
Neva’s face blanched. “How long do you think he’s been in the museum?”
“And why didn’t someone see him?” asked Garnett. “Guess we’ll never know the answer to that.”
Neva was staring at Diane. She said, “Should you go to the doctor? Your face.”
Diane found a mirror and looked into it. A large bruise spread across her jaw, and her lip was split and bleeding. One of the paramedics came to look at it.
“Can you move it? Does this hurt?”
“It’s fine. Just a little sore,” she said.
He pronounced her jaw unbroken, but told her to put ice on it. She nodded absently.
“Neva, he’s also the one who trashed your house. If you look at his hands, you’ll see they fit the mold you made. And David, you know that thing we couldn’t think of?”
“The Odells,” he said, and Diane nodded. “They saw him at the funeral.”
“I’m not sure why you guys didn’t smell him,” said Jin, waving his hand in front of his face. “This guy was rotting before he even died.”
“He’s putrid,” said Diane. “David, Jin, will you two process my clothes, please? I’ve got to get out of them and get a shower before I die from nausea.”
“Of course,” said David. “Let’s take you into the conference room, so as not to contaminate this crime scene.”
“When you’re done, get some rest,” said Garnett. “I’ll do a report later. Do put some ice on that jaw. It looks terrible.”
Diane sat in her museum office in clean jogging clothes with an ice pack on her jaw and her feet up on a chair, her hair still wet from the shower. A crime scene cleanup crew was working in her lab removing the residue of the human carnage that had occurred there. Chanell was overseeing the installation of a new and better surveillance system that had arrived to replace the one sabotaged by Valentine and MacRae. Korey was still working on the diaries.
Things were working toward normal, but nothing felt right. Someone in the Taggart family had caused all this mess, and she wanted them brought to justice. She’d been over and over the evidence looking for something, anything that would definitively point to them.
“Boss?” Jin was at the door holding a piece of paper, waving it at her.
Diane put her feet on the floor and the ice pack down on her desk. “What have you got?”
Jin collapsed in a chair in front of her desk. “I like this office. I think you need to spiff up your bone office some more.”
“Did you come to recommend a decorator?”
Jin grinned and brushed his hair back from his eyes. “No. Korey and I were talking about the diaries, and Korey wondered why Caver Doe-I can’t get used to calling him Dale Wayne Russell-anyway, Korey was wondering why he didn’t write down what happened, since he didn’t die right away-and had nothing to do but sit in that cave and wait. He at least had time to eat a couple of Moon Pies.”
“And you said?” prompted Diane.
“That he didn’t have anything to write on. Then I remembered that he had a pencil in his pocket, and I thought about it, and there it was. . the money. What if he wrote on the money? Remember the roll of bills we found in his shirt pocket?”
Diane nodded.
“I didn’t do anything with them.” He shrugged. “It was money covered in blood and cadaver juice. I didn’t think. But I went back and did the ESDA thing. Did you know that Korey has an electrostatic detection apparatus too?”
“Yes, Jin, I did.”
“We have lots of redundancies,” said Jin.
“No, we don’t. The museum and the crime scene unit are separate.”
“Oh, yeah, I forget sometimes.”
“What did you find on the bills?”
“He wrote down what happened. Sort of.”
Diane leaned forward and took the paper from Jin. The photograph of the electrostatic image was difficult to read, but she could make out words. The handwriting grew progressively worse-probably as he had grown sicker.
“I kind of translated it on the back,” said Jin.
Diane turned it over and read.
“That’s a sad story,” said Diane. “It’s signed ‘Dale.’ We were right; it’s Dale Wayne Russell.”
“Poor fellow. Waiting for someone named Emmett to come back for him. And in love with Rosemary. Isn’t this like a dying declaration?” said Jin.
“Yes, it is. Garnett’s been trying to find out something about the identity of Dale Wayne Russell. I haven’t talked with him about it since yesterday. He’s having a hard time overcoming his political survivalist tendencies. This might light a fire under him.”
Diane was about to pick up the phone when it rang.
“Diane Fallon.”
“Dr. Fallon, this is Emmett Taggart. We met at Helen Egan’s funeral.”
“Yes, Mr. Taggart, I know who you are.”
Jin’s eyes grew wide. Diane pointed to the phone in Andie’s office, and Jin nodded and went in to pick up.
She watched Jin. When he was ready to pick up she said, “Hold on just a moment, please, Mr. Taggart. Let me go to my other phone.”
She motioned to Jin and he picked up the receiver to listen. There was the momentary sound of another phone on the line until Jin pressed the mute button.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Taggart?” she said.
“It’s what I can do for you. I’ve been thinking about that mummy exhibit of yours and how much I like the museum. I was considering making a sizable donation.” Emmett Taggart’s voice reflected a man accustomed to being in control, to having his wishes fulfilled, to having people ingratiate themselves to him.
“Kendel Williams takes care of donations,” said Diane in an attempt to disarm him. “She’s not in her office at the moment. I’ve had to clear out the museum because of some unfortunate events. Our lives are very much disrupted.”
There was a pause during which Diane imagined Taggart enjoying the contribution he had made to that disruption. She looked at Jin and held up her legal pad on which she had written the word
The tone of Emmett Taggart’s voice now reflected a noticeably more insistent quality but with a varnish of civility. “I understand what you are saying, but for the kind of donation I’m thinking about, I’d rather speak to the director.”
“And you would want what in return for this donation? For large donors, we usually name a room after them.”
Distaste was now evident in his voice as he was actually having to ask for something, to justify himself. “I wasn’t thinking of a room. I was thinking of consideration for all the years of good I have done, all the charities I
