Beverly Connor - Dust to Dust

All in all, Diane had a good ending to a not altogether pleasant workday. After Kathy Nicholson left, Andie came back from the meeting with the curators and gave Diane her report. Diane told Andie to write it up and she could present it to the board.

Frank called and said he would be late coming home, probably very late. Diane grabbed an apple and cold drink from her refrigerator and called it dinner. She sat down on the couch in the sitting room off her office, put on a CD of classical music, and cleared her mind of anything to do with murder or death before she left the museum.

Diane drove out to Marcella’s house before she went home. When she arrived there, Marcella’s yard was lit up. David had brought the lights they used for night work. Why, she wondered, were they working at night?

A police car was parked in the drive. A patrolman sauntered up to her car.

“I hope there’s not another problem,” said Diane, getting out of her SUV.

“No, ma’am. David Goldstein asked a couple of us to come down and stand guard. He didn’t want a repeat of the other night,” he said.

“Good move. How is Patrolman Daughtry doing?” asked Diane. “His leg healing up?”

“Leg’s doing good. Got in a bit of a dustup over his gun. I guess you heard,” he said. “I don’t think it will amount to much. He’s off work now with his leg up, watching football reruns, so I guess he’s doing great. You really think those punks will come back here?”

“I don’t know. It was pretty stupid of them to come the first time,” said Diane.

“You’re right about that. Can’t account for stupid. We’ll keep a lookout. We got a little drive we can circle that takes us around to the back where they came in the first time. They try to park there again, we’ll get them.”

“Thank you, Officer,” said Diane. She went around back and spotted David standing at a plane table tripod looking at aerial maps. Hector and Scott were making a grid of Marcella’s yard with string and stakes.

“Are you camping here?” said Diane.

David gave her a look somewhere between a grin and a frown. “Looks like it. It was Scott’s idea. He and Hector are all over the experiment thing. We’ll probably be able to write a paper entitled ‘The Best One Hundred Ways to Find a Buried Body in the Woods.’ Seriously though, they did come up with some good ideas.”

“Why not start in the morning?” she said, looking out over the lit yard at the busy Spearman twins.

David followed her gaze. “I see why Jin hired the two of them. They work very efficiently together.” He looked back at Diane. “We started right after I spoke with you. It gets dark so early these days, Scott thought it would be a good idea to work after dark setting up grid lines so we can start taking samples in the morning. So far it seems to be going well.” He grinned. “They haven’t started singing ‘Kum Ba Yah’ yet. That’s a plus.”

“Wait until bedtime,” said Diane. She looked around the yard. “Where are your tents?”

“Marcella’s daughter and her husband came by the house. They told us to just bed down in our sleeping bags in her mother’s living room. They are very nice people,” he said.

“They are. Did she say how Marcella is?” asked Diane.

“Doing better, tires easily. She said she seems to have clarity of thought. I think Paloma was more worried about that than anything else,” he said. “Neva is coming tomorrow to help. I think she said Mike will come too. That will be good.”

“That’s right-Mike is due back from Africa,” said Diane.

Mike Seger was the museum’s geology curator. He also worked for a pharmaceutical firm, collecting extremophiles from around the world, a job that allowed him to bring unique specimens back to the museum’s rock collection.

“Due back tonight,” said David. “This grid part isn’t going to take as long as I was afraid it would. However, running the samples will take some time. Do you really expect to find bodies?” he asked.

“I’m not sure. It’s a gut feeling. The bone came from somewhere,” said Diane.

“A lot of strange stuff going on around here,” said David. “Somebody was crazy for yard ornaments. We’ve found a ton of them just lying around. Lots of gargoyles. Apparently they haven’t kept away the evil spirits,” he said.

“They aren’t on guard,” said Diane, smiling and looking up at the roofline of the house.

“I suppose that explains it,” said David. He gestured toward the porch where Daughtry fell through the rotten boards. “The policeman said Daughtry was suspended for a couple of days. The chief of police wasn’t upset that he dropped his gun, but that he didn’t report it. I personally think they’re being a little tough on him. But it does look like Ray-Ray What’s-his-name was shot with Daughtry’s gun.”

“Does Hanks know anything more about that?” asked Diane.

“If he does, he’s not talking. I think information primarily goes one way with him. He’s really trying hard to keep control of the case,” said David.

“I’m not taking it away from him,” said Diane. David grinned. “Don’t you dare say, ‘Not yet.’ ”

“Hanks did tell me he got a list of places that employ day laborers, and he’s questioning people Ray-Ray worked with,” said David. “I don’t know if he’s found out anything of value. What I wonder is why they shot Ray-Ray. Maybe he was just a day laborer in the burglary. Maybe he wasn’t needed when it was finished.”

“Could be,” said Diane.

“Or maybe they just shot him because his name was Ray-Ray and they got tired of saying it over and over again. Who would name their child Ray-Ray?” David threw up his hands.

“Have you been able to separate any of the footprints connected with Marcella’s attack from the later ones that were left when we were attacked?”

“I have several prints on top of one another. I think most of the secondary prints were from the paramedics and Jonas Briggs. Izzy collected the shoe prints of the paramedics, so we have those, and I got Jonas to give me his. I’ve got the computer working on separating the images. I don’t hold out a lot of hope. There’s a lot of smearing. So far, the boot prints I told you about earlier are the only ones we’ve found that are clear enough to match with a specific shoe-if we find the shoe.”

“Where is Neva on her search of the courthouse records?” said Diane.

“I don’t know. She had to go out on a couple of murders over in Jackson County. She’s working on the courthouse project between jobs,” he said.

“What do you have here?” Diane gestured toward the map.

“Aerial maps taken in the area over the years. I’m looking for some common points we can mark with stakes. We’re going to do an overlay when we get the data on the chemical makeup of the soil and see what ground features correlate with what chemical characteristics. Too bad we don’t have any infrared photos.”

“It looks like you have everything under control,” she said.

“It’s coming along. Hope we don’t have any more surprise intruders,” he said. “I got backup just in case. A couple of patrolmen wanted to earn overtime for the holidays coming up. It’s all working out for everyone,” David said.

“I met one of them coming in. They seem to have a plan for securing the property,” said Diane.

“I walked them over the area when they got here,” David told her.

It seemed to Diane that everything was going well here. If she hurried, she could make it home before it got too late to call Kingsley to fill him in on the latest about the three women from Gainesville. It would be interesting to see if he was as suspicious as she was about them.