Beverly Connor - Dead Past

“How about the books?”

“I’ve looked through a number of them, and so far nothing jumps out. It would help if I had some idea what I am looking for.”

“If we had the solution, we’d have the solution, wouldn’t we?” said Diane.

“Cute. I’ll keep you informed on all the cases,” said David.

“I’ll take the Cipriano case, and you three work on the rest. Garnett will probably tell you what the GBI finds at the McNair crime scene if you ask him nicely.”

“You think the cases could be linked?” asked David.

Diane shrugged. “Right now I can’t see how. The only commonality between Stanton and McNair is me, unfortunately. And I really can’t see a connection with Cipriano-maybe Stanton and the meth lab, but you can’t get too far with rhyming words.”

David stared at her for several moments. “What? Did I miss something? Was there something in one of the poetry books about the meth lab explosion?”

Diane smiled. “No. I just wondered to myself, What if Jere Bowen heard wrong? She said the voice was muffled and she couldn’t hear exactly what he said.” Diane went over her rhyming list with him, stopping at cook. “It was just a thought.”

“Interesting. Long shot, but could be true.” David looked like he was going to laugh.

“OK, it was crazy, but who knows,” she said. “It will be a while before the GBI processes the trace from McNair, but maybe you can get some of the details of the crime scene from Garnett.”

“I’ll get to work.” David stood up. “We’ll solve this,” he said.

Diane could tell from his voice that he meant it.

“I’m glad you’re confident. I don’t relish people casting wondering glances at me for the rest of my life.”

“Like I said, we have Jin. I tell you, I don’t think you know how you motivated him.”

“Yes, I do,” said Diane.

Diane sat staring at the lone wolf for several minutes after David left her office, hoping that some pattern would form in her mind. She concluded that she didn’t have enough information. Blake Stanton, she was sure as she could be with so little information, was hit to keep him from talking. If the meth lab had exploded with only the cook inside, there wouldn’t be near the seriousness as it exploding with a house full of young people. It would be worth killing to keep secret any connection with that-provided that there was someone behind the lab besides the poor fellow who got blown to smithereens. The meth lab connection was a good place to start, she thought.

She opened up her bone vault where her computer equipment for reconstructing 3-D facial images from skulls was stored. She turned on the computer and the laser scanner.

Three partially reconstructed skulls were sitting in boxes of sand. One was from bones found in the burned-out basement. Not much was there-the brow and top of the eye sockets, the cheek and lower socket on the right side that included part of the nasal area. Part of a maxilla-the bone anchor for the upper teeth-and a fragment of a mandible-the lower jaw.

She was able to match the upper and lower parts because the wear patterns on the upper and lower molars and premolars fit exactly. Luckily, those teeth had been still in their sockets. Unfortunately, no dental records had been submitted that matched the remains she had.

Diane used clay to prop up the reassembled pieces of skull on the modeling pedestal. It looked like a strange piece of artwork. When the modeling software was up, she turned on the apparatus and watched as the pedestal rotated and the laser read the topography of the fragments and generated a matrix of points on which to construct a wire frame of the head and face.

Diane asked the software to interpolate the missing part of the face from the parts that were present. The result would be a face that looked more symmetrical than it actually was because the computer only had one side to calculate what the other side looked like. But it would be a likeness that would be useful.

When she had a wire frame on which to work, she asked the software to use the skin depth database to reconstruct the face. Building the face was a slower process. She watched it being constructed.

She felt free in the vault. At least Patrice Stanton couldn’t get to her here.

Diane studied the completed 3-D model of the face generated from the glued-together skull fragments. It was not someone she recognized. She didn’t think he would be. But she was willing to bet that he was known to someone in the police department.

Armed with a new face to work with, Diane printed out several paper copies, put an electronic copy of the image file on a memory stick, turned off her fancy equipment, and left the vault, locking it behind her.

She looked at her watch. It was a couple of hours past her usual lunch time. She hoped David, Jin, and Neva had stopped for lunch, but they were like her in that respect-often working right though it without noticing. Diane left her osteology lab and walked over to the crime lab. She found her crew busy. Jin and Neva had their heads together over a map. David was on the phone.

“Have you guys eaten?” asked Diane.

“Eat,” said Jin. “No time. We’ve got criminals to catch. Neva and I were just looking at the jogging route Marcus took. I’ll make a matrix of the access points and…”

“How did you find out where he was killed?” asked Diane.

Jin gave her his “Please, I’m a detective” look.

“What have you been doing?” asked David, placing the phone back on the hook.

Diane produced the printouts of the facial reconstruction.

“This skull was one of two that I hadn’t identified. The other was found on the first floor near a window. These bones were in the basement and they were the only bones found there-that is, the only bones McNair’s team turned over to us.” Diane was sure that there were bones in the material that McNair took that she would never see.

“You think this is the cook?” said David.

“I’m thinking that he is,” said Diane.

“Let’s send a copy to Garnett,” David suggested. “This should make him happy. It’s the best lead they’ve had on the meth lab thing. They’re up against the wall, and that Adler person’s been giving them hell about it.”

Diane handed David the memory stick; he put it in his computer and e-mailed the image to Garnett.

“OK,” said Diane sitting down at the table where Jin and Neva were looking at the map. “I thought you were working on the Stanton murder, Jin.”

Jin looked at Neva and over at David. “We’ve come up with a theory-hypothesis, to be more precise.”

“An idea would be the most accurate,” said David.

“OK, an idea,” said Jin. “What if McNair is mixed up somehow in the meth lab mess?”

“Mixed up how?” asked Diane. If that were true, it would be a sticky wicket, indeed.

Jin shrugged. “Not sure. He could have been investigating it on his own in hopes of cracking it and taking the glory. Found out too much and was killed.”

“Or,” offered David, “he’s in it up to his beady little eyeballs. He’s been spending a lot of money-I know Garnett said that his wife has money, but what if he’s really getting money from a drug operation? What if he’s the shadow the police are all looking for behind the meth cook? He went to great lengths to get all the evidence under his control, you’ll have to admit that.”

“OK,” said Diane, “I’m buying it so far.”

“We have several scenarios to look at,” said Jin. “McNair might have killed the Stanton kid because he was afraid the kid would talk, and then someone killed Stanton for the same reason, or for revenge, or something. Or, there is some other person above McNair in the meth operation who wanted to protect himself. Maybe he thought McNair was being too heavy-handed in taking the evidence and we were going to catch on that McNair was trying to hide something.”