Beverly Connor - Dead Secret

“What is this?” She said out loud and put paper out on another table and set the bone on it. “I’ll get Sylvia Mercer in here to identify this. Go ahead with what you were saying about Lymon.”

“Not a lot more. The students were aware that Mike lost his assistantship, but no one knew why. They thought maybe it was because she was angry over his changing his dissertation research to crystallography, which is out of her field. But she apparently encouraged him and helped him pick someone in crystallography to replace her on his committee. That doesn’t sound like anger. I’m thinking maybe this harassment was a onetime thing, and her anger came later.” He stopped talking a moment and stared at the bones Diane was laying out on the table.

Diane turned to look at him. “You look like you have something else to say.”

“Just trying to think it out. From what I can find out, her husband’s leaving hit her hard. I think she wanted to get some self-esteem back and thought Mike would be receptive.”

“Because he worked for her?”

“Because she knew he was attracted to another older woman.”

“You mean me. Is there something I should know about that?”

David looked up at her, surprised. “About you? No. I’m just thinking out loud. You said she thought you and Mike were having an affair. Everyone knows you and Mike go caving and that you’re friends. Some even know Mike would have liked to go out with you. She probably thought that Mike would be a safe place for her pride to land. She was wrong, and that’s why she got so angry.”

Diane noticed that David was tiptoeing around calling her an older woman, like Dr. Lymon-they were about the same age. She smiled. “You may be right. I guess the question is, how angry was she? If she didn’t stab us, could she have gotten one of her students to do it?”

David leaned with his back against the wall and folded his arms. “I don’t think so. Not the ones I talked to. I didn’t find evidence of any students who liked her well enough to carry her briefcase, much less kill for her.”

“How did you get all this information, if I may ask?” said Diane, looking in the garbage bag again and finding a foot bone.

David grinned. “The students were pretty easy to talk to. I pretended to be a father checking out the department for his kid.”

She looked up at him. “The students didn’t think that was funny?” Diane remembered when she was a young student, and she would have thought that strange.

“I’m sure they did, but what was really funny was that several of them seemed to like the idea that I would care enough to do it.”

“I’m relieved about Dr. Lymon. Thanks, David.” She let out a deep breath. “What about Alan?” She really didn’t want to talk about Alan, but she needed to find out if David had discovered anything.

“You know, I’m having trouble visualizing you married to someone like that,” said David.

Diane didn’t like to think about their marriage either. He now made her shiver, and not in a good way. “Yeah, me too.”

“I think he’s in the clear. He had a dental appointment that day. I talked to his dentist.”

“That’s a relief, too. Frankly, I didn’t want the complications his guilt would bring.”

“How’s your mother?”

“I’m not sure. As you can imagine, this had quite an effect on her. She’s usually strong and opinionated, but she was cowed when we brought her back. I think it will take time.”

Diane pulled out a cluster of bones with a long tail. “Got any idea what this is?” She put the bones on the table with the other animal bone.

“From the tail it looks like an opossum.”

“Why, David, I didn’t know you knew animal bones.”

“I’ve seen enough roadkill to be able to ID the tail.”

“It looks like we have several animals mixed in with Jane Doe.” She pulled out another animal long bone and a cheap walking shoe.

David picked out the beetles as Diane fished around in the leaves. She found several more bones of some kind of mammal.

Most of the human hand and foot bones were missing, as was her left femur. Oddly enough, the hyoid bone, which was often missing in decomposed corpses because it was so small, was there, but only because it was stuck to flesh. It was broken.

“The hyoid is a bone in the neck that is often broken in strangulation,” said Diane. “It looks like someone strangled her, slit her throat and sliced her up-and I’m not sure in that order.”

“Overkill?”

“Maybe. The woman was old, weak and vulnerable. Why do this-and why do I keep asking questions like that?”

“Looking for a rational killer, I guess. You think it may be a serial? The way she was killed suggests a pattern.”

“Maybe. Have a look at the database. I’m not sure Sheriff Burns has the access or the manpower to do the searches we do.”

David collected all the live bugs he could find, as well as several bug parts. “Quite a collection,” he said.

“I’ll put the rest of the bag contents on the screen, spray out the dirt and pick out the leaves. I’ll let you have a look at the detritus to see if there are any other kinds of bugs.”

David nodded. He took his jar of bugs and left Diane alone with her bones. In the screen she found three bones of the hand and a thin gold wedding band. Unfortunately, it wasn’t engraved.

Diane took the scope and viewer into the isolation room to examine the bones for telltale fibers and any other small thing that might be revealed. She ran the scope along the bones and dried flesh and watched the magnified image on the monitor. She found several fibers, lifted them out with tweezers and placed each one in an envelope and labeled it.

The magnified image showed several cuts on the ribs similar to the cuts on the long bones. The killer had sliced down her torso, leaving nicks on both sides of her rib cage. God, thought Diane, how do people get disturbed enough to do this to a person?

Diane left the room and came back with the handheld metal detector from the crime lab. She moved it slowly a couple of inches above Jane Doe’s bones. It would be a long shot, but-The detector went off in the middle of her thought. The area was the upper part of the left femur, the greater trochanter, a prominence where the gluteals, iliopsoas, and piriformis muscles attached to the bone. The bone was covered with dark dried skin. When she put the scope over it, she could see it was sliced.

With a scalpel she gently cut the dried flesh away. In the scope image she saw something embedded in the exposed bone. She grasped it with a pair of forceps and pulled. It came out easily and was what she had expected and hoped for-the tip of a knife blade. With this, if they found the knife, they could identify it as the weapon. She put the metal fragment in an evidence bag and labeled it.

She used the scope again and examined the face, the teeth and the eye sockets for the minutiae that criminalists looked for-something caught in the teeth, a shred of something that had taped her mouth shut or her eyes closed-anything that might provide a clue to who she was and what had happened to her.

Jane Doe had most of her teeth, and they were in good condition-just a few old fillings. The pattern of wear on the adjacent teeth said that she’d had a bridge anchored to her upper back molars. But the bridge wasn’t present. Perhaps Jin and Neva would find it.

Something in the left eye socket caught Diane’s attention-a very small, light-colored object stuck to the dried skin. Diane pulled gently on it with her tweezers until it came free. The object had a piece of something else attached to it. Diane put it in a tray and gently rinsed it.