Beverly Connor - Dead Secret

“I found something at my house.”

“Something that I missed?” cried Jin.

“Sort of. In a way.”

Jin’s look was a mixture of amazement and horror.

“What is it?” said Diane.

“You know that the intruder destroyed all my polymer clay figures. He also got into my workplace and messed up my clay, mashing it all together.” She took a twisted and folded piece of red, blue and brown clay and set it on the table with a clunk. She had clearly baked the mass of clay.

“I went by my place before visiting Mike and sort of got to crying over my clay and looking at it. I think the intruder made a mistake. There was an imprint in the clay.”

“Fingerprints?” asked David.

“No, not fingerprints. I think he wore latex gloves.” She tapped the piece she had set on the table. “I found an imprint in here that looks like the folds of a glove. I baked this piece to make a mold. Then I put another piece of clay in the mold and made a cast. This is what I found.” She put another piece of baked clay on the table. This one was the color of terra-cotta pots.

Diane picked it up and looked at the form in the clay. “It’s an impression of his fingers.”

“I’m thinking that he took my clay and was mashing it together and made the impression with his four fingers. Look at the folds, kind of like the inside of a gloved hand, and the impression itself is sort of muted, as if it had something covering it. You can see the back side of a ring and fingernails. You can also see that one finger is badly damaged.”

“Very good, Neva,” said Jin. He grinned at her.

“I’ll put it in the evidence drawer for my house break-in,” said Neva.

“Call Garnett,” said Diane. “Tell him what you found.”

“Me?” said Neva.

Neva had always been a little intimidated by Garnett. “You found it,” said Diane. “And it’s an identifying characteristic.”

Neva nodded, then smiled. “Sure.”

Diane turned to Jin. “What did the two of you find at the Jane Doe crime scene?”

“A running shoe, a pair of socks, several small plastic buttons,” said Jin. “But I may have missed something.”

“Get over it, Jin,” said Diane.

“Yeah, Neva was there,” said David. “She would have found anything you didn’t.”

Jin shrugged and continued. “We found some of the bones of her hands and feet and a few others we couldn’t identify. We photographed the place, but didn’t find anything but the bones. The deputy did a number on the site. Oh, I did get a bug out of his car. It’s a dermestid, just like we figured.”

“Did you find a femur?” asked Diane. “Our Jane Doe is missing one.”

Jin and Neva looked at each other. “No,” they said, shaking their heads.

“Are there any nursing homes in the area?” Diane asked.

“The closest one is ten miles. Sheriff Burns said no one is missing that he’s aware of,” said Jin. “The sheriff took us to the site. He’s pretty steamed at Deputy Singer, especially when he saw all the shovel marks in the ground and we told him how the bones arrived. Singer was supposed to have called us to photograph the scene and collect the bones.”

“I got the impression,” said Neva, “that he won’t be having a job when he gets out of the hospital.”

“Whenever that is,” said Jin. “Sheriff Burns said that besides his injuries, he developed some kind of rash thing.”

“Urticaria, probably,” said David. He rubbed his arm unconsciously. “It’s a skin condition brought on by an allergic reaction to insect bites. He probably looks pretty bad about now.”

“Poor guy. Is that all the crime scenes we have at the moment?” said Diane. She hoped that the murderers in the area would hold off killing anyone until her team got caught up.

“I believe that’s it, Boss,” answered Jin. “Except Caver Doe.”

“Caver Doe has waited fifty years. He can wait a little longer. Let’s get the analysis of these cases done as quickly as we can. Neva, when you have time, I’d like to see some sketches of the faces of the victims. First up, get the autopsy photos of Quarry Doe and draw him a presentable face-preferably with his eyes open. We need to identify him. You okay with that?”

Neva wrinkled her nose. “Sure. If I can slip on their fingers to get a print, I can draw their decaying faces.”

“Jane Doe’s skull from the woods will be ready in a couple of days. It’s in with the dermestids now. And it looks like we’ll be getting another skeleton from the deep.”

Diane spent the next day working only on museum business. Jin and Sheriff Canfield were arranging for a salvage company to raise the car from the bottom of the quarry lake. Most of the evidence from the various crime scenes had been processed. She’d checked Jane Doe’s bones. They were nearly ready for her to examine again. Things were going smoothly, and that always made her a little nervous. She went to bed that evening waiting for the other shoe to drop. Frank told her that she was turning into a pessimist.

Early the next morning Diane stood on the bank of the quarry waiting for Jin to surface. A salvage crew was waiting with her. They had their own divers. Once Jin and his team came up, they would begin the job of raising the car from the bottom. The depth had been measured at 120 feet. The divers had to descend and ascend in increments to adapt to the changes in pressure.

The plan in operation was for Jin to work the inside of the car and collect the bones and anything else that could get damaged or lost during the recovery. Diane had brought Korey with her. He stood talking to the salvagers and Sheriff Canfield.

Korey had told Jin that when he put anything in a bag, to make sure he sealed enough water in to protect the evidence inside. Everything wet had to stay wet to prevent decomposition from exposure to the air-at least until they got all the information they needed from it.

“As soon as the bones and artifacts come out of the quarry,” Korey said, “they’ll go into tubs of distilled water. Then we’ll dry the bones and prevent them from cracking with a series of alcohol baths, increasing the concentration until we reach a hundred percent alcohol. You can go ahead and analyze the bones if you want to. It won’t hurt to take them out of the water for a short amount of time if you keep a spray bottle handy to keep them damp.”

Diane looked at her watch. Jin still had fifteen minutes before he and the other divers had to come up, according to the chart he showed her. She occupied herself by comparing the scene around her with the notes and reports that her team had created. The long-overgrown avenue through the woods was more evident in person. The road that led to the quarry consisted of two parallel dirt tracks with its middle grown up with tall grass.

The quarry lake was a pretty place, a place that would have been a good swimming hole. The water was clear and it was relatively private. A thick wood grew around the whole area. Diane was told by the local historians that a hundred years ago granite had been mined here. She’d probably seen buildings made from its stone and didn’t know it.

Rocks made her think of Mike. She wondered how he was getting along. Neva said he had been busy making notes of what he wanted to do in his new job. Her mind wandered to Annette Lymon. Andie had told her that Dr. Lymon was looking for her. She dreaded that encounter.

The sun was warm on her face. She closed her eyes. She would like to go swimming right now. She’d been fighting a mild feeling of depression for the past few days, brought on, no doubt, by what had happened to her mother, seeing her ex-husband again, and what he did to Susan and Gerald. And not to mention getting stabbed. She rubbed her arm.