Beverly Connor - Dead Secret

“He hit some Atlanta companies; that’s why my unit was involved. I noticed that in one of his hotel rooms our guys discovered a small glassine envelope. I thought that might mean he was a stamp collector, but that was a long shot. There are lots of uses for glassine envelopes. I gave the info to the FBI. They checked out stamp conventions that corresponded to places he’d visited and didn’t find a correlation, so they dropped it.”

His eyes twinkled in the candlelight as he spoke. Diane absolutely loved his eyes. “But you didn’t.” She took a bite of her steak. It occurred to her that she hadn’t eaten all day, except for an energy bar for breakfast.

“I’d been studying the guy. He collected Matchbox cars, rocks, coins and comic books as a kid-he was a collector. Stamps are nice for someone who moves around a lot. No, I didn’t let it go. The FBI had hacked into some of the places he shopped online and saw that he used the password ‘ironage’ on one site, ‘lavaroad’ and ‘tigerail’ on a few others.”

“Tiger ale? What is that, some kind of drink?”

Frank shook his head. “The FBI didn’t think anything about his passwords, but I got to playing around with them. They’re anagrams for Noriega, Alvarado and Galtieri.”

Diane stopped eating and stared at him. “How did you possibly come up with that?”

“I’m a detective-one who deals with lots of numbers and words. What can I say?”

“So what did you make of these anagrams?”

“The FBI thought it was interesting, but still didn’t make anything of it. I was betting that was his stamp interest-dictators of small countries, something like that. I looked again at the places he’d been and got the catalogs of the ones that had stamp conventions. They all had stamps of the kind I thought he might collect if my hunch was right. As a check, I looked at some of the stamp convention catalogs at places he didn’t go-sure enough, none of them had the kind of stamps I thought would interest him.”

“Pretty slick,” said Diane. “How did you find him?”

“The FBI at this point had come to my way of thinking, and they tried to set a few traps, but they couldn’t lure him in. Then the thing about Pitcairn Island came up in the news-the mayor and his buddies convicted for multiple rapes. The mayor served as a de facto dictator on the island for years. It turns out, too, that the basis of Pitcairn’s economy is stamps. It was a long shot, but I thought maybe it might appeal to him. So I picked out a set of stamps that he would find interesting-and rare-and set my own trap.

I put them up for sale-called them a rare collection from the realm of Pitcairn’s petty dictator-he bit and we got him.”

Diane laughed and clapped her hands. “Frank, I’m impressed. I really am.”

“Sometimes it comes down to paying attention to words.”

“You certainly went a long way with a few jumbled words.”

Diane took a bite of her potato and kept her fork in her mouth so long that Frank put his own fork down and looked at her.

“I know that look,” he said. “You thought of something.”

“I did. It was the word. You’re right: Sometimes it comes down to words.”

Frank’s eyes sparkled in amusement as he watched Diane.

“Okay, what’s the word?”

“Cave. You know about the break-in here?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve been assuming that the real target of the break-in was the Moonhater Cave witch bones-but it wasn’t.”

“It wasn’t?”

“No, I don’t believe it was. It was a sleight-of-hand kind of thing-you watch one thing while something else is really going on. John Rose sent a decoy box of bones because he expected that an attempt would be made to steal the Moonhater witch bones somewhere in transit or after they arrived here.”

She explained to Frank about the controversy over the Moonhater Cave witch bones and about the Wiccans and Druids.

“He expected the bones to be stolen by the Druids or by someone they hired to do it. The bones were stolen, and that’s what fooled me. It was a natural conclusion that his expectation had come true. The thieves also took a couple of microscopes, but I thought that was a distraction meant to hide their real intent. They stole a box of Caver Doe evidence too, and I thought maybe that was also for show.”

Diane punctuated her sentences with her fork. “The real Moonhater witch bones arrived today. They’re in a box packed and labeled identically to the box of bones that was stolen. It was a plain box cushioned with bubble wrap inside the shipping box. On the box containing the bones, John Rose wrote the words ‘Moonhater Cave Bones’-didn’t say ‘Moonhater Witch Bones,’ which is the way we’ve been thinking about them. It said ‘Moonhater Cave Bones. ’ You see?”

Frank squinted at her. “Spell it out.”

“The thieves came looking for the bones we found in a cave. They saw a box lying in plain sight that said ‘cave bones’ and probably thought, ‘How many could there be?’ They were after Caver Doe. They thought they got him. And that’s why they also took the box of evidence labeled Caver Doe.”

“It makes sense,” said Frank. “But why? Caver Doe’s bones are, what. . about fifty, sixty years old?”

“I don’t know yet.” She reached for her cell. “I need to call David.” She dialed his number and he answered on the first ring.

“Hey, Diane, what’s up?” David sounded hopeful.

“Something just occurred to me.” She told him about her theory.

David was silent a moment. “That makes more sense to me than that the Druids did it.”

“You know what that means, don’t you? It means the Caver Doe death, the crime lab break-in and the quarry murders are linked. If Caver Doe is linked to the quarry by the buttons, and the break-in was about Caver Doe, then the break-in and the quarry murders are linked.”

“Interesting,” said David. “Of course, it depends on your scenario being right.”

“It is right,” she said emphatically and laughed. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow. I just wanted you to be thinking about it.”

“That sounded interesting,” said Frank.

“No more crime. Let’s talk about dessert. Let’s order something really rich.”

Diane was in early the next morning. After a workout at home, she jogged the museum nature trail and took a shower in her office suite. She felt invigorated. Her arm was healing nicely. She did some museum business and had put all the finished papers on Andie’s desk by the time her assistant arrived. They spent a few minutes discussing museum business; then Diane went upstairs to the crime lab.

David was in the lab. So was Jin.

“I thought I was early,” said Diane.

“You are,” said David. “We’re just earlier. I told Jin about your revelation.”

“I think you’re right, Boss.”

Jin and David were writing on two whiteboards. On one board, Jin was listing each crime and the evidence they had so far. On the other board, David was making a matrix. The top of the matrix he labeled Crime Scene and listed Cave, Lake Bottom, Quarry, Lab . The side of the matrix he labeled Evidence and listed Buttons, Picture of Car, Decade, Theft . He marked an X wherever one of the pieces of evidence was linked to a scene.

When he finished he stood back and looked at his work. An X at one intersection in the matrix indicated that identical buttons were found at the Caver Doe and the Plymouth Doe crime scenes; another showed that both deaths occurred during the same decade. Another X in the matrix confirmed that the picture of the submerged car found near the bodies of Scuba Doe and Quarry Doe linked their deaths with the car containing Plymouth Doe found at the bottom of the quarry. The crime lab break-in and the Caver Doe death were connected by the box of Caver Doe evidence stolen from the lab. Most of the connections were tenuous, but all were suggestive.