Beverly Connor - Dead Secret

“The hell I will.” Diane punched him in the throat with her fist.

He squealed and raised his knife over his head.

The shot was deafening in the enclosed room. The specter paused, knife in midair. Diane didn’t wait to scramble away from him. He fell forward.

She looked over to see Emery half propped up with his gun aimed in her direction.

“I hope you don’t intend to shoot me after all this,” she said.

He lowered the gun. Diane went to him. He collapsed again into a pool of his own blood on the floor.

“Don’t tell my family, please. I’m sorry.”

“I’ll tell them you’re a hero,” said Diane.

He closed his eyes and Diane ran for the phone. It had been pulled out of the wall. She ran to her office phone. It was dead. She opened the vault. The phone in there was working. She dialed 911.

When she came out of her office, she expected to see the wild man gone, vanished the way demons did. But he lay on his face still, his blood spilling into an expanding puddle.

She felt for a pulse in Emery. There was none. His life had been shorter than he thought. In some odd way, his fall from grace may have saved her life. If Emery hadn’t been there, the madman would have killed her. She shivered at the thought. The smell that clung to her clothes sickened her. She went to the sink and threw up.

Her crew, including Mike and Korey, came in with the paramedics. They stood in the doorway like a startled Greek chorus and stared at Diane and the bloody scene. Garnett appeared soon after, looking equally as baffled.

“What happened here?” He went over to look at Emery, then at the stranger. “Who is he?”

“I have no idea. Emery saved my life. The other man was trying to kill me.”

Garnett looked at her and they locked gazes for several moments. “Okay, that works for me,” he whispered. “You have no idea who this other man is?”

“He’s the one who stabbed me and Mike.”

“Him?” said Mike, and started to walk toward the body. A policeman held him back. “Why?”

“I don’t know. He babbled something about you trying to steal his rabbits.”

Neva slid her arm around Mike’s waist and he put his arm around her. Anchoring each other from evil, it seemed to Diane.

“That’s him too?” said Mike. “Who is he? Damn. What is he?”

“A demon from hell, as near as I can tell,” said Diane.

“We now know where that strange smell came from,” said David.

Neva’s face blanched. “How long do you think he’s been in the museum?”

“And why didn’t someone see him?” asked Garnett. “Guess we’ll never know the answer to that.”

Neva was staring at Diane. She said, “Should you go to the doctor? Your face.”

Diane found a mirror and looked into it. A large bruise spread across her jaw, and her lip was split and bleeding. One of the paramedics came to look at it.

“Can you move it? Does this hurt?”

“It’s fine. Just a little sore,” she said.

He pronounced her jaw unbroken, but told her to put ice on it. She nodded absently.

“Neva, he’s also the one who trashed your house. If you look at his hands, you’ll see they fit the mold you made. And David, you know that thing we couldn’t think of?”

“The Odells,” he said, and Diane nodded. “They saw him at the funeral.”

“I’m not sure why you guys didn’t smell him,” said Jin, waving his hand in front of his face. “This guy was rotting before he even died.”

“He’s putrid,” said Diane. “David, Jin, will you two process my clothes, please? I’ve got to get out of them and get a shower before I die from nausea.”

“Of course,” said David. “Let’s take you into the conference room, so as not to contaminate this crime scene.”

“When you’re done, get some rest,” said Garnett. “I’ll do a report later. Do put some ice on that jaw. It looks terrible.”

Diane sat in her museum office in clean jogging clothes with an ice pack on her jaw and her feet up on a chair, her hair still wet from the shower. A crime scene cleanup crew was working in her lab removing the residue of the human carnage that had occurred there. Chanell was overseeing the installation of a new and better surveillance system that had arrived to replace the one sabotaged by Valentine and MacRae. Korey was still working on the diaries.

Things were working toward normal, but nothing felt right. Someone in the Taggart family had caused all this mess, and she wanted them brought to justice. She’d been over and over the evidence looking for something, anything that would definitively point to them.

“Boss?” Jin was at the door holding a piece of paper, waving it at her.

Diane put her feet on the floor and the ice pack down on her desk. “What have you got?”

Jin collapsed in a chair in front of her desk. “I like this office. I think you need to spiff up your bone office some more.”

“Did you come to recommend a decorator?”

Jin grinned and brushed his hair back from his eyes. “No. Korey and I were talking about the diaries, and Korey wondered why Caver Doe-I can’t get used to calling him Dale Wayne Russell-anyway, Korey was wondering why he didn’t write down what happened, since he didn’t die right away-and had nothing to do but sit in that cave and wait. He at least had time to eat a couple of Moon Pies.”

“And you said?” prompted Diane.

“That he didn’t have anything to write on. Then I remembered that he had a pencil in his pocket, and I thought about it, and there it was. . the money. What if he wrote on the money? Remember the roll of bills we found in his shirt pocket?”

Diane nodded.

“I didn’t do anything with them.” He shrugged. “It was money covered in blood and cadaver juice. I didn’t think. But I went back and did the ESDA thing. Did you know that Korey has an electrostatic detection apparatus too?”

“Yes, Jin, I did.”

“We have lots of redundancies,” said Jin.

“No, we don’t. The museum and the crime scene unit are separate.”

“Oh, yeah, I forget sometimes.”

“What did you find on the bills?”

“He wrote down what happened. Sort of.”

Diane leaned forward and took the paper from Jin. The photograph of the electrostatic image was difficult to read, but she could make out words. The handwriting grew progressively worse-probably as he had grown sicker.

“I kind of translated it on the back,” said Jin.

Diane turned it over and read.

Fell. Broke lots of bones. Hurt. Emmett gone for help. Water gone. Food gone. Emmett should be back. Hurt. Rosemary. I love you, Rosemary. Emmett, where are you? Accident? Emmett not coming back. I’m dead. Whoever tell Rosemary I love her. Dale.

“That’s a sad story,” said Diane. “It’s signed ‘Dale.’ We were right; it’s Dale Wayne Russell.”

“Poor fellow. Waiting for someone named Emmett to come back for him. And in love with Rosemary. Isn’t this like a dying declaration?” said Jin.

“Yes, it is. Garnett’s been trying to find out something about the identity of Dale Wayne Russell. I haven’t talked with him about it since yesterday. He’s having a hard time overcoming his political survivalist tendencies. This might light a fire under him.”

Diane was about to pick up the phone when it rang.

“Diane Fallon.”

“Dr. Fallon, this is Emmett Taggart. We met at Helen Egan’s funeral.”

“Yes, Mr. Taggart, I know who you are.”

Jin’s eyes grew wide. Diane pointed to the phone in Andie’s office, and Jin nodded and went in to pick up.

She watched Jin. When he was ready to pick up she said, “Hold on just a moment, please, Mr. Taggart. Let me go to my other phone.”