Beverly Connor - One Grave Too Many

He slipped a page from the folder he was carrying and handed it to her. “It was sent from your computer,” he said.

“Looks like it. Will you forward me the message?”

“Sure. I’ll do that.”

When Donald left, Diane headed for her office. As she crossed the lobby, the guard standing by the intercom stopped her.

“A Frank Duncan wants to see you, Dr. Fallon.”

“OK. You can let him in.”

The guard opened the door and Frank walked in carrying a large envelope.

“Frank, I didn’t expect to see you today. Any news about what happened to your friends?” She gestured toward the hallway that led to her office. They walked through the glass doors labeled ADMINISTRATION and continued down the corridor.

“I know you don’t like being involved in any investigation, but I would really like to talk to you.”

“Is this about their deaths?” Diane fished her door key from the pocket of her jacket.

“Yes. The detectives have picked up their daughter, Star.”

Diane held her key so tightly in her hand, her knuckles were white. She stopped and turned to face Frank, not even realizing she also held her breath until she spoke. “She’s alive, then? She’s all right? That’s good news. I. . well, I feared the worst.”

“So did I. She’s alive, but the kid’s in a world of trouble. Her parents and brother are dead, the detectives think she killed them, and I’m afraid the whole thing’s being mishandled by the Rosewood police department.”

They entered Diane’s office by her private entrance, and she sat down at her desk. “Mishandled how?”

Frank drew up a chair and laid his envelope on her desk. “Do you know anything about Rosewood politics these days?”

“Some ongoing disagreements involving the mayor and the city council?”

“And the county commissioners thrown in, just to further complicate everything. It’s a hell of a mess.”

“I don’t know much about local politics. I try to stay out of it as much as my job will allow.”

“The short version is that there’s a power struggle between Mayor Sutton and the city council. He thinks Rosewood is Atlanta.” Frank made a face. “He wants to be governor one of these days and he’s using our little city to build his empire.”

“A lot of people are moving here. We’ve had to do demographics for the museum.”

Frank waved his hand. “I work in Atlanta and live here. There may be only sixty-three miles in between, but there’s a big difference. The city council’s just as bad in the other direction as the mayor is. They don’t want any change that might shake up their little kingdom. They have their own fish to fry.”

Diane leaned back in her chair. “What does all this have to do with the murder of your friends? Are you saying it was some kind of political hit?”

“No, of course not. That’s not what I’m getting at.” Frank fidgeted in his chair, moving it closer to her desk. “We finally get a new police commissioner. We needed one. But the mayor wrestled his choice from the city council. The commissioner’s been pushing out people who don’t support the mayor and hiring new people-most of them old buddies of his, who will, like the chief of detectives, keep a low profile and do what they’re told. The chief of detectives, in turn, has been putting his men in. The upshot is that it’s all political cronyism, and nobody knows what the hell they’re doing.”

“The main thing is the crime scene, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation know what they’re doing.”

“The GBI didn’t work the crime scene. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. The chief refused to call them. He’s got this hair up his butt that Rosewood police can handle our crime without outside help.”

“Can they?”

“No. The best homicide cop was Jake Houser, but he wasn’t one of the commissioner’s men. Now that he’s gone to a desk job, the homicide squad is a bunch of new people hardly older than Kevin.”

Diane made an effort not to smile, wondering if Frank was just feeling estranged from officers half his age. “But they might still be competent.”

“Whose side are you on?”

“Yours, of course. I think you ought to contact the president of the city council and tell him they were right all along, that the mayor’s pricks. . I mean picks. . the mayor’s picks are screwing up an investigation.” Diane didn’t know the girl, but she felt a giddy relief upon learning that she hadn’t been killed. Jails and trials could be dealt with. But not death.

“This isn’t funny.”

“No, it isn’t. What is it they’re doing wrong?”

“Warrick. Janice Warrick-she’s the detective in charge-allowed George’s mother and stepfather in the house. She let the stepfather tramp around the bedroom before anything was processed.”

Diane pressed her lips together. “Did you mention to Detective Warrick that letting anyone on the crime scene was contaminating the evidence?”

“I mentioned it. I hammered her over the head with it. She asked me how a paper detective could possibly know anything about crime scenes. She was going to let them take things out of the house. When I objected, she tried to make me leave. I told her that I was executor of the will, and if anything was missing from the house, I’d sue the department and her personally.”

“Were you in the crime scene?”

Frank stared at her a moment. “I stayed mostly on the front porch. Do you have anything else on the bone?”

“Yes.” She pulled out a sheet of paper from her desk. “Here’s the report. It’s on the standard form.”

He took the page and glanced it up and down. “Find anything new?”

“Yes.”

“You mean you missed something the first time?”

Diane nodded. “Yes, I did.”

“Well, does this make us even for me throwing away the spiderweb? What’d you find?”

“A fish rib and a cap from a blowfly puparium in the marrow cavity.”

“What? A fish rib and a what?”

“A cap from a blowfly puparium. Do you know about the life cycle of blowflies?”

“Oh, sure, everyone knows about that. . All I know about flies is that they’re a damn disgusting nuisance.”

“If it weren’t for them, and a host of other disgusting creatures, the world would be littered with dead, undecayed animals. After the third instar of a blowfly. .”

“Third instar? That sounds like Star Trek .”

“Bug speak. You know that flies are attracted to dead bodies.”

“Yes, I do know that.”

“There’s a point in the life cycle of a blowfly at which it moves away from the corpse and burrows into the ground. This third skin shedding, or instar, hardens into a capsule and becomes the puparium. From this, it emerges after a period of time in the ground as an adult fly by popping off a cap at the end of the puparium. This cap is what I found. My identification has to be verified by an entomologist, but the significance of these finds is that neither the fish bone nor the puparium cap should be found inside the bone.”

“Okay. So, how did they get there?”

“My guess is they washed in. But there are other scenarios. The bone could have already been underground and decomposed, and this fly came from something decomposing on top of it or near it. When the blowfly moved underground, it wound up burrowing into the cavity in the bone. Later the bone was eroded, or dug up for your friends to find.”

“Does this help us?”

“It says something about the environment the bone was in-”

“Like in a river?”

“No, the blowfly wouldn’t be underwater. Suppose that your friend George thought it was a deer bone because there were antlers, or hooves, or whatever present. So, we have deer bone and fish bone in the same place. I think you might look for the rest of the body-the remaining bones-in a place where animal bones are processed. A hunting camp, somewhere that processes meat. . something like that.”