Dead Past

by Beverly Connor

  It had stopped sleeting several hours earlier and was now hard cold. Diane hurried her pace toward the crime scene to check on David, Jin, and Neva. They must be exhausted, sifting though that huge mess of charred detritus.

  They were packing up the crime scene van, about ready to leave the site to the night watchmen.

  “How’s it going?” she asked.

  “It’s going as well as can be expected,” said Neva. Her face was rosy from the cold. She took a Kleenex out of her pocket and blew her nose. “McNair’s men took most of the evidence away in a truck. Not much we can do. David’s doing a slow burn—pardon the pun.”

  David’s features were frozen in a frown. “We were outnumbered and Neva and I were at the coffee tent when they did it. Jin didn’t know about the issue, or he would have called you. They didn’t get the smaller stuff; it was locked in our van.”

  Diane could relate to the slow burn David must be doing. Her cheeks were aflame. “I’ll talk to McNair and Garnett,” said Diane. “And whoever else . . .”

  She was interrupted by three vehicles pulling up behind their crime scene van. Doors opened and people started piling out. Diane couldn’t see them clearly for the glare of the headlights in her eyes, but their aggressive movement toward her gave her the distinct feeling she was about to be arrested.

  Chapter 14

  Diane blinked her eyes when the headlights finally switched off. What in the world, she thought. She felt David, Neva, and Jin walking up beside her. A united front—against what?

  “Diane.” One of the individuals was Chief Garnett.

  She felt a silly sense of relief. “Chief,” she said as he came into the circle of light cast by the streetlamps.

  She could see by the set of his jaw that whatever it was, it wasn’t good. That feeling was reinforced by the presence of the police commissioner and McNair with him, along with two men she didn’t know who seemed to be with McNair.

  The police commissioner was a small man who looked as if he would be more at home doing anything but police work. He wore rimless glasses and earmuffs. Part of a gray lapel matching his gray pants peeked out from the front of his black fur-trimmed topcoat. He was shivering. Diane didn’t wonder that he was cold; he wore no hat and he had only a thin layer of hair.

  McNair wore his usual smirk, but it had more of a look of triumph to it now.

  “We’ve reached a compromise,” said the commissioner.

  “I’m taking the evidence you’ve collected,” McNair said.

  The commissioner cast him a scowl, but McNair didn’t notice because he was looking at Diane. It was obviously a done deal. Diane was afraid that what they were going to do was compromise the evidence.

  If McNair was expecting a howl of protest, he was disappointed. Diane said nothing. She decided to treat them pretty much the way she had treated the Stantons at the hospital—let them confess.

  “What he means,” said Garnett, “is that the arson investigation unit will handle all nonhuman evidence and your unit will handle all the bones and nontissue human remains. The medical examiners will handle any tissue samples.”

  “That sounds logical,” said the commissioner. He made it sound as though he was asking Diane a question.

  She felt like saying it might be logical if anyone but McNair were handling the evidence.

  “I’ll take the evidence now,” said McNair.

  “If I’m not mistaken, you have already taken most of it,” said Diane.

  “Now, I’m taking the rest of it.” McNair nodded to the two strangers and they started for the van.

  David stepped in front of the door, blocking their access.

  “Commissioner,” said Diane, “perhaps Mr. McNair needs to be reminded that we are all required by law to follow strict protocol for the transfer of custody of evidence. Each item must be individually logged out of our inventory and signed for before it leaves the custody of the crime scene forensics unit.”

  “She’s stalling and evading, Commissioner,” McNair snapped. “Giving us a lecture.”

  “Are you refusing to cooperate, Diane?” asked the commissioner. “If so . . .”

  “No, of course I’m not. I’m simply pointing out that if Mr. McNair’s men enter that van and take the evidence without following the required protocol, they will render the items unusable as evidence in any legal proceeding or criminal prosecution.”

  “I see what you’re saying,” replied the commissioner, then reconsidered. “Exactly what is it you’re saying?”

  “Simply that protocol requires that my crew retrieve each bag containing nonhuman materials from its storage box, enter a record of its transfer into the evidence log, and hand it over to Mr. McNair’s custody as it is signed for by Mr. McNair or a legally authorized member of his staff,” said Diane. “What happens to it after that point is Mr. McNair’s responsibility.”

  “That sounds proper,” the commissioner said.

  McNair’s men looked at him and he nodded for them to stand down. This is ridiculous, thought Diane. They are acting like thugs.

  “I’ll have to look inside all the other bags to make sure I get everything I need for my investigation,” said McNair.

  “Very well,” said Diane. “The commissioner and Chief Garnett are here to sign as witnesses that the seals were broken on site when the evidence is challenged in court.” Diane took a pen from her pocket and handed it to the commissioner.

  “Sign?” he said. “Challenged in court, you say?”

  “Yes, we all remember the O.J. trial and what happens when evidence is not handled according to strict protocol. We will need official witnesses as to who did what and when, and who authorized it, especially if the seals are to be broken for no legitimate forensic purpose in field conditions where evidence can be lost or contaminated.”

  Damn it, thought Diane, if the commissioner is going to cave in, he is going to accept responsibility for the consequences. Her statement had the desired effect. The commissioner didn’t want his name on anything, and there was no graceful way to say he wasn’t going to authorize the diversion from proper protocol.

  “I think we can trust that Diane’s crew know the difference between bone and other material,” he told McNair. “It’s what they do.”

  McNair scowled. It was a small thing, but from the look on his face, McNair wanted to win even the small battles.

  Diane told Neva and David to bring out the bags of evidence containing nonhuman materials.

  “I want to look at the labels on all the bags you don’t hand over,” McNair said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Garnett. “The way you’re acting, you’d think we aren’t all on the same side. What possible reason could they have for withholding evidence? We have an agreement. My people will abide by it.”

  “I agree,” said the commissioner.

  David shot Diane a look that said, “Don’t you think this is damn peculiar?”

  Yes, she thought, very peculiar.

  It took David and Neva more than half an hour to retrieve and log out all the bags they had so carefully packed in the van. Diane hated to see the carefully collected and recorded evidence go to McNair’s custody. On the other hand, all he wanted was the glory, and he had many good people working for him. The evidence should be safe in their hands. He wouldn’t be getting his hands dirty analyzing any of it. He didn’t really know how.

  “We’ll be finishing up the fire scene, too,” said McNair. “We’ll box any bones we find and send them to you.”

  He turned, got in his truck with his friends, and sped away, throwing up slush on all of them, even on the commissioner’s nice black topcoat.

  “This is for the best,” said the commissioner, brushing off his coat with a gloved hand. “He’s rough around the edges and not very tactful, but the job will get done.”

  “That is our hope,” said Garnett. “This is a high-profile event, and it will come back to bite all of us in the ass if McNair screws it up.”

/>   “He won’t. I assure you, he won’t.” The commissioner sounded more hopeful than certain.

  The commissioner got in his car with one quick look over his shoulder and drove away. At least he didn’t splatter us, thought Diane.

  “What just happened?” she asked.

  “McNair’s uncle got to the commissioner,” said Garnett.

  “Did you explain that it was McNair who was mishandling the evidence?”

  “Yes, and the commissioner believed me. This is really not about logic or who’s right; it’s about politics,” said Garnett. “We are just going to have to make the best of it. Do you have pictures?”

  “Yes,” said Diane.

  “If McNair screws up and it becomes a public issue, we’ll use them. If any perp gets off because of McNair, we’ll certainly use them.”

  Diane was thoroughly pissed when she arrived at her apartment. She had made the short walk through the woods, trudging through snow over a foot deep in hopes that the walk would cool her down. It didn’t. She took a shower, dressed in something decidedly nonforensic, and drove to the museum.

  It was closed, but in times like these when she’d been ankle-deep in bodies and politicians, or just generally having a bad day, she drew peace from visiting and contemplating the exhibits in the museum. Sometimes it was the Egyptian room and the amulets that had been folded inside the mummy’s wrappings; sometimes it was the rocks and gemstones; sometimes she walked among the giant dinosaur skeletons or sat and looked at the wall murals of dinosaurs with tiny fanciful unicorns the artist hid in all the paintings.

  Her former boss, Gregory Lincoln, liked to look at Vermeer paintings when he was out in the field. Gregory carried postcard-sized representations of his favorites. He would look at the everyday scenes painted by Vermeer for hours—the love letter, woman with a water pitcher, the guitar player, the geographer. They seemed to put him in a meditative trance. Diane once asked what he was thinking when he looked at his pictures.

  “I’m trying to figure out what’s going on in them. What’s the woman thinking about as she’s handed the letter? What map is the geographer drawing, how many places has he been?”

  Diane had adopted Gregory’s habit of looking at beautiful art when she needed a break from a particularly grim assignment and had kept it up even after she gave up human rights investigations. Tonight the soothing shapes of the seashells held a particular appeal.

  It would be a couple of hours before the low-level night lighting came on. Museum lighting is a science all its own. Because light is both destructive and necessary, she had staff whose only job was to tend to the peculiar needs of museum lighting. At night there’s the bare minimum of lights, and most of them are low to the floor so no one trips over anything. It’s good for the exhibits, but not good for viewing. She could of course override the day-to-night lighting change, but she would not do that simply for her own personal viewing.

  The RiverTrail Museum of Natural History resided in a nineteenth-century three-story granite building. The interior decor contained ornate moldings, polished granite floors, wood paneling, brass fixtures, wall-sized murals of dinosaurs, and very large rooms.

  Using her master key, she entered through the west-wing entrance where the Aquatic Animal section was located. The guard on duty at the information desk nodded a hello. Diane smiled at him. She cast a glance at a brachiosaurus in the dinosaur room in front of her before she turned left and walked straight to the seashell section.

  Seashells are the houses and bones of mollusks—soft-bodied creatures that mostly inhabit aquatic environments. The museum had a fairly decent collection from among the more than fifty thousand possible varieties.

  As in bones, if you know the code contained in seashells, you can read the history of the animal. The distinctive pattern of pigments laid down on a shell is governed mostly by DNA but is shaped by the experiences of the animal. Even among the members of the same variety, no two individuals have exactly the same pattern. A mollusk enlarges its shell along the edge, just like human bone growth at the epiphysis. On these growth edges the pigmentation pattern is laid down. Whatever happens to the mollusk—feast, famine, injury, temperature changes—has an effect and is recorded in the pattern. The mollusk wears its history on its back. A computer monitor in the shell room graphically illustrated the process, but Diane skipped that tonight. She’d seen it many times when it was being created.

  She lingered a moment by the Humans and Shells exhibit to wonder at the cowrie shell necklaces from Africa, the mother-of-pearl jewelry, the carved conch shells loaned from the Archaeology Department depicting religious and ceremonial engravings of the southeastern Indians of the United States. There were display examples of kitschy souvenir shells from Florida. One of the prize specimens in this particular exhibit, acquired by Diane’s assistant director, Kendel Williams, was a gilded saltshaker in the form of a rooster made from the shell of a chambered nautilus.

  Just beyond the Humans and Shells exhibit was the Math of Seashells. Not a favorite with most visitors, but Diane liked it, as did all the math teachers in the area. They often brought classes on field trips to watch the video explanation of the mathematics of the spiraled chambered nautilus based on the Fibonacci sequence of numbers. The video went on to show that pinecones, sunflowers, spiral galaxies, movement of bees, and even the Parthenon contain the same mathematics. Teachers loved that. For those really into the math of seashells, there was a video of the algorithmic process involved in the laying down of the pattern. Not very popular, but Diane left it on the computer, anyway. The instructors of higher mathematics loved her for that.

  The fossil shells were a favorite of visitors mainly because they loved looking at the spiral shells whose component minerals had been replaced by pyrite so that they looked like pure gold. But these weren’t Diane’s favorites.

  What she liked best were simply the shells themselves, the spiky, shiny, swirling, spiraling, multicolored unaltered seashells. There was something very calming about just looking at them—much like the joy of looking at the Vermeers.

  She was looking in wonder at the details of a particularly lovely pelican shell when she heard raised voices coming from the aquatic lab.

  Chapter 15

  The door to the aquatic lab was ajar and Diane moved toward the opening. Only one of the voices was doing the shouting. Diane recognized it as belonging to the new aquatic collections manager, Whitney Lester.

  “I know you stole the shells. It will be easier on both of us if you just admit it now.”

  Diane didn’t hear the answer, only a soft murmur.

  “I’m tired of wasting my time with you. You are going to lose your job. That’s certain. Whether or not it goes to the police is up to you. Where are the damn shells? I’m not going to have valuable articles go missing on my watch, do you hear?”

  Diane walked into the lab and found Lester glowering over Juliet Price. Lester had backed her up against a table. Juliet looked terrified.

  “I’m sick of your mousy ways. Tell me, damn it!” yelled Lester.

  “What’s going on?” said Diane, in a voice she hoped was calm.

  Whitney looked in Diane’s direction with the same angry look she was giving Juliet, ready to light into whoever was interrupting her. Her expression turned to surprise, then an attempt at a smile.

  “Dr. Fallon, I didn’t hear you come in.”

  How could you with all your yelling, thought Diane. “What’s going on?” she repeated.

  “Miss Price stole several valuable shells from the collection. I’m trying to persuade her to give them back.”

  Diane looked at Juliet Price. Her arms were folded over her stomach and she was bent over. Her blond hair swung forward and hid her face.

  “Dr. Price, are you all right?” asked Diane.

  “She’s fine. She’s a malingerer.”

  Diane ignored Whitney. “Juliet, are you all right?” Diane walked toward her and guided her to a chair.

&nb
sp; “I didn’t steal the shells,” she whispered. “I need this job.”

  Diane heard a snort from Whitney. “You should have thought of that. . . .”

  “Enough,” said Diane. “Juliet, you aren’t going to lose your job. Sit right here and try to stay calm. I’ll be right back.”

  “Mrs. Lester, in the office, now,” said Diane.

  Whitney Lester looked as if she’d been hit between the eyes. “You’re not going to leave her out here?”

  “Now, Mrs. Lester.” Diane preceded her into the collection manager’s office and sat down behind her desk.

  Whitney Lester followed and stood for several seconds as if waiting for Diane to get up from her desk. After a moment she sat in a chair in front of the desk, smoothing her brown suede skirt under her. She sat up straight and arranged her face to show her serious disapproval—or at least that’s what it seemed to Diane as she watched the movements of Lester’s expression go from surprise, to puzzlement, to a stern demeanor. She reached up once to smooth her salt-and-pepper hair.

  “What’s this about?” asked Diane.

  “Juliet stole some valuable shells. I’m trying to get them back.” She puffed up her chest, looking very righteous.

  “What’s missing?” asked Diane.

  Whitney straightened up again, looking more confident. “A Conus gloriamaris, seven inches long and worth four thousand dollars. Eight Cypraea aurantium, three hundred dollars apiece.” She ticked off each item on her fingers, hitting each finger firmly and bending it back as if that lent greater emphasis to the loss. “A giant whelk worth two hundred fifty dollars. That’s over six thousand dollars worth of shells.”

  “Have you informed Security?”

  “No, I like to handle things in my own department,” she said.