Dust to Dust dffi-7

by Beverly Connor

  Hanks looked to be in considerable discomfort, but he sounded reluctant. Diane thought he would have welcomed the chance to receive some painkillers. After a few moments’ thought and with what appeared to be some regret, he left with the others, walking at a brisker pace than Diane thought she could have mustered under the same circumstances.

  Whit watched Hanks a moment, then turned back to Diane. “How are things in your life now that you have control of all the museum operations again?” he said.

  “So far, things are running smoothly,” she said.

  Diane walked with Whit around to the driveway where he was parked. Hanks’ car was there, and the patrolman’s. So were two other police vehicles. They watched the ambulance leave with its cargo.

  “What are you doing here?” asked Whit. “I was under the impression you didn’t do on-site crime scene work much anymore. Someone told me you had finally learned to delegate.” He gave her a wide grin.

  “I’m trying,” said Diane. “Marcella Payden is a consultant to the museum.”

  Whit’s eyebrows went up. “Dr. Payden? The archaeologist? Is this her home?” He glanced over at the house and back at Diane. “Sylvia and I heard her give a talk a few days ago on the analysis of pottery in archaeology. Not exactly my idea of a hot date, but Sylvia wanted to go. Dr. Payden was entertaining. She can make a dull topic sound interesting, even to us archaeology dummies.”

  He paused. “What happened? Is she-” He stopped and let the question hang between them.

  “I’m told she survived the attack, but I don’t know her condition. It happened early last evening,” said Diane. “I’m not sure why it took so long for my crew to be called in.”

  “I can answer that,” said Neva, who was coming from the van with a case, heading for the house. “One of the policemen was telling me and Izzy about it. Dr. Payden was unconscious when she was brought in. At first, the doctors thought she had fallen accidentally and hit her head. It wasn’t until they did a thorough exam and took some X-rays that they came to the conclusion she might have been attacked. That’s when they called the police.”

  “How was she discovered?” asked Diane.

  Neva shrugged. “That’s all the policeman knew.” She motioned toward the house. “Izzy and I have a path cleared if you want to come have a look around.”

  Diane nodded. “Thanks, Neva.”

  “How’s your dress?” Neva asked, eyeing Diane’s change of clothes.

  “About what you would expect after a trek through a briar patch, a little hand-to-hand with a thug, and rolling down a hill in it. Not good. It’s what I get for wearing a cocktail dress to a crime scene,” Diane said.

  Neva grinned and went on her way.

  “It must have been some exciting night,” said Whit.

  “More so than I would like,” said Diane.

  “About this Detective Hanks,” said Whit, nodding in the direction the ambulance had taken him. “Do you know him?”

  “Not really. He was one of the hires during the previous Rosewood administration. He was cleared of any involvement in the misdeeds involving the mayor or the chief of police, but I think he feels he has to be overly competent in order not to be suspect. You know how it is in Rosewood these days. After the destruction left by the mayor and his gang, everyone is a little on edge.”

  Whit grinned happily, nodding his head in agreement about the state of anxiety in Rosewood. Like all those who lived outside the city limits of Rosewood itself, Whit was a little smug and self-righteous about the recent Rosewood corruption. After all, Rose County residents weren’t the ones who voted the mayor and his cronies into office. That was Rosewood City folks’ doing.

  He took his leave, wishing Diane luck as he got in his jeep and drove away. She wanted to yell after him that she hadn’t voted for the scoundrel either. He was no friend of hers, and she had the scars to prove it. Instead, she just waved.

  Diane proceeded toward the house. At the edge of the front yard there was a picket fence that might have been white at one point in its life but was now weathered to a dusty gray. In the middle of the fence was a trellised archway with no gate. There were remnants of dead vine intertwined in the wood slats, signs of recent attempts by Marcella at clearing the growth.

  Behind the fence, the front yard contained more cement ornaments-birdbaths, more broken statuary. From the fresh dirt stains on most of it, Diane guessed that Marcella had dug the pieces up from the yard. Must be interesting for an archaeologist to have things to dig up in her own yard.

  Diane climbed the steps to the newly refurbished front porch. The light was now on and the porch and surrounding area were well lit. She looked up at the bottom of the second-floor balcony. The wood looked new there too. Unfortunately for Officer Daughtry, Marcella’s renovations hadn’t yet gotten to the dilapidated back porch.

  The house had four tall windows across the front. Through one of them Diane could see Neva inside using electrostatic lifting film to collect a footprint off the floor. Diane donned the plastic head and foot coverings she’d retrieved from the van earlier and slipped on a pair of gloves. She started to enter the front doorway, stopped, and stepped back.

  Her eye was caught by glints of light reflecting from something embedded in the wood frame around the door. Sparkling from underneath flakes of peeling white paint were what looked to be the broken sherds of ceramic inserts inlaid in the wood frame. Diane tried to think what the inserts might have been before they were apparently vandalized, but there was nothing identifiable left. They had all been shattered. How odd, she thought.

  She moved to just inside the threshold and looked around at the room. There was an aroma of Mexican food in the house.

  “We’ve found some good boot prints,” said Neva. “Several sizes larger than what Dr. Payden would wear.” She nodded toward the door. “I think she took her shoes off in the house.”

  Diane looked down at a pair of leather sandals sitting on a wooden stool near the door. “Could be right,” she said.

  The floor was dark, wide-plank hardwood with a satin sheen-another of Marcella’s renovations. A few rugs were scattered around. They were mostly decorated in geometric patterns that looked Southwestern.

  The walls were a cream color and the furniture was mostly leather with chenille throws and pillows decorated similarly to the rugs. There was no television in the room and no place for one. Against one wall was a large, dark wood hutch that was open and empty.

  Under the window just to the left of Diane was an old wooden desk that had seen better days. There was a lamp on it and the middle drawer was half open.

  “Have you looked in the desk?” she asked.

  Neva nodded. “All the drawers are empty. I haven’t yet dusted for prints there or on the hutch.”

  Just in front of the desk, surrounded by small flags that the forensics crew used to mark notable features at the crime scene, was a dark stain on the floor, almost invisible because of the dark wood. Blood, Diane realized. Marcella’s blood. There wasn’t a large pool of it. The stain was about the size of a large dinner plate. This was where Marcella was felled, thought Diane, about the time she and Frank were at the benefit at Bartrum listening to a speech about funding for the arts.

  Neva and Izzy had marked a clear path through the house with flags. This was the walk zone they examined first so they could move about the house without contaminating evidence. Diane walked into the dining room. The odor of food was stronger here. Marcella had been cooking a Mexican dinner. She was expecting company. The table was set for two. The candle in the center of the table had burned down and the pool of wax around the wick had hardened.

  Diane heard Izzy working in the nearby room, probably where the most recent intruders had entered. She didn’t like two crime scenes-the attack on Marcella, and the recent deadly trespass-intertwined with each other. It confused things trying to distinguish one crime scene from the other. Jonas Briggs, her good friend, chess partner, and archaeology curator, w
ouldn’t be quite so daunted. Archaeologists are accustomed to working sites that are one on top of the other and that leave the archaeologists to make sense of the layers.

  Jonas Briggs, she thought. He was probably the one having dinner with Marcella. They were good friends. He may have found her. That would make Jonas a suspect to Hanks. Diane fished her cell from her pocket.

  Chapter 5

  Diane started to key Jonas Briggs’ number, but stopped and retraced her steps to the living room. Neva was rolling up the film of the boot print and sliding it into a tube.

  “Neva, you said the policeman didn’t know who found Marcella. Is that right?”

  Neva looked up and nodded. “That’s what he said. The two policemen are with David, searching the woods for evidence. You could call him.”

  “I didn’t know David was here. I didn’t see his car,” said Diane.

  “He arrived a little bit ago. It was getting crowded near the house, so he parked on down the drive,” said Neva. She gestured out the window in the direction of the driveway. “Did you find something?” Neva put away the film tube and picked up the case with the electrostatic lifting device.

  “No, I just thought of something. Jonas might have been the one who discovered Marcella,” began Diane.

  Neva opened her mouth in surprise, wrinkled her brow, and looked in the direction of the dining room. “She was having someone for dinner. And they were… It could be Jonas. I didn’t think about that.”

  “I’ll call him,” said Diane.

  She punched in the number of his cell. No answer. She tried his home. No answer there either. She called his cell again and left a message asking him to call her.

  “No luck?” Neva, still with the anxious expression on her face, stood with the electrostatic device under her arm.

  “He may be at the hospital,” said Diane. “His cell may be turned off. I left him a message.”

  “Of course,” said Neva. “That’s where he would be.”

  Diane didn’t know why she was so worried, but she was. She called David’s cell.

  “Hey, Diane. Hear you’ve had one of your usual evenings out,” he said.

  “It has been interesting. Found anything?”

  “Shell casings. Maybe we’ll get lucky with them. One of the policemen tells me there’s an old road back behind the house. That’s probably where they parked. We’ll be looking there next.”

  “Do you know who found Marcella Payden?” asked Diane.

  “No. When the call came I recognized the address. I did some computer work for her out here,” he said. “Hooked up a scanner system for her. Nice lady.”

  “I’m probably just being paranoid,” Diane said, “but it bothered me the way Hanks seems sure the attack and the theft were unrelated incidents. They may be, but we don’t know. It was as if he already has a suspect for her attacker. If Jonas found her, Hanks might have him at the head of the list of suspects. Jonas is so far removed from things like crime. I hate to think of him going through an interrogation.”

  Neva held the lifting device close to her chest, staring at Diane in alarm. Everyone at the museum and the crime lab was very fond of Jonas Briggs. He had come to work for the museum after he retired from the faculty at Bartrum. With his white hair, bushy white eyebrows, toothbrush mustache, and crystal blue eyes, he was everyone’s grandfather, or mentor, or maybe wizard.

  “Jonas is pretty tough,” said David. “You know that.”

  “In academics,” said Diane.

  “In city council meetings. Hell, you know they are all scared of him.”

  Diane laughed. “You’re right. All this is just speculation anyway. I have no idea whom she was planning to have dinner with.”

  “Speaking of food, maybe we can have some breakfast after this,” David said.

  “Good idea-Waffle House?”

  Neva was nodding. She loved their pecan waffles.

  Diane called the hospital to check on the condition of Marcella Payden. She got only the words “critical but stable” from them because she was not on the list of people authorized to receive information about the patient. But that didn’t matter. Diane was just looking for the word alive, and she got that.

  Diane went up the stairs to look over the rest of the house. The first room she entered was the bedroom. It was a simple bedroom with a double bed made from cherry wood and covered with a plain tan chenille bedspread. A dresser stood on one wall. It held a comb, brush, perfume, and lotion. A chest of drawers opposite the bed had a large-screen TV on top. A stuffed chair sat by the window with a floor lamp beside it. Marcella’s nightstand had a picture of a young family. She had a married daughter. Diane guessed it was a picture of the daughter and her family.

  The bedroom was neat and uncluttered. The adjacent room was a different matter. It was a study in clutter. Long library tables flanked by bookcases lined three of the walls. Additional bookcases stood on each side of the door. All were overflowing with books, journals, and papers. More books were stacked on the floor, in corners, and on chairs.

  On the table to her left sat a computer, printer, and scanner-probably the one David installed. Scattered across the table near the computer were printouts of potsherds she had scanned, many annotated in her own handwriting.

  The wall above the table and every available wall space were covered in an amazing collection of maps: satellite maps of canyons, deserts, and terrains with oxbow rivers, topographical maps, road maps, and maps of archaeological sites showing postholes and other ground features. Many of the maps had numerous red dots scattered across them in clusters. After a moment Diane realized each dot probably represented a location where a potsherd had been found. As in crime scene investigation, the location of items reveals much.

  The table on the opposite wall had several reconstructed pots and boxes of sherds. One box looked as if it might be part of the reference collection Marcella was creating for the museum. At one end of the table, relatively clear of clutter, were a microscope and a box of slides.

  But the star of the room was on the center table. In a box of sand stood a face being reconstructed from broken pieces of ceramic pottery. Diane walked over to it. The piece appeared ancient to her eyes. It had the look of tempered American Indian ceramic. Its dark tan surface was sprinkled with white inclusions of the tempering material. But Diane had never seen any Indian artifact like this-a mask, not stylized, but with refined, realistic features. It was quite beautiful.

  It was a reconstruction in progress, a broken three-dimensional puzzle being reassembled. The sand allowed the pieces to stand on edge as Marcella worked with them. Several sherds lay on the table waiting to find their place in the emerging form. So far almost half the face had been reconstructed-most of the chin, the nose, one cheek, an eye, half a forehead. In the sand behind the larger piece was a smaller reconstruction. It looked as if it was going to be the ear and the other cheek. Several sherds were glued together in clusters but still lacked the links that connected them to the main piece.

  Beside the box of sand were drawings of the face. One was an extrapolation of the finished work. Diane wondered where the mask was from. She was lost in thought when Marcella’s phone rang.

  It startled her for a moment-a phone ringing in a house whose owner was gone. Diane walked over to the computer table and answered it with a simple “Hello.”

  “Who is this, please?” It was a female voice, possibly young. Sometimes it was hard to tell. The accent seemed Midwestern, but Diane wasn’t good with accents.

  “Whom are you trying to reach?” Diane asked.

  “Someone in my mother’s house… I mean, are you a detective? I’m Paloma Tsosie. Marcella Payden is my mother.”

  “Mrs. Tsosie,” said Diane, “I’m very sorry about what happened to your mother. I’m Diane Fallon. I’m with the police looking over the house.” Diane didn’t like to say “crime scene” to relatives. It was too harsh, too scary.

  “Are you one of the crime scene peo
ple?” Marcella’s daughter asked.

  “Yes.”

  Paloma Tsosie paused a moment. “That’s a coincidence,” she said almost absently. “Mother does contract work for a museum director named Dr. Diane Fallon.”

  “Same person,” said Diane. “I have several jobs.”

  “How odd,” she said.

  “It is, a little. How can I help you?” asked Diane.

  “My husband and I are flying out to Georgia. We’re in Arizona now.” She paused. “We would like to stay at the house. Is that possible?”

  Diane thought of the blood on the floor. Marcella’s daughter couldn’t see that.

  “We have a lot of fingerprint powder, equipment, and lights all over the house,” said Diane. “But I think I can have it cleaned up for you by this evening. I’ll have to ask the lead detective, of course.” Then, as an afterthought, she added, “The museum can put you up in a hotel in Rosewood. It would be closer to the hospital.”

  “Oh, that would be very kind. Thank you,” said Paloma, clearly liking the idea.

  “Do you have someone to pick you up at the airport?” asked Diane.

  “Jonas Briggs. He’s a family friend. He’s going to meet us,” she said.

  “Fine. I’ll let him know your hotel,” said Diane.

  “This is very kind of you,” she said.

  “I wish you were visiting under better circumstances,” Diane said. She paused a moment. “I’m in your mother’s workroom. She has a lot of work in progress and the house just had a break-in,” said Diane.

  “A break-in? You mean after Mother was attacked? No.”

  “Yes, several hours after. I don’t know what they took. But they didn’t get her computer equipment. I was wondering if you would allow me to take her work and her computer to her office at the museum?”

  “That would be good. Mother’s work is really important to her, and I know she has a lot of it on the computer. She does all kinds of three-dimensional scans of her pottery sherds. She would want it kept safe.”

  “Good. I’ll give you an inventory of what we take,” she said.