DF02 - Dead Guilty

by Beverly Connor

  Whit pointed to a pine table against the wall flanked by two speakers. The table was empty, but the dust pattern showed that something had sat there.

  Diane looked around the room for any other ghosts of missing objects. It was a sparse room with walls painted the color of sand. The furniture consisted of a brown futon couch and two chairs, one stuffed and slipcovered in brown corduroy, the other a canebacked rocker. The coffee table was a large roughhewn cross-section of a tree trunk with glass covering the top. The some-assembly-required computer desk sat against one wall.

  On the wall opposite the couch, a tall bookcase held a television and books on forestry and stacks of Na tional Geographic. Beside it was the table where the DVD player had sat. The hardwood floors were bare.

  ‘‘Jin took the girlfriend’s—Kacie Beck’s—fingerprints before she left. She was very cooperative,’’ he said.

  Diane nodded. Whit’s dark eyes looked sympathetic as he took a final look toward the bedroom.

  ‘‘Young guy.’’ He shook his head. ‘‘I’m not sure why I ran for this office. I’m thinking of bowing out the next election.’’

  ‘‘Working with murder is certainly wearing on men tal health,’’ said Diane. ‘‘Sometimes it seems like peo ple have become so used to it, they’ve lost their perspective on the horror of it.’’

  ‘‘Dad thinks it’s movies and television, but I don’t know what it is.’’ He shook his head again as if to shake the thoughts from his mind. ‘‘Tell Frank I said hello.’’

  Frank, thought Diane. He’s due back from San Francisco. She wondered if she’d ever have time to see him again. She wondered if she’d ever have time to get back to the museum again. She sighed as Whit went out the door.

  Neva came marching up the steps just as Whit drove away. She stopped in front of Diane. Diane had seen her drive up and waited for her on the porch.

  ‘‘I heard it on the scanner. Were you going to call me?’’

  ‘‘No. I try not to overload new people with death the first week on the job.’’

  ‘‘I can handle it.’’

  ‘‘It wasn’t aimed at you. It’s just my policy. How ever, I’m glad you’re here. It’s going to be a long night, and I fear we may have another crime scene soon.’’

  Diane assigned Neva the kitchen. ‘‘Jin’s taking fin gerprints. David’s taking photographs, and you and I are doing evidence searches. Start with the back door. We believe he entered through the front door. He may have left through the back.’’

  Neva nodded. ‘‘Vic let him in?’’

  ‘‘Probably got the key from under the mat. The victim may have been in the shower. He’s one of the guys who found the hanging victims in the woods.’’

  Neva’s eyes widened. ‘‘Oh, my God. What’s going on?’’

  ‘‘I don’t know. Hopefully, by the time we finish, we’ll have enough evidence to at least know if they are connected.’’

  ‘‘They have to be connected, don’t they?’’

  ‘‘Coincidences do happen.’’

  ‘‘Yeah, but . . .’’ Neva glanced into the bedroom, where Jin and David were working. ‘‘This is some coincidence.’’

  Diane began a spiral search of the living room be ginning at the tree trunk coffee table. As she worked, the house made noises. Beyond the creaking of the floors and the sound of wind against the windows, the refrigerator turned on and off; so did the airconditioning. Things that were normal now seemed odd, almost ghostly, with Chris Edwards dead. Some one should tell the house that it can rest now, Diane thought as the refrigerator once again came on.

  Jin came from the bedroom. ‘‘I need to turn the lights out,’’ he said. He was carrying a filter and black light to check for fingerprints.

  ‘‘You’re going to like this, Boss,’’ said Jin. ‘‘I found the infamous bloody glove in the bedroom—at least its print. It looks like the index finger on the glove had a tear on the surface of the leather.’’

  ‘‘Leather?’’ asked Diane.

  ‘‘Looks like it. We can ID this baby if we find it. There’s a lot of prints on the coffee table here, but I bet they belong to the victim and his girlfriend. You think maybe they were involved in some kind of kinky stuff that got out of hand? I heard what you guys said about the time of death.’’

  ‘‘You think she also hit him with a hand weight?’’

  ‘‘I did a crime scene in New York where the victim suffered an astounding amount of consensual abuse. What is it that happens to a person in childhood that wires the brain to like that kind of stuff?’’

  ‘‘I don’t know, and we don’t know what happened here.’’

  They worked all night and into the morning— searching, dusting, collecting. The smell of fingerprint powders and reagents mixed with the smell of death that always lingered.

  ‘‘Heard we have a mummy.’’

  Despite the fact that the crime unit wasn’t techni cally connected to the museum, David and Jin claimed the museum as theirs. So did the technicians Diane had hired to work in the lab. Neva was the only one who didn’t appear to feel any connection with the mu seum yet. Diane didn’t know if that was good or bad.

  ‘‘We apparently inherited one while my back was turned.’’

  ‘‘Know anything about it?’’ asked Jin.

  ‘‘Kendel said the mummy case appears to be from the twelfth dynasty. But that doesn’t mean the occu pant is from that time. From what Kendel and Jonas have told us, there was a flourishing trade in mummies in the 1800s, and European adventurers and Egyptian entrepreneurs were eager to supply the tourist trade. That included taking stray mummies and playing musi cal mummy case.’’

  ‘‘They also made new mummies for customers,’’ said David. ‘‘Are you sure it’s even ancient? It could be just a couple hundred years old.’’

  ‘‘Right now, we don’t know anything about it.’’ Diane found a smear of blood on the metal base of the desk lamp. ‘‘I need a photograph in here, David. I believe it’s Jin’s bloody glove.’’

  David took several shots of the smear using lighting in various positions to enhance the pattern.

  ‘‘What are you going to do with the mummy?’’ said Jin, who was waiting to lift the print when David finished the photographs and Diane collected the sample.

  ‘‘After Korey cleans it up, it goes for a CT scan,’’ said Diane.

  ‘‘Cool. I’d like to see that.’’

  Most of the night they worked in silence, occasion ally interrupted by small bits of conversation about the museum, Jin’s music, and David’s bird photo graphs. Neva said very little, and Diane realized that they didn’t know much about what she did outside of work. They did discover that she liked to model small animals from polymer clay.

  Just before dawn the radio came on in the bedroom and startled everyone.

  ‘‘That got the old heart pumping, didn’t it?’’ Jin laughed.

  ‘‘I think I wet my pants,’’ David said. ‘‘Must have been set by the victim. Time to get up.’’

  ‘‘Won’t be getting up this time,’’ Jin said.

  Diane went to the kitchen to check on Neva. She found her in the pantry picking up and shaking cans of food. Neva looked up sheepishly.

  ‘‘I, uh, just... you know how some people keep their valuables in fake cans of soup? Whoever it was apparently checked out the kitchen drawers, and I just thought...’’

  ‘‘Good idea. I wouldn’t have thought of that. Find anything?’’

  Neva looked relieved. Her whole body relaxed and she smiled. ‘‘Nothing in the groceries. Jin found plenty of prints, but they were in places you’d expect in a kitchen that’s used for cooking. He said they were probably from exemplars. I’ve collected some fibers from the doorjamb. That’s one good thing about these old houses: The door frames are apt to be splintered— good for grabbing at clothing.’’

  ‘‘It looks like the perp wore gloves,’’ said Diane. ‘‘I don’t think we’ll be getting any
of his prints.’’ She looked out the kitchen window and down at her watch. ‘‘It’s getting to be daylight. When you finish, I want you and David to work the outside, around the house.’’

  Diane and Jin worked the bathroom. It was this room that told a big chunk of the story of what hap pened to Chris Edwards.

  She stood in the middle of the bedroom, her brow wrinkled, recreating in her mind scenarios of what might have happened. She was fairly certain it wasn’t anything sexual. He’d just showered—his hair had smelled of shampoo and the bathroom towels were damp—and put on his briefs before he was hit, appar ently with the hand weight. First in the nose—the blood spattered on the sink. He may have been hit again on the temple at that time. He fell, smearing blood on the floor.

  He was half-pulled and he half-walked out of the bathroom—there was a bare bloody footprint on the floor. Blood was on the soles of his feet.

  His hands were tied behind him and a rope was tied around his neck. It was possible they hadn’t meant to kill him straightaway because, as the morgue techni cian noticed, the rope wasn’t tight around his neck. He had to lean into it for it to choke him and cut off the blood supply to his brain.

  One thing Diane did know: Whoever tied these knots wasn’t the same person who tied the ones on the hanging victims in the woods.

  Chapter 11

  When Diane walked into Lynn Webber’s autopsy room, Lynn was examining the surface of Chris Ed wards’ body with a scope on a rope. The scope trans mitted a magnified

  making visible any

  image onto a computer screen, puncture marks, fibers, or other

  minutiae that marred or clung to his skin.

  ‘‘We’ll be finished in just a minute,’’ Lynn said. They were in the main autopsy room. The isolation

  room was just a wall away. Diane could see the shiny metal tables through the large window.

  Odd, she thought, she didn’t mind the closed-in feel ing of a cave. She rather liked it. But the isolation room was a different matter. Being confined with a decaying body wasn’t her favorite way to spend an afternoon.

  Chris Edwards’ corpse looked as if he had just died. He lay on his side on the table, dressed the same way he had come into the world, with the exception of the yellow rope that now tied his hands behind his back. The rope that had been so tight around his neck, that had cut off not only his air passage but the blood supply to his brain, was now loose, the weight of his body no longer pressing against it.

  Just two days ago, Diane had talked with him. He had thoughts, a personality . . . life. Now everything he had been was gone. Only the dead flesh and bones remained.

  She tried thinking back to when they had spoken, if he had said anything or acted any way that would give a clue to what happened to him afterward. Both he and Steven Mayberry had been edgy, but that was understandable. They’d just found three dead bodies. Nothing from her memory of her brief interaction with him enlightened her.

  ‘‘You come to get the rope?’’ asked Raymond.

  Diane almost sighed. ‘‘Yes. I’ve come to get the rope, and anything else you have for me.’’

  ‘‘I delivered Blue Doe to your lab this morning. I’ve got Red and Green Doe ready for you to take back.’’

  ‘‘That was quick work.’’

  ‘‘Raymond likes his work,’’ said Lynn. ‘‘He espe cially likes to skeletonize the bodies. He doesn’t get to do that too often.’’

  ‘‘They’re much prettier in their bones. Skin doesn’t wear well, especially hung out to dry like that.’’ He grinned.

  ‘‘You seem happy today,’’ said Diane.

  ‘‘Like Dr. Lynn says, I like my work.’’ Raymond didn’t take his eyes off the screen. ‘‘I got it,’’ he said. He used his tweezers to pluck something from the body and placed it in an evidence bag.

  ‘‘We have some fibers and a couple of hairs for you that we’ve collected from Mr. Edwards,’’ said Lynn. ‘‘The blood in his hair is interesting.’’

  Diane walked over and looked where Lynn parted his hair to reveal the scalp.

  ‘‘The blood didn’t come from his head. I think it was on the perp’s hand—or his glove. See this irrita tion on his scalp? I think the perp held his hair to pull back his head. Like this.’’ Lynn illustrated by pull ing on the hair.

  ‘‘Releasing the pressure on his neck to let him breathe,’’ said Diane. ‘‘Might have been an interroga tion technique.’’

  Lynn nodded. ‘‘That’s what it looks like to me. Okay, Raymond, let’s let Diane get her rope.’’

  Diane took this rope the same way she had the others, first securing the knot, though it was tied tight into a granny knot and pretty well secure on its own. She tied the noose off with string before cutting it.

  ‘‘This is different rope,’’ said Raymond.

  ‘‘The rope on the other victims was hemp. This is polypropylene. It makes good outdoor carpet and rope. Boaters like it because it doesn’t absorb water— and it floats.’’

  ‘‘You know your rope,’’ said Raymond.

  ‘‘Rope is one of the most versatile tools in history. It’s good stuff.’’

  ‘‘Not too good for our boy here,’’ said Lynn.

  After the noose was off, Diane took the rope off his hands. This was more difficult, for the rope was tight and bit into his skin. As she worked, Raymond snapped pictures.

  ‘‘I’ll get these to you as soon as I can. I put the other photographs with the bones,’’ he said. ‘‘They turned out real good.’’

  ‘‘Raymond also gave you copies of the photos of the tattoos. Maybe they’ll help in making an identification.’’

  Diane didn’t wait around for the autopsy. Even though she’d met Chris Edwards only briefly, it was not easy to watch someone she knew being dissected. As she took a last look at the body, she wondered where Steven Mayberry was. Dead like Chris? Or was Steven the killer and on the run?

  Diane took the bones of Red and Green Doe, the rope, and all of the evidence Lynn and Raymond had collected for her back to the crime lab. David looked up from his microscope when she came into his lab.

  ‘‘I’m looking at fibers from the door frame of the house now,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s mostly white cotton from tee-shirts and blue cotton from jeans. Jin got some good prints of his bloody glove.’’

  ‘‘Speaking of blood . . .’’ Diane said.

  ‘‘Neva drove the samples to Atlanta.’’

  ‘‘I’m glad none of you people need any sleep.’’ ‘‘Sleep? We get too much sleep.’’ Jin, wearing jeans

  and a black tee-shirt that said M.E.S ARE ON THE CUT TING EDGE, came bopping into the lab, holding a folder. ‘‘You know, if we live to be a hundred, we’ll have spent over ten years asleep. I checked out the prints we found. All are exemplars, except maybe the glove print.’’

  ‘‘Got anything on the clothes from the Cobber’s Wood crime scene?’’

  Jin nodded. ‘‘Lots of carpet fibers. Orange nylon. I found them on all the rope too, including that piece found on the ground. I’ll have the brand of carpet soon. There was some brown shed human hair, but no roots.’’

  ‘‘All the blood samples are delivered.’’ Neva en tered the lab and stood for a moment, looking embar rassed. She held a brown bag in her hand from which she took three boxes, and handed one to each of them. ‘‘Hey, what’s the occasion?’’ asked Jin.

  ‘‘No occasion. We talked last night about my work with clay, and... well, thought you might like some.’’

  Diane opened her box. Nestled in white tissue paper was a tiny figurine of a gray squirrel on a log, holding an acorn. It was small enough to hold in the palm of her hand, but the details—the fur of the squirrel, the bark on the tree, the cap of the acorn—were remarkable.

  ‘‘You made this?’’ said Diane.

  ‘‘Yes. It’s very relaxing.’’

  ‘‘Relaxing?’’ said David. ‘‘Look at this. You must have had to do each leaf separa
tely.’’ His figurine was a tree with a bird standing on a branch next to another bird sitting on a nest. ‘‘Those feathers look real.’’

  Jin’s was a raccoon peering out of a hollow tree. ‘‘Cool,’’ said Jin. ‘‘Do you sell them?’’

  ‘‘I go to craft fairs occasionally. Mostly, I make them for friends and family. Mom calls them dust catchers.’’

  ‘‘It’s heavy,’’ said Diane, weighing hers in her hand.

  ‘‘I put nuts or BBs in the bottom of the clay to keep the center of gravity low. Even though they’re small, they’re pretty good paperweights.’’

  ‘‘These are great,’’ said Diane. ‘‘Thank you. This had to take hours to make.’’

  ‘‘As I said, it’s very relaxing.’’

  ‘‘I’ll have to introduce you to the people who make models of planned exhibits. They’ll love this.’’

  Neva seemed pleased with the reception of her gifts. Diane was relieved that Neva was making an effort to identify with the team. The intercom squawked with the receptionist’s voice announcing that Sheriff Braden and Chief Garnett wanted to see her.

  ‘‘Buzz them in.’’

  That must be a pair, thought Diane. She knew that Sheriff Braden and the chief weren’t the best of friends. But neither were she and Garnett. These days, it seemed that Garnett was trying to rebuild a lot of burnt bridges. The two of them looked cordial enough as they walked into the crime lab.

  ‘‘The sheriff was discussing with me a possible link in our murders, and I thought I’d bring him over to see the lab.’’

  Sheriff Braden scrutinized the room as he ap proached. ‘‘This looks real modern.’’

  ‘‘We’re proud of it,’’ said Diane.

  ‘‘It has the latest equipment,’’ said Garnett.

  ‘‘You do DNA work here too?’’ asked the sheriff.

  ‘‘No. We send that to the GBI lab in Atlanta.’’

  ‘‘I know you aren’t finished analyzing all the evi dence yet,’’ Garnett said, ‘‘but we’d like to see what we have so far.’’

  It appeared that Garnett wanted to get down to business before the sheriff asked about any other pro cedures they didn’t do.