Dead Secret (21 page)

Jin reached for the autopsy report. “Korey’s right. You get your mouthpiece jerked out, it can break your teeth.”

He flipped through Rankin’s report, reading the findings. Diane looked over his shoulder.

“The ME said something about that—the teeth being broken from the inside out. That must have been what he was talking about,” said the sheriff. “Now, Jin, didn’t you say there might be a second diver?”

“There had to be one, unless the guy was a complete idiot.”

“I’ve been talking to his relatives, and that would be the consensus,” the sheriff said. “He took some scuba-diving lessons, but the instructor kicked him out because he wouldn’t follow safety protocol.” He pronounced
safety protocol
as if he were quoting the instructor. “Jake Stanley has never been in bad trouble, but always on the fringes of it. Kind of guy who wants the quick buck, knows everything and won’t listen to anyone.”

“And that’s why he’s dead,” said Jin.

“You see something in the autopsy report, son?” the sheriff asked Jin.

Diane directed Canfield and Jin to the table to sit down. Korey took his leave just as Neva came in carrying a box.

“Have a seat, Neva,” said Diane. “We’re discussing the quarry crime scene.”

Neva nodded to the sheriff and sat down.

“The tests on his tissue samples and blood,” said Jin, answering Sheriff Canfield’s question, “had a high nitrogen level. He probably at least had nitrogen narcosis, which would have impaired his judgment considerably, plus caused a lot of other physical problems. That may be why, if he was attacked and his hose was cut, he didn’t put up much of a fight.”

Diane nodded. “Some of the bruises are consistent with having those branches pushed down on him, which is what may have happened, rather than his getting tangled up in them.”

The sheriff shook his head. “His family and friends that me and my deputies have talked with so far haven’t a clue as to what he was doing or who he was doing it with. They all said he’d been acting real secretive lately.”

“God, I’m good,” David shouted from his computer.

Chapter 31

As if choreographed, all their heads turned toward David, who sat with his hands folded across his chest, looking at his computer screen with the amount of satisfaction that Newton must have had when he discovered gravity, or college freshmen when they discover beer comes in a keg.

“You have something to share?” asked Diane.

“Sure, when I finish enjoying the moment,” said David.

Neva smiled at Jin, who shook his head.

“You’ve got to understand how difficult this was. You don’t just plug it into the software and ask it to make the picture clear. You have to work with it, tweak it, baby it—failing that, write your own algorithm.” He hit a key, which initiated the sound of the printer. “You see, the problem is, range between color values is different in, for example, the background and the foreground, so one—”

“David,” said Neva. “We really appreciate the level of intelligence and skill it takes for you to do what you do, but I for one don’t understand what the heck you are talking about. Bottom-line it for us. Let’s see the picture.”

“That would be the most impressive.” David scooped up the pages coming out of the printer and walked over to the table. “In case you have forgotten, here is the original.” He tossed it on the table.

“You mean to tell me you made something of this?” said the sheriff. “There’s nothing here.”

“It would seem not, but . . . ” He made a flourish with his hand and began dealing the pictures like cards in a deck. “I printed one for each of you.”

“I’ll be damned,” said the sheriff. “This can’t be possible.”

“Wow,” said Neva. “Now, see, this is impressive.”

“I’ll say,” agreed Jin.

Diane examined the photograph. What was once a foggy blur was now something recognizable—not crystal-clear, but it didn’t have to be. It showed enough. It was an old car, the kind in old Eliot Ness gangster movies. What was so remarkable about the work that David had done was not that he brought out the car in the photo, but that, on the shelf of the backseat near the rear window, was unmistakably a human skull.

None of them said anything as they studied the photograph. Finally, Jin broke the silence. “How long you think that’s been down there?”

“I have to hand it to you and the lab here,” the sheriff said looking from the original photograph to David’s enhancement. “This is pretty amazing.” He laid the pictures down on the table. “So we know what our dead guys were looking for. What we don’t know is why anybody would care after all this time—if, of course, that’s why they were killed.” He shook his head. “Now I’ve got to figure out how I can get that thing up off the bottom.”

“I’d like to go down and photograph it first,” said Jin. “Maybe even work the crime scene from down there. I scuba-dive.”

The sheriff nodded. “How do you think we should go about this?”

“We can call a company,” said David. “They’ll probably do something like inflate a balloon inside the vehicle—or tie special balloons to it. That’s how they got those enormously heavy antique logs that Korey was talking about off the bottom of Lake Superior. Depending on what condition it’s in, they’ll try to contain it in some way. Jin can tell us how the process works.”

“Well,” the sheriff, said as he stood up. “thanks for finding me another crime scene—one that looks expensive.” He chuckled. Canfield went to the door and Diane buzzed him out.

“Good job, David,” said Diane. “You did good. More than good. I’m really impressed.”

“We all are,” said Jin. “I thought the sheriff’s eyes were going to drop out of his head.”

“All the praise is appreciated—and deserved.” He made a flourishing bow. “Thank you.” He turned to Neva. “So, Neva, what’s in the box?” said David.

“I found something at my house.”

“Something that I missed?” cried Jin.

“Sort of. In a way.”

Jin’s look was a mixture of amazement and horror.

“What is it?” said Diane.

“You know that the intruder destroyed all my polymer clay figures. He also got into my workplace and messed up my clay, mashing it all together.” She took a twisted and folded piece of red, blue and brown clay and set it on the table with a clunk. She had clearly baked the mass of clay.

“I went by my place before visiting Mike and sort of got to crying over my clay and looking at it. I think the intruder made a mistake. There was an imprint in the clay.”

“Fingerprints?” asked David.

“No, not fingerprints. I think he wore latex gloves.” She tapped the piece she had set on the table. “I found an imprint in here that looks like the folds of a glove. I baked this piece to make a mold. Then I put another piece of clay in the mold and made a cast. This is what I found.” She put another piece of baked clay on the table. This one was the color of terra-cotta pots.

Diane picked it up and looked at the form in the clay. “It’s an impression of his fingers.”

“I’m thinking that he took my clay and was mashing it together and made the impression with his four fingers. Look at the folds, kind of like the inside of a gloved hand, and the impression itself is sort of muted, as if it had something covering it. You can see the back side of a ring and fingernails. You can also see that one finger is badly damaged.”

“Very good, Neva,” said Jin. He grinned at her.

“I’ll put it in the evidence drawer for my house break-in,” said Neva.

“Call Garnett,” said Diane. “Tell him what you found.”

“Me?” said Neva.

Neva had always been a little intimidated by Garnett. “You found it,” said Diane. “And it’s an identifying characteristic.”

Neva nodded, then smiled. “Sure.”

Diane turned to Jin. “What did the two of you find at the Jane Doe crime scene?”

“A running shoe, a pair of socks, several small plastic buttons,” said Jin. “But I may have missed something.”

“Get over it, Jin,” said Diane.

“Yeah, Neva was there,” said David. “She would have found anything you didn’t.”

Jin shrugged and continued. “We found some of the bones of her hands and feet and a few others we couldn’t identify. We photographed the place, but didn’t find anything but the bones. The deputy did a number on the site. Oh, I did get a bug out of his car. It’s a dermestid, just like we figured.”

“Did you find a femur?” asked Diane. “Our Jane Doe is missing one.”

Jin and Neva looked at each other. “No,” they said, shaking their heads.

“Are there any nursing homes in the area?” Diane asked.

“The closest one is ten miles. Sheriff Burns said no one is missing that he’s aware of,” said Jin. “The sheriff took us to the site. He’s pretty steamed at Deputy Singer, especially when he saw all the shovel marks in the ground and we told him how the bones arrived. Singer was supposed to have called us to photograph the scene and collect the bones.”

“I got the impression,” said Neva, “that he won’t be having a job when he gets out of the hospital.”

“Whenever that is,” said Jin. “Sheriff Burns said that besides his injuries, he developed some kind of rash thing.”

“Urticaria, probably,” said David. He rubbed his arm unconsciously. “It’s a skin condition brought on by an allergic reaction to insect bites. He probably looks pretty bad about now.”

“Poor guy. Is that all the crime scenes we have at the moment?” said Diane. She hoped that the murderers in the area would hold off killing anyone until her team got caught up.

“I believe that’s it, Boss,” answered Jin. “Except Caver Doe.”

“Caver Doe has waited fifty years. He can wait a little longer. Let’s get the analysis of these cases done as quickly as we can. Neva, when you have time, I’d like to see some sketches of the faces of the victims. First up, get the autopsy photos of Quarry Doe and draw him a presentable face—preferably with his eyes open. We need to identify him. You okay with that?”

Neva wrinkled her nose. “Sure. If I can slip on their fingers to get a print, I can draw their decaying faces.”

“Jane Doe’s skull from the woods will be ready in a couple of days. It’s in with the dermestids now. And it looks like we’ll be getting another skeleton from the deep.”

Chapter 32

Diane spent the next day working only on museum business. Jin and Sheriff Canfield were arranging for a salvage company to raise the car from the bottom of the quarry lake. Most of the evidence from the various crime scenes had been processed. She’d checked Jane Doe’s bones. They were nearly ready for her to examine again. Things were going smoothly, and that always made her a little nervous. She went to bed that evening waiting for the other shoe to drop. Frank told her that she was turning into a pessimist.

Early the next morning Diane stood on the bank of the quarry waiting for Jin to surface. A salvage crew was waiting with her. They had their own divers. Once Jin and his team came up, they would begin the job of raising the car from the bottom. The depth had been measured at 120 feet. The divers had to descend and ascend in increments to adapt to the changes in pressure.

The plan in operation was for Jin to work the inside of the car and collect the bones and anything else that could get damaged or lost during the recovery. Diane had brought Korey with her. He stood talking to the salvagers and Sheriff Canfield.

Korey had told Jin that when he put anything in a bag, to make sure he sealed enough water in to protect the evidence inside. Everything wet had to stay wet to prevent decomposition from exposure to the air—at least until they got all the information they needed from it.

“As soon as the bones and artifacts come out of the quarry,” Korey said, “they’ll go into tubs of distilled water. Then we’ll dry the bones and prevent them from cracking with a series of alcohol baths, increasing the concentration until we reach a hundred percent alcohol. You can go ahead and analyze the bones if you want to. It won’t hurt to take them out of the water for a short amount of time if you keep a spray bottle handy to keep them damp.”

Diane looked at her watch. Jin still had fifteen minutes before he and the other divers had to come up, according to the chart he showed her. She occupied herself by comparing the scene around her with the notes and reports that her team had created. The long-overgrown avenue through the woods was more evident in person. The road that led to the quarry consisted of two parallel dirt tracks with its middle grown up with tall grass.

The quarry lake was a pretty place, a place that would have been a good swimming hole. The water was clear and it was relatively private. A thick wood grew around the whole area. Diane was told by the local historians that a hundred years ago granite had been mined here. She’d probably seen buildings made from its stone and didn’t know it.

Rocks made her think of Mike. She wondered how he was getting along. Neva said he had been busy making notes of what he wanted to do in his new job. Her mind wandered to Annette Lymon. Andie had told her that Dr. Lymon was looking for her. She dreaded that encounter.

The sun was warm on her face. She closed her eyes. She would like to go swimming right now. She’d been fighting a mild feeling of depression for the past few days, brought on, no doubt, by what had happened to her mother, seeing her ex-husband again, and what he did to Susan and Gerald. And not to mention getting stabbed. She rubbed her arm.

It was as if a dark mist were settling around her. She couldn’t see it, but she felt it, and it gave her a sense of dread. Frank was good; he was her anchor. He’d come over the evening before and brought one of her favorite meals—Chinese. And he had made her laugh. She touched the locket around her neck, pushing the heart shape into her chest, feeling the metal, remembering that Ariel had touched it. Yes, a swim right now would be good.

She was brought out of her reverie by a splash and voices. She opened her eyes. Jin was back up, bags and camera tied to his body. One after another, minutes apart, divers popped up after him. Four in all, each carrying bags. Jin was swimming to shore rather than getting in the boat. The second group of divers started putting on their gear. For them it was time for the real show—bringing up the car.

“Hey, Boss. It’s nice down there. A little chilly, but nice. I got some good pictures and a lot of evidence.” He pointed to the bags hanging from his body weighing him down. “Damn, these weren’t so heavy underwater.” He grinned.

“It’s an old Plymouth, maybe 1935-ish or something. David will probably know. It’s in pretty good condition, considering. No license plates on it. Too bad. That might have helped.” Diane walked with Jin to the museum van, where he took off his diving gear.

The van was one the groundskeepers used and had been stripped of carpeting. Korey came trotting over to help transfer the bones Jin had brought up into tubs of distilled water in the van.

Diane held the dripping skull in her hands. It was almost pearlescent, the way the saturated white bone reflected the sunlight. Right away she knew it would probably be a young female. It was too gracile to be otherwise. The wisdom teeth were just about to erupt. There was nothing on the face that suggested how she died. No broken face bones or broken teeth that suggested a car accident. But at the back of the head there was a depression fracture. She put the skull in the water with the other bones and replaced the cover.

“You know, Boss,” said Jin, stripping off his wet suit. “When you look at the bones, it doesn’t really matter if they dry out too fast and crack. You’ll just be burying them after you finish.”

Korey looked scandalized.

“We don’t know what we’ll find, when we’ll find it or how long it will take to identify her,” Diane said. “We may have to store her for years, and we want her in the best condition possible.”

“Yeah,” agreed Korey. “Always err on the side of conservation.”

Jin laughed. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to climb in the van a minute and close the door to change clothes.” He slammed the door shut after he was inside. “We searched the bottom for another diver,” he yelled as he was changing clothes. “Nothing.”

While he put on dry clothes, Diane looked at the special slates he had used for writing underwater. He had made a grid of the scene and a drawing of where everything was found. What had the scuba diver, Jake Stanley, and Quarry Doe been looking for? she wondered, staring at Jin’s drawing. What besides an ancient skeleton could be in an old car that probably had been at the bottom of the quarry for who knew how long? For that matter, what was the relationship of Quarry Doe to the diver, Jake Stanley?

Jin had made notes of a few things found outside the car on the quarry bottom: old tires, cans, bottles, several unidentified pieces of metal. Because the time the divers could spend at that depth was limited, he had concentrated most of his time inside the car itself.

The van door opened and Jin jumped out, dressed in cutoffs and a T-shirt. “You’re not going to believe what we found.”

“Probably not,” said Diane. She half expected them to come up with something of value—like a suitcase full of money.

“Vintage men’s magazines.”

“What?” said Korey.

“Really. From the thirties and forties. You know, Boss . . .”

She could see Jin’s mind working. “No, we aren’t going to do a museum display of them.”

“How did you know that’s what I was going to ask?”

Diane simply looked at him.

“The difference between what people thought was beautiful then and now is really interesting. I mean, with all the plastic surgery and exercise and . . .”

“Jin, move on,” said Diane.

“We can get some dates off the mags.”

“Good.”

The other divers on Jin’s team came to the van with their booty—mostly bones. They also brought clothes—a yellow gingham dress, a white apron, black shoes, and a sweater. Diane and Korey placed all of it in containers of distilled water.

While Diane and her team were packing up the evidence, the recovery team got to work. Diane heard them calling orders to one another in the background. A large tow truck sat near the edge of the water. Men wearing life jackets stood in the water on the underwater shelf near where Jake Stanley was found. The shelf was about six feet wide and four feet deep. After that, there was a dropoff all the way to the bottom of the lake. The salvagers were letting orange material down into the water, readying the lift bags for the divers to take down to the car.

The museum crew stayed well away from the operation, unlike an Atlanta news crew, who were taking pictures up close. Korey and Jin got on top of the museum van to observe the process. Diane sat in the van and studied Jin’s map of the underwater crime scene. After several minutes she put it away to watch with the others.

At the moment there was nothing much to see. The boat that anchored the descent line that Jin and his people used was gone, and the lake was calm and empty. Then, like a whale surfacing and spouting water, the car suddenly surfaced surrounded by orange lift bags, and everybody clapped. That must be one of those things, Diane thought, that you never got tired of seeing if you did this kind of work—large objects suddenly popping up out of the water. She grinned as if she’d just seen a circus act.

The divers tied a line to the car, and the men on the bank began winching it in. Jin got off the top of the van and retrieved his camera to take more photographs. At the depth the car was submerged, they had been unable to see true colors. Diane could see that the dark gray car had maroon seats. When the recovery team had the car secure on shore, Jin took a picture of the dark gray humpbacked Plymouth that was in remarkably good condition. Diane heard one of the men say he thought it was a 1938. For Diane, looking at the old car brought up from the depth of the lake was like looking back in time.

Plymouth Doe, as Jin had christened their newest skeleton, lay on the table in Diane’s osteology lab. The next day Diane had come in early to get started on the skeleton. The bones were wet and shining like pearls that had been molded into the shape of a skeleton. Korey had told Diane to keep the bones wet as she worked, so she had a spray bottle for that purpose. Korey had mixed a bath of fifty percent alcohol and fifty percent distilled water that the bones would be submerged in after Diane’s examination of them.

Plymouth Doe was female. Her pelvis was clear on that. It was broad and shallow like a cradle—and it had held at least one infant in her lifetime. Her wisdom teeth were just starting to erupt. The medial end of the clavicle was just beginning to unite with its epiphysis. There was no complete epiphyseal union on her femora or her humeri. Plymouth Doe was young—between sixteen and twenty-two, Diane guessed. Too young to die.

The newest magazine found in the car with her was dated 1942. If, for sake of argument, they could say that was the date Plymouth Doe died, she would now have been around eighty. Plymouth Doe could still be alive had someone not cracked her skull. Diane examined the rod-shaped fracture with a hand lens. The edges were smooth except for one nick in the bone. It looked like whatever object made the fracture had some small protrusion on it, like a burr or imperfection on whatever weapon was used.

There were no healed fractures on any of her bones. One curious characteristic Diane discovered when she was looking for evidence of right- or left-handedness—the beveling on her right glenoid fossa, the right shoulder socket of the scapula, was greater than on her left. This usually indicated that there had been more rotation in the right shoulder socket—a common sign of right-handedness. Greater beveling usually went hand in hand with larger muscle attachments on the dominant arm and shoulder. But Plymouth Doe’s left muscle attachments on her arm and shoulder were larger than her right. Her glenoid fossa said she was right-handed, but her muscle attachments said she was left-handed.

One occupation Diane had read about that could cause this was waitressing. Having to balance a heavy tray with the less-dominant hand left the dominant hand free. A right-handed waitress balanced a tray on her left hand. Had Plymouth Doe been a waitress in her relatively short life? She thought about the white apron found with her clothes.

Diane moistened the skull with the spray bottle and began taking the tedious measurements on the face just as Neva entered the lab with a folder tucked under her arm.

“I have some drawings of Quarry Doe—Jake Stanley’s partner in death,” she said. Quarry Doe had been dead in the water long enough for his face to become distorted. Diane wanted Neva try to make his face look alive to help identify him. “I also scanned Caver Doe’s skull,” Neva continued, “since he was sitting there right beside it. Remember that photo we found with Caver Doe? Even though it had been soaked in Caver Doe’s blood and fluids, David got me an image from it by using the computer and some of his fancy lights. It was a photograph of a girl, and I drew her picture too.”

“That photo wasn’t stolen?” she asked.

Neva looked a little embarrassed. “I had taken it from the evidence box and had it in the desk in the vault. That’s where I’ve been working on the drawings.”

“That’s a relief. I thought we had lost it in the burglary,” said Diane. She walked over to the table, where Neva laid out the drawings.

The modern body, Quarry Doe, had a seventies shag haircut. With some guys that cut had never quite gone out of style. To be so young—the ME estimated his age at twenty-five—his face had a rough edge to it. Quarry Doe was aging fast. He had thin lips, wide eyes, black hair and a crooked nose that was slightly pug.

Beside the drawing was an autopsy photograph of Quarry Doe’s back. It was covered with tattoos—tigers, snakes, knives, fangs, guns, roses, crosses, swastikas and more—filling every square inch. Some were well-done; others were crude.

“These are prison tattoos,” said Diane. “That will make it easy for the sheriff to identify him. Did you give Sheriff Canfield a copy of your drawing of his face?” Neva nodded. “Prison tattoos are forbidden, so having them is a sign of rebellion; the more you have, the more time you had to spend getting them, and the greater the risk of getting caught. It’s a kind of prestige to have a lot of them. Probably says something about our vic.”

Diane went to the next set of drawings. Neva had placed the last two portraits together—Caver Doe and the girl in his photograph—possibly his sweetheart? Caver Doe looked young. His bones told her that he was, but his portrait really showed his youthful, graceful face—quite a contrast to the face of Quarry Doe. The face of the woman from the photograph was equally pretty. Short wavy hair, bright eyes, full lips with corners turned into a hint of a smile. Her dress had a crocheted collar. There was something about her that looked vaguely familiar.