One Grave Less (7 page)

She had been gently pulling her leg, gradually adding pressure.
Just look away
, she willed.
Look away, damn it, just for a second
.

She waited for an opening. She knew one would come. He didn’t strike her as being a patient man.

“I have friends who will ransom me,” she said. “Maybe for more money than you can get from Julio’s man.”

“It might come to that. But, see, I get the idea this guy Julio’s got is willing to pay a lot of money.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” she said. “I’m simply not that important.”

She had been pretending she was Diane Fallon. It seemed easier. It seemed like a way to get information about what they wanted without exposing her own identity to them. She wondered what Diane Fallon had done in South America that had made someone want her so badly.

“Was it Patia who pointed me out to Julio?” said Maria.

“She sometimes works for archaeologists here—a good way to get information. Julio lives off information,” he said.

Then you’d think he’d have been better at gathering it
, she thought.
Do they think Georgia has only one forensic anthropologist?

His face screwed up again, apparently from a wave of pain. “My leg hurts, damn you,” he said. “I might just teach you a lesson before I turn you over to the buyer.”

Suddenly he made his move. She hadn’t seen it coming. He acted so quickly she had no time to respond. He was on top of her with his gun pointing at her face, his good hand resting on her throat.

Diane stared openmouthed at Martin Thormond.

“What?” she managed to say after several moments of being completely dumbfounded. “Drug smugglers? Someone told him I was involved with drug smugglers?”

“I told him, of course, that it was ridiculous.” Martin pulled a piece of paper from his inner coat pocket. “I have his name—Brian Mathews.”

Diane took the paper and stared at it for a long moment.

“I have no idea what this is about,” she said, “but I’ll find out.” She paused. “You said he asked nothing about the events that happened here in the museum last evening?”

“He didn’t. I thought that was odd,” Martin said.

He stood there awkwardly, as if searching for something else to say, shifting slightly from one foot to the other. He was going through, Diane guessed, what people often go through when confronted with an accusation about someone they know. Not believing it but, at the same time, entertaining the notion that it might be true.

Hell. What some people will say
.

“Thank you, Martin,” she said. “I’ll find out what this is about.”

He nodded, gave her a lopsided self-conscious smile, and made his exit—a little quickly, thought Diane.

She turned off the lights, closed and locked the door to the boardroom. Outside the door in the hallway she smelled the familiar odor of the treacly perfume Madge Stewart wore. Diane was thinking that the scent certainly had staying power.

As she walked past the door to the storage closet adjoining the boardroom, she heard a faint noise from inside. She stopped, opened the closet door, and found herself confronting a wide-eyed and very much surprised Madge Stewart.

“Are you lost?” said Diane.

Madge smoothed her frizzy hair with a hand.

“Lost? I, uh, I guess I am.” She attempted to regain her composure, smoothing her frizzy hair again. “I wasn’t watching where I was going.”

She fled the closet, her shoes clicking on the granite floor of the museum as she hurried down the hallway.

“This is just great,” Diane whispered to herself.

In the back of the closet was a door that opened into the boardroom. Madge obviously had been listening to Diane’s conversation with Thormond. That was all that was needed to make a bad situation worse. Madge would spread the rumor of Diane’s involvement with drug smugglers to everyone she knew.

Diane’s own heels clicked on the floor as she made her way to her osteology office. She had two offices, one for each hat she wore—museum director and crime lab director. Her museum office was decorated with Escher prints, photographs of her caving, paintings, and a desk fountain. And it had an attached lounge with a full bathroom.

Her osteology office, by contrast, was small with pale walls and comfortable no-frills furniture. There was adequate space, but no more. On the wall opposite her desk hung a watercolor of a lone wolf hunting. Perhaps that was symbolic, she thought, as she sat down at her desk and reached for the phone.

Diane called the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
newspaper and asked for Brian Mathews.

“I have a note on my desk saying he wanted to speak with me,” she said.

It was almost true. She did have a note on her desk. And no doubt, at some point he probably would want to speak with her.

“Oh, really? Let me see.” The woman answering the phone sounded confused. “Well, you are a museum, right?”

“Yes,” Diane confirmed.
She probably read the caller ID
.

“It must have been about Machu Picchu. That’s where he is. Are you following his blog?”

“No,” Diane said. “He has a blog?”

Diane searched for his name on the
AJC
Web site using her computer while she was talking. She found quickly that Brian Mathews was a travel reporter currently on vacation, going to major archaeological sites in Mexico and Central and South America. He was recording his trip on a blog at the
AJC
Web site.

Odd
, thought Diane.

“I’ll wait until he contacts the museum again,” she said, thanking the woman.

Machu Picchu. That’s in Peru
.

Diane sat for a moment, questions running through her mind about Mathews’ call to Martin Thormond. Did Mathews call from Peru? Had he been talking to someone who wished her harm? Someone who thought telling a reporter lies was a way to hurt her? Was it really Mathews . . . or someone pretending to be a reporter?

Damn
. As if she didn’t have enough problems at the moment. She stood up and smoothed her blazer.
One problem at a time
.

Her office was adjacent to her osteology lab, which connected to the crime lab. She left her office intending to pass through her bone lab . . . stopping abruptly when she saw a box on the metal table. It was one of the crime lab boxes used to store bones and other evidence.

The bone from the backpack
, she thought.

She looked in the box. It was there, lying softly but securely on brown paper over batting—the small upper arm bone of a child. It was a sad little bone. Bones of children were always sad—a life just starting . . . and ending too soon . . . often violently.

Diane put on her white lab coat and disposable gloves and picked up the bone. It was only a diaphysis—the bone shaft. The ends were gone. The epiphyses hadn’t fused.

The bone was a light yellow-gray in color, the color of the soil from which it was taken. She sniffed it. It wasn’t old, perhaps a few years. Not from an archaeological dig.

She measured the length of the bone and looked on a reference chart on the wall. The child was just over three feet tall. Probably between four and six years of age. Small for six.

The bone had no abnormalities, no healed breaks, no evidence of malnourishment, nor of any pathology. Murder victim? Illegally disinterred? What was it doing in the backpack with a bunch of feathers and animal parts?

Diane slipped off her gloves and dropped them in a trashcan. She walked across the room and opened the door. As she crossed the threshold, she took off her museum hat and put on her hat as director of the crime lab of the city of Rosewood, Georgia.

The first thing she saw when she entered the lab was an image of feathers projected on the large viewing screen. Elegant plumes with their parts neatly labeled.

Feathers are one of nature’s many well-designed inventions. They look and feel fragile and soft, they have great beauty, yet they are great protectors, better than an overcoat.

Diane recognized the illustration as being from one of David’s many databases. He was telling Izzy about feathers. They sat at the conference table looking at the screen. The new system they had recently installed for debriefing about evidence was money well spent. She pulled a chair out, sat down, and listened patiently, only because she knew when she finished with her crime scene crew, she had to go have lunch with Vanessa and Laura.

“Two main types,” David said.

He clipped his phrases short, as if he were going down a bulleted list of characteristics. Probably because deep down he felt Izzy had a short attention span for details.

“Contour and down. A contour feather is the large, flat feather that covers the body of an adult bird.”

“The ones Indians wear in a headdress,” said Izzy. He grinned at David.

Izzy, like Jin, liked to irritate David whenever the opportunity arose. And the main way to irritate David was to act either sophomoric or not interested in his databases.

“And down is in pillows. See, I know feathers.”

David rolled his eyes. “Contour feathers have a long, thick central shaft called a rachis.” He pointed at examples on the projection as he talked. “The branches off the rachis are called barbs. More branches off the barbs are called barbules, and they are held together by tiny hooks called barbicels. Together these form the vane or vexillum of the feather—the main part of the feather. All this structure makes it so you can zip a feather up and down. Got that? Because I’m giving a test.”

“What?” said Izzy. “Zip them?”

“In a manner of speaking,” interrupted Diane. “Kind of like Velcro. It protects the bird. Now, David, will you bottom-line it for me?”

Diane was getting impatient, even though finishing meant having to go to lunch. But she knew David would expand his explanation into the variations in feathers that allowed people like him to tell what kind of bird a feather came from.

David frowned. He loved to lecture and he was usually pretty good at it. But sometimes the other members of the team were a trial and he would make it boring and long on purpose.

“I was just joshing you, David. I always thought feathers were just feathers,” said Izzy.

“Everything in the universe has qualities that are unique enough that they can be differentiated apart from other like things if we just examine the characteristics closely,” David said.

“And I can see you’ve made a fine start,” said Izzy. He turned toward Diane. “Have you seen the number of databases he has?”

“Yes,” said Diane. She grinned at David. “It’s one of the things that makes us unique. So, what do we have?”

David clicked the remote and displayed the evidence from the knapsack up on the screen.

“The talons are from a harpy eagle. The mummified paws are from a woolly monkey. The beak is from a keel-billed toucan. The teeth are from a jaguar. They have holes drilled in them and were once probably part of a necklace. The holes were all made with the same tool, probably a jeweler’s drill. The feathers are from macaws. The blue ones are from a Spix’s macaw.”

“A Spix’s macaw?” said Diane. “I didn’t think there were any left.”

David started to answer when Neva, another of Diane’s crime scene team, came out of a glassed-in cubicle where she had been working on the woven bag the evidence had been found in. They had thought it might be a medicine bag from one of the tribes. Neva slipped off her gloves and disposed of them.

“The bag is on cam two,” she said, and David switched over to it. The screen blinked and came back up with a view of the embroidered bag with a woven handle. “It’s not South American,” said Neva. “It’s Thai.”

“Thai?” said David. “Really?”

Neva nodded. “It’s saturated with a drug called XTR25. It’s a new variant of ecstasy and pretty powerful. The DEA is going to be interested in this,” said Neva.

Diane felt sick to her stomach.

The museum restaurant where Diane was to meet Vanessa and Laura had an ancient medieval library look about it. The center of the restaurant was a maze of tall, vintage brick archways that created small chamberlike spaces with vaulted ceilings, each containing four or five tables of dark wood. Booths lining the walls were tucked behind similar archways.

Diane knew that Vanessa and Laura would choose a booth. They always did. More privacy. She saw them seated across the restaurant. Madge Stewart was standing in front of their booth with her back to Diane, speaking in an animated fashion.

It didn’t take her long
, thought Diane.

She watched Madge’s gossip dance. It was like a tattletale pantomime. Vanessa said something to Madge. Madge’s body language changed. She stood still, like a scolded child.

Diane sighed and threaded her way through the tables toward the booth. She was almost there when Laura noticed her, smiled and waved with a little too much animation. Diane grimaced.

Madge jumped as if Diane had goosed her.

“Oh, I have to go,” she said. “Nice speaking with you, Vanessa, Laura.” She smiled weakly at Diane and hurried off.

Madge was in her forties but sometimes acted like a seventh grader. And all her friends, like Laura and Vanessa, unwittingly encouraged her by coddling her. At least that’s what Diane thought.

All of them were also old Rosewood several generations back. Nearly all the “old” families had strong bonds among them. But still, Diane had no idea why they excused Madge’s bad behavior. She wasn’t a stupid woman by any means. She was a talented artist. She also seemed to be everyone’s baby sister.

“I hope you haven’t been waiting long,” said Diane. “But I see you’ve been entertained by the latest gossip.”

Diane sat down opposite Laura and Vanessa. Laura had redone her blond hair in a short pixielike cut. It looked good with her small face . . . which was frowning at the moment. Vanessa’s platinum white hair was in a smooth French twist. It gave her face a tranquil look, even with her piercing blue eyes.