Dead Guilty

spine was quite long. Green Doe had a large nose. What she found interesting was not the size of the nose, but that if Green Doe had decided to have a nose job, it would have been of the same type that Blue Doe had. Odd.
    Diane glanced at her watch. It was late. If she ex pected to get any sleep, she didn’t have time to do another skeleton, no matter how loudly this one now called to her.
    ‘‘Damned interesting,’’ she muttered to herself as she reluctantly put the skull back in the box.
She locked the osteo lab and walked back to the crime lab. She was glad to see that her crew was gone. They all needed sleep. The night operator was settled behind her desk reading a book. Diane waved as she left by the museum entrance.
Diane rarely used the lab’s private elevator that al lowed her to come and go and never set foot in the museum. Walking through the large exhibit rooms gave her psyche a rest after dealing with all the grim aspects of crime.
When she stepped out of the third-floor crime lab wing and closed the door behind her, the change in ambiance was startling. The shiny metal antiseptic fur nishings and white walls were replaced by dark, rich wood walls, granite floors, vaulted ceilings and the sweet smell of wood polish. She crossed the overlook that allowed a view onto the huge first-floor dinosaur room, where she saw the silhouette of David sitting on a bench in the dim light. Looking at the wall paint ings, no doubt. The pictures of dinosaurs didn’t exactly have the soothing quality of Vermeers, but she herself often unwound by sitting quietly and looking at them—or at any number of wonderful things in the museum.
She took the museum elevator to the first floor and joined David in the dinosaur room with the skeletons of the twenty-five-foot-long T. rex –looking Alber tosaurus, the suspended pteranodon with his bony wings nearly spanning the width of the room, the aquatic tylosaurus, the three-horned triceratops, and the newly arrived brachiosaur.
She sat down beside David on the bench. ‘‘Relaxing?’’
‘‘Looking at that little unicorn.’’
The museum’s wall paintings were done in a style of dated realism that gave them a charming antique quality. A distinctly unique characteristic of the twelve wall murals was the tiny unicorns hidden in each painting. Diane never tired of looking at them. Appar ently, neither did David, for she often found him sit ting with the Mesozoic Era dinosaurs or in the Pleistocene room.
‘‘What are you thinking about it?’’
‘‘Some days I think he’s going to get trampled. Other times, I think he’s just going along with the big guys.’’
‘‘They never get trampled,’’ said Diane. ‘‘They’re magic.’’
‘‘That’s good to know. Sometimes I worry about them.’’
‘‘You don’t have to worry.’’
David’s voice was calm, quieter than usual. ‘‘My divorce became final today,’’ he said.
Another casualty of our work, Diane thought.
‘‘You okay with that?’’
‘‘Actually, yes. I don’t feel much about it. It’s not that I don’t still love Carolyn, but . . . I don’t feel it anymore—if that makes any sense whatsoever.’’
‘‘I guess I can understand that.’’
‘‘I thought we might get back together. She was excited when I got a job at a museum.’’
‘‘Then she discovered you would still be doing crime scenes?’’
‘‘Yeah.’’
‘‘You know, David...’’
‘‘I need to do this. I need to see justice done. De spite all the little political undercurrents, this is a good place to work.’’
‘‘Yes, it is, despite all the political undercurrents— as long as you can swim.’’
David smiled. ‘‘That was a good thing—sending Neva to work the car. She just left here a while ago. Found some blood. A few fibers and some miscellany. She’s getting a warrant to go over Mayberry’s trailer.’’
‘‘Blood’s not good.’’
‘‘There wasn’t much of it. So who knows? We may yet have a happy ending. What do you think’s going on?’’
‘‘I don’t have a handle on it yet.’’ Diane told him about the discoveries she found on the skeletons.
‘‘Interesting about the noses. What you figure?’’
Diane shrugged her shoulders. ‘‘Coincidence, maybe? Perhaps a familial relationship? Maybe they met each other in Blue’s doctor’s waiting room?’’
‘‘It’ll be interesting to compare DNA. The M.E. did take samples, didn’t she?’’
‘‘Sure. But you know