Dead Guilty

how DNA is. Good chance it’s all degraded. I’m going home to get some rest. You head home too.’’
Diane left the dinosaur room, walked down the hall way past the museum store and cut through the pri mate section to the main lobby of the museum. Chanell Napier, the museum’s head of security, was at the desk.
‘‘What’re you doing here this late?’’ asked Diane.
Chanell was slender and athletic. She had dark skin, a round face and black hair cut close to her head.
‘‘I like to rotate out with the night guards once in a while. Keeps me up to date on what goes on at night. I get to know the night custodial staff.’’
‘‘I hope not a lot goes on here at night.’’ Diane laughed.
‘‘It’s pretty quiet. Just a lot of polishing of these shiny floors and walls. I like things quiet.’’
‘‘So do I. Carry on.’’ Diane passed through the dou ble doors that led to the private area of the museum where she and many of the other staff had their of fices. The office corridors were empty. The carpeting looked freshly vacuumed, so she guessed the custodial staff had already cleaned here.
She unlocked the private door to her office. On her desk was a stack of mail Andie had left for her. She sifted through the letters and placed them in stacks according to how urgent they were. Some she simply threw away.
Kendel had put a stack of requisition forms from the museum curators with notes attached to each re quest saying whether she thought it had merit.
‘‘I think this is a good idea. Good price,’’ read one note.
Diane looked at the form. The paleontology curator had found a small museum that was selling its collec tions. They had two casts of velociraptor skeletons for what really did appear to be a good price. The casts were damaged, but the paleontologist assured Diane that this wasn’t a problem.
Velociraptors were the speedy, vicious villains of Jurassic Park . Everyone who came to the museum wanted to see one. They were not nearly as large as the Albertosaurus or brachiosaur, but the movie gave them a long-lived reputation. Diane wrote on Kendel’s note to tell the paleontologist to purchase the skele tons. When they were assembled, it would mean an other round of good publicity for the museum.
The next item was another memo from Kendel. She discovered that members of the family who gave them the mummy had amulets that had come from the mummy’s wrapping. She thought she could negotiate a good deal on them. Diane agreed with that too. As long as they had a mummy and a case, it would be good to have everything that went with it. They cer tainly couldn’t afford an entire Egyptian collection.
The last item was from Korey. He had X-rayed the mummy, and she could come up to the conservation lab at any time and take a look. He had also scheduled an MRI for next week.
Things seemed to be going along nicely at the mu seum. So far, working two jobs hadn’t been too much of a problem—and she really didn’t need that much sleep. She wrapped up the museum business and left her office, walking directly into the Pleistocene room.
She liked the museum at night. The cavernous rooms were dark except for a few low-level lights fixed close to the floor so that one could navigate through the museum at night without running into the exhibits. Museum lighting was its own problem, light being a destructive force, yet completely necessary. The light ing of a museum must take into consideration angle, distance, strength and type of light, and requires more mathematics than one might think possible for what for most people is a commonplace matter. The light must have destructive UV rays filtered from it, but it also must render accurate representations of color. Diane had staff whose only job was to take care of the lighting.
Her footfalls echoed a hollow sound on the granite floor. Walking though the Pleistocene hall was like being in the twilight area of a cave—that place where only a small amount of light filters in from the en trance and gradually diminishes to total darkness. Here she could see only the silhouettes of the skele tons of the mammoth, the giant sloth, the huge shortfaced bear.
Caves are places of dramatic opposites. Some rooms and passages are so small you have to suck in your breath just to get through. Others, Diane could have fit her entire museum inside. The big rooms of mapped caves have glorious names—the Chandelier Ballroom, Pellucidar, Cathedral Hall, Grand Ball room, Throne