Dead Guilty

hers. Despite the hot night, his body felt good and safe, like home. The last thing she thought of before going to sleep was the lone rope she left lying out on the table in the lab.

Chapter 21
    When Diane arrived in the crime lab, Neva ap proached her anxiously and handed her drawings of Fred and Ethel. The drawings looked as if Fred and Ethel had sat for them. They were similar to the com puter graphics, but didn’t have that computer graphic look. Both were Caucasian. Diane noticed the noses right away. They had the most distinctive detail. Neva had taken to heart the lesson Diane gave her.
    Ethel was young, midtwenties, with dark hair falling below her chin, oval face, slight nose, eyes wide apart. Fred was older, midforties. Neva had drawn his hair neither short nor long, but a median length for males. His face was square and his nose almost pug, with a prominent dip between the nasal bone and the frontal bone between the eyes. Their lips were neither thin nor thick. Fred and Ethel, who never knew each other in life, were now ‘‘married’’ skeletons, given a new life in Neva’s drawings.
    ‘‘Very good,’’ Diane told her. ‘‘This is exactly what I’m looking for. We’ll have to frame and hang these.’’ A museum exhibit had already begun playing out in the back of her mind.
    Diane unlocked the lab and the vault for Neva. While she waited for David, she set up the camera equipment.
    ‘‘If this rate of mayhem keeps up, you’re going to have to hire a second crime scene unit,’’ said David as he came through the door.
    ‘‘Maybe we can put an ad in the paper notifying everyone that the county has reached its quota of mur ders for the year, so they can’t commit any more.’’
    David took over the task of setting up the cameras, and Diane laid out the bones for the photographs. As he helped her photograph Red Doe’s bones, David briefed her on the crime scene and the latest gossip.
    ‘‘You certainly gave Neva a boost—sending her to process the car by herself, then assigning her to recon struct the faces.’’ He spoke in a low voice, even though there was no way Neva could hear them from inside the vault room. ‘‘She was much more confident—and friendly—at the crime scene.’’
    ‘‘She just needed experience—and someone to counteract Garnett. That Janice
year apparently touched all the
the department.’’
Warrick thing last women working in
    ‘‘Garnett asked us to take Raymond Waller’s collec tion to keep safe in the museum until Raymond’s fam ily could claim it. He didn’t want to leave it in the house. I took everything to Korey. I thought some of the items might need special care.’’
    ‘‘That’s fine. Korey will know how to care for them.
    Nice of Garnett to take care of things for the family.’’ ‘‘He’s not a bad guy,’’ said David. ‘‘A little too
political. Acts like he’s always looking over his
shoulder.’’
‘‘Probably is. Have you met the mayor?’’ ‘‘No, but I understand that you’ve had a conversa
tion with him.’’
Diane smiled as she placed Red Doe’s fourth lum
bar vertebra on the stand to be photographed. ‘‘Yes.
We had a conversation.’’
David laughed, snapped the pictures and removed
the camera from the stand. ‘‘That’s the last one, isn’t
it?’’ Diane nodded. ‘‘We’re processing the Waller evi
dence as quickly as we can. There wasn’t much there.
We collected fiber samples from the furniture that had
been ripped up. When we find the perp, he’s bound
to have gotten fibers all over him.’’
‘‘Someone was obviously looking for something,’’
mused Diane. ‘‘You don’t think it was the collection?’’ David shrugged. ‘‘Maybe. That seems the most ob
vious. It’s just that...’’
‘‘There are those other murders,’’ finished Diane. ‘‘Yeah, those other murders. And why would he rip
up the upholstery in search of baseball bats? Doesn’t
add up.’’
David cast a glance at the lone rope lying on the
table, the one found on the ground at the Cobber’s
Wood crime scene. ‘‘You going to be able to do any
thing with that?’’
‘‘I don’t know. It was tied in knots long enough to
leave kinks in the rope. I thought I might be able to
do something with those.’’
‘‘What can you possibly do? The knots are gone.’’ ‘‘But they were there.’’
‘‘So was my hair, but we can’t reconstruct where
the cowlick was.’’
‘‘It was on the