Dead Guilty

front right side, opposite where your
part was.’’
David opened his mouth, then shut it, and stroked
his bald head as if feeling for something. ‘‘How could
you know that?’’
Diane took a rope she had purchased that morning and laid it beside the crime scene rope. ‘‘You forgot,
I’ve seen pictures of you as a kid.’’
David threw back his head and laughed one loud
Ha! ‘‘You had me going. Good thing you told me. I’d
have been thinking about that all day.’’
‘‘You’d have figured it out. The point is, there’s
always evidence.’’
David went back to the crime lab, shaking his bald
head, leaving Diane to study the rope. Near one end
was a cluster of six kinks about an inch to an inch
and a half apart—some kinks were more crimped than
others. Fifteen inches down, there was a larger kink
with significant wear on the inside of the curve. Two
and a quarter inches from there, another series of
worn places. The wear was not continuous, but in
patches down the rope.
She photographed the rope and measured all the
places where it was kinked and worn. Altogether,
there were eleven kinks of varying sizes and seven
places where the rope had been worn, some quite ex
tensively, some barely noticeable. Sometimes the wear
was inside the kink, other times it was alone. Diane lay her new rope beside the crime scene
rope—called the ‘‘lone rope’’ in her notes. She took
red and green Sharpies and began marking the new
rope to match the lone rope—green signifying a kink,
red signifying wear.
‘‘Okay, smarty,’’ she muttered to herself, ‘‘what
kind of knot was tied in this rope?’’
The obvious first choice—obvious to her, at least—
was a sheepshank. Perhaps the person wanted to use
the rope, but was worried the worn places had weak
ened it. A sheepshank is a method of strengthening a
rope by tying it in such a way as to take the strain off the weak areas. It shortens a rope, but is a good way
to use a damaged rope in a pinch.
She tied a sheepshank several times, each time try
ing to match the green kinks to the turn of the knots
and placing the red worn areas where they would be
strengthened by having good rope on either side. Even
after numerous attempts, she never got close to match
ing her red and green points to the turns of the
sheepshank.
The initial failure made her
Okay, the kinks are the turns of
    more determined. the knots—or . . . where the rope looped around an object. And so where does the wear come from—from rubbing
    object, or itself ? Diane fished a handful
    against an of colored rubber bands out of a drawer and dropped them on the table next to the experimental rope.
    First she located each green kink with no red wear on the inside, made a bight—a loop—and placed a yellow rubber band around it to hold it in place. She took the kinks with inside wear and did the same thing. Where the rope showed several kinks close to gether, she didn’t bother with how the knot was actu ally tied, but simply looped them together and held them with a blue rubber band. Okay, now it looks like a mess, but that’s all right.
    Diane examined the crime scene rope again and studied the red wear marks on her experimental rope. She tried several ways of folding the rope so that the wear marks—the red marks on her experimental rope—touched each other. Each way was a tangle of rope with no significant pattern.
    There was about a foot and a half where several spots of wear spiraled around the rope. She folded her arms and frowned at the two pieces of hemp lying on the table. The lone rope had been twisted in some way. She made a loop at the widest space between wear marks and then twisted the rope so that all the wear marks touched, securing it with a red rubber band. It now almost looked like something. But what?
    Neva came out of the vault, stretching her arms. ‘‘I thought I’d break for lunch,’’ she said.
Diane looked at her watch. She’d been at this damn rope far too long, and what was it going to tell her anyway?
‘‘I didn’t realize it’s getting so late. How’s the recon struction going?’’
‘‘Good, I think. I’ll have something by the end of the day. If people will refrain from killing each other for a while, I’ll get all three done pretty quickly.’’
‘‘What’s your take on the most recent murder?’’ asked Diane.
‘‘We don’t have that many murders here, and now we have a cluster of five, maybe six. It doesn’t look like a