Dead Hunt

pales by comparison.’’
    He let her off at the museum side-door loading dock and extracted a promise for her to call as soon as she could. Diane thought there was just a little too much cloak-and-dagger about the whole thing. However, she slipped into the building, taking back staircases and service hallways to Mike Seeger’s office in the geology lab.
    Mike was the head curator for geology, one of Diane’s caving partners, and a good friend. He also worked part-time for a company that searched for and collected extremophiles, organisms that live in the most extreme environments on earth. It wasn’t just his knowledge of geology that made Mike valuable to the company, but his skill as a rock climber and a caver. He had recently returned from one of his expeditions. Mike was also Neva’s boyfriend. He, Diane, Neva, Jin, and another friend frequently went caving together. Diane knocked on his door. He opened it immediately and Diane slipped in. He closed the door behind her.
    ‘‘God, I love working here,’’ he said with a broad grin. ‘‘There’s always something adventurous going on.’’ He gave her a quick hug and stepped back to look at her. ‘‘You okay, Doc? I haven’t had a chance to talk with you since I got back.’’
    ‘‘I’m muddling through business as usual,’’ she said. Mike’s office was crowded with crates of rocks— probably volcanic. Each trip, he brought back geologic samples for the museum. These were from his latest. Along the walls he’d hung huge posters of rock formations and caves from around the world. On a bookcase stuffed with geology books was a photograph of all of them at the entrance to a cave.
    Mike had the body of a rock climber—lean, no fat between his skin and hard muscle. His boyish face was getting a slight weathered look from all his outdoor activity. He wore jeans and bright white Richard III Tshirt. He pulled up a chair for her and one for himself.
    ‘‘What’s this about, Mike?’’ asked Diane. He reached for some papers on his desk. ‘‘Neva said the DA told her and the others not to
    talk to you or show you the crime scene report.’’ He grinned. ‘‘Of course he didn’t tell her not to talk to me, nor did they tell me not to show you their notes.’’
    That was Diane’s team all right. On occasions like this you had to explain exactly all the things you didn’t want them to do, or they would find a loophole in the instructions. She reached for the pages.
    ‘‘My team can be very sneaky,’’ she said.
    ‘‘I’ll say. They made the notes and gave them to me with instructions before they spoke with the district attorney. David said they would be warned off from talking to you once the DA had been informed. He was right.’’
    A small laugh escaped Diane’s lips. ‘‘David should write a book—a practical guide to paranoia.’’
‘‘Jin wanted you to know that he hated calling Garnett,’’ said Mike.
‘‘He had to,’’ said Diane. ‘‘He didn’t have a choice once he identified the blood.’’
‘‘Well, he’s real bummed out about it,’’ said Mike. ‘‘He kept muttering about how he gets this brand-new DNA lab and the first person he gets in trouble from it is you.’’
Diane shook her head and smiled. ‘‘He did the right thing.’’
She scanned the first page. The information was written in David’s neat hand, listing what was found in her apartment. First was the blood. It was Clymene’s. Jin had mapped the entire pool and took samples from Diane’s clothes. All of it was Clymene’s and it was all fresh blood, not stored blood. The blood trail led down the back stairs of Diane’s apartment and out to Diane’s car, where Clymene’s blood was found in the trunk along with one of Diane’s serrated kitchen knives. The knife had been washed clean with kerosene.
They had so far found no trace evidence that was helpful. The police were alerted by a call from a man using a cell phone who identified himself as a neighbor. However, all the neighbors said they heard nothing until the police arrived. And last: Diane’s tox screen came back positive for a barbiturate—not a high dose, but enough to make her sleep well. No container was found with any barbiturate residue and there were no pills in her house.
She looked at the next page and sucked in her breath. It was the report on the crime scene in White County that Neva and Jin had worked the day before—the body was that of the Reverend