Dead Secret

the top. Diane took it out of the bubble wrap and locked it inside the vault.
    “Thanks, Korey. I understand you had dinner with Neva and Mike last evening.”
    “Yes. Had a good time. Mike seems to be getting along pretty good. I have to tell you, I was worried. That was scary at the funeral.” He shook his head, then smiled. “I’m glad you hired him. That was a good choice. He works hard around here.”
    Diane locked up the lab again and walked down the hall with Korey.
    “You going home or back to the lab?”
    “Home. I was in Andie’s office when the stuff came and I offered to bring them up.”
    Diane arched an eyebrow and smiled. Korey laughed out loud.
    “I can’t pull anything off around you, can I, Dr. F.?”
    They reached the elevators. “Spill it, Korey. What is it you want?”
    “I’d like to go the International Conference of Museum Conservators.”
    “Where is it going to be?”
    “Glasgow this year.”
    Diane thought for a moment. “Let me see what we have in the budget for conferences. But assuming we have the money, sure, pack your bags.”
    “Thanks, Dr. F.” He punched the elevator button. It opened and Frank got off.
    “Diane. Just coming to see you. Hello, Korey.”
    “Hey, Frank. How’s it going?”
    They shook hands and all of them rode down in the elevator together. Korey said good-bye, and Diane walked with Frank to her office.
    “I was about to go look at some paperwork and then call it a night.”
    “Good timing. How about you take your paperwork home and let me take you to dinner? We can eat here in the restaurant if you like.”
    “Actually, I can leave the paperwork. I let the crime staff go home early—well, early for us, anyway. I’ll get on it tomorrow. You look happy.”
    “I’m celebrating,” Frank said.
    “Good.” Lately everything had been about her—all her problems. It would be nice to spend an evening talking about Frank for a change. “You catch that guy you were looking for?”
    “Yes, I did, and I’m celebrating.”
    Over a dinner of steak and baked potato in the museum restaurant, Frank told her about the embezzler that everyone, including the FBI, had been looking for.
    “He hit some Atlanta companies; that’s why my unit was involved. I noticed that in one of his hotel rooms our guys discovered a small glassine envelope. I thought that might mean he was a stamp collector, but that was a long shot. There are lots of uses for glassine envelopes. I gave the info to the FBI. They checked out stamp conventions that corresponded to places he’d visited and didn’t find a correlation, so they dropped it.”
    His eyes twinkled in the candlelight as he spoke. Diane absolutely loved his eyes. “But you didn’t.” She took a bite of her steak. It occurred to her that she hadn’t eaten all day, except for an energy bar for breakfast.
    “I’d been studying the guy. He collected Matchbox cars, rocks, coins and comic books as a kid—he was a collector. Stamps are nice for someone who moves around a lot. No, I didn’t let it go. The FBI had hacked into some of the places he shopped online and saw that he used the password ‘ironage’ on one site, ‘lavaroad’ and ‘tigerail’ on a few others.”
    “Tiger ale? What is that, some kind of drink?”
    Frank shook his head. “The FBI didn’t think anything about his passwords, but I got to playing around with them. They’re anagrams for Noriega, Alvarado and Galtieri.”
    Diane stopped eating and stared at him. “How did you possibly come up with that?”
    “I’m a detective—one who deals with lots of numbers and words. What can I say?”
    “So what did you make of these anagrams?”
    “The FBI thought it was interesting, but still didn’t make anything of it. I was betting that was his stamp interest—dictators of small countries, something like that. I looked again at the places he’d been and got the catalogs of the ones that had stamp conventions. They all had stamps of the kind I thought he might collect if my hunch was right. As a check, I looked at some of the stamp convention catalogs at places he didn’t go—sure enough, none of them had the kind of stamps I thought would interest him.”
    “Pretty slick,” said Diane. “How did you find him?”
    “The FBI at this point had come to my way of thinking, and they tried to set a few traps, but they couldn’t lure him in. Then the thing about Pitcairn Island came up in the news—the mayor and his buddies convicted