Dead Secret

Offer our apologies and ask them to reschedule. Offer them a seventy percent discount if they will.”
    Andie nodded.
    “I would hope that twenty-four hours is plenty of time to make all preparations for the search. So let’s say the search will officially begin tomorrow at six P.M. Mr. Emery, can you make arrangements?”
    “Yes. I’ll get right on it.”
    Diane looked at her watch. “It’s three o’clock now. We’re locking down at six o’clock today, including the restaurant. The only people who will stay will be museum security personnel and the crime lab crew. Mr. Emery, I want your security people fresh when the bomb unit gets here tomorrow, so you and yours can go home now for rest, and Chanell’s people can secure the building until tomorrow afternoon. Is that okay with you, Chanell?”
    She nodded. “I’ll notify my people and call in a couple of officers on leave to double up until Mr. Emery’s people come in tomorrow,” she said.
    “Okay, all of you tell any of your people who will be affected,” Diane said. “But do not discuss with anyone what has been said in this room. The official reason for closing is a breakdown of environmental controls, to be repaired over the weekend. Security is extremely important. We can’t take the chance that any information might leak out of here about what we’re doing. Maybe we’ll get lucky and resolve this whole thing in a few days and can get back to normal.”
    That was possible, she thought. Sometimes it was like falling dominoes when they got a critical mass of evidence—just one more piece could make them start falling, and suddenly a case was solved.
    Maybe that critical evidence would be the DNA. Diane realized that she was counting on their getting DNA that she had tricked her captors into giving her. There was a good chance that the spittle didn’t contain any, or there wasn’t enough.
    She sent the staff away to make plans. Now came the task that she dreaded most—calling her parents and telling them that she was the reason for her mother’s nightmare.
    Diane called Daniel Reynolds first. She told him part of the story—leaving out the danger to the museum. The fewer people who knew about that the better.
    “I need you to contact the federal marshals’ office, the FBI, and the Bureau of Prison authorities; alert them that the danger might not be over, that someone still may hack into their systems to hurt a member of my family.”
    “That must be some kind of case you’re working on, to worry someone this much,” he said.
    “That’s just it—the events that started this whole thing happened in 1942. Most of the people involved would be very old or dead.”
    “Their descendants wouldn’t.”
    Diane was silent for a moment. Of course, she thought, people didn’t live out their lives in a vacuum. They had children and grandchildren. And great-grandchildren, just like Jane Doe-Flora Martin had a great-grandchild. People built lives, reputations and fortunes, and their descendants often depended on those reputations and fortunes. Reynolds’s remark put her mind on had a new line of inquiry, a new way to look at the problem.
    “From the silence, I must have gotten you thinking,” said the lawyer.
    “You did, indeed. And it seems so obvious.”
    “I’ll get on this right away. I suppose you’ll be calling your folks.”
    “Yes. After I hang up with you.”
    “Then I won’t keep you. Don’t worry about this end. I’ll see that the right people get on this.”
    She called Gerald first. She caught him at his office and told him essentially what she had told Daniel Reynolds.
    “I just wanted you to know, because they are going to be needing support, and they won’t want it from me.”
    “God, Diane. I’m not sure I understand this. This sounds more like the Russian mob or something.”
    “It is extreme, I agree. Are you and Susan doing okay?”
    “We’re still living under the same roof and being civil to each other, so I guess we’re doing fine. Alan took some vacation time, I understand. Apparently, it was a blow to him for you to think he’d stab you.”
    “That, and being wrong. He always had a hard time with that.”
    “Your dad’s been at home all week with your mother, so they should be together. You want me to call Susan and give her a heads-up?”
    “Yes, thanks. She might want to go on over there.”
    When Diane hung up, she waited with her hand on the phone, dreading what was coming. A knot formed