Dead Secret

Georgia. The successful use of the museum’s forensic anthropology lab in the solution of a number of local homicides had caught the attention of Rosewood’s mayor and police chief. As a result of political manipulations by Rosewood city officials, a crime scene unit had been set up on the third floor of the west wing of the museum, with Diane as its director also. All in all, it was an interesting world she lived in. However disparate the combination of museum work and crime fighting might seem, she found it helpful for the crime lab to have access to the abundance of museum experts. The talents of the crime scene unit had even come in handy when the museum acquired an Egyptian mummy. A museum and a crime scene lab turned out, to everyone’s surprise, to be a good, if odd, fit.
    David and Jin were members of Diane’s crime scene crew. Jin was in his twenties, half-Asian, and came from New York, where he’d been a criminalist. David had worked with her at World Accord International when the two of them were human rights investigators. Neva, a former police officer, came to her from the Rosewood Police Department. The three of them made up Diane’s crime scene unit. But David and Jin weren’t cavers, and Diane didn’t want them inside a rugged cave like this one.
    Mike began his ascent, easily climbing the rope hand over hand. When he cleared the top, he and Neva exchanged a few quiet words, and then she started down the rope.
    Diane had been surprised that Neva wanted to take up caving again after her true near-death experience in this very cave system. Being wedged in a crevasse between rocks, with gravity pulling her ever tighter into the squeeze, had been a frightening experience. But Neva showed a remarkable determination to get over the trauma. She was wide-eyed and pale the first few times back in a cave, but she stuck with it. Diane wondered if it was as much for Mike as for caves.
    “What’s up?” Neva looked up at the opening until the light disappeared with Mike down the tunnel. She grinned, and Diane watched her face change as she turned her head and spotted the remains.
    “My God, that’s not anyone we know . . . ?”
    “No. This guy’s been here a very long time.”
    “What happened to him?”
    “I don’t know. I can’t see enough of his bones to tell, but I’d bet he broke a limb, probably a leg. Looks like he was a caver. Has a helmet with a carbide lamp, a canteen, and I just noticed a backpack sticking out from under him. But I haven’t seen any rope. I don’t know of any caver who would venture this far into a cave without rope.”
    “Novice?” Neva said, squatting to look at the mummy and his artifacts.
    “Maybe, but novices usually bring rope—sometimes not enough of it, but they usually have it.”
    “What do you want me to do?”
    “We can’t touch the body until the coroner arrives, but we can do a grid search of the floor.”
    “What about the breakdown?”
    “We’ll get Mike to help with some of it.”
    “You’re kidding. You’re going to look under the rocks?”
    Diane surveyed the piles of rocks on the floor. “We’re not going to move them all, but I’d like to see if anything is under the rocks that just fell. You take that end; I’ll start at the wall with the opening.” She gestured toward the hole in the opposite wall. “We’ll meet in the middle.”
    Diane and Neva made their way to opposite sides of the room, but instead of searching the floor, Diane looked up at the opening in the wall.
    “I think he fell from here,” she said. Her words reverberated across the cavern. She doubted Neva could make out what she’d said. Diane waved her away when she saw Neva’s headlamp turn in her direction.
    Diane rubbed a hand over the rough texture of the wall. It was about twenty feet to the opening, not a bad climb. She examined the wall, mentally noting hand- and footholds. Piece of cake, like climbing a ladder. She keyed her radio. “Neva, I’m going up top to the opening here. You can continue searching the floor, or wait for me, whichever you prefer.”
    Diane pulled her chalk bag from her pants pocket, dusted her hands and felt for the first two holds—a crack in the rock face in which she slipped the fingers of her right hand, and a protrusion she grabbed with the other. She proceeded up the face of the cliff, making sure every handhold and foothold was stable before she moved to the next, always using her hands for balance and her legs to