Dead Secret

could somehow salvage the crime scene in the woods that Deputy Singer had messed up. “And, Jin, be careful.”
    “Always, Boss.”
    “And put that sack in my isolation closet.”
    “Sure.” He grabbed the sack and made for her lab.
    In Diane’s osteology lab she had two small rooms sealed off from the rest of the lab for the purpose of keeping and cleaning bones that still had flesh. They were so small that Diane referred to them as her closets. One room had a dermestarium similar to the one in the faunal lab, a old chest-type freezer converted to house a colony of dermestid beetles—the insects that stripped bones of flesh. The faunal lab used their beetles to clean animal skeletons for the reference collection and museum display; Diane used her colony for cleaning human bones. She preferred dermestid beetles and hydrogen peroxide, rather than boiling, which made a greasier bone.
    Diane used one room to keep contaminated remains isolated from the rest of the building and the other to keep the insects confined. Nothing could be more devastating to a museum than to have dermestids get loose. They loved to eat all the things that museum collections were made of. The isolation room also had a sink for washing the finished bones in hot water to kill any beetles hiding in cracks or openings. Diane didn’t usually clean bones that had a lot of flesh still attached, like Caver Doe, or decomposing bodies. She let the medical examiner’s assistant clean those. She cleaned up only bones that were almost completely skeletonized. She guessed that the bones in Jin’s garbage bag were of that type.
    Diane turned her attention to the folder that Jin had given her for the quarry bodies. She looked at each of the photographs in turn and placed them on the table along with Jin’s drawings and notes of the scene.
    Jin returned from the isolation room and sat down. “Sorry, Boss. I should have put the bones away immediately.”
    “That’s all right. Tell me about these guys.” She gestured at the array of photographs.
    Jin pointed to one of the photographs. Diane picked it up and examined the scene. It showed a body dressed in jeans and a T-shirt lying facedown in the water next to a log. It was labeled QUARRY DOE.
    “The fishermen first found the body of just one man,” said Jin. “When Sheriff Canfield came, they found the scuba diver in the water caught under the brush. The sheriff speculated that the first man slipped and fell trying to help the scuba diver.”
    “Who’s the ME on this?” she asked.
    “Rosewood’s ME,” said David. “Rankin.”
    “What does he say about them?”
    David looked to Jin. “He hasn’t finished the autopsies, but at the scene he said they’d been dead about three or four days. The skin, hair and nails were loose, and the bodies were that greenish-black-purple color they get. He was talking like he agreed with Sheriff Canfield that it was an accident.”
    Diane looked at the photograph labeled SCUBA DOE. The scuba diver’s black-and-yellow suit barely showed through the tangle of branches that covered him.
    “What do you think, Jin?”
    “I have questions. Like where’s the other diver?”
    “Other diver?”
    “Scuba diving is like caving. You don’t do it alone. It’s very dangerous. There has to be another diver. If the other diver was Quarry Doe, then where’s his equipment?”
    “You tell this to the sheriff?”
    “Yes. He had the deputies search near the lake. But, see, if the other diver had his weight belt on and got into trouble, he may be at the bottom of the quarry. And that’s another thing. I asked the sheriff how deep it is and he said a hundred feet or more. In that case, where’s the descent line? You go that deep, you have to descend slowly and stop at intervals to adjust for the pressure changes. You use a marked descent line to do that. I looked and didn’t find one.”
    “What did you get from the crime scene?”
    “It’s all laid out on the table,” Jin said, pointing to one of the analysis rooms.
    “Let’s go have a look.” Diane rose, scooped up the papers and put them in the file.
    Scuba gear and an assortment of evidence bags were arranged on the metal table. The room had the aroma of death from pieces of the victims stuck to their clothes. Diane had never really gotten used to that aroma.
    “I checked out the tank,” said Jin. “Nothing hinky about it. No tampering. It’s out of air, and one of the hoses was punctured. There