Dead Secret

of them seemed to like the idea that I would care enough to do it.”
    “I’m relieved about Dr. Lymon. Thanks, David.” She let out a deep breath. “What about Alan?” She really didn’t want to talk about Alan, but she needed to find out if David had discovered anything.
    “You know, I’m having trouble visualizing you married to someone like that,” said David.
    Diane didn’t like to think about their marriage either. He now made her shiver, and not in a good way. “Yeah, me too.”
    “I think he’s in the clear. He had a dental appointment that day. I talked to his dentist.”
    “That’s a relief, too. Frankly, I didn’t want the complications his guilt would bring.”
    “How’s your mother?”
    “I’m not sure. As you can imagine, this had quite an effect on her. She’s usually strong and opinionated, but she was cowed when we brought her back. I think it will take time.”
    Diane pulled out a cluster of bones with a long tail. “Got any idea what this is?” She put the bones on the table with the other animal bone.
    “From the tail it looks like an opossum.”
    “Why, David, I didn’t know you knew animal bones.”
    “I’ve seen enough roadkill to be able to ID the tail.”
    “It looks like we have several animals mixed in with Jane Doe.” She pulled out another animal long bone and a cheap walking shoe.
    David picked out the beetles as Diane fished around in the leaves. She found several more bones of some kind of mammal.
    Most of the human hand and foot bones were missing, as was her left femur. Oddly enough, the hyoid bone, which was often missing in decomposed corpses because it was so small, was there, but only because it was stuck to flesh. It was broken.
    “The hyoid is a bone in the neck that is often broken in strangulation,” said Diane. “It looks like someone strangled her, slit her throat and sliced her up—and I’m not sure in that order.”
    “Overkill?”
    “Maybe. The woman was old, weak and vulnerable. Why do this—and why do I keep asking questions like that?”
    “Looking for a rational killer, I guess. You think it may be a serial? The way she was killed suggests a pattern.”
    “Maybe. Have a look at the database. I’m not sure Sheriff Burns has the access or the manpower to do the searches we do.”
    David collected all the live bugs he could find, as well as several bug parts. “Quite a collection,” he said.
    “I’ll put the rest of the bag contents on the screen, spray out the dirt and pick out the leaves. I’ll let you have a look at the detritus to see if there are any other kinds of bugs.”
    David nodded. He took his jar of bugs and left Diane alone with her bones. In the screen she found three bones of the hand and a thin gold wedding band. Unfortunately, it wasn’t engraved.

Chapter 29
    Diane took the scope and viewer into the isolation room to examine the bones for telltale fibers and any other small thing that might be revealed. She ran the scope along the bones and dried flesh and watched the magnified image on the monitor. She found several fibers, lifted them out with tweezers and placed each one in an envelope and labeled it.
    The magnified image showed several cuts on the ribs similar to the cuts on the long bones. The killer had sliced down her torso, leaving nicks on both sides of her rib cage. God, thought Diane, how do people get disturbed enough to do this to a person?
    Diane left the room and came back with the handheld metal detector from the crime lab. She moved it slowly a couple of inches above Jane Doe’s bones. It would be a long shot, but—The detector went off in the middle of her thought. The area was the upper part of the left femur, the greater trochanter, a prominence where the gluteals, iliopsoas, and piriformis muscles attached to the bone. The bone was covered with dark dried skin. When she put the scope over it, she could see it was sliced.
    With a scalpel she gently cut the dried flesh away. In the scope image she saw something embedded in the exposed bone. She grasped it with a pair of forceps and pulled. It came out easily and was what she had expected and hoped for—the tip of a knife blade. With this, if they found the knife, they could identify it as the weapon. She put the metal fragment in an evidence bag and labeled it.
    She used the scope again and examined the face, the teeth and the eye sockets for the minutiae that criminalists looked for—something caught in the teeth, a shred of