Dead Secret

something that had taped her mouth shut or her eyes closed—anything that might provide a clue to who she was and what had happened to her.
    Jane Doe had most of her teeth, and they were in good condition—just a few old fillings. The pattern of wear on the adjacent teeth said that she’d had a bridge anchored to her upper back molars. But the bridge wasn’t present. Perhaps Jin and Neva would find it.
    Something in the left eye socket caught Diane’s attention—a very small, light-colored object stuck to the dried skin. Diane pulled gently on it with her tweezers until it came free. The object had a piece of something else attached to it. Diane put it in a tray and gently rinsed it.
    She stepped out of the small room, taking the tray containing the tiny something with her. Mounting the object on a glass slide, she slipped it on the microscope stage and looked through the eyepieces, moving the focus until she could see it. It looked plastic and translucent—almost like a head with a tail. She moved it with her tweezers. It was some kind of tube with a rounded something attached to one end. Diane turned it over, trying to figure out what it could be. The other side was marred by an imperfection. She twisted the focus knob. Not an imperfection, but something stamped or engraved into it. She increased the magnification and refocused. It was a string of digits—a number.
    Diane wrote down the numbers, then attached the digital camera to the microscope and photographed the tiny object. When she finished taking several shots on each side and at different magnifications, she took the memory stick from the camera to the vault where her computers were.
    The vault was a secure, environmentally controlled room where she stored skeletal remains. It was also where she kept her special computer equipment and software. With her forensic software, using a few bone measurements from a skeleton she could make accurate predictions about a victim’s race, sex and a host of other variables. She could enter skull and facial measurements into another program and it would predict with a fair degree of accuracy what country or demographic region the individual came from.
    She also had three-D facial-reconstruction equipment—a laser scanner that mapped skulls, and a dedicated computer with software for building a face from the data. When she discovered that Neva was an artist, she had taught her how to use the equipment, and they had been able to get identification of several victims from Neva’s artistic reconstructions. Neva had also given a face to the mummy that the museum inherited—all with the help of the equipment. It was a pretty high-tech room.
    The vault also had a plain, ordinary office computer. As she entered the room she saw Caver Doe on a table in the corner, waiting for his examination to be finished. She looked at her watch. Not today, maybe tomorrow.
    Diane booted up the computer, put in the memory stick and looked at the pictures she had taken of the object from Jane Doe’s eye socket. She sat back in the chair and stared at the image—a tube attached to something round, with a number, and found in the eye socket. Something medical? What medical thing would be in the eye?
    She logged on to the Internet and ran a Google search on medical devices and eyes. As she browsed through the hits, several words and phrases kept appearing dealing with glaucoma, eye pressure and drainage devices. She searched on those terms, and the first hit contained a diagram of a device that looked remarkably like what she had found—a tube shunt. She searched again using the terms eye shunts and glaucoma and came up with over eight hundred hits. She clicked the Images button in Google, and pictures of eye shunts scrolled across the screen. She didn’t even have to enlarge the pictures to see that she was right. What she was looking at were many variations on the device she had found—an eye shunt, a treatment for glaucoma. If the number on the shunt was a serial number, could it be traced? Diane smiled to herself with satisfaction. She loved unexpected discoveries.
    Diane turned off the computer. As she locked the vault behind her, the thought of the thieves crossed her mind, and she shivered with a combination of fear and relief that they hadn’t broken into the vault containing all that expensive equipment—and data.
    She secured the shunt in an evidence bag and took it to the lab, along with the gold ring and pieces of