Dust to Dust

stained the same earth-toned colors. It had similar wounds in the skull—sharp-force trauma to the back of the head. His limbs had been removed from his body, not with any surgical precision, but with an axe, and evidenced all the clumsy damage that came with a coarse instrument.
    Looking at the arms that had been severed, the sliced head and trochlea of the humeri, Diane wondered whether the woman, MAG, could have been the artist who created the bone-tempered pottery. Could she have dismembered these bodies by herself? No, she would have needed help. Lynn Webber needed a diener to grapple with the cadavers, put them on the table for autopsy, arrange them for photographs. Most medical examiners did. The deadweight of a human body would have been extremely hard to move around. There had to be at least two perps—or one burley man. It would have been next to impossible for one woman to do this. Especially at a time when women were not as buff as they are now.
    Perhaps it was a true artist colony and several people lived in the house. Maybe the message on the desk drawer meant MAG knew what was going on and she was afraid for her life. She or her mother was the landlord. Why didn’t she move in with her parents? Or get them to throw the others out? But sometimes it isn’t that easy. Bullies can intimidate some people into emotional paralysis. And the writing on the drawer came from an emotionally distraught person.
    Diane had finished with the measurements of the skull when she heard raised voices coming from the crime lab. She took off her gloves, washed her hands, and went out to see what was happening now.
    David, Neva, and Izzy were at the round debriefing table with Jin. David was pointing to evidence envelopes laid out in front of them. He was arguing with Jin, gesturing to a report he had in his hand. Neva stood by with a frown on her face. Izzy just looked puzzled.
    “What’s going on?” Diane asked. Her people rarely argued.
    “Jin has mixed up the evidence,” said David. “It’s all compromised. Marcella’s and the Dance case from Gainesville you are working on.”
    “What?” said Diane. She did not want to hear that, not with a crowd of law enforcement and forensic people on the way to examine the Stacy Dance evidence. “Jin?”
    “I didn’t, Boss. I don’t know what he’s talking about. You know I don’t mess up,” he said.
    Diane turned to David. He looked tired.
    “What’s this about, David?”
    “This evidence he’s about to give away to Gainesville. Some of it is the evidence we collected at Marcella’s. I don’t know how, but somehow when he was working on the Gainesville stuff, it got mixed up. I don’t see how we can use any of it now.”
    “No, Boss, I’ve been trying to tell him,” said Jin. “I don’t know what he’s talking about. I worked on the Dance evidence in my lab. You know that.”
    Jin stood with his arms crossed, glaring at David, who glared back.
    “Let me see,” said Diane.
    She read the Stacy Dance evidence report, flipping through the pages, looking at the photographs Jin had taken of the evidence.
    “What’s the problem?” said Diane.
    David tapped the paper in her hand. “The evidence Neva and Izzy collected from Marcella’s is mixed in with the Dance evidence. Jin must have been working here when we were, and he grabbed the wrong evidence.”
    Diane had collected much of the evidence from the Stacy Dance crime scene, and she recognized it in Jin’s report and photos.
    “Are you saying this is the evidence collected at Marcella’s? Have you looked in Marcella’s container?” said Diane.
    “I was about to get it to see what kind of damage has been done,” said David.
    Diane looked at the jumble of shoe prints Jin had separated out using the computer software. “The shoe prints too?”
    “Yes,” said David, “especially the shoe prints.”
    “You’re saying this is the boot print collected at Marcella’s?” Diane asked David again, pointing to a photo.
    “I had to work on it to get it clear,” offered Jin. “There was a jumble of shoes on the electrostatic lifting film. I had the software separate out some of the prints from one another.”
    David pointed at the photograph. “This is the hiking boot print from Marcella’s. Yes.”
    “In that one, the heel was showing good,” said Jin. “I tried to filter out the other overlapping shoes from the rest of the print, but the heel is really clear.”
    “The heel is all you