Dust to Dust

at aerial maps. Hector and Scott were making a grid of Marcella’s yard with string and stakes.
    “Are you camping here?” said Diane.
    David gave her a look somewhere between a grin and a frown. “Looks like it. It was Scott’s idea. He and Hector are all over the experiment thing. We’ll probably be able to write a paper entitled ‘The Best One Hundred Ways to Find a Buried Body in the Woods.’ Seriously though, they did come up with some good ideas.”
    “Why not start in the morning?” she said, looking out over the lit yard at the busy Spearman twins.
    David followed her gaze. “I see why Jin hired the two of them. They work very efficiently together.” He looked back at Diane. “We started right after I spoke with you. It gets dark so early these days, Scott thought it would be a good idea to work after dark setting up grid lines so we can start taking samples in the morning. So far it seems to be going well.” He grinned. “They haven’t started singing ‘Kum Ba Yah’ yet. That’s a plus.”
    “Wait until bedtime,” said Diane. She looked around the yard. “Where are your tents?”
    “Marcella’s daughter and her husband came by the house. They told us to just bed down in our sleeping bags in her mother’s living room. They are very nice people,” he said.
    “They are. Did she say how Marcella is?” asked Diane.
    “Doing better, tires easily. She said she seems to have clarity of thought. I think Paloma was more worried about that than anything else,” he said. “Neva is coming tomorrow to help. I think she said Mike will come too. That will be good.”
    “That’s right—Mike is due back from Africa,” said Diane.
    Mike Seger was the museum’s geology curator. He also worked for a pharmaceutical firm, collecting extremophiles from around the world, a job that allowed him to bring unique specimens back to the museum’s rock collection.
    “Due back tonight,” said David. “This grid part isn’t going to take as long as I was afraid it would. However, running the samples will take some time. Do you really expect to find bodies?” he asked.
    “I’m not sure. It’s a gut feeling. The bone came from somewhere,” said Diane.
    “A lot of strange stuff going on around here,” said David. “Somebody was crazy for yard ornaments. We’ve found a ton of them just lying around. Lots of gargoyles. Apparently they haven’t kept away the evil spirits,” he said.
    “They aren’t on guard,” said Diane, smiling and looking up at the roofline of the house.
    “I suppose that explains it,” said David. He gestured toward the porch where Daughtry fell through the rotten boards. “The policeman said Daughtry was suspended for a couple of days. The chief of police wasn’t upset that he dropped his gun, but that he didn’t report it. I personally think they’re being a little tough on him. But it does look like Ray-Ray What’s-his-name was shot with Daughtry’s gun.”
    “Does Hanks know anything more about that?” asked Diane.
    “If he does, he’s not talking. I think information primarily goes one way with him. He’s really trying hard to keep control of the case,” said David.
    “I’m not taking it away from him,” said Diane. David grinned. “Don’t you dare say, ‘Not yet.’ ”
    “Hanks did tell me he got a list of places that employ day laborers, and he’s questioning people Ray-Ray worked with,” said David. “I don’t know if he’s found out anything of value. What I wonder is why they shot Ray-Ray. Maybe he was just a day laborer in the burglary. Maybe he wasn’t needed when it was finished.”
    “Could be,” said Diane.
    “Or maybe they just shot him because his name was Ray-Ray and they got tired of saying it over and over again. Who would name their child Ray-Ray?” David threw up his hands.
    “Have you been able to separate any of the footprints connected with Marcella’s attack from the later ones that were left when we were attacked?”
    “I have several prints on top of one another. I think most of the secondary prints were from the paramedics and Jonas Briggs. Izzy collected the shoe prints of the paramedics, so we have those, and I got Jonas to give me his. I’ve got the computer working on separating the images. I don’t hold out a lot of hope. There’s a lot of smearing. So far, the boot prints I told you about earlier are the only ones we’ve found that are clear enough to match with a specific shoe—if we find the