One Grave Too Many

what they’re told. The chief of detectives, in turn, has been putting his men in. The upshot is that it’s all political cronyism, and nobody knows what the hell they’re doing.”
    “The main thing is the crime scene, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation know what they’re doing.”
    “The GBI didn’t work the crime scene. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. The chief refused to call them. He’s got this hair up his butt that Rosewood police can handle our crime without outside help.”
    “Can they?”
    “No. The best homicide cop was Jake Houser, but he wasn’t one of the commissioner’s men. Now that he’s gone to a desk job, the homicide squad is a bunch of new people hardly older than Kevin.”
    Diane made an effort not to smile, wondering if Frank was just feeling estranged from officers half his age. “But they might still be competent.”
    “Whose side are you on?”
    “Yours, of course. I think you ought to contact the president of the city council and tell him they were right all along, that the mayor’s pricks . . . I mean picks . . . the mayor’s picks are screwing up an investigation.” Diane didn’t know the girl, but she felt a giddy relief upon learning that she hadn’t been killed. Jails and trials could be dealt with. But not death.
    “This isn’t funny.”
    “No, it isn’t. What is it they’re doing wrong?”
    “Warrick. Janice Warrick—she’s the detective in charge—allowed George’s mother and stepfather in the house. She let the stepfather tramp around the bedroom before anything was processed.”
    Diane pressed her lips together. “Did you mention to Detective Warrick that letting anyone on the crime scene was contaminating the evidence?”
    “I mentioned it. I hammered her over the head with it. She asked me how a paper detective could possibly know anything about crime scenes. She was going to let them take things out of the house. When I objected, she tried to make me leave. I told her that I was executor of the will, and if anything was missing from the house, I’d sue the department and her personally.”
    “Were you in the crime scene?”
    Frank stared at her a moment. “I stayed mostly on the front porch. Do you have anything else on the bone?”
    “Yes.” She pulled out a sheet of paper from her desk. “Here’s the report. It’s on the standard form.”
    He took the page and glanced it up and down. “Find anything new?”
    “Yes.”
    “You mean you missed something the first time?”
    Diane nodded. “Yes, I did.”
    “Well, does this make us even for me throwing away the spiderweb? What’d you find?”
    “A fish rib and a cap from a blowfly puparium in the marrow cavity.”
    “What? A fish rib and a what?”
    “A cap from a blowfly puparium. Do you know about the life cycle of blowflies?”
    “Oh, sure, everyone knows about that. . . . All I know about flies is that they’re a damn disgusting nuisance.”
    “If it weren’t for them, and a host of other disgusting creatures, the world would be littered with dead, undecayed animals. After the third instar of a blowfly . . .”
    “Third instar? That sounds like Star Trek .”
    “Bug speak. You know that flies are attracted to dead bodies.”
    “Yes, I do know that.”
    “There’s a point in the life cycle of a blowfly at which it moves away from the corpse and burrows into the ground. This third skin shedding, or instar, hardens into a capsule and becomes the puparium. From this, it emerges after a period of time in the ground as an adult fly by popping off a cap at the end of the puparium. This cap is what I found. My identification has to be verified by an entomologist, but the significance of these finds is that neither the fish bone nor the puparium cap should be found inside the bone.”
    “Okay. So, how did they get there?”
    “My guess is they washed in. But there are other scenarios. The bone could have already been underground and decomposed, and this fly came from something decomposing on top of it or near it. When the blowfly moved underground, it wound up burrowing into the cavity in the bone. Later the bone was eroded, or dug up for your friends to find.”
    “Does this help us?”
    “It says something about the environment the bone was in—”
    “Like in a river?”
    “No, the blowfly wouldn’t be underwater. Suppose that your friend George thought it was a deer bone because there were antlers, or hooves, or whatever present. So, we have deer