Scattered Graves

I meant.’’

Chapter 35
    Diane went to her office to call Janice Warrick while the others finished off the remainder of the pizza. Ja nice took a while to come to the phone. Diane played with a rock that had come loose from her desk fountain—pushing it back into place and taking it out again. She looked at her reflection in the blade of a letter opener, hoping that somehow the bruising on her face had vanished. It had not.
    When Janice answered, Diane related the entire chain of events and linking suppositions again. It was helpful to keep going over it. It showed up any weak ness in the logic and what needed to be dealt with. There were a lot of ifs connecting the links in the chain.
    Diane wasn’t sure how Janice felt about Frank knowing so much, but there wasn’t much she could do about it. They’d asked Diane to look into things on the sly when she was just a private person. She couldn’t undo the resources she had used before she became the director of the crime lab again.
    ‘‘This is a lot to take in,’’ Janice said.

    ‘‘And most of it may or may not be true,’’ said
    Diane.
‘‘It sounds good, though. It all fits, doesn’t it?’’ Ja
nice said.
‘‘It does,’’ said Diane. But sometimes that’s a trap,
getting seduced by the nice fit. ‘‘Jin will try to get DNA from the tooth. Sheriff Canfield asked the Atlanta PD to go by Malcolm Chen’s apartment. If Chen is miss ing, they will try to find some samples to test for DNA—a toothbrush, hairbrush, that kind of thing. Maybe we can find some firm connections for you to
deal with.’’
Diane noticed that all the sharing was going one
way. Janice was not giving any information from her
end of the investigation—which was as it should be,
but it reminded her of what Izzy had said. The detec
tives had a problem with her butting into an investiga
tion. As she thought back, most of the ones she had
been heavily involved in were ones where the perpe
trator had involved her by coming after her, or the
FBI had asked her to get involved. She had never just
up and announced that she was going to take on a
case and they could all report to her. By far, most of
the crime scene data she and her team gathered was
sent to the detectives in charge of a case and that was
the end of her involvement. Diane felt a bit falsely
accused.
‘‘I think it’s about time I brought Bryce in for a
talk,’’ said Janice. ‘‘I’d like you to keep Rikki Gillinick
on at the lab for a while. I think the longer they have
hope they’ll find what they are looking for, the more
information we can get from them.’’
‘‘All right,’’ said Diane. ‘‘You might want to get the
GBI to do your crime scenes until we wrap this up. I
can’t allow her to work on anything beyond what we
are doing now. We probably will have to rework cases
that came under Bryce’s tenure the way it is.’’ ‘‘I see what you mean. Do you think she’ll get suspi
cious, not working cases?’’ asked Janice.
‘‘The first thing I did after I was reinstated was to
ask David to contact TechClean to do a top-to-bottom
cleaning of the lab,’’ said Diane. ‘‘There was a layer
of dust on everything, and that can only mean the air
filters aren’t working. We have to fix that problem. I
also told them we have to recalibrate all the equip ment. That will take as long as I let it. Rikki was present during all that discussion, so she knows we
won’t be doing much outside the lab for a while.’’ ‘‘Okay. That’s what we will do. You let us know
when you’re ready to take new cases. Any luck with
the computer?’’ asked Janice.
‘‘David and Frank are working on it, and they’re
very good,’’ Diane said. ‘‘Apparently it’s slow going.’’ ‘‘Okay. Keep me informed and thanks for the infor
mation,’’ she said.
‘‘Sure,’’ said Diane. ‘‘How is Garnett?’’
‘‘Lawyered up. Which is a good thing. This has been
very hard for us to deal with. I told him that if the
new chief tries to hang it on him, we’ll all back him
up,’’ said Janice. ‘‘He probably thought I was playing
him like a perp. Frankly, I think he’s protecting some
one. So does the chief.’’
‘‘That makes more sense than him being a mur
derer,’’ said Diane.
Diane put the phone back in the cradle and immedi
ately her cell rang.
It was plugged in on her desk. She unplugged it and
flipped it open. It was Sheriff Canfield.
‘‘Interesting news,’’ he