The Night Killer

in the middle, literally. I’ll ask,” he said.
    While Diane waited on the line she checked her e-mail. There was a mountain of it she needed to deal with personally and she began sorting through it until Lynn came on the phone.
    “Diane, so sweet of you to call,” Lynn said.
    “Lynn, I’m sorry about the surprise. I was in the woods with no cell service and, of course, when we found the condition of the bodies, well, I told the agent in charge he needed to give them to you. This is a big case and there is no one I trust like I trust you with it. I’m also grateful for your getting in touch with Scott and Hector.”
    “I’m happy to help out,” said Lynn. “Actually, I think I can get a paper out of this. Interesting series of bodies—all killed the same way. I’m not finished yet, but I’d be willing to bet my job that we’re going to find these two were killed with the same weapon as the others. Really interesting.”
    “ Puzzling would be my choice of words,” said Diane.
    “That too,” Lynn said.
    “Thanks for doing this,” said Diane. “We owe you a big one.”
    Neva often complained that Diane had to stroke Lynn Webber’s ego a little too much, which might be true. But Diane also used Lynn. Lynn Webber was in a traditionally men’s field and had to work doubly hard to make sure she stood out. Diane knew that Lynn would be willing to do anything that was intriguing and would give her an edge in her field.
    “Like I said, it will make a good paper. I’m going to make casts of the vertebrae as I did with the others. I’m getting quite a collection. Interesting that this was a couple too—but a young couple. And they were killed in a cave, the agent said?”
    “They were killed outside nearby and dumped in the cave,” said Diane.
    “And they were killed before the Barres. I wonder what a profiler would make of that,” she said.
    “I don’t know,” said Diane. “Raises lots of questions.”
    “I’ll send you my report,” Lynn said. “Hector and Scott are quite excited that their samples will be used to pinpoint time of death in these two—unlike their samples in the other cases.”
    Diane thanked her again and hung up the phone. Before tackling the e-mails, she called Beth in Archives to see how the speed-readers were progressing. Beth put Fisher on the line.
    “Hi, Dr. Fallon,” he said. “We’re making good progress. The gold mine you wanted to know about is mentioned in the second diary. Only he identified it as a cave. The author of the diary and a friend were exploring a cave when they found a cavern with deposits of gold—a vein about three to six inches thick and bits of sparkling pieces in the wall. The two were very excited and made a pact to keep it a secret between them and to come back and mine it themselves.
    “There was no further mention of it in that diary or in any of the others written when he was a kid. He actually seemed more interested in arrowheads. That’s his main focus throughout. There was a big event when he was sixteen. They had several days of hard rain that caused widespread mud slides. He found a whole cache of arrowheads that had washed out of the hillside road embankment not far from his home. That was the highlight of his year.
    “In the diaries written after he became an adult, Mikaela found an entry mentioning the childhood gold discovery and him taking a sample to someone in the geology department at Bartrum, where he found out it was pyrite. From the tone of the entry, he seemed to take the news with good humor. We are still reading and have quite a few diaries to go,” Fisher said.
    “Was there any mention of where the cave was located, or a description of it?”
    “Not exactly. Early on, when he was a kid, he wrote that he wasn’t going to write down the location, in case someone read his diary. In his older years he didn’t mention it at all, so far. Like I said, we are still reading.”
    “Thanks, Fisher. That’s good information. Thank Mikaela for me too,” she said.
    “Sure. Oh, and there is something else. Sometimes he drew pictures of what he found. Some of the stones he thought were gold were round shaped. He wrote that he intended to polish them. We compared his drawings to some of the exhibits in Geology and think they were pyrite spheres. I imagine polished up, they would look like marbles.”
    Diane was silent for a long moment.
    “Dr. Fallon?” he said.
    “I’m still here. Fisher, that is very helpful.