The Night Killer

there was a record in case anything happened to the scene before I found help. When Travis and I got back to the house, it was undisturbed. I knew official photos would be made of the crime scene, and I knew mine were of limited quality. They just didn’t seem important at the time.”
    He leaned forward in the chair and glared at Diane. His face was flushed, but his voice was quiet. “What’s done is done. But I don’t want you in my county investigating on your own. I don’t want you coming into my county for any reason until I solve this. And if I find that you’ve lied to me or kept things from me again, you’ll find yourself in my jail. Do you understand me?”
    “Yes, I understand you. I hope you understand that I, like you, am a sworn officer of the court. I have my authority and responsibilities, and you have yours.”
    They stared at each other for a moment without either of them speaking or breaking eye contact.
    Here I am in a pissing contest with the sheriff. Just where I did not want to be , she thought to herself. Better ease back.
    “If I remember anything that might be helpful from my conversation with the Barres or my trek through the woods, I assume you would want me to call you,” she said.
    “Make sure you do.”
    With that, he gathered up all the evidence, including Diane’s clothes, and turned to go. Protocol would require that the sheriff sign out any evidence he took from the crime lab, but Diane decided not to impede his exit. It was his case; he had the evidence in his possession; he was now responsible for it.
    She showed him the way out of the building. As she watched him drive away, she breathed a sigh of relief, deciding it had gone better than she had expected.
    Despite his warning, she fully intended to pursue the matter. She couldn’t drop it, not after she had seen the Barres sitting there in their dining room. She wouldn’t go into his county, as he phrased it, but she had the photographs. She could do a lot with those. She wondered whether Travis was amenable to sharing information.

Chapter 16
    Diane knew David would have sent copies of the crime scene photographs to her computer. So after she watched the sheriff drive away from the museum, she walked back to her osteology lab, went straight to the vault, and keyed in the security code.
    The vault was an environmentally controlled room where she stored skeletal remains sent to her for analysis. Diane had some pretty fancy equipment there too. It was where she kept the jazzed-up computer with the forensic software. And where she also kept 3- D facial-reconstruction equipment—a laser scanner for scanning skulls and a different dedicated computer with software for reconstructing a face from the scan.
    Diane steeled herself for what she was about to look at—grasping for her objectivity and tucking away her emotions—and turned on her computer. As she was waiting for it to boot up, she looked wistfully at the other computer and wished that she could draw well enough to reproduce the skull she had seen on the hood of her car, and then perhaps her facial- reconstruction software could come up with a reasonable facsimile of what the person looked like.
    She turned her attention back to her computer and called up the photographs that David had sent. To her surprise, he had also created a 3-D reconstruction of the two rooms from the photographs.
    “When did he have time to do that?” she whispered to herself.
    Since Diane hadn’t entered the dining room to take photographs, David had to extrapolate much of the room and the distances between objects. He had less work to do in the living room, where she had taken a 360-degree panorama of shots.
    Diane looked at David’s 3-D rendering first. She toured the dining room where the Barres, in virtual form, were seated, dead, at the dining room table. David had superimposed dotted lines over objects and labeled dimensions. It appeared that he’d used the doorway as a reference for distances. She was sure he had, among his multitude of databases, the length and width of doors in a house of that age. There were other objects in the room that he used to cross-reference the ratios of the photographs with the real world. David had not known what was on the walls that the camera hadn’t seen. But Diane did know. She entered the program, put in the relevant information, and restarted the virtual tour.
    She looked at the blood spatter first. It was highlighted and labeled for