The Night Killer

out of her mind and answer some letters she’d been putting off. She had finished three of them when her phone rang. It was her private number that only a handful of people knew. She picked it up.
    “Fallon,” she said.
    “Diane, this is Ben Florian. How are you? I was shocked to hear about your experience up in the mountains.”
    “I’m fine, Ben. Thanks for asking,” said Diane.
    This was unusual. She didn’t think Ben had ever called her, except once, when Frank was shot a few years ago.
    “Frank and I’ve been canvassing the free clinics around the area and some of the homeless shelters, and I told him I wanted to call and tell you what we’ve found out.”
    Diane’s heart quickened. They had found something.
    “You won’t believe this, but our gal’s known in about every place we visited. We were thinking we’d be real lucky to find anyone in the area who had seen her. After all, even if we were right about her, she didn’t have to do her hunting in Atlanta. There are any number of places she could have gone—Augusta, Columbus, Savannah, Chattanooga even. But Atlanta’s closer to Rendell County, so it wasn’t a bad bet.”
    “You’re kidding,” Diane said when he paused for a breath. “You found people who know Tammy Taylor?”
    “They knew her under different names, but they knew her. Most had a real good opinion of her. She made out to do volunteer work—a regular girl Friday with a heart, she was. Had access to files and everything. Yeah, the gal had a good racket going. She befriended several ladies. But nobody we talked with knew she took people home with her.”
    “That’s all too much to be simply innocent coincidence. Where do we go from here?” asked Diane.
    “Well, we do have one definite crime, for certain,” he said. “That’s the unreported death and the improper disposal of the person whose skeleton you found cemented in the tree. Tammy is a common factor linking the skeleton with the old folks here in the Atlanta senior centers. Frank and I are going to talk to the GBI—see if there’s enough grounds for them to set up an investigation. I think we can make the case that the crime started here in Atlanta and extended across county lines. Really, the discovery of one pension check being deposited to an account with Tammy’s or Slick’s name on it ought to be enough. That would get it out of Conrad’s jurisdiction.”
    That’s going to piss Sheriff Conrad off , thought Diane. She told Florian that Tammy and Slick might have fled.
    “That so? Well . . . Wait a minute,” he said.
    He left the phone and Diane waited. It was a relief to know what the whole Slick- Tammy-skeleton thing was about—or probably about. Ben came back on the phone.
    “That was a call from one of the shelters. A woman showed up today and told them she’d been brought back to Atlanta by a woman named Tammy Taylor who was supposed to take care of her. They said the woman was pretty upset about it too. Frank and I are going to talk with her right now. Looks like maybe our gal got scared. Frank’ll fill you in this evening.”
    “Thanks for calling, Ben. It’s a relief to know what the heck’s going on,” said Diane.
    “We don’t know yet, but I’m betting that I’m right.”
    Diane hung up the phone and stared at it for a moment, thinking she needed to try to get in touch with Jonas Briggs again.

Chapter 26
    Jonas Briggs, the museum’s archaeologist, came to Diane after retiring from Rosewood’s Bartrum University. When the museum first opened, Diane offered office space and lab space to Bartrum faculty members if they would curate collections in their field of expertise. In the beginning, the department heads and faculty were resistant to the idea, thinking that RiverTrail would be a dinky nonacademic museum. They sent nontenured and retired faculty to her in order to clear space in their own buildings for tenured professors.
    The resources at the museum and the quality of the collections proved that the department heads and tenured professors had miscalculated, and curatorship at RiverTrail became a prime posting. Discovering its initial mistake, the archaeology department at Bartrum tried to replace Jonas with a tenured faculty member, but Diane diplomatically explained to them that it wouldn’t be possible. Jonas had become critically involved in too many important exhibits and research projects. To cut off further forays from the Bartrum archaeology department, she hired