The Night Killer

office,” she said, going through the adjoining door, closing it behind her.
    Diane called Beth, one of the archivists, and asked her about the speed-readers Sierra had recommended.
    “I need someone to read through the diaries we have of Roy Barre’s grandfather. I’m looking for a reference to a lost gold mine. It will probably be in the early diaries, but may be mentioned in later ones,” said Diane.
    “How many diaries are we talking about?” Beth said.
    “I’m not sure. There are three pretty good-sized boxes of them. The grandfather started keeping a diary when he was a teenager and kept it up until he died in his seventies,” said Diane.
    “How interesting,” Beth said. “You don’t find many diarists. Mikaela and Fisher will be happy to do it. They’ve been wanting a . . . ah, to be more helpful to the museum.”
    Diane knew Beth started to say they’d been wanting a patch. Someone on the museum staff had designed a small patch to give to whoever did consulting with what they called the Dark Side—meaning the crime lab. Diane had never seen one. She suspected they kept it from her. She shook her head. The museum staff was always up to something.
    “I appreciate their help. The boxes of diaries are in Jonas’ office. Thanks, Beth,” said Diane.
    Diane called up her e-mail. She scrolled down to look at the senders. Several were from other museum directors asking about diverse topics, from the RiverTrail’s educational webcam project, to requesting tissue samples of the mummy, to asking if Diane had used radio-frequency identification for special tours. Diane answered all their questions.
    The last e-mail was from her own head of conservation for the museum—Korey Jordan. Diane had delivered to him for analysis the piece of weathered paper Liam discovered at the campsite of the missing girl and her boyfriend. In Diane’s entire operation, Korey had more experience than anyone else with recovering images from paper. He had e-mailed her the results.
    She had thought that bringing out the words would be difficult because of the weathering of the paper, but Korey had used the electrostatic detection apparatus, an elegantly simple procedure. He had only to sandwich the paper between a glass plate and clear Mylar, place it on the machine, charge the whole thing with an electric field, and coat the Mylar with electrically charged black powder. The powder settled over the indentations in the paper and, voilà, there were the words.
    Diane glanced at the photograph of the newly exposed words, then read what Korey had transcribed. It was indeed a list, as Liam suspected. The part that was visible to the naked eye said, get Barre’s diary . The beginning of the sentence was, Break in and.
    Well, hell. The unnamed missing couple went to the top of Diane’s list of suspects.
    She silently read the list over several times.
    Break in and get Barre’s diary.
    Diane wondered if their break-in was at the time she was lost in the woods and things got out of hand. She also wondered if there was some reason the couple might have thought the Watsons had the diary. She was still trying to fit the Watsons in. It was a hard fit.
    Talk to CND’s —
    The rest of that sentence was torn away, but it had to refer to a person. Talk to some person. Who? Who was CND? Diane thought a moment, thinking back to her discussion with Liam. Cora Nell Dickson—the woman in the nursing home whose father was a friend of LeFette Barre’s. The note had to mean a relative, hence the possessive punctuation.
    Buy book on spelunking.
    Jeez, that wasn’t good. Perhaps Liam was right after all, and they went caving when they shouldn’t have.
    Find equipment —
    Here, too, the rest of the sentence was torn away. But Diane could guess what it was about. She imagined it was caving equipment. This wouldn’t have a good end. Diane was familiar with many of the caves in North Georgia. Most were hard caves to explore. And the mines were particularly treacherous. Caves had their own stability, being carved out by nature as they were—removing the weaker materials, leaving the stronger. Mines, on the other hand, were dug out by man—taking what was considered valuable, leaving behind what was not. Mines required supports to hold up the ceilings of tunnels, and those supports—usually timber—weakened over time and collapsed. Not that cave tunnels were immune to collapsing. On the contrary, they could be very dangerous. But nature