The Night Killer

tended to be a better mining engineer than man—that was Diane’s observation.
    It appeared that the two young people had more spirit of adventure than they had good sense.
    Could they have been so frustrated that Barre wouldn’t share his grandfather’s diary that they killed him and his wife in a rage? Then, the next evening, had the same rage and killed the Watsons? Still the problem with the Watsons.
    Perhaps it was simply a serial killer. In which case there might be more to come. Diane shook her head. Or perhaps either the Barres or the Watsons were a decoy, a red herring. It could be that all the analysis she had been doing about the Barres was completely useless and it was the Watsons she should be concentrating on. Or maybe she could leave the Watsons out of the equation completely and look further into the Barres’ history. Diane was looking forward to the coming Sunday. She was still deep in thought when Andie put through a caller.
    “Diane, Lynn Webber. I’ve finished the Barre and Watson autopsies. I cleared out my morning and afternoon so I could get all four done. I thought you’d like to have my preliminary findings.”

Chapter 39
    “Lynn, yes, I am anxious to hear what you found,” said Diane. “Thank you for doing this. I’m sure you had to do a lot of rearranging of your schedule and I appreciate it.”
    “Just a little changing. I didn’t mind,” Lynn said. “I have to tell you, Hector and Scott are so precious. And such a hoot. They even made Grover laugh, and you know how hard that is.”
    Diane smiled. Grover was Lynn’s very solemn diener in the morgue.
    “They can be very entertaining,” agreed Diane.
    “I was very interested in the research they are doing. They gave me a bang-up proposal,” said Lynn.
    Hector and Scott were interested in taphonomy. Their particular interest at the moment was the postmortem interval—the length of time between death and whenever the body was discovered. Knowing when a murder victim died was one of the main pieces of information authorities needed in order to help find and convict the perpetrator.
    Taphonomy for forensic scientists was the study of what happened to a body from the time of death to discovery. Mike, Diane’s geology curator, also used the word in his discipline. For him it meant the study of the movement of an organism from the biosphere to the lithosphere—from organism to fossil. Forensic scientists didn’t have that long to wait.
    When a person died—unless normal decomposition was prevented by embalming, freezing, dehydration, or a few other rare circumstances—bacteria began to liquefy the organs, muscles, and skin. Chemicals found in the various organs and soft tissue during this process showed predictable changes over time. If you knew the temperature surrounding the body during the decomposition process, you could determine postmortem interval to within hours—certainly days. David called it an elegant use of data and mathematical formulas.
    Hector and Scott wanted to wind the clock a little tighter. They proposed that Lynn Webber and other area medical examiners allow them to collect tissue samples from cadavers that came to the MEs for autopsy, and compare data from the samples to known times of death—or nearly known.
    Their research would not help Diane determine precisely when the Barres were killed, but she hoped it would help in future cases. The current standard procedure of sampling the potassium concentration in the vitreous humor of the eye might help in the Barre case, but Diane feared that too much time had passed since their deaths. Moreover, the standard error of two hours for that indicator still wasn’t what she needed. She needed a tighter time line.
    Diane wanted to know what the time interval was between Ozella Barre’s death and the death of her husband, Roy. She was equally anxious to know whether there was a similar time difference between the deaths of Joe and Ella Watson.
    That was one of the things that bothered her, the time difference between the two Barres. Why? What was the killer doing after he killed Ozella Barre? Did he get interrupted by someone or something after Ozella’s death? Was the killer trying to get information, and thought Roy would be more forthcoming if he knew up close and personal what the stakes were? Did he think Roy would tell him anything after seeing the woman he had devoted his life to killed in such a terrible way?
    “Hector and Scott share Jin’s