DF08 - The Night Killer (11 page)

“You know bones?” he said, sitting down in the stuffed chair and crossing his legs so that his left ankle was on his right knee.

“Yes,” she said.

“You sure those were bones at Slick Massey’s place?” he said.

“I have no doubt,” said Diane.

“Slick and Tammy say it’s a plastic Halloween skeleton you saw,” he said.

“It wasn’t,” said Diane. “I’m quite sure of what I saw.”

“Slick’s no-account. His daddy wasn’t much better. This Tammy’s about the kind of woman his father usually took up with. Still, I need to see bones before I can do anything,” he said. “Got no missing persons.”

“I understand,” said Diane.

“Travis said you took some wood with you from that tree that fell on you,” he said.

“I did. I wanted to see if a body had decomposed inside the hollow tree,” she said.

He shrugged his shoulders. “Slick might say it was a deer,” he said. “Not that it would make a bit of sense. But you can’t know if it’s human, is what his lawyer would say.”

“His lawyer would be wrong,” said Diane. “We can identify human antigens if they are there.” Diane didn’t explain immunochemistry to Sheriff Conrad. She would let him ask if he wanted a lengthier explanation.

“You can tell if it’s human . . . even without the body?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

Diane was a little surprised. She had worked with most of the surrounding county sheriffs, and they were amazingly up-to-date on forensics. Sheriff Conrad seemed like a throwback to another era.
He must really hate scientific progress
, she thought.
Or really be uninterested in it.

“Did you kill the Barres?” he asked.

If he thought he was going to surprise her, he would be disappointed. Diane expected his question, expected it to be out of the blue, expected him to drill her with his small, dark eyes the way he was doing now.

“No, of course not,” she said, meeting his eyes.

“Travis told me about your trek through the woods. I’d like to hear it from you,” he said. “It’s a wild tale Travis told me. I’d be interested to know if he got it wrong, or you really did what he said.”

Diane put her hands in front of her on the desk and began her narrative. She started with her visit to the Barres, about the good meal that Ozella Barre had on the table when she arrived, about all the stories that Roy Barre told of his grandfather over dinner. Diane told him how she said good-bye to the Barres and tried to find her way back to the main road in the downpour.

Sheriff Conrad was a patient listener: He never interrupted; he just watched her as she spoke. Diane told him about finding her way to the Massey house, only to have a tree fall on the hood of her SUV and break apart.

She was about to talk about the skeleton when she was interrupted by a knock on the door. David poked his head in.

“I have some results for you,” he said. “All of the analysis that you asked for.”

The sheriff seemed not to like the interruption. He frowned slightly, first at Diane, then at David.

Diane was surprised. “You guys must have worked all night.”

“We did,” he said.

“Come in,” Diane told him.

David entered with Detective Hanks close behind.

“Hello, Diane,” said Hanks. “I’ve had quite a time here. You guys do some detailed work.”

Diane stood up and introduced them. “Sheriff Conrad, this is David Goldstein, he’s my assistant director of the crime lab,” she said. “Detective Hanks is with the Rosewood Police Department.” She gestured to each of them.

“Hanks has been observing,” said David.

Not rising, the sheriff nodded to the two of them. David nodded back and put a box on Diane’s desk and began to unload several boxes and envelopes out of it.

The sheriff looked more annoyed, but Diane could see he was trying to hide it. She didn’t explain that the boxes had to do with his case. That explanation was going to be tricky, and she didn’t look forward to it.

David picked up a small box, like the kind she used in the osteology lab. He looked at her and winked.

“We found a little surprise under the hood of your SUV,” he said, giving Diane a whisper of a smile.

Diane opened the box. It was indeed a little surprise.

In the box on cotton batting lay the distal and medial phalanges of a right hand.

As Diane looked at the bones, David and Hanks slipped out the door, leaving her alone in her office with Sheriff Conrad.

“I have your body,” Diane said to the sheriff.

Leland Conrad jumped as if his chair had shocked him.

“What?”

He leaned forward with his hand outstretched.

Diane rose from her desk, walked around to his chair, and handed him the box with the two small bones.

“They are finger bones from the right hand,” she said.

He peered into the box and looked up at her. “You sure they’re human?” he said. “Mighty small.”

“Quite sure,” said Diane. “They’re human. When the skeletal hand hit my windshield and broke apart, these two bones fell down into the recess behind the windshield wipers. And that’s where my people found them. The smallest one is the tip of the finger.” She held up her hand and pointed to the tip of her own finger. “Finger bones can be very small.”

“Looks like they’re from a baby,” he said.

“They’re from an adult. Infant bones are tiny indeed, and they wouldn’t be ossified—hardened into bone.”

“Why would anyone put a body in a tree?” he asked.

“They probably thought that sealing it up in a hollow tree was a clever way to hide the body. It worked for a while,” said Diane.

She directed her attention back to the bones in the box, pointing out the significant properties.

“The bones show marked deterioration at the joints. The distal end of the third distal phalanx is almost eroded away. It could be for a number of reasons—diabetes or arthritis, for starters. There are other diseases that erode the bone in that way. I’d have to examine it more closely to know.”

She told him the details she had observed about the skull. She backed up a couple of steps.

“I doubt that Miss Taylor and Mr. Massey could have gotten all the bones out of the mud. There are two hundred and six bones in the human body, give or take. A hundred and six of them are the small bones in the hands and feet. You might want to send someone out to look for more bones. They will need a wire mesh to wash the mud and dirt through.”

“I’ll go myself and get Slick to tell me what he did with them and who they belong to,” he said with a moderate amount of vehemence.

Now
, thought Diane,
the first tricky part
. She walked back to her desk and sat down. She picked up one of the reports and handed it across her desk to the sheriff. She started with what she figured would offend him the least—her clothes.

“I had the lab process the clothes I was wearing at the time,” said Diane.

“Says here there was no blood on them. Could have washed off in the rain, I suppose,” he said.

“No, it’s more stubborn than that. It would take bleach or kerosene to get blood out,” said Diane. “I came directly here to the museum and changed clothes in my office. There were half a dozen people here. I didn’t have the time or the facilities to wash them.”

He nodded and waited, apparently suspecting that she had more.

Instead of giving him another of the reports created by her team, she continued her story of what happened that night, beginning with her getting out of her SUV to look at the skeleton, the tree lying across her hood, and having Slick grab her by the arm. She showed him her forearm with the scratches from his nails.

“Slick has some explaining to do. Said he was trying to help you after the accident,” said the sheriff. “Said you pulled away, poked him in the eye, and ran.”

“Not exactly,” said Diane. “I did hit him and run, but only after he tried to detain me, following his denial that there was a skeleton stretched across the hood of my Explorer.”

Diane took a detour from her story to tell him about Slick following her back to the museum and returning the things he and Tammy had taken out of her vehicle. The sheriff just shook his head, reminiscent of the gesture made by his son, Travis, when he heard the story of Slick and Tammy.

She told the sheriff about hearing Slick call for the dogs when she ran, about constantly listening to the barking for hours, wondering how near the dogs were and if they were vicious. She tried to convey how frightening it was, running from some maniac in a downpour, with lightning flashing all around.

Then she got to the next tricky part—the man in the woods, and why she didn’t turn the things he gave her over to Travis.

“I don’t know how long I’d been in the woods, but I met a man who said he was camping in the park and taking nature photographs. I never got a good look at his face and couldn’t recognize him, but there’s a chance I might recognize his voice. I could see that he wore a beard. He told me he had heard the dogs and saw my light and was curious,” she said.

“You believe him?” the sheriff asked.

“At the time, I thought he might be with Slick. I was trusting no one. He did tell me the dogs sounded like Walker hounds and that he was familiar with the breed of dog. He seemed to think the chances were pretty slim that they were vicious. I asked him to call your office when he could get to a phone, and apparently he did. He took my jacket to lay a false trail for the dogs away from me, and he gave me some rain gear and a knife.”

There it was. A man running around the woods with a knife when, practically within spitting distance from where he was, the Barres had their throats cut. The sheriff sat up straight, but Diane didn’t pause. She handed him another report.

“There was no blood on any of the things he gave me. I asked my people to take the knife apart and check every part of it. Had there been blood, they would have found it. Even if it had been washed, the blood still would have seeped through the cracks in the handle.”

“Don’t recollect Travis telling me about the knife. Told him he should of taken the raincoat,” he said.

“I told him about the rain gear. The knife was tucked away in my jeans. I was quite frightened when Travis found me—seeing the Barres like that. I had just had a meal with them a few hours before. They were good people,” said Diane.

Sheriff Conrad watched Diane for several moments. “Should have mentioned the knife,” he said.

“I agree. If I had been thinking like I should, I would have,” she said. “I was near the point of collapse from fatigue and dehydration.”

He didn’t like it that she had kept the things the mysterious man gave her. But he was also displeased with his son for not taking the poncho—and probably for not taking her in for questioning.

Diane continued her story before he decided whether he wanted to pursue another conversation—one she would prefer he not.

“I thought if I could find the large creek I had crossed the previous afternoon on the way to the Barres’ house, I could follow it and find the road. I found the creek—a creek—and eventually I found the Barres’ house. I thought I was safe, until I went inside.”

Another tricky part. How was he going to feel about her taking photographs of the crime scene and not telling Travis about that either? She wanted to keep outright lying to him to a minimum, but she also didn’t want to tell him that everything she did was governed by her belief that he didn’t know what he was doing. She knew that wouldn’t go over well. He’d probably try to haul her back to Rendell County with him.

“The telephone was out of order. I assumed the wires leading into the house were cut. I had to go for help, but I was very concerned about the security of the crime scene,” she said.

Diane pulled out an envelope marked
Photographs
, and took them out.

“So before I left, I snapped some photographs,” she said, handing them to him.

He took them, not taking his eyes off her. He wasn’t pleased, she saw.

“You had a camera with you? Get that from the man in the woods too—he give you his camera?”

“No. I used my cell phone,” she said.

“What?” His frown deepened.

“My cell phone. I used it to take the photographs,” she repeated.

“Your cell phone?” He looked puzzled. “You took pictures with your cell phone?”

Now Diane
was
surprised. He might not like cell phones, but surely he knew about them. He sat looking at her for a moment, then down at the photographs.

“You have the negatives for these,” he said.

Diane hesitated. “It’s a digital camera. There are no negatives,” she said.
Okay, surely they have digital cameras in Rendell County. They’re only about an hour away from Rosewood, two hours from Atlanta, for heaven’s sake. They don’t have a wall built around the county
.
They have television.

“Travis knows about these things,” he muttered, going through the photographs. “They’re not real sharp,” he said.

“You don’t get the best resolution with the camera in a cell phone,” she said.

“Why did you take them?” He looked up at her.

She thought to herself that if his gaze had been a spear, she’d have been impaled.

“I had to leave and go for help. I didn’t know if the killer might come back and move the bodies, burn the house, or otherwise disturb the crime scene. Or someone else might stumble into it. I thought there should be a record of it as it was, undisturbed,” said Diane.

“You telling me you didn’t have the presence of mind to tell Travis about the knife, but you were clear-thinking enough to take pictures?” he said.

“That describes my entire night. Going from hours of panic to moments of clarity. I was terrified running from Slick. I tried to get my wits about me enough to figure a plan to find the Barres’ house and get help. When I did, well . . . this is what I found.” She gestured to the photographs.