One Grave Less (42 page)

She got up out of his lap and sat down in the seat.

“Can you tell me what happened?” he said.

She and Ariel told the story, the whole story, the parts that were Lindsay’s, the parts that were Ariel’s, and the parts that were theirs together. It poured out of them, sometimes out of order and sometimes confused, but they didn’t stop until John knew everything—Lindsay’s kidnapping, the massacre at the mission, Ariel’s plans to find her mother, their experiences in the jungle. The people she killed in self-defense.

“I just wanted to get back to Mama so bad,” Ariel said.

John was private with his emotions most of the time, but Lindsay could see the glistening in his eyes. She was afraid to speak because she knew her voice would crack.

“We’ll get you to your mama,” he whispered. He looked back at Lindsay. “I’m glad you’re here. It’s worth any price.”

“Can we call Mama?” asked Ariel.

John grinned at her. “Sure.”

Lindsay wished she could bottle the look of excitement and joy on Ariel’s face. John picked up the phone built into his chair and called information. Then he dialed the RiverTrail Museum. He said nothing for several moments and hung up the phone.

“Can’t get through right now,” he said. “I’ll try again in a few minutes. Don’t be worried. This happens sometimes. We’ll get hold of her.”

Arthur Youngblood came out of the cockpit and stood at John’s chair. He winked at Lindsay and Ariel.

“Who’s flying the plane?” said Ariel.

“Otto,” he said.

Ariel looked down the passageway into the cockpit. “Who’s Otto?”

“Otto Pilot,” he said. “Always take him with me.”

He gave a hearty laugh. Lindsay wondered how many times he had made that joke and how many times he had laughed at it. He turned to John.

“There’s a big weather system stalled over North Georgia. We won’t be able to get near the place. Our best bet is to go home to Cherokee and land in our private field, especially since we kind of took that long detour from our flight plan. I could try for Atlanta, but it’s bad weather there too, and they have a lot of security.”

John nodded. “The bad weather is probably why I can’t get through on the phone. We can drive down to Rosewood,” he said.

He looked over at Ariel. She had an anxious look on her face, like maybe her dream wasn’t going to come true after all.

“It’s not that far,” said John. “We’ll get you there.”

“You don’t think the bad man will get there first, do you?” she said. “He knows I’ll tell Mama about him and what he did to Father Joe and the others. What if he tries to hurt her?”

Diane awoke from a three-hour nap and took a shower. It left her less refreshed than she would like. Star was still asleep. Frank was having coffee and doughnuts with David and Izzy. She found Gregory Lincoln sitting alone on a bench near the huge dinosaur paintings in the Pleistocene Room.

He sat with his forearms resting on his knees. He was in quiet contemplation, looking through a packet of postcards he carried with him. Each card was a small reproduction of a Vermeer painting whose subject was people doing everyday things. It’s what he did when he was under stress. The cards had grown rather ragged around the edges from frequent use.

It was early, too early for visitors, so she and Gregory had the Pleistocene Room to themselves. Gregory smiled and put his arm around her shoulders when she sat down beside him.

“I love your museum. What an utterly calm environment. Even when you have all the noisy schoolchildren it is a calm place. I love the tiny unicorns in the dinosaur paintings. Quite intriguing.��

The huge murals of dinosaurs, painted at a time when everyone thought dinosaurs dragged their tails on the ground behind them, were treasures uncovered during the renovation of the museum. The artist had put tiny unicorns in his artwork here and there to the delight of everyone who looked at the paintings.

“Life is good here,” she said.

“I thought I might be moving here, you know, but it turns out that Marguerite and I are having a girl. So I can go home.” He smiled.

Diane put a hand on his arm. “Congratulations,” she said.

“After the boys, it will be quite a different experience having a girl. Marguerite is pleased. She’s given up on trying to make the boys wear dresses on special occasions. Now I may have to install concertina wire on top of the wall around the house. I understand girls can be quite tough on parents.”

“I’m sure the two of you will manage very well,” said Diane.

“I heard you are canceling your wedding,” Gregory said.

“I told Frank I’d wait to make a decision and we would talk. But you’ve seen firsthand what I bring to the marriage.”

“You’re telling me you invited those maniacs? That seems unlike you,” he said. He went back to looking at his postcards. “I read where paintings of milkmaids in their day were considered sexual. I have to say, I see a serene woman pouring milk. I’m afraid I would make a terrible art critic. I don’t seem to have the knack for all the underlying symbolism that other people see.”

“I might as well have invited them,” said Diane. “They were after me.”

“Seems as though you will have to quit working here too,” he said. “Wouldn’t do to expose the museum visitors to deadly criminals.”

“Frank went through all that—Am I going to move to a deserted island to live out my days, etcetera,” she said.

“He has a point,” Gregory said, looking at
The Girl with a Wine Glass
. “Now, she looks like she is about to make some poor decisions. You could, of course, join your CIA or some such group where your ability to draw out bad guys would be welcome.”

Diane smiled. “That’s a thought. The problem is, I love my life here. I love Frank. I just don’t want to see him or Star hurt.”

“None of us like to see the people we love hurt.” He put the postcards back in his jacket pocket. “What is so odd about this is it shouldn’t be happening. You should be safe here in your museum—safe even in your crime lab, with its connection to criminals and their doings. I haven’t been able to get a handle on this. I realize now that there was some criminal activity going on at the mission in Brazil that I missed utterly and completely. I’ve accepted that. I believe you are right, that it had to do with smuggling endangered animals and their various parts and selling humans into slavery. But I have no idea who was behind it. I’m completely stumped. Simone must have found more damning evidence than the bag of feathers and bones to have generated this kind of extreme response. I’ve made calls to some environmental policing groups, trying to get a handle on who’s who in that world. No luck so far. Just a lot of information about things we already know, such as how lucrative it is. They gave me a few names, but I didn’t know any of them. David asked for the names so I gave them to him.”

“I’m going to contact my post office and see if perhaps they lost a package that was supposed to come to me.” Diane shrugged. “David suggested that perhaps Simone set up several post office boxes and has the package being forwarded from post office to post office—letting the U.S. Postal Service keep it in their custody for a while. That’s the kind of thing he might do.”

“That could be it. She also could have left it with a lawyer to be forwarded to you or to the authorities in the event of her death. Unfortunately, she appears not to have made provisions for a coma,” said Gregory.

“I don’t suppose Simone’s family received anything,” said Diane. “Would any of them have told you?”

“The brother or father, perhaps,” Gregory said. “But I don’t think Simone would really trust any of them with something like that. Crime is an alien thing to her family. They are perplexed and out of their ken over this.”

“Whoever is behind it believes the package exists. I have to believe they are right,” said Diane. “It’s somewhere, and we need to find it—first. If it is making its rounds in the postal system, perhaps that will come to an end soon and it will be delivered to me. Perhaps Charlotte will find something soon. I’m sure that’s why David wanted the names of known animal traffickers.”

“Charlotte? I don’t believe I’ve met her,” Gregory said.

Diane looked over at him. “David is probably going to introduce you today. He said he’s going to tell you about her. But it is a secret. Only a few of us know about her and her brother. So you must keep it a secret. He’ll make you swear in blood.”

Gregory gave a little laugh. “I’ll keep mum. Tell me, who is this Charlotte and her brother?”

“Charlotte and Arachnid are two of David’s programs that rely heavily on databases and complex algorithms,” said Diane.

“Now, I could have guessed that,” said Gregory.

“Arachnid is a program that’s like a search engine and facial recognition software combined. We used it to find information about a black widow murderer a while back. Worked quite well. You’ll love Charlotte. She’s like the network analysis you do, only with the power of a computer behind it. It not only places people in a social network, it locates degrees of separation. Like, if I know Vanessa and she has a son, and you know your father-in-law and he has a cousin, it might find if Vanessa’s son and the cousin have ever crossed paths in whatever location we are investigating. The power of it is in access to databases. David even takes it down to the level of hobbies and habits of the people in the network. You know David, if something is complex, it can always be made more complex. That’s probably why he covets a supercomputer. Can you imagine a world with David and a supercomputer?”

“For someone who is afraid of Big Brother, he certainly likes to invent Big Brother programs,” said Gregory.

“The irony isn’t lost on him. That’s why he keeps it all a secret. He doesn’t want anyone else to get their hands on it,” said Diane.

“So if the names of these animal and human traffickers I gave David have crossed paths with any of us, this Charlotte will find it? That will be helpful. That actually makes me feel better.”

“Remember, David likes to keep his programs secret,” said Diane.

Gregory smiled and shook his head. “I wonder if he has thought of tapping into some of the social networking sites. He would get a wealth of information there. Seems like Charlotte and her brother could be put to effective use,” said Gregory. “I can see it now. Jane and Jack Smith on a family vacation just happen to take a picture with Notorious Joe in the background and post it with their vacation photos on their Web site, where Arachnid finds it and discovers that Joe was in the Bahamas when he said he was in Alaska. Cool.”

Diane laughed. “I’m sure David has thought about that very thing. Sometimes I don’t inquire into too much detail about his computer activities.”

Neva, one of Diane’s crime scene team members, walked into the Pleistocene Room, smiling. She wore jeans and a purple museum T-shirt with GEOLOGY ROCKS printed across the front along with a glittering picture of amethysts.

“You look happy,” said Diane.

Neva sat on the bench with them. She brushed her honey brown bangs back with a hand.

“How are you, Neva?” said Gregory. “You do look happy.”

“I’m good. I heard from Mike. He’ll be coming home soon. Has some great stuff for the museum.” She grinned.

“I hear ‘more to the story’ in there,” said Diane.

“His company told him they were going to an ice cave. That was just a cover because they wanted to keep the real destination a secret—you’re going to hate it,” said Neva.

“What?” said Diane.

“He went to the Big Deep,” she said. “They collected truckloads of extremophiles. He said it’s loaded with them.”

“What?” said Diane, glaring at Neva.

Neva grinned. “He said you’d look like that.”

“He didn’t insist that he would go only if he could bring his museum boss and caving partner?” said Diane.

“Mike said you’d say that,” Neva said.

“What’s this Big Deep?” said Gregory.

“The deepest cave in the world,” said Diane. “It’s about eight thousand feet deep.”

“Good heavens,” said Gregory. “It sounds treacherous. And you would find that relaxing?”

“It is and I do,” said Diane. “Wow. Wow. He got pictures, I hope. The rat,” she added.

“Loads of pictures,” said Neva. “All the cavers had really great cameras on their helmets and, of course, they had their official photographer. Mike has all these ideas for an exhibit.”

“I can’t wait.” A wave of regret washed over Diane. What if she weren’t working at the museum then? What if she were banished to some deserted island? God, she loved her job.

“So tell me, Neva,” said Gregory. “You cave too. Do you find it relaxing?”

Neva shook her head. “Diane goes for the calm of it. I go for the excitement. My heart beats too fast in a cave for it to be relaxing.”

“You and Mike are an item, is that right?” asked Gregory.

Neva nodded. “I suppose. I’d marry him in a minute if he would ask.”

“Don’t girls ask these days?” said Gregory.

“I’d be too afraid of a ‘no,’” said Neva. She sighed. “Mike is way more educated than I am.”

“Really?” said Gregory. “Talking to you, you sound very educated.”

“Working where I do, I can’t help but pick up all kinds of knowledge about a lot of things, but . . .” She shrugged.

“It appears to me that you are selling yourself quite short,” said Gregory. “Education is more than a piece of paper with special letters on it. It’s the content of your mind and your awareness of it. You have all that.”

“You are such a nice man,” said Neva. “No wonder your wife is crazy about you.”

“Is she really? I’m glad to hear it. It’s hard to tell with Marguerite sometimes.” Gregory smiled at Neva.

Diane was staring at the bones of the wooly mammoth as Neva and Gregory spoke, remembering Milo Lorenzo, the man whose dream was behind the museum, the love of Vanessa Van Ross’s life, and the man who hired Diane as assistant director. It was here he had a heart attack and died. He was much younger than Vanessa and it was a shock and a tragedy.