DF08 - The Night Killer (12 page)

“I was panicked all over again. I tried to get control of myself enough to do the right thing. I took the pictures, because that’s what I do—preserve crime scenes. I meant no offense. I didn’t mean to overstep authority. I wanted to make sure there was a record in case anything happened to the scene before I found help. When Travis and I got back to the house, it was undisturbed. I knew official photos would be made of the crime scene, and I knew mine were of limited quality. They just didn’t seem important at the time.”

He leaned forward in the chair and glared at Diane. His face was flushed, but his voice was quiet. “What’s done is done. But I don’t want you in my county investigating on your own. I don’t want you coming into my county for any reason until I solve this. And if I find that you’ve lied to me or kept things from me again, you’ll find yourself in my jail. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, I understand you. I hope you understand that I, like you, am a sworn officer of the court. I have my authority and responsibilities, and you have yours.”

They stared at each other for a moment without either of them speaking or breaking eye contact.

Here I am in a pissing contest with the sheriff. Just where I did not want to be
, she thought to herself.
Better ease back.

“If I remember anything that might be helpful from my conversation with the Barres or my trek through the woods, I assume you would want me to call you,” she said.

“Make sure you do.”

With that, he gathered up all the evidence, including Diane’s clothes, and turned to go. Protocol would require that the sheriff sign out any evidence he took from the crime lab, but Diane decided not to impede his exit. It was his case; he had the evidence in his possession; he was now responsible for it.

She showed him the way out of the building. As she watched him drive away, she breathed a sigh of relief, deciding it had gone better than she had expected.

Despite his warning, she fully intended to pursue the matter. She couldn’t drop it, not after she had seen the Barres sitting there in their dining room. She wouldn’t go into his county, as he phrased it, but she had the photographs. She could do a lot with those. She wondered whether Travis was amenable to sharing information.

Diane knew David would have sent copies of the crime scene photographs to her computer. So after she watched the sheriff drive away from the museum, she walked back to her osteology lab, went straight to the vault, and keyed in the security code.

The vault was an environmentally controlled room where she stored skeletal remains sent to her for analysis. Diane had some pretty fancy equipment there too. It was where she kept the jazzed-up computer with the forensic software. And where she also kept 3- D facial-reconstruction equipment—a laser scanner for scanning skulls and a different dedicated computer with software for reconstructing a face from the scan.

Diane steeled herself for what she was about to look at—grasping for her objectivity and tucking away her emotions—and turned on her computer. As she was waiting for it to boot up, she looked wistfully at the other computer and wished that she could draw well enough to reproduce the skull she had seen on the hood of her car, and then perhaps her facial- reconstruction software could come up with a reasonable facsimile of what the person looked like.

She turned her attention back to her computer and called up the photographs that David had sent. To her surprise, he had also created a 3-D reconstruction of the two rooms from the photographs.

“When did he have time to do that?” she whispered to herself.

Since Diane hadn’t entered the dining room to take photographs, David had to extrapolate much of the room and the distances between objects. He had less work to do in the living room, where she had taken a 360-degree panorama of shots.

Diane looked at David’s 3-D rendering first. She toured the dining room where the Barres, in virtual form, were seated, dead, at the dining room table. David had superimposed dotted lines over objects and labeled dimensions. It appeared that he’d used the doorway as a reference for distances. She was sure he had, among his multitude of databases, the length and width of doors in a house of that age. There were other objects in the room that he used to cross-reference the ratios of the photographs with the real world. David had not known what was on the walls that the camera hadn’t seen. But Diane did know. She entered the program, put in the relevant information, and restarted the virtual tour.

She looked at the blood spatter first. It was highlighted and labeled for directionality. She was sure David had noted the same things she did—such as the cast-off spattering and the rumpled hair on the top of their heads.

She asked the program to reenact the crime. The killer, represented as an indistinct androgynous form, appeared in the room. He came up behind Ozella Barre, grabbed her hair with his left hand, pulled her head back, and slit her throat left to right. Diane watched the blood drip from the knife, casting off small droplets of clues. The killer then went over to Roy Barre and stopped. A small clock appeared on the screen with a message indicating an indefinite passage of time. Then the killer repeated the act with Roy. Why had the killer stopped? What had David seen? Diane flipped over and looked at the photographic images she had taken of the crime scene.

She saw the blood spatters. She had already concluded, when she saw the real scene, that the killer was probably right-handed—or at least he held the knife in his right hand. That was Blood Spatter 101. But how had David arrived at the sequence in the deaths for the two of them? She could have called him and asked, but obstinacy on her part stopped her for the moment.

She squinted at the screen as if that would help her see better. She looked at the photographic imagery, grid by grid, as she would if she were working the scene itself. Ozella, her eyes clouded in death, was facing the doorway that Diane had looked into. Roy was to Diane’s left. She could see only the right side of his face. Across from him was a dark-wood china hutch. Diane enlarged it.

The first thing she saw was herself with a camera—her own image reflected in the partially opened, curved glass door of the hutch. She enlarged the image again and saw what David had seen—Roy Barre’s face reflected in a silver serving tray inside the hutch . . . his eyes unclouded. Ozella had died first, and then Roy sometime later. Why?

Diane continued her systematic examination of the photograph. She looked closely at the hutch and tried to figure out whether any of its contents seemed to be missing. She couldn’t really tell. She searched the floor. There was a light blue Persian-style carpet under the dining table. It had several smudges on it, each about the size of an orange. The margins of the prints were indistinct. She looked at the location of each smudge. One was behind Roy, and two were near the door. She called up the photograph of the living room and examined the hardwood floor. There were no smudges near where she had stood. She was sure she would have seen them at the time if there had been.

Diane enlarged the living room floor. It looked like there could be a couple of light smudges going down the hall. Okay, they could be bloody footprints, but they weren’t exactly in the shape of footprints. They were more rounded and indistinct. Only part of a foot stepped in the blood that had soaked into the dining room rug—the heel or the ball of the foot. The killer was trying to be careful. But it was hard to be careful with all that blood.

But what about the shape?

The killer was wearing shoe coverings. Tyvek, perhaps? It wouldn’t pick up much blood, so there wouldn’t be much tracking of blood from one place to another, and a shoe covering would account for why the outer margins of the print were so indistinct.

Okay, this was a possibility—the killer had his shoes covered so he wouldn’t pick up anything or leave anything at the crime scene. Did he also wear Tyvek coveralls covering his body? That would mean he knew something about forensics. It would also mean that he left no trace evidence nor took any away from the scene. This would make it harder to find usable evidence.

Diane went back to the 3-D animation and played it out. It showed the killer leaving and going down the hall to the back of the house. David had noticed the smudges too.
Of course he did
. Diane smiled.

She finished examining the photographs of the dining room crime scene and found no other images she could identify as clues. She turned her attention to the living room, first briefly looking at the 3- D rendering. Nothing leaped out at her. She turned to the photographs. David arranged them so that she could look at them as a panoramic virtual tour. It made it easier than looking at the photographs individually, one after another.

Several of the hutches were open. She’d seen that at the house. Nothing was in disarray particularly, just open. She tried to remember exactly what it had looked like when she was there to pick up the artifacts. Unfortunately, she didn’t have a perfect photographic memory. All she could say was that, although the rooms didn’t look tossed by any means, someone had searched for something.

She took a virtual “walk” around the room, then started a systematic search, enlarging spots of interest. No good clues here like there were in the dining room.

She toured the room again, grid by grid—looking for drawers pulled out, cabinets opened, something dropped on the floor, stains, anything wrong. On her third pass she noticed something as she examined the hutch where Roy kept his collection of things. A cigar box filled with rocks his grandfather had collected was missing. She remembered it because Ozella mentioned that she’d offered Roy a pretty glass jar so he could see the rocks, but he wanted to keep them in the cigar box where his grandfather had stored them.
Pretty glassware couldn’t compete with fond memories
, thought Diane.

The cigar box was not there. In addition, other items had been moved to conceal the space where it had been. She tried to remember the rocks that were in the box. Roy had opened it to show her, but she had merely glanced inside. Nothing had jumped out at her. She had been more interested in getting her business over with before the storm hit. Now she wished she’d paid more attention.

Diane was soaking in a bubble bath when Frank got home from Atlanta. He’d called earlier and said he was picking up dinner from a new Polish restaurant he wanted to try.

“I’m glad to see you weren’t arrested,” he said, swishing his hand in the warm water.

“I think I came close,” she said. “All in all, it went well with the sheriff, but he wasn’t pleased. He barred me from his county.”

“His county? He said that, did he?” commented Frank. He bent down and kissed her. “Dinner’s here whenever you’re ready.”

She sighed and got out of the tub.

Diane and Frank rarely talked about forensic work over dinner, and never discussed Diane’s crime scene work, which was invariably more gruesome than his fraud cases. They often talked about the museum. When things were going well at RiverTrail, it provided an endless supply of happy conversations. That evening Diane told him about the fossils Kendel and Mike were acquiring from Africa, Kendel’s e-mail saying she bought several large specimens of
Archaeopteris macilenta,
several insects caught in amber, and a variety of stromatolites.

“Nothing big, like a brachiosaur. Mostly a collection of plants and insects,” she said.

She and Frank ate cabbage rolls, potatoes, and Polish cheesecake. They decided the eatery was good enough to be put on their list of preferred restaurants.

After dinner, curled up on the couch with coffee, Diane told him the details of her visit with the sheriff. She liked cuddling next to Frank, except when she talked about her crime scene work. Somehow, cuddling and gruesomeness at the same time offended her sensibilities. Instead, she tucked her legs under her and leaned sideways against the back of the couch, facing him.

“Leland Conrad does not seem to know anything about modern technology,” said Diane. “Really, he doesn’t. I’ve never seen anything like it. It was so strange. Rendell County isn’t that far away.”

Frank looked amused. “A lot of folks are intimidated by new technology, either because they fear they won’t be able to understand it or, like some of the people in Rendell County, they are afraid that it brings with it a window into all manner of wickedness.”

Diane visualized the population of Rendell County looking into the screen of a computer or cell phone and being greeted by a scene straight from a Hieronymus Bosch painting. She made a face and sipped her coffee.

“They’re not necessarily wrong. On occasion, technology does bring problems. But it’s not good for someone in Conrad’s position to disdain professional tools and help.” Frank took a drink of his coffee and set the cup down on the coffee table. “Hot,” he murmured. “But like Leland Conrad said, it’s his county. Besides, I’m sure it will all change sooner or later. They’re just lagging behind.”

“I think his son, Travis, convinced him to let the GBI work the crime scene, but I’ll bet he moved the bodies before they got there,” said Diane. “I have a feeling this is a cunning killer, and I’m not sure the sheriff is up to catching him. He warned me off, but I can’t just drop it.”

“You may have to. How are you going to investigate when you are persona non grata over there? True, it’s illegal for him to forbid you to come into the county, but he can really make your life difficult if you do,” said Frank.

“I’m thinking that his son, Travis Conrad, might be more amenable to talking with me, if I approach him just right.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Frank. “That would put him at odds with both his father and his superior.”

“Maybe. Anyway, I have evidence that Sheriff Conrad couldn’t take with him. He would have if he could. He asked for the negatives,” said Diane.