Diane was paralyzed with confusion and fear. Her six-foot-four-inch head of crime lab security lay limp, facedown on the floor. There was a wet, dark stain on the back of his jacket. In his place stood a much smaller man. In his right hand was a long knife dripping with Emery’s blood. The bad aroma she’d detected earlier wafted through the air. Not for even a moment did she believe she had been rescued.
A cold fear clutched at Diane’s heart, worse than what she’d felt with Emery. It was a primal fear that choked her in its grip. The thought passed through her mind that he wasn’t a man at all, but some demon rooted up from the bowels of the museum subbasement.
He was dirty. She could see that and smell it, but it wasn’t just body odor. Another smell clung to his dark, mangy clothing. His coat, perhaps at one time a wool suit coat, too warm for their weather, had been on his body so long it had merged and transformed and become a part of him, like scales or a molting skin. But it wasn’t his odor, the filthy clothes or his short, ratty hair, but his eyes that frightened her the most. They were flat-black, almost dead eyes devoid of humanity-or any emotion found in the human world.
She had once looked into the eyes of Ivan Santos, the man who slaughtered her daughter and her mission friends and hundreds of others during his horrific reign. In his eyes she thought she had seen the devil. But as she looked at this man, she realized that what she had seen in Santos’s eyes that one time was arrogant, self-centered hatred and anger. He was evil, but this man before her now was something different, something beyond that. Looking into his eyes was looking into a dull, black. . nothing.
“Who are you?” Diane found a fragment of her voice. It was shaky, but audible.
He kept staring for a long moment. Diane looked at the knife in his hand. His fingers. The tips of his fingers on his left hand were deformed, curved in some funny way, and the nails were thick and split, some of them missing. One finger on his right hand was severely deformed, and on that hand he wore a ring with a red stone.
In a flash, Diane put it together, the thing that had been nagging at her that she couldn’t remember-the bloodred ring and injured finger of the man the Odells had seen at the graveside service, the impression in the clay from Neva’s break-in showing a deformed finger. The evidence had pointed to the same person, but she had missed it until now. He was the one who had wrecked Neva’s house. He was the one who had stabbed her and Mike at the cemetery. But who was he, and what possible motive could he have for the brutal and murderous things he was doing?
Diane moved her fingers slowly to punch the remaining numbers to her vault, hoping to rush in, lock the vault door and call for help. He slashed out at her hand. She pulled back quickly, his blade just missing her fingers. She backed away, looking for a table to put between them. But the tables were too far away.
“Who are you?” she repeated.
Again he said nothing, just stared at her with his blank eyes, easing toward her with the knife tip pointed at her, making little jabbing motions. She saw his eyes dart to the tables, and a little smile crept onto his thin lips and he parted them slightly. His eyes lit up suddenly.
What? she thought, but she dared not take her eyes off him. She tried to back up more quickly. If she could reach the table, at least she would have a barrier. She wanted to try for the Glock, but he was too close. Get to the table, and at least you’ll have time to think.
“What do you want?” she asked, trying to pull his attention to her, away from the table.
It startled her when he answered in a high-pitched voice, “Rabbits. I want rabbits.”
Rabbits? He was the one who had been calling MacGregor and Mike.
“What does that mean exactly?” said Diane. “Why did you stab me?”
“It’s what you do with rabbits.”
“And Mike. Is he a rabbit too?” If she could get him talking, maybe she could get some sense out of him.
He frowned; his eyes went dark again. “Tried to steal my rabbits.”
“You know, fella,” said Diane, “you aren’t making a lot of sense.”
“You don’t have to make sense to a rabbit.”
“For the sake of argument, pretend for a moment that I’m not a rabbit. What the hell are you talking about?”
She made a dash for the nearest table and stood at one end. To her good luck, the brakes were off and it rolled easily. She held on to it as if it were a weapon.
He crouched and began easing around the table. She moved so that it stayed between the two of them. She backed up then and ran at him, pushing the table into him, knocking him onto his back on the slick floor. His knife bounced into the corner.
She ran for Emery’s gun, but the man jumped to his feet with an inhuman swiftness and ran at her, screaming. She tried to get away, but he knocked her sprawling against a table, overturning it with a bang. The table just missed falling on her. She tried to scramble up, but he caught her foot and dragged her to him. She kicked and he twisted her foot. She cried out in pain.
“Gotcha, rabbit.”
She looked for any kind of weapon, but there was nothing. She tried to scramble away from him, grabbing at the table for leverage, something to hold on to to keep from sliding in his direction. She kicked as she scrambled, freed herself and almost made it to her feet before he caught her legs again and pulled her toward him. Damn, he was strong.
He hit her across the jaw, stunned her and picked up his knife from the floor.
“You’ll mind what I tell you,” he hissed. “Get on the table.”
“The hell I will.” Diane punched him in the throat with her fist.
He squealed and raised his knife over his head.
The shot was deafening in the enclosed room. The specter paused, knife in midair. Diane didn’t wait to scramble away from him. He fell forward.
She looked over to see Emery half propped up with his gun aimed in her direction.
“I hope you don’t intend to shoot me after all this,” she said.
He lowered the gun. Diane went to him. He collapsed again into a pool of his own blood on the floor.
“Don’t tell my family, please. I’m sorry.”
“I’ll tell them you’re a hero,” said Diane.
He closed his eyes and Diane ran for the phone. It had been pulled out of the wall. She ran to her office phone. It was dead. She opened the vault. The phone in there was working. She dialed 911.
When she came out of her office, she expected to see the wild man gone, vanished the way demons did. But he lay on his face still, his blood spilling into an expanding puddle.
She felt for a pulse in Emery. There was none. His life had been shorter than he thought. In some odd way, his fall from grace may have saved her life. If Emery hadn’t been there, the madman would have killed her. She shivered at the thought. The smell that clung to her clothes sickened her. She went to the sink and threw up.
Her crew, including Mike and Korey, came in with the paramedics. They stood in the doorway like a startled Greek chorus and stared at Diane and the bloody scene. Garnett appeared soon after, looking equally as baffled.
“What happened here?” He went over to look at Emery, then at the stranger. “Who is he?”
“I have no idea. Emery saved my life. The other man was trying to kill me.”
Garnett looked at her and they locked gazes for several moments. “Okay, that works for me,” he whispered. “You have no idea who this other man is?”
“He’s the one who stabbed me and Mike.”
“Him?” said Mike, and started to walk toward the body. A policeman held him back. “Why?”
“I don’t know. He babbled something about you trying to steal his rabbits.”
Neva slid her arm around Mike’s waist and he put his arm around her. Anchoring each other from evil, it seemed to Diane.
“That’s him too?” said Mike. “Who is he? Damn. What is he?”
“A demon from hell, as near as I can tell,” said Diane.
“We now know where that strange smell came from,” said David.
Neva’s face blanched. “How long do you think he’s been in the museum?”
“And why didn’t someone see him?” asked Garnett. “Guess we’ll never know the answer to that.”
Neva was staring at Diane. She said, “Should you go to the doctor? Your face.”
Diane found a mirror and looked into it. A large bruise spread across her jaw, and her lip was split and bleeding. One of the paramedics came to look at it.
“Can you move it? Does this hurt?”
“It’s fine. Just a little sore,” she said.
He pronounced her jaw unbroken, but told her to put ice on it. She nodded absently.
“Neva, he’s also the one who trashed your house. If you look at his hands, you’ll see they fit the mold you made. And David, you know that thing we couldn’t think of?”
“The Odells,” he said, and Diane nodded. “They saw him at the funeral.”
“I’m not sure why you guys didn’t smell him,” said Jin, waving his hand in front of his face. “This guy was rotting before he even died.”
“He’s putrid,” said Diane. “David, Jin, will you two process my clothes, please? I’ve got to get out of them and get a shower before I die from nausea.”
“Of course,” said David. “Let’s take you into the conference room, so as not to contaminate this crime scene.”
“When you’re done, get some rest,” said Garnett. “I’ll do a report later. Do put some ice on that jaw. It looks terrible.”
Diane sat in her museum office in clean jogging clothes with an ice pack on her jaw and her feet up on a chair, her hair still wet from the shower. A crime scene cleanup crew was working in her lab removing the residue of the human carnage that had occurred there. Chanell was overseeing the installation of a new and better surveillance system that had arrived to replace the one sabotaged by Valentine and MacRae. Korey was still working on the diaries.
Things were working toward normal, but nothing felt right. Someone in the Taggart family had caused all this mess, and she wanted them brought to justice. She’d been over and over the evidence looking for something, anything that would definitively point to them.
“Boss?” Jin was at the door holding a piece of paper, waving it at her.
Diane put her feet on the floor and the ice pack down on her desk. “What have you got?”
Jin collapsed in a chair in front of her desk. “I like this office. I think you need to spiff up your bone office some more.”
“Did you come to recommend a decorator?”
Jin grinned and brushed his hair back from his eyes. “No. Korey and I were talking about the diaries, and Korey wondered why Caver Doe-I can’t get used to calling him Dale Wayne Russell-anyway, Korey was wondering why he didn’t write down what happened, since he didn’t die right away-and had nothing to do but sit in that cave and wait. He at least had time to eat a couple of Moon Pies.”
“And you said?” prompted Diane.
“That he didn’t have anything to write on. Then I remembered that he had a pencil in his pocket, and I thought about it, and there it was. . the money. What if he wrote on the money? Remember the roll of bills we found in his shirt pocket?”
Diane nodded.
“I didn’t do anything with them.” He shrugged. “It was money covered in blood and cadaver juice. I didn’t think. But I went back and did the ESDA thing. Did you know that Korey has an electrostatic detection apparatus too?”
“Yes, Jin, I did.”
“We have lots of redundancies,” said Jin.
“No, we don’t. The museum and the crime scene unit are separate.”
“Oh, yeah, I forget sometimes.”
“What did you find on the bills?”
“He wrote down what happened. Sort of.”
Diane leaned forward and took the paper from Jin. The photograph of the electrostatic image was difficult to read, but she could make out words. The handwriting grew progressively worse-probably as he had grown sicker.
“I kind of translated it on the back,” said Jin.
Diane turned it over and read.
Fell. Broke lots of bones. Hurt. Emmett gone for help. Water gone. Food gone. Emmett should be back. Hurt. Rosemary. I love you, Rosemary. Emmett, where are you? Accident? Emmett not coming back. I’m dead. Whoever tell Rosemary I love her. Dale.
“That’s a sad story,” said Diane. “It’s signed ‘Dale.’ We were right; it’s Dale Wayne Russell.”
“Poor fellow. Waiting for someone named Emmett to come back for him. And in love with Rosemary. Isn’t this like a dying declaration?” said Jin.
“Yes, it is. Garnett’s been trying to find out something about the identity of Dale Wayne Russell. I haven’t talked with him about it since yesterday. He’s having a hard time overcoming his political survivalist tendencies. This might light a fire under him.”
Diane was about to pick up the phone when it rang.
“Diane Fallon.”
“Dr. Fallon, this is Emmett Taggart. We met at Helen Egan’s funeral.”
“Yes, Mr. Taggart, I know who you are.”
Jin’s eyes grew wide. Diane pointed to the phone in Andie’s office, and Jin nodded and went in to pick up.
She watched Jin. When he was ready to pick up she said, “Hold on just a moment, please, Mr. Taggart. Let me go to my other phone.”
She motioned to Jin and he picked up the receiver to listen. There was the momentary sound of another phone on the line until Jin pressed the mute button.
“What can I do for you, Mr. Taggart?” she said.
“It’s what I can do for you. I’ve been thinking about that mummy exhibit of yours and how much I like the museum. I was considering making a sizable donation.” Emmett Taggart’s voice reflected a man accustomed to being in control, to having his wishes fulfilled, to having people ingratiate themselves to him.
“Kendel Williams takes care of donations,” said Diane in an attempt to disarm him. “She’s not in her office at the moment. I’ve had to clear out the museum because of some unfortunate events. Our lives are very much disrupted.”
There was a pause during which Diane imagined Taggart enjoying the contribution he had made to that disruption. She looked at Jin and held up her legal pad on which she had written the word Emmett in big letters for Jin to see. Jin’s face registered astonishment.
The tone of Emmett Taggart’s voice now reflected a noticeably more insistent quality but with a varnish of civility. “I understand what you are saying, but for the kind of donation I’m thinking about, I’d rather speak to the director.”
“And you would want what in return for this donation? For large donors, we usually name a room after them.”
Distaste was now evident in his voice as he was actually having to ask for something, to justify himself. “I wasn’t thinking of a room. I was thinking of consideration for all the years of good I have done, all the charities I have given to, all the people I have helped.”
“You want acknowledgment?” Diane was almost enjoying this. Rubbing his face in his own arrogance and his guilt. And it had its desired effect. He came back at her on the offensive, with less caution.
“Let’s stop this. You know exactly what I want, and I have enough money to pay for it. You may think I did something in the past that I should be punished for, but anything I might have done has been balanced several times over by all the good I’ve done.”
But Diane was just warming to the challenge. “I’ve just spoken to the family of Jewel Southwell. They have been devastated by her disappearance sixty-three years ago, and are still feeling the effects today.”
“Jewel.” He said the name as if he had just now remembered. Perhaps he had forgotten her name. “She was a waitress with an illegitimate child.”
“No, the child was not illegitimate. Jewel’s husband worked out of town.”
“You wouldn’t have known she was married by the way she acted.”
“She loved life, and her family loved her. I also have a last letter from Dale Wayne Russell. Let me read it to you.” Diane read the poignant last words of Caver Doe. “He expected you to come back for him.”
There was a long, drawn-out silence, but Diane could still hear the old man breathing. When he spoke again, he was not contrite, but he was calmer and sounded sincere, almost pleading.
“Dale was hurt too bad. My cousin was a careless boy. He was going to die anyway. You have to understand. I loved Rosemary too.”
“He was your cousin?”
“I thought you knew that. Yes, he was my cousin. Don’t presume to judge me until you know everything.” His calm had not lasted long, and was replaced by a return of his arrogance and self-justification.
“I know we have three recent murders,” said Diane.
“Blackmailers!” he spit. “Blackmailers!”
“Nothing they did justifies your taking the lives of Jake Stanley, and Flora and Donnie Martin,” said Diane, her own temper now raised. “My mother was thrown in a black hole of a prison as a result of your criminal activities. There is nothing you can do to undo her suffering or to repair my ruined relationship with my family. No amount of money will change any of the evil you have done. You’ve hurt me and people I love and you want my goodwill?”
“About your mother, that wasn’t-”
The blast that exploded through the phone was so loud it hurt Diane’s ear.
“Mr. Taggart? Are you there? Mr. Taggart?” Diane heard the phone click.