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.