Diane. She stared at the face rotating on the screen as she spoke with Garnett.
“Eric’s one of those family members you kind of hope will go off and not come back. Always in trouble. Spent time in jail for dealing, assault and battery, spouse abuse, you name it. He was shot in a drug deal that went sour. His family had hoped that cured him, but he was a hard case. I guess he’s cured now.”
“Must have been what McNair was trying to hide,” said Diane.
“Probably so. Discovering Eric’s involvement with the meth lab would definitely have implicated Marcus. They were tight. Marcus was the only relative Eric was close to.”
“How did Marcus get to be arson investigator?” asked Diane.
“Marcus kept out of trouble himself. He also had a benefactor,” said Garnett.
“Who?” asked Diane.
“Guess.”
“Adler?” answered Diane.
“First try. It’s looking worse and worse for Adler. The more we find on McNair, the more we have on Adler. I don’t know if you’ve seen the news. He’s been trying to distance himself from McNair. But his political career is circling the drain. I’d love to arrest the bastard. That would be icing on the cake.”
What did David say about payback being a bitch? thought Diane. Adler had no friends in the police department. He should have thought of that. You’d think a politician would have.
“Can I get dental records on Eric McNair or x-rays of his shoulder?” asked Diane.
“The guy may never have gone to a dentist. The hospital should have x-rays from the shooting injury. I’ll get them sent over to you,” said Garnett.
“That’ll confirm the identification,” said Diane. “I don’t guess there’s any line on where the occupants of the Impala went,” she said, jumping subjects.
“None. They obviously ditched the car. They’re probably in another vehicle by now and long gone.”
“They’ll hang around,” said Diane.
“How do you know?”
“Because they didn’t get what they wanted,” said Diane.
“You mean the secret code thing you were talking about?” asked Garnett.
From the tone of his voice and the ambiguity of his understanding of what the secret code thing represented to the gunman, Diane could see that Garnett wasn’t buying the looking-for-treasure motive. It didn’t matter. She bought it. And she knew they would return to get the coded message.
“You’ll let me know if he’s sighted?” she said.
“You know I will,” replied Garnett. “But I think you can relax.”
She hung up with Garnett. The face of Eric McNair rotated in three dimensions on her screen. What a tragic life to have gotten as far as his midthirties and have no one miss him. She printed out both faces—the two men who died together in an instant in the basement of the house—and saved them to a portable memory stick.
Jin, David, and Neva had made significant progress sorting through the cigarette butts. The map was full of small x’s, each representing a Doral. But she didn’t like what she saw. The vast majority of the x’s clustered near the morgue tent and the coffee tent.
“Doesn’t look good, does it?” said David.
She looked up and caught him watching her.
“We’ll need to find out what the people at tent city smoke,” said Jin.
What the people at tent city smoke, thought Diane. None of them wanted to say that who they were looking at as a murder suspect was one of the medical examiners, their assistants, or a policeman. Those were the only people allowed in the area.
“I hate this,” said Neva, “but I’ll find out what the policemen smoke.”
“I’ll do it,” said David. “They’re your friends.”
“Neither of you will do it,” said Diane. “We’re going to give the information to Garnett and let him investigate. That’s what we do: We supply objective information from the scene and he uses it to investigate the crime.”
“Since when?” said Jin.
“I’m not willing to alienate the police department any more than I have to. I’m taking the coward’s way out of this one. It’s up to Garnett now.”
“That works for me,” said Neva.
Diane didn’t hear Jin or David objecting. Good.
“This is something for you to mull over,” said Diane. She laid down the printout of the face she had reconstructed.
“Why did you have the computer draw Marcus McNair?” said Neva. She looked at Diane with a puzzled frown.
“Yeah, Boss,” said Jin. “You testing your software?”
“Is this McNair?” asked David, picking up the page and examining the printed picture.
“We’re waiting for confirmation, but it appears to be Eric McNair, Marcus McNair’s cousin,” said Diane.