“Louis, do something,” she said. “Pay the man or something.”
“Now, you wouldn’t be trying to bribe me, ma’am,” said the policeman who Diane now remembered was Mickey Varner. “I’d hate to be adding charges.”
Mickey looked over his shoulder at Mr. Stanton. “You can see her down at the station.”
He hauled her off, protesting all the way. Diane wouldn’t be surprised if by the time they got to the police station, resisting arrest would be added to the charges.
The son, Blake Stanton, was standing in the doorway, looking at Diane with black hatred. She suspected that this was not the fireworks he had anticipated.
Before going into the morgue tent, Diane walked across the adjoining yard to the crime scene to see how David and Neva were doing. The sky was overcast with gray-white clouds, and the temperature was below freezing. She could see her breath every time she exhaled. Diane thought she heard on the radio that the forecast was for another ice storm this evening. It must be really hard living in Siberia, she thought as she trudged through the show. But from her experience she knew that as hard as it was working in the cold, working in the heat would be worse. The cold mutes the smell—though it’s still bad enough.
Between her crew and McNair’s arson team, they had made significant progress clearing away debris. In over half the area she could see the burned floor where piles of charred rubble had been before. David and Neva met her as she approached.
“How’s McNair acting?” asked Diane in a low voice.
“About the same,” said David. “The talk you gave him didn’t do a bit of good. He’s still looking in the evidence bags. I tell you what I’d like to do . . .” He didn’t finish the sentence.
“David, did you happen to take pictures of him tampering with the seals on the bags?”
David stared, frowning at her for several moments. “Diane, it worries me when someone knows me that well.”
“That would be a yes,” said Neva.
“It’s good that you did. McNair is telling the commissioner we’re compromising the evidence. I just want to make sure when push comes to shove, we have some leverage to shove really hard. I knew I could count on you.”
“You should talk about me. Who took photographs on her cell phone—from her closet, yet—just a few months ago of her ex-husband sneaking into her bedroom?”
Diane smiled. “David, I like you the way you are, paranoia and all. I wouldn’t change a thing.”
“Why is McNair doing this?” asked Neva.
“It’s a control thing. Why do control freaks like to control?” She shrugged. “In this case, probably because it’s such a high-profile crime. He must think it will launch his career or his fortunes or something.”
“The guys who work for him really aren’t that bad when he’s not around,” said David. “They know their business and I get the sense that they don’t like him very much.”
“Do the best you can. I’m having Garnett work on the problem. That’s all I can do at the moment. If he comes back and starts pawing through sealed evidence again, call me.”
“Will do,” said David. “We’ve sent you a truckload of bones. The nearer to the heat of the blast, the more loose bones we find.”
Diane sighed. It still surprised her that someone who is alive and vital one minute can, in a moment, be reduced to bones.
“Then I’d better get back to work,” she said.
The morgue tent looked just as it had when she left—blackened bodies on every table. Jin was at her table laying out bones. Archie was at his table sorting through boxes of objects and medical information collected from parents of missing children. It frightened Diane to think that with the slightest change of fate, he might have been filing Star’s identifying information. She shivered. All of them looked up when Diane walked in.
“We were all so glad to hear that you found Star,” said Lynn Webber. “It was as if she belonged to all of us.”
“I appreciate that, guys. I can’t tell you what a scary night it was until we found her. She was doing what she should have been, studying for finals with a friend.”
She paused a moment as she took her place at her metal table. “Her friend, Jenny Baker, was asked to go to the party by Bobby Coleman. She decided to study instead.”