One Grave Less (16 page)

“I don’t know,” said Diane. “I wasn’t aware she was at the museum today. We don’t have a board meeting. But she takes several of the classes and, as Lynn said, she loved the museum.”

Lynn looked at Whit and he nodded his okay. No one touched a body without the coroner’s clearance. Lynn squeezed Diane’s arm and turned toward her task.

Diane watched Lynn and David for a moment as they approached the body. She turned and looked from Whit to Garnett.

“I don’t want Vanessa to hear about this from the media. What can I tell her?”

Whit wrinkled his brow. “Just what you know now. No details. Tell her not to speak with anyone beyond her household about it. I’m sure it will be in the news soon enough.”

Garnett nodded in agreement.

 

As Diane drove to Vanessa’s, she called her friend,psychiatrist Laura Hillard, and told Laura to meet her at Vanessa’s. She hung up before Laura could question her. Laura was also an old friend of Vanessa and Madge Stewart.

Vanessa’s estate was in the oldest section of Rosewood. The trees that lined her drive were older than the oldest member of Vanessa’s family, which was saying a lot. Vanessa came from a family of centenarians and super centenarians. The large house came into view and Diane parked in the circular drive, got out, and walked to the door.

Vanessa’s housekeeper, Mrs. Hartefeld—called either Hattie or Harte by Vanessa, depending on her mood—answered the door. Hattie Hartefeld preferred simply Harte and had often wondered aloud why a parent would have named an infant Hattie.

“Dr. Fallon,” said Harte, “how nice to see you.” She looked over Diane’s shoulder and saw Laura driving up. “Well, this is a coincidence. Isn’t it?” She looked quizzically at Diane.

“I called her to come, Harte. Can I speak with Vanessa?”

“Of course.” She frowned as she opened the door wide and waited for Laura to approach. She let them into Vanessa’s white gilded sitting room and went to fetch Vanessa.

“What’s all the mystery?” Laura smiled at Diane.

She thinks it’s about the wedding
, thought Diane.
This is terrible
.

Vanessa came in dressed in a peach pantsuit, holding her hands out to greet Diane and Laura.

“What a nice surprise,” she said.

“I’ll bring some tea,” said Harte, and she turned to leave.

“Harte, please stay for a moment,” said Diane.

The three of them stared at her as if just now noticing the stricken look on her face.

“What is it?” said Vanessa.

“Something has happened,” said Laura.

Diane nodded and asked them to sit down. Vanessa, Laura, and Harte sat on the sofa. Diane sat on one of the chairs near the fireplace where Milo Lorenzo’s portrait hung. The museum was Milo’s vision. He had been a professor at Bartrum University and the love of Vanessa’s life. He died of a heart attack before the museum opened. Diane glanced up at him before she spoke.

“We’ve had a tragedy at the museum,” she began.

“Oh dear,” whispered Vanessa, putting a hand to her throat.

“It looks like a drowning,” she said. “I’m so sorry.” Diane felt tears start to sting her eyes. “It was Madge Stewart.”

The three of them gasped. Harte whimpered and put a hand to her face. Diane knew Harte felt as she did. Like Diane, Harte complained about how Vanessa and Laura babied Madge, saying that she would be a much less obnoxious person if they would stop. Diane had expressed the same sentiments, sometimes in harsher words. Now she felt pangs of guilt. She imagined that Harte did too.

“What happened?” said Vanessa.

“I don’t know. Her body was discovered by the grounds crew. They pulled her out of the water in hopes of saving her, but she was gone. Lynn, Garnett, and Whit are there now. I put David in charge of investigating the scene.”
The scene
. It sounded so harsh and clinical—and sinister.

“Do you expect anything other than an accident?” asked Laura.

“No. But they have to investigate,” said Diane.

“Oh, poor Madge,” whispered Vanessa. “Poor little Madge.” Harte put a hand over Vanessa’s and Vanessa patted it with her other hand. “I’ll handle the funeral. Madge has some cousins, but few other relatives. I can’t believe this,” she said.

“You’ll keep us informed?” said Laura. “We need to know what happened.”

“There is something about it that bothers you,” said Vanessa.

Despite Vanessa’s watery eyes and grieved face, she looked stern. Diane wanted to disappear into the chair.

Diane shook her head. “Please don’t ask me any questions. Whit has instructed that no one outside of this room even be told of the death until he releases a statement. I asked for special permission to come tell you so you wouldn’t hear it on the news. Let’s wait,” she said.

“All right, dear,” said Vanessa.

Diane was glad Vanessa didn’t press.

Something
was
bothering her. She didn’t like the way Madge was dressed. And she could tell the coroner was bothered by it too.

Diane found Gregory down in the dungeon where David had left him. He was writing furiously in his notebook but looked up when Diane came into the room. He reached over and pulled up a chair for her.

“Diane, I heard about the tragedy. I’m sorry. Was the person a friend?”

“Yes,” said Diane, but it felt like she was lying. The weight of all the recent events were on her shoulders as she plopped heavily onto the seat. “She was a member of the board here and a good friend to several of the other members.”

Gregory eyed her. “But not a good friend to you?”

Diane slumped and confessed her guilt. “I’m trying to remember the last kind thing I said to her . . . and can’t.”

“It’s very difficult when someone whose bad behavior we’ve called out dies on us and we are left wishing we had ignored their irresponsibility.”

Diane gave him a weak smile. “I could have been kinder,” she said.

“Knowing you, you were,” he said.

“Your sentiment is appreciated,” she said. “How do you like your accommodations?”

“It’s rather terrific down here.” He put his hands on the arms of the office chair as if to point to its astonishing comfort. “It’s good to see that David has been able to turn his paranoia into such remarkable creativity.”

“I think a big part of David’s paranoia is an excuse to play with databases and gadgets,” she said. “It wouldn’t surprise me if he were digging out a new room here in the basement to house a secret supercomputer.”

“He said supercomputers are above his price range,” said Gregory.

“So he’s talked with you about a supercomputer,” said Diane. “I guess I’d better worry.”

“He was going on about a friend in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, with a Cray Jaguar. I thought it was a car,” said Gregory. “I thought perhaps 2.33 petaflops was you Yanks’ word for horsepower.”

Diane smiled and shook her head. “Perhaps I’d better check the subbasement.”

“He said if he needed a large amount of computing power he could use slaves,” said Gregory.

Diane sat up in her chair and looked at Gregory. “What? He’s using hacked botnets?”

“He said he never used computers in the United States—or Great Britain. But he might have said that for my benefit. My guess would be China.”

Diane put her head in her hands. “You are joking, aren’t you?” she said.

“Actually, no,” said Gregory. He paused as Diane groaned. “But David may have been. It’s hard to tell sometimes, you know.”

Diane looked up and smiled. Gregory grinned back. She looked down at his notebook.

“It looks like you’ve been hard at work,” she said.

Gregory liked to work in a notebook with pen and ink. At a glance, it looked as though he was a serious doodler, but his doodles always meant something. Instead of color-coding concepts, he doodle-coded them. He had started with a list of all the people on the team in South America. He had drawn a line through the deceased members, but that didn’t delete them from his analysis. He had fancy frames around others.

He was doing a network analysis—looking at how each member was connected to the others, correlating each with their World Accord job description, with their current job, with their special talents, personality traits, background, with whom they stayed in contact after the massacre. David would have gladly written an algorithm for him, but Gregory liked to use his own brain for the analysis, continually adding little things to his people map, as he called it, following strings of a web with an unknown pattern until he found the strand that led him to the spider.

The notebook was spread out so that two facing pages were showing. Diane noticed his computer screen was filled with open windows containing various reports from their work in South America. She glanced at what he had so far. His first entries were of the three of them—Diane, David, and Gregory himself—listing the rumors with the annotation “vague” beside them.

“Vague?” said Diane.

“None of the rumors about us have any detail attached to them. God knows, the journalists in London tried to find something.”

“That’s the way lies are,” she said. “You don’t need much substance to make them stick, so long as there are people out there who are convinced that where there is smoke there is fire.”

“People love to believe the worst,” he commented, studying his notes and tapping them with a pen.

Diane was familiar with Gregory’s notation for the most part, but he frequently used a shorthand description of just one or two letters whose meaning was not obvious. Next to hers, David’s, and Gregory’s names he had put the letters
F
and
A
. By Simone Brooks, he had written a
W
. Her fiancé, Oliver Hill, had a line through his name and the letters
I
and
M.

Gregory had listed all of the people who worked for World Accord International. He had also listed the people who ran the mission—Father Joseph and his staff—along with some of the semiregular visitors.

“What are the letters?” asked Diane. She pointed to the one by her and David’s names.

“I’m labeling several variables. Neither David nor I have turned up any other member of the team who were the object of rumors. I don’t know about Simone. I’m hoping your Mr. Garnett will find out something from the brother.” He sighed. “I’ve been trying to find a difference between the three of us and the others who weren’t targeted.”

“And?” asked Diane.

“Nothing clear—but interesting, nonetheless. Among all the members of the team, only we three remained close friends after South America. I’ve called the others a couple of times a year. You know, to check up on them. But I can’t say I’ve stayed friends with any of the team except you and David. Martine Leveque asked me not to call anymore; she wanted to forget that part of her life.”

Diane winced and Gregory smiled.

“I didn’t take it personally. Anyway, Martine lived outside Paris the last we spoke. David hasn’t been able to get in touch with her.”

“I don’t imagine she wants to hear from him either,” said Diane.

Martine had been an interviewer, along with Simone. They often worked together with Steven and sometimes David. She, like all of them, was traumatized by what they found at the mission that day.

“What about Steven Mays?” asked Diane.

“He lives in Washington. I helped him get on at your Diplomatic Corps. I have a call in to him. Hopefully, he’ll call back soon. In the meantime, I spoke with a contact at your State Department. They know of no rumors flying around Steven.”

“And Hannah?”

Diane glanced down at the notebook. Hannah Payne had been their photographer. She meticulously documented the evidence they uncovered, the mass graves, the torture rooms. She had her camera, as she always did, when they returned to the mission. She went from body to body taking photographs, dispassionately recording every atrocity. When she finished, she started over, as if crawling into the camera would insulate her from the horror. David, Gregory, Steven, and several of their excavators armed themselves and searched the mission. David climbed to the top and looked out over the area to see if the perpetrators who had committed the horror were readying for another attack. And she had gone in search of Ariel. Simone wept over her fiancé. Hannah had caught it all on her camera.

Diane shook her head to push back the memories that rose like bile in her throat.

“Hannah freelances for several news sources,” said Gregory. “She’s traveling at the moment. I believe she prefers not to hear from me, though she wasn’t as blunt as Martine.” He tapped his pen on the page. “I’ve been able to find many of the other team members—Maxwell, Ellis, Sharon, and several of the excavators. None have had any problems like ours. It looks as if it is just the three of us.”

“What do all your initials mean?” asked Diane again.

“Oh, just observations. You and David are friends and adept—
F
and
A
. Simone is wounded, hence the
W
. Even before the death of her fiancé, she had a wounded air about her. I think that is why she was able to relate to witnesses so well. Oliver, her fiancé, was idealistic and meticulous. Hannah was armored—
AR
. She used her camera as a shield against the horrors of the world and against getting close to anyone. Steven was ambitious and sharp, that’s the
AB
and the
S
. Martine was afraid and aloof. I had a lot of
A
s to contend with in my variables.” He shook his head. “I don’t know if any of this will help, but it reminds me of the people we knew and what they were like. I was wondering if Simone would have confided in any of them. She and Martine were good friends—at least as friendly as Martine got.”

Diane started to speak when she heard the computer ping. It was one of the sounds indicating that it had found results from a search.