The Night Killer Part 14

"Okay, Dr. Fallon," she said.

Diane went to her office and sat down. She considered calling Frank's minister. She thought of him as Frank's minister even though she sometimes attended with Frank, but she wasn't a member of the church. She decided to ask Frank to speak with him. She would discuss her plan with him this evening.

It would be good if she could speak with Christine and Spence before she went to the church-get a little advance information on whom to talk to. She hadn't asked them when the funeral was going to be. She didn't even know if the sheriff had released the bodies. Going to the funeral and talking to people might be a better idea. How could the man possibly object to her going to the funeral of friends? But the funeral would be a hard time for everyone, and she hated the idea of going around asking questions.

Diane tried to put all of that out of her mind and answer some letters she'd been putting off. She had finished three of them when her phone rang. It was her private number that only a handful of people knew. She picked it up.

"Fallon," she said.

"Diane, this is Ben Florian. How are you? I was shocked to hear about your experience up in the mountains."

"I'm fine, Ben. Thanks for asking," said Diane.

This was unusual. She didn't think Ben had ever called her, except once, when Frank was shot a few years ago.

"Frank and I've been canva.s.sing the free clinics around the area and some of the homeless shelters, and I told him I wanted to call and tell you what we've found out."

Diane's heart quickened. They had found something.

"You won't believe this, but our gal's known in about every place we visited. We were thinking we'd be real lucky to find anyone in the area who had seen her. After all, even if we were right about her, she didn't have to do her hunting in Atlanta. There are any number of places she could have gone-Augusta, Columbus, Savannah, Chattanooga even. But Atlanta's closer to Rendell County, so it wasn't a bad bet."

"You're kidding," Diane said when he paused for a breath. "You found people who know Tammy Taylor?"

"They knew her under different names, but they knew her. Most had a real good opinion of her. She made out to do volunteer work-a regular girl Friday with a heart, she was. Had access to files and everything. Yeah, the gal had a good racket going. She befriended several ladies. But n.o.body we talked with knew she took people home with her."

"That's all too much to be simply innocent coincidence. Where do we go from here?" asked Diane.

"Well, we do have one definite crime, for certain," he said. "That's the unreported death and the improper disposal of the person whose skeleton you found cemented in the tree. Tammy is a common factor linking the skeleton with the old folks here in the Atlanta senior centers. Frank and I are going to talk to the GBI-see if there's enough grounds for them to set up an investigation. I think we can make the case that the crime started here in Atlanta and extended across county lines. Really, the discovery of one pension check being deposited to an account with Tammy's or Slick's name on it ought to be enough. That would get it out of Conrad's jurisdiction."

That's going to p.i.s.s Sheriff Conrad off, thought Diane. She told Florian that Tammy and Slick might have fled.

"That so? Well . . . Wait a minute," he said.

He left the phone and Diane waited. It was a relief to know what the whole Slick- Tammy-skeleton thing was about-or probably about. Ben came back on the phone.

"That was a call from one of the shelters. A woman showed up today and told them she'd been brought back to Atlanta by a woman named Tammy Taylor who was supposed to take care of her. They said the woman was pretty upset about it too. Frank and I are going to talk with her right now. Looks like maybe our gal got scared. Frank'll fill you in this evening."

"Thanks for calling, Ben. It's a relief to know what the heck's going on," said Diane.

"We don't know yet, but I'm betting that I'm right."

Diane hung up the phone and stared at it for a moment, thinking she needed to try to get in touch with Jonas Briggs again.

Chapter 26

Jonas Briggs, the museum's archaeologist, came to Diane after retiring from Rosewood's Bartrum University. When the museum first opened, Diane offered office s.p.a.ce and lab s.p.a.ce to Bartrum faculty members if they would curate collections in their field of expertise. In the beginning, the department heads and faculty were resistant to the idea, thinking that RiverTrail would be a d.i.n.ky nonacademic museum. They sent nontenured and retired faculty to her in order to clear s.p.a.ce in their own buildings for tenured professors.

The resources at the museum and the quality of the collections proved that the department heads and tenured professors had miscalculated, and curators.h.i.+p at RiverTrail became a prime posting. Discovering its initial mistake, the archaeology department at Bartrum tried to replace Jonas with a tenured faculty member, but Diane diplomatically explained to them that it wouldn't be possible. Jonas had become critically involved in too many important exhibits and research projects. To cut off further forays from the Bartrum archaeology department, she hired Jonas as permanent curator for the museum's archaeology collection. Since then, Diane and Jonas had become good friends and occasional chess partners.

Jonas was currently in Arizona with Marcella Payden, a fellow archaeologist, surveying newly discovered Anasazi sites. Diane dialed his cell number, expecting that he was probably still out of range, and was surprised and disappointed when he answered. She was dreading telling him the news.

"Diane, nice to hear from you. I see on my phone that I have several missed calls from you. We just now got back to a place with service. It's a little shack of a diner out in the middle of nowhere, but they have a tower out back. Did you get the projectile points from Roy Barre?"

"Yes," she said, "we have them."

"I hope it wasn't any trouble for you to go fetch them," he said.

Diane almost laughed.

"I have some . . ." Diane hardly knew what to call it-bad, sad, tragic, horrific-it was all of those and more. "I have some bad news," she said.

"Oh, no," he said. "Has something happened?"

"Roy and Ozella Barre were murdered in their home," she said.

There was only silence on the other end. It went on for so long that Diane thought perhaps the signal disappeared somewhere between Georgia and Arizona and she was going to have to deliver the dreadful message again.

"Murdered?" he whispered. "Oh, no, not the Barres. That can't be. Who would do such a thing?"

"We don't know. About forty-eight hours later another older couple in Rendell County was murdered the same way," she told him.

"A serial killer?" he said.

"It seems like it," Diane said.

"But you don't believe it," he said.

"I don't believe anything. I don't have enough evidence," she said.

"Just a minute. Here's Marcella with a cold drink," he said.

Diane could hear him telling Marcella the news, and her startled reaction. "I don't know," Diane heard him say to Marcella. "She hasn't said yet.

"Do you know when the services will be?" he asked Diane.

"No. I don't even know if the sheriff has released the bodies," said Diane.

"Are you investigating?" he asked.

"Yes, but I'm not supposed to be," she said.

"Not supposed to be? What does that mean?" said Jonas.

"I've been run out of Rendell County," she said.

"What? By whom?" he asked.

"The sheriff," she said.

"Leland Conrad."

Diane heard a derisive harrumph.

"What has he got against you?" he asked.

"There is a very long story that goes with this and no time to tell it," said Diane. "Let's just say I irritate him."

"Good. Someone should. But you are looking into it?" he asked.

"The Barre children have asked me to investigate, and I will. But it has to be done carefully. It is an open investigation and the sheriff is the lawful authority," she said. "However much I wish he were not."

"Is there anything I can do?" he said.

"In your visits with Roy Barre, is there anything he said . . . anything about someone he was afraid of, someone who didn't like him? Did he allude to any secrets he possessed? Did he have any valuables? Is there anything that you can think back on that now looks suspicious?"

"Well," he said, "let me think." He paused. "I saw him several times while we were negotiating. I call it negotiating. He mainly wanted someone who was an expert on points to talk to. He'd already decided he wanted to donate the points to the museum. He and his wife are-were-real nice people. Ozella's a great cook." He paused again. "d.a.m.n, this isn't helping you one bit."

"I'm sorry I had to dump this on you," said Diane.

"What else could you do? It's a hard thing to be the bearer of bad news," he said.

"Did Roy or Ozella strike you as having secrets? The kind that people would kill for?" asked Diane.

"I didn't get that impression at all. Rendell County is the sort of place where everybody knows everybody and their secrets," Jonas said.

"I got that impression too," said Diane.

"Roy and his wife didn't like Leland Conrad. I do know that. There was a lot of dustup between their churches. A lot of animosity about Roy deciding to let a phone company put a tower on his land. Silly stuff, I thought. I guess you heard about Conrad's church. They call it Baptist, but Roy and Ozella said it seemed more like a cult to them. The Barres didn't like Conrad's group calling themselves Baptists."

"Was there a lot of anger from Sheriff Conrad's church toward them?" asked Diane.

"You mean, would they kill over their differences? There's a lot of historical precedent for such things, but I wouldn't think that would be true here. I didn't get the feeling it was that bad," he said.

"The other couple killed were members of the Barres' church," said Diane.

"You don't say. Well, that does look suspicious, doesn't it? I don't know then. I wouldn't have thought it, but who knows?" He paused for a long moment. "You know, I just can't see murder being committed over a cell tower, or even their religion. I went to the Waffle House up there a couple of times with Roy, and heard some lively debate there with some people from other churches at times, but nothing that would lead to murder. It was more like, how literally should the 'taking up of serpents' be taken?"

"Does Leland Conrad's church handle snakes?" asked Diane, wrinkling her face.

"No. Some of the others in the county do, though. One brought a snake to a county commission meeting. Roy said that was a hoot," said Jonas. "I've found most of the people up there to be nice folks-even the members of Conrad's church. It's mostly the leaders of the church that Roy had issues with. And those issues were mainly about the use of his land-the cell tower, and the development proposal."

"What development proposal?" said Diane.

"Some developers looking to buy a section of land from him for later development. Some people in Rendell County would like to attract tourists in the winter-sort of like Helen. Have shops, skiing, that sort of thing. Roy was all for it, but so were a lot of other people."

"Did Roy receive any threats over it?" she asked.

"He never mentioned it. I can't imagine that killing Roy and Ozella would stop it. His kids might up and sell the whole parcel to developers anyway," said Jonas. "Besides, Roy wasn't even the driving force behind it-that was a man named Joe Watson."

Diane felt a cold chill run up her spine. "Did you say Joe Watson?" she said. "Was his wife named Ella?"

"I don't know," said Jonas. "Roy just mentioned it in pa.s.sing."

Diane could detect the note of caution in his voice as he spoke. His words came out more slowly, and each syllable seemed to carry a question with it.

"A Joe and Ella Watson were the second couple who were murdered," said Diane.

"Well," he said, "then I suppose someone did think the project was worth killing over." He paused a moment. "I don't understand it. It was only talk at this point-just speculation. It doesn't make sense that anyone would kill over it now. But what do I know? I'm just an archaeologist."

"Can you think of any other people or things he mentioned that might be important?" said Diane.

"Sooner or later, most of our conversations got back around to his grandfather. LeFette Barre was a big influence in Roy's life. From the time Roy was eight years old, his grandfather took him surveying with him. His grandfather was a surveyor and did some cartography."

"Roy mentioned it," said Diane.

"I bet he did. He loved to talk about his grandfather. They would camp in the woods and hunt for Indian arrowheads and whatever else caught their eye. To hear Roy talk, it was the happiest time in his life. But then, he's always happy. Was," he added. "Roy said from the time his grandfather could walk, he was out looking for interesting things in the woods. The man should have been an archaeologist instead of a surveyor."

"Was there anything in LeFette Barre's diary that could shed light on any of this?" asked Diane.

"I've only read Roy Barre's catalog of the arrowheads and the notes he made from the diaries."

"Diaries?" said Diane. "I thought there was only one diary."

"One?" said Jonas, a little startled. "The guy started keeping them when he was fifteen, and he died when he was seventy-two. We've got several boxes of them in my office."

Chapter 27

"Boxes of diaries?" said Diane. She was rather stunned by the revelation. "How many?"

"Well, I think there are three boxes," said Jonas.

"And here I thought you took his diary with you to Arizona," said Diane.