DEAD GUILTY.

A DIANE FALLON FORENSIC INVESTIGATION.

by BEVERLY CONNOR.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to give thanks to Judy Hanson and Terry Cooper for patiently answering my questions.

''Rule number one of crime scene work: If it's wet and sticky and it ain't yours, don't touch it.'' -Terry Cooper, -Terry Cooper,

crime scene specialist, Georgia Bureau of Investigation

KNOTS.

Bowline Figure Eight Knot Stevedore's Knot Fisherman's Bend Handcuff Knot Waggoner's. .h.i.tch Fisherman's Bend Handcuff Knot Waggoner's. .h.i.tch

Chapter 1.

"If I'd known she was so afraid of snakes, I wouldn't have hired her," Diane Fallon muttered as she parked her car behind a patrol car on the hard shoulder of the small two-lane dirt road. She could hear the screams of her museum a.s.sistant director still ringing in her ears as she took her case from the backseat and climbed out.

Two guys and four young women dressed in cutoffs and tanktops stood in a knot talking to each other on the opposite side of the road between a beat-up pickup and a Jeep. A blonde, cell phone to her ear, stretched up on her toes, as if that would give her a better view into the woods. The words "See anything" leaped out of the crowd.

On Diane's side of the road, two men, tanned and athletic, stood next to a patrol car with what looked like surveying equipment in a pile at their feet. One of them appeared restless. He started to light a ciga rette when the other stopped him, pointing to the dry weeds.

The onlookers turned their attention to Diane as a patrolman approached her, sp.a.w.ning a minicloud of dust with each step. He was a young freckled redhead, and he squinted at the sun though his dark gla.s.ses, his khaki shirt wet with spots of perspiration around his collar and under his arms.

"Nothing to see here, lady. Get back in your car." He motioned with his hand as though he was direct ing traffic.

"Forensic anthropologist." Diane held out identifi cation that hung around her neck. "Sheriff Braden called."

The patrolman attempted a smile, nodded and pointed to the woods. "You have to work your way through the woods there. It's dense at first, but you'll come to a deer trail. Follow it about a quarter of a mile." He hesitated a moment, a grimace distorting his features as he nodded toward the two men next to his car. "They say it's not normal."

Not normal. The kind of death they called her out for usually wasn't. "My crime scene crew will be here soon. Send them down when they arrive."

"Sure thing. Spray yourself down good. Lot of deer ticks in these woods."

She thanked him, retrieved a can of bug repellent from her case and sprayed herself from head to toe before ducking through the underbrush. She followed orange tie markers through brittle flora until she found the deer trail.

About four hundred yards into the woods, a breeze brought a brief shot of relief from the heat but carried with it the aroma of death. Pushing her way through a thicket of wild shrubs, she saw the sheriff through the leaves. He and several deputies stood in an open ing under large spreading trees, staring at the crime scene, muttering to each other. They looked in her direction and nodded as she came into the clearing- obviously glad to see her arrive.

At the familiar yellow-and-black tape she stopped to take in details of the scene. Like a grotesque image from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, three bodies hung by their necks from ropes in the copse of trees. three bodies hung by their necks from ropes in the copse of trees.

The sheriff approached her, shaking his head, wip ing his face with a blue bandana and fanning himself with his wide-brimmed hat. He was a tall, thin man with a round face and thick, wavy dark hair that was just beginning to gray at the sides.

"I don't know what they could have done to these people to make them like that," he said, motioning in the direction of the three hanging bodies. "When word of this gets out..."

Diane said nothing. She walked with the sheriff carefully around the perimeter of the yellow-taped crime scene. What had upset the sheriff and his depu ties was not simply the triple death, but the horrid look of it. Bodies hanging still, as though frozen- their necks stretched from one to three feet in length.

The bodies looked very much alike, the way dead do. The kinship of the dead-skin black with decay, vacant eye sockets, exposed bones, mouths open and askew. They were each dressed in similar if not identi cal coveralls-navy blue, maybe dark gray, it was hard to tell, they were so stained with dried body fluids. One had long blond hair half plastered to its skull, with strands blowing gently in the breeze. The other two had shorter dark hair-brown maybe, or black. All had their hands tied behind their backs.

Without warning, the farthest body fell as the neck skin ripped apart. The head bounced on the ground and rolled a dozen feet from the torso, trailing a long piece of neck with it.

"Oh, Jesus," said one of the deputies, jumping back reflexively.

Diane watched the fall with interest. To her it was a process, and knowing the processes that work on bodies after death is to understand pieces to a puzzle of great consequence that she had to solve. The direc tion and distance a head rolls when it pops out of the noose is useful information for finding a missing skull. Knowing how long it takes for the head to separate from the torso in a decomposing hanging victim under specific conditions is valuable information for those interested in taphonomy.

She could see from the faces of the people here watching that this information was not of interest to them. She glanced at her watch.

The sheriff turned his gaze from the scene and mopped his brow again. "What do you make of this, Dr. Fallon?"

"We've been having a long dry spell," Diane said. He gave her a sideways glance. She crumpled leaves from a nearby bush in her hand and nodded toward the vic tims. "The dry air aids in this rather peculiar effect."

"You saying this is natural?" He said, "I've seen a few hanging victims, and I know the body stretches, but jeez... I've never seen anything like this."

"You just haven't seen them at the right time, or under the right conditions. The pull of gravity makes the bodies stretch, making them taller than they were in life. Sometimes you get this effect." Diane gestured toward the long neck of the victim closest to them.

"Well, I'll have to say that's a relief. We couldn't figure out how the killer could have done this-or why. Thought it must be some kind of perverted maniac-you know, as opposed to our normal maniacs we have running around."

Diane laughed with him, glad for any comic relief, no matter how mild.

She turned her attention back to the scene. Not many maggots on the corpses. But she didn't expect there would be. She turned her attention to the drip zone-an area underneath the bodies where liquified decay and bits of flesh dropped to the ground. Hun dreds of maggots and their beetle predators made the surface of the ground move with a writhing motion. Soon they would find the fallen corpse, and if left alone they and other late arrivals would strip it bare.

"This is just disgusting," said one of the deputies.

Diane didn't recognize him. She didn't know all the deputies in this county to the north of Rosewood. He must be new. If he stayed with this job, he'd see things far more disgusting.

Hang 'em high. The words flitted through Diane's brain as she looked at the two bodies suspended from the leafy canopy. Even stretched long as they were, their shoes were still three feet from the ground. How had they been hung so high? The words flitted through Diane's brain as she looked at the two bodies suspended from the leafy canopy. Even stretched long as they were, their shoes were still three feet from the ground. How had they been hung so high?

The killer-or killers-had to scout out a place with enough strong limbs for three hangings. Even in heav ily wooded areas, hanging trees weren't that easy to come by. She glanced at the deputies milling around.

"Ask everyone to move back," she said to the sher iff. "There have to be vehicle tracks here somewhere." But looking at the underbrush and ground cover, she didn't see where a vehicle could have pa.s.sed.

"You'd think so," said the sheriff, looking at the ground as though the tracks might be under his feet. "The perp had to use a winch or something." He mo tioned to the deputies. "All right, everybody. Let's move back, and watch where you step. We don't need to be trampling the crime scene."

"Those guys with the surveying equipment . . . did they find the bodies?" asked Diane.

The sheriff nodded. "They were doing a timber cruise for the paper company. This land belongs to Georgia Paper."

"Then the two men are familiar with the lay of the land around here."

"I'm sure." He turned to speak to a young deputy when he saw him spit out a chew of tobacco. "Dam mit, Ricky, what the h.e.l.l do you think you're doing? Pick that up."

"What?" The deputy looked around at the others, who shook their heads and tried not to laugh.

"That wad of tobacco you just spit out. Pick it up. This is a crime scene, not a sidewalk."

"Pick it up and do what with it?"

"Put it back in your mouth-I don't care, just don't throw it away here."

As they bantered back and forth, Diane fished a bag from her case and put a large red X on it and handed it to the sheriff.

The sheriff poked the deputy with it. "Here. Put it in this and take it back to your car. And while you're up there, talk to them timber fellas and see if there's a back road into here. Leon, you go with him and make sure he don't screw up."

The deputy picked up the discarded tobacco cud with a wad of leaves and stuffed the whole thing in the brown paper bag.

As he and the other deputy, Leon, were leaving, the sheriff shouted at them. "And don't p.i.s.s in the woods on the way back." He turned back to Diane. "I tell you, sometimes I wonder how he gets through the day."

"Is the coroner here?" she asked, suppressing a smile.

"Not yet. You know we have a new one, don't you?"

"It's not Sam Malone?"

"No. He retired. Moved to Florida. Lynn Webber's the coroner. She's a medical examiner at the hospital too. Smart little girl. Real smart."

"Do I hear you talking about me, Mick Braden?"

Sheriff Braden's face lit up at the approach of a young woman dressed in designer jeans and a white lab coat. "Nothing but good things," he said. "Lynn, this is Diane Fallon..."

Lynn Webber was several inches shorter than Di ane's five feet, eight inches, and her short, shiny black hair was much more neatly coifed than Diane's nononsense haircut. She extended her hand and gave Diane a smile that flashed bright bleached white teeth. "I just love the museum. I took my parents there while they were visiting. It kept them from thinking about what I do for a living for a whole day." Her dark eyes twinkled as she laughed.

"I suppose medical examiner isn't the job they picked out for you," replied Diane, shaking her hand.

"They wanted me to be a pediatrician." Lynn Web ber looked up at the hanging bodies. "Good heavens. We've got something here, don't we, Sheriff?"

"I'll say." The sheriff nodded. "It was a relief, though, when Dr. Fallon told me this is natural."

Lynn lay a hand on his arm. "Bet you thought someone stretched them on a rack before stringing them up." She laughed again.

"Something like that," he said. "Lynn here caught a murderer that almost slipped by us. We all thought the Whitcomb woman died of a heart attack- including her doctor. Wasn't going to even have a postmortem-natural causes. Lynn just happened to hear the paramedics talking about the woman's rigor. Something about her position. What'd you call it- hyperextension? Suspected right away it was a poisoning."

"Sodium monofluoroacetate?" said Diane. She saw a momentary flash of disappointment in Lynn's eyes before she nodded.

"I'm impressed," Diane continued. "That's a tough one. I only know about it through my human rights work. It's the poison of choice among men in India who kill their wife because her dowry wasn't high enough."

Dr. Webber looked at her, speechless for a moment, pondering, perhaps, the self-centeredness of murder ers. She shook her head and looked back at their corpses. "How'd the perp get them so high?" Her gaze darted around the crime scene. "A ladder, maybe. But it would've been hard to get their cooper ation to just climb up and stick their head in a noose, wouldn't it?"

"The crime scene should show something. . . ." Diane began, then stopped.

Dr. Webber and the sheriff followed her gaze up to where, among the leafy branches, a fourth noose hung.

Chapter 2.

"The one that got away? Or is it waiting to be filled?" said Dr. Webber, squinting up at the piece of hemp hanging in the tree. "It's not exactly a noose, is it? It's just a rope tied to a limb."

Diane had been studying the rope. It hung from a branch high off the ground like the others. Whoever put it there hadn't tied the familiar hangman's knot with tight coils above the loop. The noose was formed by a portion of the rope pulled back through a small loop tied on the end of the rope, creating a slip noose. Were it not for the small leafy branch that stuck its woody fingers through the loop, the noose would have slipped and vanished, leaving only an enigmatic piece of rope.

Diane looked carefully at the other ropes, paying particular attention to the one from which the body had fallen.

"It's like the others." Diane started to explain, when their attention was drawn to a rustling of the bushes, and her forensic team filed into the clearing.

"Well, this is weird." Deven Jin set down his case and stared at the two bodies in the trees and the one on the ground.

Neva Hurley stopped abruptly, her mouth agape. "One of those flies is going to light on your tongue," said Jin, shoving her gently.

Neva snapped her mouth closed.

David Goldstein used a small set of binoculars to focus in on the bodies, then shifted to the leafy can opy. "I suppose you've seen the other rope," he said. "Just now." Diane introduced her team to Dr. Web ber and the sheriff. "Neva came to us from the Rose wood Police. Jin's from New York, where he worked crime scenes, and David worked with me at World Accord International as a human rights investigator." They shook hands, muttered h.e.l.los and commented briefly on the strange state of the corpses.

Her team was anxious to get started. Jin, the youn gest, was in hyperactive mode, his body moving even though he was standing in one spot, looking as if he was about to break into dance to some music only he heard. Diane envied his youthful energy. He snapped opened his case and began pulling out the marker flags, rope, wire stakes and drawing supplies. He shoved his straight black hair out of his eyes, pulled it back into a ponytail and donned the plastic cap that Diane required.

"David doesn't need a cap," Jin said. "He just wears one so people will think that fringe around the edges is a full head of hair." Laughing, he handed a cap to Neva.

David rolled his eyes and quietly took out his cam era equipment.

Dr. Webber watched as he loaded it with film. "He doesn't use a digital camera?" she asked Diane.

"I use both, but I get greater depth of field and finer detail with the film," said David over his shoulder. "David's actually quite an artist," said Diane. David scowled. "Trying to be accurate isn't artistry." "I'm talking about your bird photographs."

He c.o.c.ked his head. "One might describe them as artistic."

Neva put on her cap and stood glancing from David and Jin to Diane, as if waiting for directions. Diane was torn between giving her some rea.s.suring gesture or leaving her to manage whatever insecurities she was dealing with. Neva was one of the gifts Diane had to accept in her curious bargain with the Rosewood Po lice. She wasn't sure Neva really wanted to be here.