‘‘News travels fast,’’ said Diane.
‘‘Your neighbors were talking about it when David and I arrived,’’ said Neva. ‘‘That’s just... just plain mean.’’
‘‘I’m apparently a hard neighbor to live with. Finding anything?’’ she asked.
‘‘Blood,’’ said Neva.
Chapter 36
‘‘You found blood?’’ said Garnett. ‘‘So this kid . . . Bobby Banks is involved with Clymene?’’
‘‘We’ve found a few drops on the bed frame. And a couple of drops in the bathroom. It’s not much. He could have had a nosebleed, but...’’
‘‘But what?’’ said Garnett.
Diane noticed the landlady watching them behind her partially closed door.
‘‘Is there a clear path in the apartment?’’ Diane asked, meaning, had David and Neva processed a place in the apartment where they could walk and not contaminate evidence.
‘‘Sure,’’ said Neva.
Neva led the two of them back to 1-D. Diane heard the landlady’s door close softly behind them. Once inside, Diane glanced around at the apartment. It wasn’t much different from hers in layout, larger perhaps. The sofa, chairs, table, and lamps were new but very cheap. There were no paintings or photographs or accessories of any kind.
‘‘Spartan,’’ said Garnett.
‘‘Isn’t it?’’ said Neva. ‘‘Bed and bath’s the same. Nobody really lived here. He just stayed here.’’
‘‘You had a but you were going to tell us about,’’ said Diane.
‘‘We found an IV needle wedged in the floorboards,’’ said Neva. ‘‘I think this is where they donated the blood and rested up afterward. I think Clymene and her sisters were in the bedroom when David came to the door to ask if the guy in the apartment had heard anything.’’
David entered from the kitchen. ‘‘Neva tell you what we found?’’ he said. ‘‘They were here. Right here. I talked with that kid there in the doorway. He told me he’d been studying and didn’t hear a thing.’’
‘‘I wonder why he didn’t just say he heard a ruckus, to bolster the image that Diane was doing something in her apartment,’’ said Garnett.
‘‘Then he would be the only witness,’’ said David, ‘‘and we would have come back to him and found him missing. This way, he’s like everyone else in the building.’’
‘‘Smart group of people,’’ said Garnett. ‘‘I wonder where they’re from.’’
‘‘I’m going to find out,’’ Diane said as she turned to leave. ‘‘You guys are doing a good job, by the way.’’
She left Neva, David, and Garnett and went back to the museum and made an appointment for movers to pack everything up in her apartment after the cleaning crew finished.
Since Frank wasn’t coming back to Rosewood this evening, she thought she might stay at the museum on one of her couches. Perhaps she could just move into the museum. Maybe create a small apartment in the basement somewhere in the east wing. She shook her head of the thought. She was mentally creating a life where she would never leave the museum.
When she got back to the museum, she had a note from Kingsley saying he was sorry to miss lunch, that he had to go back to Atlanta but would return tomorrow. Jacobs was probably somewhere in the building trying to find out if they were thieves. Which reminded her that she needed to bring the board up-to-date on the disposition of the artifacts. She sent an e-mail to the members asking them to come to a board meeting at the end of the day.
After sending the e-mail, she started searching the Internet to find out how to contact estate planning attorneys and family lawyers. There were several professional organizations that had lists of attorneys in estate planning, or family law, but only addresses were listed, no e-mail addresses.
She picked up the phone and called the museum’s attorney and asked about lists of lawyers from professional organizations and their e-mail addresses. She told him what she wanted to do, carefully explaining that this was a woman who was stalking and preying on wealthy clients of attorneys. He suggested that if she left the message and photograph on various attorney Listservs, it might reach a broader audience.
Diane found a fairly good photograph of Clymene on the local newspaper’s Web site. After getting permission to use it, she created a message asking for help in identifying the woman in the attached photograph. She went back and forth on how much she should reveal, and decided to give a moderate amount of information, but mention that she was thought to have preyed upon men with large estates. She then e-mailed the owners of the Listservs and asked if they would post the message for her, explaining to them in greater detail the importance of finding Clymene. She expected to be turned down by half. She was surprised when none did.
With that out of the way, she told Andie she was going over to the crime lab for a while. She used the back way to avoid meeting anyone that might slow her down. The downside was that she missed seeing most of the exhibits and she enjoyed that, even in passing.
No one was in the crime lab. Jin, she assumed, was down in his DNA lab. Neva and David were still at her apartment building. She had been trying to convince the police commissioner and the mayor that she needed to hire more personnel, but they always turned her down. Right now she was stretched thin, but she couldn’t use this as an example of why she needed another person. The police commissioner would just tell her that catching Clymene was the responsibility of the U.S. Marshals. And he would be right. But Clymene had targeted her, and in doing so had targeted the lab.
Diane entered one of the warren of rooms in the crime lab that housed one of the many computers. This one had face recognition software and a capacity for long searches.
Sophisticated face recognition software can pick a face out of a crowd—a clever thing for a computer to do. It has to recognize that a face is not a gourd, or a bole of a tree, or a rock, or a cloud, or anything else that happens to look similar to a face. After that bit of cleverness, the software then can compare that face with images that are stored in a database.
A photograph could be scanned into the software and it would search a database for a match. Diane scanned Clymene’s mug shot, which would work just fine because the software didn’t look at expressions. It took measurements between various landmarks on the face and created an index number. It then looked for faces with similar indexes.
When Clymene was on trial, the DA didn’t bother looking for who she really was. He said he didn’t need to know ancient history to convict her. So a deep background investigation was never done. Diane would correct that error now. She decided to search both American and international databases.
With a second computer Diane sent the mug shot to Colonel Alex Kade. Diane had become acquainted with him when he matched a missing child’s photograph with a facial reconstruction Neva did of a skeleton found in the woods near Rosewood. In his retirement he searched, with the blessing of the FBI, for missing children in a
pornography sites on the
database he created from Web. His daughter disappeared when she was fifteen. They found her years later but not before she had suffered severe abuse and had contracted a fatal disease that took her life. He said if he could have just found her earlier he could have saved her. Now he tried to save other children.