One Grave Less by Beverly Connor Page B

person.”
    “Don’t beat yourself up over that,” he said, sipping his coffee.
    “This went down literally under my nose,” she said. “It’s my job to protect the museum. Now one of our major exhibits has been seriously damaged. I don’t know if Mexico will still loan us the artifacts. All the advertisements are in place. It’s a disaster.”
    “Do you know what it was about, what your friend was doing there? Has she talked?” asked Frank.
    Diane was glad he hadn’t patted her head and said, ‘It’s not your fault, no one will blame you, it will all work out.’ He had gone straight into detective mode.
    The phone rang and Diane unfolded herself and scooted down the sofa to the table that held the phone. It was Jin, the director of her DNA lab.
    “Boss,” he said, “sorry to call you at home, but I thought you would want to hear the preliminary report from the analyses.”
    “Yes, Jin, I do,” she said.
    “We got good samples to analyze. The blood they tried to burn away still left some traces and we have been able to piece together what might have happened. We’re not finished, but a pretty good picture is beginning to come out of it,” he said.
    “Good. Tell me what you have.” Diane gripped the receiver tight. Frank had mainly old-fashioned landlines in his house. Great for when the electricity went off.
    “Looks like the guy was stabbed about where he lay. There was a struggle and some of the woman’s blood was in the exhibit room too. The blood leading from the exhibit room belonged to her. Right now it looks like she may have stabbed him, tried to get away through the lab room, and collapsed. David said she has a blow to her head that she may have gotten during the fight. But that didn’t take her down until later. Like I said, it’s all preliminary.”
    “That’s good, Jin. Did you do the stable isotope analysis on the bone?”
    “I was getting to that. Scott did the analysis. The ratios look like the bone came from someone who was raised in the Amazon rain forest. Does that help?”
    “It’s another piece of the puz—”
    She stopped . . . gripped the phone. . . . She couldn’t breathe.
    Oh God .
    “Boss? You there?”
    Jin’s words were faint in her ears.
    “She’ll call you back.” It was Frank talking to Jin.
    She heard the sound of the phone receiver being put back on the cradle.
    “What’s wrong?” Frank sat down beside her. “Diane, are you ill?”
    “Simone. What if Simone was bringing me . . . what if that was . . . Oh, dear God. What if it was Ariel, my little Ariel? What if that was her little bone I was cutting?”
    Tears flowed from her eyes as she bent over, choking on her grief.

Chapter 13
    If Frank hadn’t been holding her, Diane would have fallen to the floor. All this time she had told herself, made herself believe, that Ariel had somehow gotten away during the massacre. That somehow she had hidden in the jungle she knew so well, had saved herself from the slaughter. She had wanted to believe that somewhere Ariel was alive, was well, was happy. That someday she would grow up to be old enough . . . old enough to travel, and perhaps she would make her way to America . . . to Georgia . . . back to Diane. And all that time there was also the dark fear that this moment would come.
    “If it was your Ariel,” Frank whispered in her ear, “and I’m not saying that it was—but if it was her, she was in the best, most loving hands.”
    Diane leaned against Frank for a long time. When finally she pulled away she was feeling . . . she didn’t know what to feel, or believe. She balled her hands into fists so she wouldn’t shake.
    “Why else would Simone come to see me . . . carrying a child’s bone? She found where Ivan Santos buried the dead from the mission. She found . . .” Diane’s lower lip trembled and she bit it to stop the quivering. “She found Ariel’s grave.”
    “What do the other things mean?” said Frank. “The feathers and the animal