Dead Secret Read Free Page A

been a too-thin floor that had collapsed countless years ago.
    She looked down at her hands. Faint abraded lines of blood etched her palms and fingers. “My hands are going to be sore for a while. I imagine my body’s going to ache too.”
    Mike took one of her hands and examined the palm. “Now, how many caving trips has it been that I’ve told you, you need to put on your gloves?”
    “I know, I know. I just like the tactile feel of the cave.”
    “Yeah, well, you’re going to be feeling the tactile sensation for several days.”
    Diane stretched her sore muscles and groaned. Damn, she was going to be in just great shape when she and Frank, her detective boyfriend, went on vacation tomorrow. Better remember to pack the Ben-Gay and heating pad, she thought.
    “Is everybody okay?” Neva leaned over the edge of the hole in the ceiling. “We heard you on the walkie-talkie and came as quickly as we could.”
    “We’re fine,” Diane yelled up at her. “Thanks to Mike’s quick rope-tying skills. Be careful of that hole; there might still be some weak spots up there. Where’s MacGregor?”
    “He didn’t think he’d fit down that narrow tunnel. Frankly, I think he was right. It’s a tight squeeze.”
    Dick MacGregor was a member of the caving club and, most important to Diane, he was a relative of the owner of the land where the entrance to the cave was located. That fact was enough for her to put up with his annoying personality traits and have him as one of her caving partners. He wasn’t fat, but he was stouter than Mike, Neva and Diane—and there were some close places he wouldn’t fit into without becoming stuck.
    “Neva, would you climb down here with me? Mike’s going back to the surface with MacGregor.”
    “So,” said Mike with a grin, “you are itching to have a go at the skeleton.”
    “Mysteries, particularly cave mysteries, always interest me.”
    “I thought so,” he said as he stepped through the rubble and made his way to the rope dangling from the hole in the ceiling.
    Diane noted that he’d tied a series of loops on the rope to aid in climbing back up.
    “How stable is the lip of that hole?”
    He looked up. “It’ll do for now.”
    “Can you bring more lights?” said Diane.
    “Sure. Want me to contact someone at the crime lab for you?”
    “Ask David or Jin to bring a kit, but tell them to wait outside. I think you had better bring it in.”
    Diane was director of the RiverTrail Museum of Natural History in Rosewood, Georgia. The successful use of the museum’s forensic anthropology lab in the solution of a number of local homicides had caught the attention of Rosewood’s mayor and police chief. As a result of political manipulations by Rosewood city officials, a crime scene unit had been set up on the third floor of the west wing of the museum, with Diane as its director also. All in all, it was an interesting world she lived in. However disparate the combination of museum work and crime fighting might seem, she found it helpful for the crime lab to have access to the abundance of museum experts. The talents of the crime scene unit had even come in handy when the museum acquired an Egyptian mummy. A museum and a crime scene lab turned out, to everyone’s surprise, to be a good, if odd, fit.
    David and Jin were members of Diane’s crime scene crew. Jin was in his twenties, half-Asian, and came from New York, where he’d been a criminalist. David had worked with her at World Accord International when the two of them were human rights investigators. Neva, a former police officer, came to her from the Rosewood Police Department. The three of them made up Diane’s crime scene unit. But David and Jin weren’t cavers, and Diane didn’t want them inside a rugged cave like this one.
    Mike began his ascent, easily climbing the rope hand over hand. When he cleared the top, he and Neva exchanged a few quiet words, and then she started down the rope.
    Diane had been surprised that