Dead Secret by Beverly Connor is the third book of the Diane Fallon mystery series set in contemporary Georgia.
"Diane has several jobs.” Diane suppressed a smile. Susan made it sound like she worked at McDonald’s during the week and Waffle House on weekends. “I’m director of the RiverTrail Museum of Natural History, as well as the director of the Rosewood Crime Lab and the Aidan Kavanagh Forensic Anthropology Lab.”
Forensic anthropologist Diane Fallon is an enthusiastic, experienced and safe caver. The passage was maybe twenty feet long, barely wider than her shoulders, the ceiling two feet high at its highest, sixteen inches at its lowest—a tight fit. Loose stones scraped through her clothes from her chest to her abdomen and down her back. Of all the places she could be, this was the best—the dark, secret places of a cave.
On a caving trip, she finds a decades-old murder victim she nicknames "Caver Doe". Clues around and on the body dated him to the 1940s. “Natural mummification. The tissues have been partially preserved by the dry air of the cave.”
Levi’s pre-1936 jeans had a back cinch. The back cinch was a little minibelt that tightened the waist. They were called waist overalls back then, not blue jeans. His jeans also have a crotch rivet. The crotch rivet and the back cinch were removed during World War Two to save on metal and fabric and never used again. That dates them to before the Second World War. In 1937 the company changed the way they sewed the back pockets, so the material would cover the rivets. That was because the cowboys complained that the metal rivets scratched their saddles—they were marketing to cowboys, and cowboys were particular about their saddles. Caver Doe’s jeans also had suspender buttons. All that puts them before 1937. Now, what Caver Doe’s jeans didn’t have was a red label. The company started sewing the red label in 1936 so Levi’s could be recognized at a distance. Caver Doe’s jeans did have belt loops. Those were first added in 1922.
“A Mickey Mouse flashlight?” “Made by USALite. Shows Mickey Mouse walking in the dark with a flashlight. It dates to 1935."
Moon Pies wrappers from the nineteen-forties.
Diane found the unearthly appearance ironic—nothing was more of the earth than a cave.
Diane tries to keep the news of her caving accident from her lover Frank, but fails. The last thing she wanted to hear from Frank tonight was a lecture on the dangers of caving. Noncavers just didn’t understand the allure of caves—and it wasn’t like she had accidents every weekend.
“Do you have some kind of compass that points you to dead bodies?”
“What good luck you had your crime scene people with you.”
Life with Frank would be great, and he had certainly hinted that they should marry, but Diane was convinced that they got along so well because they saw each other so little. They were never in each other’s pockets, tripping over each other’s feet, or irritated by each other’s idiosyncrasies.
Then an automobile containing another murder victim is recovered from a lake. Evidence links the bodies. Meanwhile, a supposed witch's bones are shipped from England for Diane to examine in the crime lab within her museum.
"Is that all the crime scenes we have at the moment?” said Diane. She hoped that the murderers in the area would hold off killing anyone until her team got caught up.
“If I’m gonna live that long, I’d hate to live most of my life as an old woman,” Andie said. “Spoken like a youngster,” a soft voice behind her said.
She could do a five-seven, a five-eight or -nine in a pinch. Only a handful of elite rock climbers could handle a rock face with a five-fourteen degree of difficulty—it required an enormous amount of skill and strength.
Of course, Diane has to "play nice" with all the relevant law enforcement agencies, and all their petty power antics. He sat on the bumper of his Lumpkin County patrol car with his arms folded in a manner that Diane had seen young children do when they were in full pout mode.
sometimes letting people have their say defused their hard feelings.
A series of attacks by various unknown parties almost succeed in stealing the bones from the museum. As attacks escalate, Diane's loyal crew trace a complicated web of clues.
The dental formula for an adult human was two, one, two, three. Two incisors, one canine, two premolars and three molars—the number of upper and lower teeth on one side, thirty-two in all.
Ribs were one of the best places to look for marks left by weapons. Gunshots and knives to the torso could hardly miss them.
One of the vicious attacks is on Diane's mother - through no fault of her own, victim of a computer hacker, she's sent to prison. The prison was built just after World War II and meant to house only four hundred inmates at most. The current population hovered around two thousand and was little more than a warehouse for women prisoners. Tombsberg didn’t have any educational programs, rehabilitation programs, occupational programs or any other activities to occupy the prisoners’ time. It was riddled with disease, and medical care was better in third-world countries. On any list of prisons, Tombsberg would rank at the bottom.
the upper part of the left femur, the greater trochanter, a prominence where the gluteals, iliopsoas, and piriformis muscles attached to the bone.
Things were going smoothly, and that always made her a little nervous. She went to bed that evening waiting for the other shoe to drop. Frank told her that she was turning into a pessimist.
Isotope analysis of oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, strontium and lead from her teeth could give interesting results about where she was actually from. These elements were taken into the body through the food that was eaten, the air that was breathed, and the water that was drunk as a person was growing, and became a fixed part of their chemical makeup. The proportions of the chemicals deposited in the teeth were different in different locales throughout the world. The chemical analyses would tell where she grew up.
Diane and her crime lab crew eventually discover the identities of the remains, and the mastermind criminal behind the attacks. Even with a mountain of evidence against them, the rich and powerful often weren’t convicted—Despite the tremendous power of wealth, justice prevails in the end.