Free The Bone Chamber by Robin Burcell

Griffin, ergo the government, had gone to great pains to keep Sydney in the dark, allegedly to protect her, even though she was a federal agent, armed and trained, better equipped to handle the dangers of whatever cluster they’d thrust her in the midst of. But what about Tasha Gilbert, a woman whose passion was old bones? What protection had they offered her by keeping her in the dark? If this case was so damned dangerous they couldn’t even let Sydney know what was going on, what business did they have letting an anthropologist walk around unprotected so that she could be hit by a car?
    Anger anew over her friend’s death spurred her back to the computer. She had recommended Tasha for this case. Tasha knew her, trusted her. The least Sydney could do was repay that trust and make sure that Tasha’s killers were brought to justice.
    Having lost her appetite, she tossed what was left of her sandwich in the trash. The best way to solve Tasha’s murder was to find out who their Jane Doe was. Between the sudden call out, the government involvement and secrecy, the surveillance, and now Tasha’s death, there was no doubt in Sydney’s mind that the murder of this Jane Doe was connected.
    She tried looking for the girl’s identity on the Internet, but came up with too many hits of missing young women. A better lead might be trying to figure out the location of that crime scene photo she used in her drawing, where the victim had been found. She tried to remember the details. The girl’s clothing had been unremarkable. No help there. Too bad there hadn’t been more of the building and streetlamp to make an accurate guess of where the crime scene was located, but she doubted that Griffin was about to pull out a full crime scene shot for her benefit.
    Everything about the locale had appeared old. Not just old, but historic, right down to the cast-iron lamppost. Plenty of reproductions like that in this area alone, so she doubted that would clue her in. The building definitely had an old feel to it, with the large red blocks of stones, very similar to the brownstones commonly used in the Northeast. She returned to the computer, typed in “red stone buildings” and the first site that came up was titled “A Web Gallery of Stone Buildings and Their Building Stone.”
    The site showed not only the photos of the structures, but also close-ups of the stones used. She scrolled down, paused about midway at the description of “red sandstone,” and felt fairly certain the paragraph described the stones in the building she’d seen. At the bottom of the page was a “Related Links” section. She clicked on “Building Stones of Maryland,” a logical guess since she’d been flown to the East Coast to do the drawing, which told her the victim was probably from this area. Or the crime scene was in this area. Tasha’s death had certainly been in this area, she thought, leaning back in her chair and focusing on the screen.
    Seneca red sandstone was listed, and she read how that very sandstone had been used in 1847 to build the Smithsonian Institution building in Washington, D.C. She typed “Smithsonian buildings” into the search bar. The official Web site popped up, one announcing their latest displays: Campana collection on loan from the Louvre, and something about the Holy Crusade. Her crusade was a bit different. It wasn’t the collections she cared about. What she wanted to see was the grounds, and she clicked on “Images.”A view of the Smithsonian castle came up, and she searched that site and others for close-up photos. There was one of a grassy area with a black streetlamp, a very old-looking black streetlamp…
    “Almost too easy,” she said, because hell if that didn’t look just like the crime scene.
    She typed “murder Smithsonian” into the search bar. The only thing that came up was a book someone had written in 1990. Estimating her age, she typed in “murder Washington DC 24 year old woman,” and again