Shattered Image

I was in my studio finishing up my last case before beginning on the Red Bud victim, and I wondered who she was—this woman left to decompose among the cottonwood leaves. Her face was slim and oval-shaped. The nose bone was narrow and pronounced. It still had some of the cartilage on the very tip when she was found, although the buzzards had gotten just about all the other soft tissue. Her nose had a nice angular shape to it—a strong high ridge—and the brow formed a wonderful arch out of the nose and over the eyes. Her cheekbones were relatively high and created a smooth curve inward toward a narrow but rounded chin. The contrast of angles and curves gave her bone structure a delicate appearance overall.

In spite of the beauty I saw in this face, there was ugliness there, too. The ugliness was not hers, though. It was something inflicted upon her by human hands. There were scars—healed fractures in the bones of her face, and Drew said there had been similar scars in her arm bones and ribs.

The bone of her nose had also been broken, as had one of her cheekbones. Parts of her skull contained other fractures, too, but these wounds were not scars or healed breaks. These were death blows.

The face I had restored bore none of that terror. What I restored was a face made by the hand of God—a face that denied the abusive intervention of man. I blocked the horror of what I saw whenever I worked and remembered the sacred words: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them.” As long as I could focus on what I was restoring, I didn’t have to think about what had happened to the victim to put them in need of my skills.

With clay hair and eyes in place, the image was complete, and I placed it in the kiln for firing. When the bust was done, I removed it and set it out on one of my worktables. When it was cool, I made photos from all sides and then called Lieutenant Drew Smith at Ranger headquarters. He was in and wanted me to bring the bust over that day. It was a beautiful day for a drive through Austin. I put on my dark brown slacks, a short-sleeve beige sweater and my brown snakeskin boots. I placed the bust in a case for transport and loaded it into the Mustang.

It was cool and clear and a breeze blew through the trees and filled the air with the fresh green scent of spring. I rolled the windows down on the ’Stang and decided to take my scenic detour through town to get to Drew’s office.

I lived in the older Hyde Park section of Austin and the trip to Ranger HQ should have been about fifteen minutes, but fifteen minutes didn’t seem like enough time to enjoy all the sights and smells of the day, so I found my way to a road through the hills—to a road called Balcones.

The wind blew through my hair and I rode the curves all the way up Balcones as it wound its way above Lake Austin to a breathtaking view that I caught in my rearview mirror. I downshifted into second to make the rest of the grade, and looking forward, I made a left at the next intersection. Then I drove to the top of the mount, where I absorbed one of the best views in town.

Soon, I found my way back down, and made a right to head back into town toward Drew’s shop. By the time I got there, it would be a thirty-minute trip, instead of the fifteen minutes of the more direct route, but these scenic detours were one of my favorite ways to avoid the gloom and doom that was inherent to the forensic work I did.

As I flew down and around the curves of the road, my thoughts turned to the face that would appear on the Red Bud Isle skull we had unearthed from the riverbank the previous morning. Once I was through with my meeting with Drew, I would have to call Chris and make arrangements to go down to the morgue for the casting of a mold of the skull. Once a mold had been made, I would take it back to my studio and begin the meticulous work of pouring a plaster version of the skull and fleshing it out with clay. What face would it reveal? The face of someone slain over ten years before, who had lain in a grave not only unidentified, but unmourned—a person whose fate had been utterly unknown for all that time. Whose face would it be? Who and where was the murderer now?

The road curved to the left and now I was on a straight path to Ranger headquarters. Within five minutes I approached the intersection at Lamar Boulevard, downshifted into second and wheeled the Black Beauty to the left, getting just a tad of tire squeal out of the rubber as I took the corner. A quick right turn into the parking lot and I was there, scoping for a place to land. I found a spot not too far from the front doors and made my way inside with case in hand.

It was always good to see Drew Smith. Drew and I had been friends a long time. We had met on a case years ago, and we had bonded as friends because our mothers were both from Terrebonne Parish in Louisiana. My mama’s people were from Boudreaux and Drew’s lived in Houma. My mom wasn’t with us anymore, but Drew’s Mama Beatrice, as everyone called her, was alive and kicking. She was some great lady. That woman could really cook, too. I had first met her on a trip back to Terrebonne Parish to visit some of my kin. She laid out a spread before me that would have fed five truck drivers. Then she insisted that I take leftovers home with me so I would have “something for the road.” You could tell that Mama Beatrice was used to feeding three big boys, now three large men. Drew had a sister, too, but she was a petite thing like her mother, and I joked with her that she had remained small and slim because her brothers devastated the dinner table before she got anything to eat. She had laughed and said that there was too much truth in my joke.

Drew was a handsome African-American man who stood six feet, four inches tall, with square shoulders and a rock-solid body underneath them. He had a dazzling smile with an endearing overbite and the softest brown eyes I had ever seen in the face of a cop. He was between the ages of thirty-eight and forty, but he had old-fashioned manners and ethics, and that was a good thing in my book.

Make no mistake, however, Drew Smith was a law enforcement officer’s law enforcement officer. True to the legend of the Texas Rangers, Drew got his man—or woman—and put them away. If he couldn’t get them right away, he would dog a case until he finally dug up what he needed to make it stick. His work was meticulous and airtight every time—he made sure of it. He didn’t tolerate sloppy work in others and he tolerated it even less in himself. You don’t become a Texas Ranger by being average, and you don’t become one of the best of the Texas Rangers by being anything other than excellent in law enforcement. For this reason, I always found it a true professional reward to work on a case with Drew.

Such was the case with the cottonwood victim. Drew would not let go of this seemingly hopeless case. He was an inspiration. He had insisted that I be brought in to do a reconstruct of the victim’s face. Now I walked toward his office carrying the results of my work with me. A Jane Doe now had a face. Soon, she might also have a name. I knew that Drew Smith would not rest until he saw that she had both.

When I reached Drew’s office, we shook hands and then hugged. I hadn’t seen him in a month of Sundays. I set the case on his desk and slowly lifted the top off of it. When he saw the face he breathed in and out deliberately.

“Well, there she is then,” he said. “Somehow I already knew her. This one has haunted me, Toni.”

I nodded.

“I totally understand that. You should feel your hands in the clay, my friend.”

He shook his head. “No, ma’am, I don’t think I could do what you do. It’s tough enough to do what I do.”

He patted me on the back and smiled thoughtfully.

“Can I buy you a beverage?” he asked.

“No. I’m going to have to travel on to my next case.”

“Another one already?”

“Unfortunately so. Bones by the river.”

“Oh yes, yes. I read about it in the paper this morning. Sounds intriguing, Toni—very intriguing.”

“I think I could stand a little less intrigue for a while.”

Drew chuckled and then got out a Polaroid camera and made his own photos of the bust. He took the photos outside his office and handed them to a clerk, giving her instructions as to what to do with them. The photos would go out to all jurisdictions in Texas and various outlying jurisdictions in Louisiana, Oklahoma and New Mexico. All federal agencies would receive copies as well, and her face would make the six o’clock local news on all networks. Maybe someone would recognize her. Only then could anything be done about locating her killer.

I said goodbye to Drew, we hugged again and I left the building. As I walked back to my car, I turned and looked up at the window to Drew’s office. I felt strange letting her go and leaving her there. I became attached to these anonymous persons. I wanted to care for her somehow, but I had done my best in that department by completing the bust. She was in good hands now. Drew would take care of her for me.

I called Chris from the car. She wanted to meet me for lunch down at Symphony Square, just a few blocks from the morgue. We would lunch on Tex-Mex before heading back to her office, where I could begin the first part of my work on our most recent victim. I only had to stop by the house briefly to pick up the supplies that I would need to make the mold. I took the short route to the house, picked up my things and headed downtown to meet Chris.

Chris was waiting at a table when I got there. She was dipping chips in hot sauce and wolfing them down as fast as her hand could make the trip from the basket to the bowl to her mouth and back to the basket again. I was always amazed to see someone so small and trim eating so much food. I wondered if she possessed a hollow leg.

“A little hungry today, are we?” I said as I took a seat opposite her.

“Mmm, hmm,” she muttered with a chip in her mouth. “Another early morning sans breakfast. I’ve been a little busy trying to do an autopsy on those bones—and I’m not done yet.”

“So, how goes the struggle?”

“Well, from one bone I discovered a type of soil that was inconsistent with the grave site—in other words, it was not that reddish-brown clay. It was embedded in one of the crevices of a bone—black, fertile-looking stuff. I found similar soil irregularities in other bones.”

“So, the departed had been buried before.”

“Mmm, hmm. Figured, but wanted to prove it.”

“So what else?”

“Called a guy I know down at A&M and talked it all over with him. Told him I was sending him dirt samples. The samples are going down via the Mike Sullivan Express.”

“Preserving the chain of evidence.”

“Yep. Do you know those Aggies can almost pinpoint to the spot the origin of any soil in this state?”

“Doesn’t surprise me. Agriculture is huge business here. If you’re going to be an expert in ag, you have to know your dirt.”

Chris nodded, still crunching chips. “Victim was a woman, I’d say probably between the ages of thirty and thirty-five at the time of her death.”

“Race?”

“Caucasian.”

“Know how she died yet?”

“Ordinarily that might take some careful scrutiny of the bones and I might come up with nothing, but in this case, an elementary schooler could have figured it out.”

“The suspense is killing me—no pun intended—so give.”

“Big bullet hole right in the skull,” she said with a trigger finger pointed at her temple, firing with a thumbhammer for emphasis.

“Nifty.”

“Yep. I’m going to continue my review of the rest of the bones. If I find anything earth-shattering—no pun intended right back at you—I’ll give you a shout.”

“So you think she was shot ten years ago?”

“More. Ten years is the minimum. I’ll have a better guesstimate of that when I’m done.”

“Hmm.”

“What?”

“I was just thinking…trying to remember what I might have been doing back then. Jack was still alive. My son was probably in high school. All that time gone by and she’s lain dead and undiscovered.”

“Yeah, someone shoots a woman in the head, buries her in one place and then comes back a few weeks ago, digs her up and buries her by the river. Very weird.”

“Definitely weird. Why do you dig someone up and move their bones?”

“Don’t know. Fetish?”

I shrugged. “I’d like Leo’s take on this, though.”

Leo Driskill was Chris’s cousin by marriage. Leo’s only living relative was her cousin, Pete Driskill, who was a brainy history expert. Pete and Chris had married about two years ago, making Chris and Leo cousins-in-law.

Chris nodded. “Call her.”

The Travis County Morgue was only a few years old. The old morgue had been something out of a Charles Dickens novel and the county had finally popped to build a new one. New or not, morgues are the coldest places on earth, I think—all stainless steel with a mixture of smells that range from total disinfectant to malodorous death. It was never a great place to be, but it was a place I had to go to do the first stage of what I do.

Chris had put the skull back together for me and I saw the hole where the death wound had been inflicted. I wondered at who had ended this woman’s life in such a fashion. It was chilling to see it—this broken skull pieced back together with that sinister hole in the temple, and to envision in my mind the living person receiving such a wound. In my mind I could see before me the woman with flesh on the bones, and I drifted to that moment of death. The barrel of the gun was against her temple, she was terrified, overcome with disbelief that this was her last moment. A finger squeezed the trigger, then there was the thunder of the hammer hitting the firing pin, and the explosive impact of the bullet. I shuddered and snapped back into the current reality.

“Are you okay?” Chris asked.

“Yes. I was just thinking about how she died.”

Why had she been reburied so long after her death? It was a new one on me, and I couldn’t imagine what was going on, but I knew that my work would be critical to finding the answers. Identification of the victim is the most important stage in a murder like this.

I began to mix the materials I needed to make a mold of the skull. I had my own technique for this process. I used a plastic material similar to the one a dentist uses for making impressions of teeth. The skull is impressed into the material, and then the material hardens to a certain point, at which time I remove the skull. I then take the mold back to my studio and cast it in plaster. Once the plaster is dry, I begin sculpting the clay face back to life on the plaster skull.

When I had this skull in the casting phase, Chris showed me the rest of the bones that had been recovered from Red Bud Isle.

“We found all of them, so wherever she was buried before, she was undisturbed, and the killer moved her entire skeleton.”

I nodded and looked at all the bones neatly arranged in their proper anatomical order—a now-headless skeleton laid out on a cold autopsy table.

“Were there any personal effects found?”

“Yes.”

I looked at her quizzically.

“Just this.” She pointed to one corner of the table.

It was a tattered piece of what appeared to be flowered cloth.

“Clothing?”

Chris nodded. “Probably part of a dress or blouse.”

“So, assuming she was originally buried with clothes, the clothes either decomposed completely, except for this scrap, or the killer discarded those and retrieved only the bones but missed this scrap.”

“That would be about the size of it. There were no other personal effects, so I’d say the killer ditched them all.”

“There’s another happy thought. How long before the Aggies have results on the soil samples?” I asked.

“They didn’t give me a time frame, but they have to analyze the samples for mineral content and all the little microbes they find there, so I imagine it’ll take a little bit anyway. Between your reconstruction of her face, and their location of the burial soil, we might actually get lucky enough to figure this out.”

“I hope you’re right.”

After I left the morgue, I tried Leo at her office, but the woman who answered the phone said that Lieutenant Driskill was in the field. So, I called her on her cell phone. When she picked up, I could tell she was in transit.

“So, you’re out in the field following up on hot leads?”

“That’s a glamorous way of putting it. I just got through interviewing a rent-a-cop that I think might be suffering from a little firebug.”

“Seriously?”

“Unfortunately so. He has all the signs and he fits the behavior pattern. I got him to write out the facts of a fire he ‘reported.’ I’m taking the written description to a psychologist for analysis right now.”

“Wow. Well, I’m calling you because Chris and I would like to talk to you about the bones from Red Bud Isle.”

“Okay. Something there for me to work with?”

“It’s not the original burial place and there was a large bullet hole in the skull.”

“Interesting. When I get done with my forensic psychologist, I’ll go by the morgue and get the details from Chris. I’ll let you know if I come up with anything brilliant.”

“So, what’s up with this rent-a-cop case?”

“Warehouse fire. Fire was definitely started by human hands and not an accident. Three security guards, one killed.”

“Oh no, that’s terrible! Did he burn to death?”

“No. Smoke inhalation, or more exactly, toxic-fume inhalation, combined with soot and searing heat. It’s actually what kills most people in a fire.”

“Who’s the homicide detective on it?”

“Tommy and your son. They suspect the other guard. I know he’s innocent. The guard I’m working on is the guy who did it. I’m going to make sure an innocent man doesn’t go down. Tommy hates it when I do this, but that’s tough. I’m going to do my job in spite of any personal relationships I have with the homicide team. I’ll tell you more when I come by with an assessment of your Red Bud case.”

“Good. I’d like to hear more.”

Inside my studio, I mixed plaster and poured it into the mold I had made of the skull when I was down at Chris’s office. The process was familiar, but never tedious or routine. I always approached my work with the reverence it was due. I was making a cast of someone’s skull—the skull of a person who had been deprived of her life in a cruel and untimely way. My subjects were always real people who had real families and friends. They were flesh and bone, and spirit in my beliefs—and while temporarily separated, they were all parts of a whole and real person. I never forgot that in my work.

When the plaster dried, I would open the synthetic mold and begin restoring her face. As I let the plaster set, I began my preparation. I lit a candle and I began to pray. Her soul would be at peace soon—I wanted it to be at peace with a name attached to it. I prayed, as I always did, for the guidance to do this right.

Chapter Three

The skull looked as if it was covered with pencil erasers. They were tissue-depth indicators, actually, and had been cut precisely to a depth for each portion of the face, based on statistics from a forensic anthropology chart. I had taken the basic information of race, gender and approximate age to decide which part of the chart to use. Now it looked as though her skeleton had some strange version of the measles. My next step would be to fill in between the indicators with clay, the top of each indicator showing me where to stop and smooth it off. It was like connect the dots for sculpture, although I would have to use my sculpting skills to make the raw, three-dimensional “data” look like a real human being. I was intently focused on my work, when the phone rang. I was so startled, I nearly fell off my stool.

I picked up the cordless handset that I had carried into the studio and was surprised to hear Irini Nikolaides on the other end of the line, distress in her voice. We exchanged the normal greetings of good friends before she broke the news.

“Toni, they may have found my Teddy’s bones in that horrible jungle.”

Stunned, I sat unable to form a thought, much less a word. Theodore Nikolaides had been a good friend to my husband and me in the Vietnam War. In fact, it was Ted, my compadre in faith, who had introduced me to Jack. “He’s a nice guy for you, Toni,” Ted had said—the matchmaker concerned that this woman serving in a battle zone should find a proper husband. I was a nurse then, helping put young boys back together hoping to send them home alive. Jack had been an MP there.

Teddy had talked to Jack about faith because of me. Jack hadn’t attended church in years and didn’t have any particular religious preference at the time. Ted thought he’d be a good match for me, but only if we could share faith with each other. Ted could talk to him about it—share his own experiences with Jack man-to-man. When Jack and I actually met, Jack’s conversations with Ted about faith were already taking hold. He had embraced his faith with his whole heart again and he and I had made a beautiful journey together in our lives.

Unfortunately, our matchmaker had not made the journey with us. As a pilot, Teddy flew reconnaissance missions close over the jungle treetops. One terrible day he flew out on what should have been his last mission before heading home. His hitch was up and he couldn’t wait to get back stateside with his wife and two kids. He was so excited. I could still remember that magnetic smile as he boarded his plane.

Then the word came back that Ted had been shot down and no ejection or chute had been seen. Other pilots reported seeing his plane crash on the top of a hill. It had skidded along a ridge with dense foliage. I knew that Ted, ever the hero, was trying to save himself and the plane. Determined not to give up, he must have struggled to keep the nose up and wings in the air, but it was too late to eject as he came close to the hilltop. So, Ted had committed himself to trying to land the plane. The wings had broken off as the plane began hitting trees, and then it had burst into flame. It wasn’t a spectacular fire because Ted was at the end of his mission and low on fuel, but it had been enough to ensure his death.

“Irini, what are we talking about here?”

“Those people at CILHI, they sent a team to that part where Teddy was last seen. They found bones and some other things and they think it might be him.”

CILHI stands for Central Identification Laboratory Hawaii, and they are the ID people for all military personnel missing in action. It’s an army operation located at an air force base just outside of Honolulu. They work to identify all MIAs from World War II, Korea and Vietnam.

“When will they know if it’s him?” I asked.

“Well, that is why I called you. They won’t know because there are not enough of the teeth to compare to Teddy’s dental records. You know, he had such good teeth, but they check the bad ones in these tests, not the good ones, and most of Ted’s teeth they didn’t find. So, now they can’t do the comparison. Also, the DNA is bad.”

“What do you mean?”

“They say they have to compare it to someone in his mother’s family.”

Ted’s mother had died in Greece. His father had brought him and his brother with him after she died. His mother had one brother back in Greece and they had lost track of him after World War II during the civil war that followed. Ted had talked about it many times. The only family he knew was his father’s family. Further complicating matters was the fact that Ted’s older brother, and only sibling, had a heart attack four years previously and died.

Irini continued, “I ask them why they don’t check it with someone else in his family or against the kids. They say it’s not the right kind of DNA. I don’t understand it.”

“It’s called mitochondrial DNA, Irini. It can only be compared against a person’s mother’s family. The other kind of DNA in your cells breaks down over time, so they probably can’t use it.”