LITMIR.BIZ

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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.

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