Shattered Image

“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?”