“That’s me. How are you, Doc?”
I caught my reflection in the mirror that hung on the bathroom door: practically naked, wrapped in an undersized and sodden towel, my face and neck crimson with sunburn, my thigh throbbing and bleeding again. I smiled, with a topspin of grimace. “I’m just fine, Sheriff. How about you? Any luck identifying that girl from the strip mine?”
“Not a goddamned bit, Doc, if you’ll pardon my French. That’s why I’m calling—see if maybe you could help us some more. Bubba and me was talking, and he asked me did you still have that girl’s skull. I said, ‘Well, I sure as hell hope so—he ain’t never give it back to me.’ ” The sheriff paused.
I scanned my desktop for the skull, but it wasn’t there. I felt a flash of panic—had someone made off with it?—but then I saw it sitting on my windowsill, and I vaguely recalled having moved it out of the way a few days before. Or was it a few weeks before? Out of sight, out of mind, I thought guiltily. “Of course I’ve still got it, Sheriff. Do you want it back?”
“Oh, hell no, Doc. I wouldn’t know what to do with it. Thing is, Bubba was telling me about a TBI training he went to a while back. They had somebody from the FBI there talking about putting faces back on skulls—makin’ ’em out of clay. Showing what the dead person looked like. Bubba ’n me was wondering if maybe you might know how to do that.”
“I’ve tried it a time or two,” I said, “but to be honest, I’m no good at it, Sheriff. My clay heads look like a fourth grader’s art project. I’d only make it harder to ID the girl.” I’d hoped that might draw a laugh from him, but instead, he sighed.
“Well. I figured it didn’t hurt none to ask. We’ll keep knocking on doors and asking questions. Thing is, Doc, we’re running out of doors to knock on.”
“That’s the way sometimes with forensic cases,” I commiserated. “Especially old ones. People forget. Out of sight, out of mind,” I added, feeling another pang of guilt for having nothing helpful to offer him. I wished him luck and hung up, but I felt the dead girl’s eyes—her vacant eyes—staring at me in reproach, her silent voice clear and accusatory in my head: What about me? she seemed to say. Have you forgotten me, too? So soon?
Wiping the blood from my thigh with the damp towel, I blotted the wound with tissue, then applied a thin line of super glue to the edges of the skin and pressed them together. The glue—cyanoacrylate, said the label, which also warned that the chemical was a carcinogen—burned my nostrils and stung like a sonofabitch. Serves you right, I heard a voice in my head sniping. But whether it was the dead girl’s voice or my own this time, I didn’t know.
CHAPTER 14
Satterfield
“YOUR FIRST TIME IS special.” People said it about all kinds of shit, Satterfield reflected, and maybe it was true—maybe every first was special. First kiss. First love. First killing.
Its specialness to Satterfield wasn’t the way he’d done it; in truth, he’d done it clumsily, and far too swiftly. Its specialness lay in the fact that he had done it. The killing had been spontaneous—as surprising to him as it was to her—but it had been an epiphany, a life-changing revelation.
Three years had passed, but the images of it remained vivid. Indeed, the more times he replayed them, the more vivid they grew.
She was small and pretty—half Jap, half round eye, with a slender, finely chiseled face and thick, red-black hair. Satterfield saw her dancing in one of the skin bars near the base, and he liked what he saw. Before he knew it, he’d dropped fifty bucks on overpriced, watered-down drinks, and then another fifty on a lap dance that left him wild with want. “Can we go somewhere?” he begged when she sat down beside him, her thigh pressing against his. “Can you take the rest of the night off? Or even just take a break and come outside with me?”
She laughed. “You want some private time with me? VIP room.” She pointed a glossy red nail—her pinky finger—toward an unmarked black door set into a black wall. “Hundred dollars. Ten minutes.”
He stared at her. “A hundred bucks? For ten minutes? That’s robbery!”
She smiled coyly. “That not what other men say.” She stood up and began undulating in time to the music, backing slowly away from his table, her face mirroring the lust that was coursing through him. A Marine at a neighboring table turned his chair toward her and slid another chair, an empty, in her direction. She glanced at the chair and then looked at Satterfield, smiling and cocking her head inquiringly.
He could stand it no more. Scrambling to his feet, he seized her by the wrist and pulled her close. “Three hundred,” he said, “if you meet me in the parking lot in ten minutes.”