Joanna finished the facial reconstruction on Thursday afternoon—only four days after she’d started, which was a speed record for her. She was urged on by occasional contractions, which, luckily, turned out to be false labor.
She wasn’t thrilled with the reconstruction, but then again, being a perfectionist, Joanna was almost never thrilled with her reconstructions. She’d had to make some compromises, for the sake of the sexual ambiguity. As a result, the youthful face she’d sculpted could have been either a long-haired boy’s or a short-haired girl’s; it could also, without much of a stretch, have belonged to a mannequin in the children’s section of Target. In the absence of well-defined male or female characteristics, the face had an unavoidable, unsatisfying blankness. Still, if a photograph of the reconstruction were seen by the right person—by someone who’d once known this child—that person’s memory might well fill in the blankness, and perhaps more easily than if Joanna had done a more detailed face. The goal in reconstructing a face wasn’t to nail the victim’s likeness with magical pinpoint accuracy; the goal was to hint, to suggest: to get close enough to the mark to prompt someone, somewhere, to call and say, “That looks like so-and-so, who went missing years ago . . .”
But the vagueness made me uneasy, as vagueness generally did, in any arena in my life.
The clay-covered skull stared up at me from a hatbox in the passenger floorboard of my truck. I was taking a chance, carrying it that way; I probably should have put the lid on and tucked the box securely behind the driver’s seat, but—vague and unsatisfying though the face was—I wanted to be able to glance at it from time to time during the eight-hour drive to Tallahassee. Maybe, just maybe, something in the face would trigger some insight that had been swimming unseen beneath the surface of my mind for the past few days.
The blank face in the box wasn’t the only ambiguity accompanying me on the drive south. Several months before, I’d made love to a librarian who’d been helping me research the history of Oak Ridge, Tennessee—the birthplace of the atomic bomb, and the location of the recent murder of an atomic scientist. Just days after sleeping with the librarian—Isabella—I’d been stunned to learn that it was she who’d killed the scientist, in a bizarre act of vengeance for the suffering that the bombing of Nagasaki, Japan, had caused her family. Some weeks after that, as the FBI tried to follow Isabella’s trail, I’d been even more stunned to learn that she might be pregnant. I’d received a cryptic message from her that seemed to confirm her pregnancy: from San Francisco, she’d mailed me an origami bird—a paper crane, symbol of peace—that contained, within its folds, a much smaller crane. Two months had passed since I’d received the origami message: two months in which I’d twisted in the wind, wondering where Isabella might be; wondering if she were indeed pregnant with my child; wondering whether she’d be caught; half hoping she would be; half hoping she wouldn’t. A psychologist I’d consulted, as I’d sorted through my conflicting feelings, had summed up my dilemma. “You’re at a crossroads,” he’d said, “a place of not-knowing. And you need to pitch your tent there for a while.”
So even as I steered my GMC pickup south on I-75 toward Atlanta and Tallahassee, I was pitched in my karmic tent, camped at an intersection from which fog-shrouded roads diverged toward unseen, unknowable futures. I was not an especially happy camper.
Chapter 6
Angie met me the next morning at the FDLE evidence-intake door. “Welcome back. How was your drive?”
“Not bad. Atlanta was slow, but that gave me a chance to check out the skyline. I came through right at dusk, when the buildings were starting to light up. Looks like the architects there are running a ‘Fanciest Roof’ contest—spires and arches and flying buttresses everywhere up there, glowing like Christmas.”
Vickery greeted me with a nod that included a slight additional wag of the cigar. Then he removed the cigar and used it to point at the box under my arm. “I see you brought along a friend. Glad you had some company.”
“Not much of a conversationalist,” I joked, then got serious. “So. A missing kid; maybe a murdered kid. How do you plan to get the pictures out to the public?” As soon as Joanna had finished the reconstruction, I’d e-mailed a batch of photographs of it, along with a draft of my forensic report on the skull. But Joanna’s work would pay off only if it were seen by someone who recognized the child’s face.
“We’ve posted the pictures and a summary of your report on CJNet,” she said. I must have looked blank, because she added, “Criminal Justice Network. Our statewide intelligence Web site for law enforcement.” I nodded. “Our public information officer already sent a press release to all the news outlets in the state,” Angie went on. “Here’s one for you.” She handed me a printed copy. Underneath the FDLE logo was a headline, contact information, and three thumbnail-size images of the reconstruction. I skimmed the copy.