“Right. What is it they need to do? Blast a brain tumor with a laser beam?”
“Close; a blood clot,” he corrected, “in the brain of a Russian defector. Cool movie. The wonders and perils of the human body. Wouldn’t that be cool, if we could actually take that trip?” I liked this kid.
Reluctantly I scooted my chair aside and turned the computer back over to him. “Okay, it’s all yours. How long will it take you to do the reconstruction?”
“Depends. A week, best case. Two weeks, if you hang around and help.” He laughed.
“Never fear,” I said. “I’ve got to get back to Tallahassee. But if you can pretend I’m not here right now, I’d love to look over your shoulder for a few minutes while you work on this.”
“Be my guest. I’ll get the rest of these depth markers on pretty quickly, then start sculpting the muscles of the face.”
In a matter of minutes—or so it seemed, though maybe it was longer and I just lost track of time—the skull bristled with rodlike depth markers projecting from its landmarks. Thin-skinned areas, such as the forehead, nasal bridge, and chin, sported nubby little markers, less than an eighth of an inch thick; in the fleshier regions of the cheeks and lower jaw, the markers jutted out nearly an inch. Ten markers were positioned along the skull’s midline, and another eleven were arrayed on each side. Mullins rotated the skull to make sure he’d not omitted any, slowly at first, then faster, like a gruesome version of a spinning top.
After a few moments the skull slowed and stopped, facing forward. Then, using the stylus in click-and-drag mode again, Mullins began grabbing strands of virtual clay from the left side of the screen and pressing them onto the skull’s right cheek. As more and more strands angled downward from the cheekbone toward the corners of the mouth, I realized that they represented bundles of muscle fibers. “So you sculpt every muscle, one by one? You can’t just put on a layer of clay and contour it to the thickness of the depth markers?”
He shook his head. “Nope. Well, you can—I’ve tried that, and yeah, it’s a lot faster—but it doesn’t look right. You just can’t fake the contours of the face. You’ve got to lay the foundation of muscles underneath the skin. No easy shortcuts.”
Fiber by fiber, as I stood and watched, Mullins continued sculpting in virtual clay. Finally I eased away silently so as not to distract him again. The muscle he was creating as I left was the zygomaticus: the muscle that had once tugged this murdered black boy’s mouth into a smile.
It had been a long, long time since he’d used that muscle.
Chapter 12
The high-powered, high-tech worlds of the Smithsonian Institution and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children seemed far away as Angie and I bumped and slewed down the dirt road to Winston Pettis’s north Florida cabin for the third time. I hoped this time would prove to be a charm. I’d retrieved my truck from the Tallahassee airport at ten the night before—had it really been only fifteen hours since I’d boarded the flight to D.C.?—and had staggered into bed at the Hampton Inn, which I’d persuaded Angie was more comfortable (and more affordable) than the posh Duval. She’d fetched me at midmorning and—after a quick errand at a sporting-goods store—we’d headed to Pettis’s neck of the Florida woods.
As we rolled west again on the long, straight stretches of Highway 90, Angie handed me photocopied pages, covered with an uneven, barely legible scrawl. I felt a rush of adrenaline. “Is this what I think it is?”
She nodded.
The soggy book had not, she told me, responded well to the methanol soak the documents examiner had tried. After Flo had soaked it in the alcohol and redried it, it had become an even more brittle brick of fused paper. So she’d begun a laborious deconstruction process, one that would require reinforcing and then peeling off the sheets of paper one at a time.
After carefully teasing off the fiberboard cover, she’d pasted a sheet of Japanese tissue onto the first page in the book—a blank one—by brushing a thin layer of wheat-starch paste onto the tissue. The tissue itself was as thin and transparent as gossamer, yet it was remarkably strong, according to Flo. It was handmade in Japan from the inner bark of the kozo, or paper mulberry, whose fibers were pounded with boards to break them into individual strands. Pasted to a weak, pulpy page of the diary, the Japanese tissue provided a near-invisible web of reinforcement, allowing her to peel off a sheet without tearing it. Thus it was, page by page, a few painstaking sheets a day—paste, dry, peel; paste, dry, peel—that Flo hoped to crack whatever secrets were coded within the buried book.
As I read the words scrawled on the pages, I felt my heart begin to pound.