JOE MULLINS WAS THREE THOUSAND MILES TO THE west of France, but ten minutes after Giselle scanned the skull in Avignon, Joe was looking at it in Alexandria, Virginia.
Joe was a forensic artist at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, a mouthful of a name that he mercifully shortened to the acronym NCMEC, pronounced “nickmeck.” After a traditional fine arts training in painting and drawing, Joe had taken an unusual detour. He’d traded in his paintbrushes and palette knives for a computer and a 3-D digitizing probe; he’d forsaken blank canvases for bare skulls—unknown skulls on which he sculpted faces in virtual clay. By restoring faces to skulls, Joe could help police and citizens identify unknown crime victims.
I’d worked with Joe on a prior case, one involving boys who’d been beaten to death at a reform school in Florida, but the Avignon case was different from the reform-school case in a multitude of ways. For one, we already knew the identity, or at least the supposed identity: Jesus of Nazareth. But was it, really? ForDisc hadn’t been able to shed much light, but perhaps Joe’s facial reconstruction—based on the skull’s shape and the artist’s subtle eye—could tell us whether our man had been a first-century Jew from Palestine.
Joe wasn’t looking at the actual skull, of course. After the CT scan, Giselle and Miranda had uploaded a massive file containing the 3-D image of the skull and sent it to a file-sharing Web site—a cyberspace crossroads, of sorts—called Dropbox. Joe had then gone to Dropbox and downloaded the file, and, as the French would say, voilà.
The case clearly didn’t involve a missing or exploited child, so Joe couldn’t do the reconstruction on NCMEC time. But he was willing to do it as a moonlight gig, a side job, and when I’d first e-mailed to ask if he’d be able to do it—and do it fast—he’d promised that if we got the scan to him by Friday afternoon, he’d have it waiting for us first thing Monday.
My phone warbled. “Hey, Doc, I’ve got him up on my screen,” Joe said. “What can you tell me about this guy?”
“Not much, Joe.” I didn’t want to muddy the water by telling him what the ossuary inscription claimed. “Adult male; maybe in his fifties or sixties. Could be European but might be Middle Eastern.”
“Geez, Doc, that doesn’t narrow it down much.”
“Hey, I didn’t include African or Asian or Native American,” I said. “Give me at least a little credit.”
“Okay, I give you a little credit. Very, very little.”
“You sound just like Miranda, my assistant. Way too uppity.”
He laughed. “This Miranda, she sounds pretty smart. She single, by any chance?”
Sheesh, I thought. “Take a number,” I said.
CHAPTER 5
“SHALL WE FIND SOME FISHING POLES,” I JOKED, “and see what we can catch from the end of this fancy pier?”
Miranda, Stefan, and I were standing on the ancient stone bridge that stretched halfway across the Rh?ne. After we left the hospital’s Radiology Department, Stefan had headed for Lumani, skirting the city wall—the fastest way to cross old Avignon was to detour around it—but as we’d passed under the bridge, I’d admired the four graceful arches. In response, Stefan had whipped the car off the road, parked, and led us up through a tower and onto the bridge, or what was left of it.
“No fishing,” he said in response to my question. “You don’t want to eat anything that comes out of the Rh?ne.”
I peered down at the emerald water. “Looks pretty clean to me,” I said, leaning over the metal rail for a better view.
“Be careful,” he cautioned. “That railing isn’t strong. See, a piece of it is missing.” He pointed to a nearby gap in the rail, cordoned off by orange plastic safety mesh. “The river is full of industrial chemicals,” he went on. “Terrible toxins and carcinogens. Not just in the water; the sediment in the bottom of the river is full of them, too.”
“Okay, I take your point,” I said. “I won’t fish, I won’t swim, and I won’t eat the mud. It’s still a pretty river, though.” He made a grimace of disagreement.
A few paces farther out on the span, Miranda hummed a few bars of music, then began twirling, singing in French, “Sur le pont d’Avignon, l’on y danse, l’on y danse”; a moment later Stefan chimed in, trailing a line behind, turning the song into a round. Miranda and I had never sung together at all, I realized with a pang, much less sung rounds. Halfway through the verse, Miranda lost her place in the lyrics, falling into sync with Stefan for the last two lines.
“Crap,” she laughed. “I mean merde. I can’t sing rounds worth a damn. I lack the courage of my melodic convictions.”
“What’s the song?” I asked. “How do you know it?”
“It’s about dancing on this bridge, the pont of Avignon. My mom used to sing it to me as a lullaby.” She smiled at the memory.