He got to his feet and took her in his arms. “And so you should. Send her to me, and I’ll reinforce it.” He kissed her. “Though I doubt if that’s going to happen. She only appeared to me a couple times just to make sure I knew that you weren’t hallucinating.” He looked directly into her eyes. “I know you need Bonnie. She’s the anchor that keeps you here with me. You were spiraling downward and almost died before you had your ghost visits from Bonnie. She brought you back, and I thank God for her.” He paused. “But if for some reason she stopped coming, I want you to know that we’ll make it all right. I have so much love for you, Eve. I’m full of it, you’re my center. You always have been and always will be. If your Bonnie drifts away from you, I’ll just pour more of that love toward you. I’ll find a way to stop you from hurting. I promise you.”
He meant every word. The knight was about to mount his stallion and launch himself into battle, she realized. God, she was lucky.
She gazed up into his face, the strong square contour, the well-shaped lips, the tea-colored eyes that held both warmth and intelligence. So familiar, yet so new, every time she looked at him. “Hey, I’m just having a few twinges, nothing major. It just seemed when Jane got on that plane that the changes were starting. A sort of harbinger of things to come.” She pushed him away and turned back to the freezer. “But change can be good, too, can’t it? After all, Bonnie wasn’t definite about anything. Forget it.” She took out the lasagna. “Jane told me she’d call me as soon as she got off the plane in London. I think I’ll start working on the new reconstruction after dinner, so that I’ll be awake when she calls…”
*
But Eve’s cell phone rang before she even finished loading the dishwasher after dinner.
“Sheriff Nalchek,” she told Joe with a sigh. “You finish here. I may be more than a few minutes.”
“Dedication and enthusiasm,” Joe repeated with a grin. “At least he waited until after dinner.”
“Not necessarily. California is three hours earlier.” She punched the access button. “Eve Duncan.”
“John Nalchek.” His deep voice was brusque. “Sorry to bother you, Ms. Duncan. I just wanted to make sure that you’d received the skull for reconstruction today.”
“Yes, FedEx is usually pretty reliable.”
“What do you think of her?”
“I haven’t opened the box yet, Sheriff Nalchek.”
“Oh.” A disappointed silence. “But you’ll do it tonight?”
“Possibly.” No promises, or he might be calling her in the middle of the night. “Or tomorrow.”
Another silence. “Okay. I don’t want to rush you.”
The hell he didn’t. “There’s no rushing a reconstruction, Sheriff. There are several stages, measuring and processes that have to be done before the actual sculpting. It will take as long as it takes.”
“What stages?”
She tried to be patient. “The first stage is repairing, then I go to the measurement stage, which is vitally important. I cut eraser sticks as markers to the proper measurements and glue them onto their specific points on the face. There are twenty points in a skull for which there are known tissue depths. Facial-tissue depth has been found to be fairly consistent in people the same age, sex, race, and weight.”
“What happens next?”
“I take strips of plasticine and apply them between the markers, then build up all the tissue-depth points.”
“It sounds kind of iffy, like connect the dots.”
“If you wish to simplify it. I guarantee it’s not simple, Nalchek. And that’s only the beginning.”
“Sorry, I wouldn’t have sent her to you if I hadn’t believed you could do the job. But you are going to put her before the others on your list?”
“I told you I would.” She remembered what she had told Joe. Dedication and enthusiasm might work miracles for that poor child. “I know that you probably had a shock when you found that skeleton. It’s never pleasant. But you have to remember that we can do something about it if we work together. We can find her parents, we can find the person who killed her.”
“I wasn’t shocked, ma’am. I was in Afghanistan, and I worked as an EMT several months before I went to work with law enforcement. There’s nothing much I haven’t seen.” He paused. “And I told you yesterday that I know I can help her if you give me a face. I know it.”