In my younger days I had tried my hand at clay facial reconstructions. The results were appalling: my reconstructed John Does tended to look like Neanderthals—and misshapen, stupid Neanderthals, at that. Perhaps, in hindsight, it was my failed attempts at facial reconstruction that had taught me to stick with things I could do well. And certainly my own failed attempts had made it easy for me to appreciate the remarkable blend of art and science manifested in every one of Joanna’s reconstructions. Now, I was counting on that blend to show us what the killer’s grainy video had not: the face, in detail, of our Cooke County murder victim.
When I walked into the bone lab with the skull Steve Morgan had brought me, I arrived just in time to see Joanna grab the nose of an African American woman and twist it completely off the face. “Ouch,” I said. “Why’d you do that?”
“I didn’t like it,” she said. “It didn’t look right.” She frowned. “Noses are hard. There’s no foundation of bone to guide you. Nothing but a hole—the nasal opening.” She made a self-contradicting face. “Well, actually, there is a formula for estimating breadth and projection. But it still leaves a lot of margin—a lot of requirement—for artistic interpretation. So you just have to guess, from how massive or delicate the rest of the face is, what sort of nose that particular face is asking for. And this face”—she nodded at the one she had partially defaced—“wasn’t asking for the nose I gave her.” She pushed back from the wooden table and eyed the box under my arm. “So that’s him? The guy chained to the tree?” I nodded and handed her the box. She opened it and carefully removed the skull, studying it closely as she talked to me. “You said he’s in his twenties?”
“Early twenties, at most. Could be as young as nineteen. But definitely not, say, twenty-seven.”
“Wow, the bone structure is classic Caucasoid. But you said he’s Middle Eastern?”
“According to the DNA.”
“Crap,” she said.
“What?”
“The nose. Narrow? Wide? Straight? Hooked? Middle Eastern noses are all over the map.”
“So to speak,” I said.
She laughed. “So to speak.”
“You’ll do fine,” I assured her, as she set the skull on a cushion to one side of her table. “Just give him whatever nose the rest of his face wants to have.” The last thing I saw, before I turned to go, was a scowling Joanna taking an X-acto knife to the face of the dead African American woman and, in the place where a nose had been only a few moments before, carving a two-inch question mark.
She’ll do fine, I assured myself. Really.
CHAPTER 28
I THRASHED, AWAKE AND ANXIOUS, FOR MOST OF THE night—the new normal, apparently—then finally drifted off shortly before dawn. I woke up at eight, weary and bleary and astonishingly late for me, and called the bone lab. “Osteology lab, this is Miranda,” answered my assistant, sounding far chirpier than I felt.
“Good morning,” I said. “Sort of.”
“Dr. B? Did you just wake up? I mean, you? Just now?”
“Ten minutes ago,” I said. “I finally fell asleep at six, so I’m running behind on everything today. How would you feel about teaching today’s nine o’clock forensic class?”
“Me? Sure. But . . .”
“But what? You can say if you don’t want to.”
“No. I mean, no, I don’t want to say no. I’d love to teach it. Today is blunt-force trauma, right?”
“Right.”
“But . . . you love teaching that class. Are you sure you can bear to let go of the reins for an hour?”
“Are you implying I have control issues?”
“No, I’m not implying it. I’m saying it, straight up. You have a teeny-tiny control issue, roughly the size of Texas, when it comes to teaching class.”
“You just watch me,” I said. “I’ll sit in the back of the room and I won’t say a word.”
“Wait—I’ll be up there teaching, and you’ll just be sitting there?”
“In the back of the room,” I repeated. “I won’t say a word.”
“Right. Sure, boss. And then hell will freeze over. And our elected leaders will all work together for the common good.”
“Not a word, I tell you. Not so much as a syllable.”
BY THE TIME I GOT TO CAMPUS, I HAD RALLIED A BIT, and I had mixed feelings about enlisting Miranda to teach. Unfortunately, I had painted myself into a corner, with a thick coat of paint in the unmistakable shade of Stubborn Pride. I had left myself no choice but to let her teach.
I suspected she hadn’t headed to class yet, so I stopped off at the bone lab to check. At the very least, I could accompany her and offer constructive feedback. Perhaps she’d even offer the reins of class back to me.
The lab’s door of the bone lab gave a particularly loud rasp as I pushed it open, setting my teeth thoroughly on edge. “How do you stand that noise?” I asked Miranda, whose desk was only three feet from the source of the sound.
“Hmm? What noise?” She looked up. “Oh, the door? It’s like anything annoying—you hear it enough times, you learn to tune it out.” She smiled at me with an arch, enigmatic smile.