a prepared specimen.”
A prepared specimen is a nice way of saying that, in order to make my job easier, the good doctor was prepared to remove the child’s head and put it through a process known as maceration. This involves immersing the skull into a solution of 60% hydrogen peroxide. (What is used for household purposes is a 3% solution of hydrogen peroxide.)
This high content solution dissolves the soft tissue away, leaving the skull clean and intact. For an artist, this is an ideal way to depict the contours of that particular person’s face.
“It’s so kind of you to offer,” I said. “And you’re right; it would make my job easier. But I think I’d rather do this as quickly as possible, for one thing and for another, well, she’s such a tiny little girl. I’d really rather not this time.”
It was a form of respect for the body that he understood. I thanked him though, because I knew his offer was made with the sincerest form of kindness. He was trying to spare me having to go through what I was going through now: staring at what used to be a face, trying to draw it as it was in life.
I turned back to my task and glanced up at the television just in time to hear the horrifying news that a plane had crashed into the Pentagon. For a while, I watched the TV compulsively, hoping for some fragment of news that would somehow make sense of everything. The president released a statement that we were under attack by terrorists.
What could I do? I cried, I watched a while longer...and then, glancing back and forth from the horror on television to the horror on my drawing board, blotting my eyes with a tissue, I picked up my chalk and went back to work.
Eyebrows lie on top of the bones of the skull in a specific way and since I could see her superciliary arch (the brow ridge), I was able to place the little girl’s eyebrows just right. They would be fine, pre-pubescent hair and probably not very noticeable. Not much drawing, just some wispy child eyebrows.
The eyebrow follows the shape of the brow ridge. If people have a high, distinct arch to their eyebrows, it means that the bone is rather thick and takes a sharp curve as it travels downward. As I looked closely I saw this child had a small bone with a shallow curve.
Just as I was about to start drawing the eyes, Two World Trade Center, the North Tower, suddenly collapsed. It was… horrible? Terrifying? Mesmerizing? I searched in vain for words to describe what I was viewing.
There just weren’t words to explain what I saw as I stared, transfixed, helpless, and watched people die. The grief, which I realized all who watched felt, was speechless, unspeakable. Heedless of the chalk I was holding, I clapped my hand over my mouth, cried, “No, no, no,” and sobbed.
For a long time, I could not work. My eyes were too blurred with tears; I couldn’t even see what I was doing.
I was still sitting, the chalk in my limp hand, when the South Tower collapsed.
Bawling, blowing my nose, praying, trying to compose myself, a few minutes later I heard the report about yet another plane that had crashed in rural Pennsylvania, southeast of Pittsburgh.
“The world has gone mad,” I whispered.
For a long time, I was hypnotized by the images on television, but eventually, when reporters began repeating themselves and it was clear that nobody really knew anything new, I took a deep shuddering breath and turned my attention back to the little lost child whose image I was trying to capture.
The eyes of a person have specific places that attach to the inner corners of the eye socket. Since the flesh had decomposed and disappeared and the eyeballs were gone, I could clearly see the “landmarks” that told me how wide-spaced her eyes would be. The fold above the lid would be smooth and dark, since there would be almost no fat in the pad behind and the eyelids would be visible. (Lack of body fat lets that nictitating membrane curve over the eyeball.) So I drew tiny eyelids.
Meanwhile, it seemed as if our whole country was under attack and nobody knew where these evil monsters would strike next. I even glanced out my office window, picking out taller buildings, trying to assess if my own was at risk.
Then I scoffed at my own nervousness and went back to work, back to crying, back to praying, back to watching the TV, spellbound, like everyone else.
In police work, there is a peculiar phenomenon that occurs whenever there is a child murder, especially one so gruesome and emotionally wrenching as this one. When the detectives who “catch” the case “make the scene,” meaning, they go to the crime scene before the body is removed and begin their investigation, other police personnel slowly begin to show up at the scene.
They may be office workers, supervisors and so on. What they are doing is offering mute moral support, quiet, steadfast presence. In many ways, it’s like a silent memorial to honor this most innocent of victims.
But I wasn’t at a crime scene. I was alone in my office, coping with the horrors both without and within.
The phone rang again. This time I recognized the voice of homicide Lieutenant Steve Arrington and I knew instinctively that he wasn’t trying to intrude or check up on me or bother me.
He was hurting as badly as I was at what we were seeing happen to our country and to the tiny girl.
“Are you all right?” he asked. “Can you still work despite the horror of what’s going on in our country?”
I assured him that despite my own shock I was working.
“Lois, can you make her smile, like when she was alive?” he asked, a bit embarrassed at making such a request at this moment.
He knew and I knew that I could. The phone call wasn’t really about that and we both knew it, but I was so grateful for his support. “Sure I can,” I said softly.
“Make her pretty,” he said quietly, “like I know she was in life.”
“I will,” I said.
“I know you will,” he said. “I know you can. Help us find her, help us nail whoever did this to her and pray for our country.”
I promised that I would and we hung up. I felt as if I had been hugged. It gave me strength.
Once again, I went back to work.
In order to tell how to draw the “iris to eye opening” ratio right, I glanced at photographs I had in my office of my two children, Brent and Tiffany. They were teenagers now, but I had some pictures from when they were small children that I used as references. The iris, I found, would occupy more of the eye opening than it would in an adult, but less than in an infant. I worked out a good balance and gave the little girl nice eyelashes.
Her ravaged little face was beginning to come to life. It gave me hope. While the somber television news anchors tried to sort out what was going on in our country, I listened and kept working.
The nose, I decided, would be smooth. The bridge that I could see from the crime scene photographs was smooth and lay low to the facial plane. The outer edges of the bottom part of the nose would start about one-half to two millimeters outside of the nasal hole, which was visible through the last film of flesh that hadn’t dissolved in the water. I gave her average-sized nostril holes.
The cheeks were easy. I covered those bones with the appropriate muscles and the smooth, brown, little girl
