me on the finer points of removing and replacing an oil filter.
The phone rang like an alarm and I was startled out of my reverie. I hurried into the kitchen and picked up the receiver on the old black clunker on the wall.
“You sleepin’, Toni?” an exhausted voice breathed.
“No, kid, I’m not. Sounds like you aren’t either.”
“Uh-uh,” she groaned.
“So what’re you doing about it?”
“Drank some hot tea earlier. Slept for a while. Been awake again now for an hour or so. What’re you doin’up?”
My caller was one of the best fire investigators in the state. In her late thirties, Lieutenant Leonie “Leo” Driskill had retired from “active combat” as a firefighter with the Austin Fire Department and now fought fires with her brain cells. She had a real knack for analyzing human behavior, too.
“I’ve spent the evening putting a face back on a dead gal,” I said. “Started on it earlier today, gave it up for a while, went back to it about ten. I’m almost done now, but I think I’m gonna get some sleep here in a bit.”
“You can do that? Just say I’m gonna go get some sleep and lie down and sleep comes?”
“Yep.”
“Dead girl doesn’t keep you awake after all that?”
“Nope. I’m trying to bring her some peace. I’m okay with that.”
“Hmm. Got too many fires in my head, Toni. Can’t put ’em out long enough to grab eight.”
I knew it wasn’t just fires keeping her awake, but she changed the subject back to my current reconstruction case, wanting to know more about the victim. I told her what we knew and then I mentioned the bones found on Red Bud Isle the previous morning. Leo was Tommy’s girlfriend, but he had not mentioned the case to her. For all his teasing of Mike, Tommy had his own issues with a girlfriend who was as good an investigator as he was. I think if she had been in the police department instead of the fire department, their relationship might not have lasted. I thought Leo was actually better than either Tommy or my own son. Soon, I would request Leo to use her special insight into criminal behavior to help sort out the facts that would unfold in the coming days.
Chapter Two
The eyes are what haunt you—those beady, lifeless eyes, sculpted out of gray clay. I sculpted the “hair” out of clay as well. I would always sculpt a neutral style to the hair—short and combed for men, pulled away from the face for women. If the woman had short hair, the pulled-back style would mimic that. If the woman wore her hair long, she probably pulled it up or back from time to time, and again the style would be similar. Occasionally, there would be some hair left on a skeleton, or some article of clothing or a hair ornament that would give me a clue as to the actual appearance of the hair. In those instances, I would sculpt hair for the figure that I thought more accurately reflected the person’s actual hairstyle.
There were several styles of forensic reconstructive art. There was the two-dimensional medium of charcoal and pencil drawings, which I used only in certain instances. There were sculptors who used glass eyes and actual wigs to finish their sculptures. There were sculptors who used fiberglass and other materials for sculpting. I liked to do most of my reconstructions in the three-dimensional medium of sculpture with pure clay. It wasn’t better, it was just that I was more comfortable with it. I used plastics for making the molds, and plaster for casting the duplicated skulls, but the final result was just the clay. There was science in all the measurements that went into reapplying “flesh” to the skull, but the end result was a melding of that science with classical art. There seemed something more human about it all when I was finished.
My studio is a long room on one end of my house. There are windows on either end of the room—the front and back of the house. The ceiling is only nine feet—I prefer a twelve-foot one myself, but my house was what it was. Anyway, I have several tables in the room for various stages of my work and also for keeping busts that I’ve finished. There are some pedestals with work that I’d done purely for art, and I have a drafting board where I do sketches for all of my work.
I was in my studio finishing up my last case before beginning on the Red Bud victim, and I wondered who she was—this woman left to decompose among the cottonwood leaves. Her face was slim and oval-shaped. The nose bone was narrow and pronounced. It still had some of the cartilage on the very tip when she was found, although the buzzards had gotten just about all the other soft tissue. Her nose had a nice angular shape to it—a strong high ridge—and the brow formed a wonderful arch out of the nose and over the eyes. Her cheekbones were relatively high and created a smooth curve inward toward a narrow but rounded chin. The contrast of angles and curves gave her bone structure a delicate appearance overall.
In spite of the beauty I saw in this face, there was ugliness there, too. The ugliness was not hers, though. It was something inflicted upon her by human hands. There were scars—healed fractures in the bones of her face, and Drew said there had been similar scars in her arm bones and ribs.
The bone of her nose had also been broken, as had one of her cheekbones. Parts of her skull contained other fractures, too, but these wounds were not scars or healed breaks. These were death blows.
The face I had restored bore none of that terror. What I restored was a face made by the hand of God—a face that denied the abusive intervention of man. I blocked the horror of what I saw whenever I worked and remembered the sacred words: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them.” As long as I could focus on what I was restoring, I didn’t have to think about what had happened to the victim to put them in need of my skills.
With clay hair and eyes in place, the image was complete, and I placed it in the kiln for firing. When the bust was done, I removed it and set it out on one of my worktables. When it was cool, I made photos from all sides and then called Lieutenant Drew Smith at Ranger headquarters. He was in and wanted me to bring the bust over that day. It was a beautiful day for a drive through Austin. I put on my dark brown slacks, a short-sleeve beige sweater and my brown snakeskin boots. I placed the bust in a case for transport and loaded it into the Mustang.
It was cool and clear and a breeze blew through the trees and filled the air with the fresh green scent of spring. I rolled the windows down on the ’Stang and decided to take my scenic detour through town to get to Drew’s office.
I lived in the older Hyde Park section of Austin and the trip to Ranger HQ should have been about fifteen minutes, but fifteen minutes didn’t seem like enough time to enjoy all the sights and smells of the day, so I found my way to a road through the hills—to a road called Balcones.
The wind blew through my hair and I rode the curves all the way up Balcones as it wound its way above Lake Austin to a breathtaking view that I caught in my rearview mirror. I downshifted into second to make the rest of the grade, and looking forward, I made a left at the next intersection. Then I drove to the top of the mount, where I absorbed one of the best views in town.
Soon, I found my way back down, and made a right to head back into town toward Drew’s shop. By the time I got there, it would be a thirty-minute trip, instead of the fifteen minutes of the more direct route, but these scenic detours were one of my favorite ways to avoid the gloom and doom that was inherent to the forensic work I did.
As
