“Maybe.” We all looked at her again. “I think her mouth needs to be different.”

“How so?” Ricky wanted to know. I said I thought it needed to be bigger and not so pursed, and Ricky did his best to form what I wanted. The result was more Ashley Judd than Angelina Jolie, but Shannon nodded.

We all contemplated the screen, our heads cocked to one side, then the other.

“I don’t know her,” Kate said eventually.

“Me, either,” Shannon admitted. “For a second there, I thought I recognized something, but now I’m not sure. Maybe I’ve been looking at her for too long.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “She still looks familiar to me.”

Kate turned to me. “But you’re the only one of us-except Ricky-who couldn’t possibly have seen her when she was alive, so if you recognize her, then she’s probably all wrong.”

I shrugged. Maybe, maybe not. Behind us, at the far end of the room, the door opened, and Brandon came in. “… when I leave here,” Brandon said. We heard his shoes move across the concrete floor, the muted thumps of police-issue Oxfords.

Kate, Shannon, and I moved aside to give him an unobstructed view of Ricky’s reconstruction. Its creator looked a little defiant, his eyes furtively peering through the overlong bangs, but his jaw pugnacious.

Brandon stopped in front of the table. As I watched, the color leached slowly out of his cheeks.

16

The phone in his hand quacked, but Brandon didn’t react. For a second, it looked as if he was going to faint. I moved discreetly out of the way.

Then he pulled himself together and spoke into the phone again. “Boss? I’ll call you right back.” He looked around. “Who did this?”

We looked at each other. After a second, Ricky admitted that he had.

“Who’s this?” Brandon gestured at the screen.

“It’s the woman from the crawlspace,” I said, while Josh explained about the forensic reconstruction software. Slowly, a bit of color crept back into Brandon ’s cheeks.

“Sorry.” He sounded sheepish. “I knew who she was… it was just coming face-to-face with her like this.”

“Knew? How did you know?” I asked, at the same time as Ricky said, “Who is she?”

Brandon explained that Wayne had called him to say that the skeleton had been identified by Dr. Whitaker. “It’s Holly White.”

For a second, no one spoke.

“I thought she was in Hollywood,” I said.

“So did I,” Brandon answered.

“Who’s Holly White?” Josh wanted to know, looking from one to the other of us.

“ Brandon ’s girlfriend in high school,” I answered for him. “They went to prom together. I saw her picture in the newspaper yesterday. You did, too, remember? I showed it to you?”

Josh nodded.

Brandon cleared his throat. “I’d better get going. As soon as the ME’s office has taken off with the… with Holly, I have to go break the news to her mother. The chief tried to knock on her door-she lives just down the street on Becklea-but she wasn’t home.”

“Does Wayne know that you and Holly used to date?” Kate wanted to know. Brandon shrugged.

“No idea. Probably not. We weren’t together long. Why?”

Kate said, after a very slight hesitation, that she had no real reason for asking. “If you knew Holly, her mother would probably prefer that you break the news, rather than Wayne. Or someone else she doesn’t know.”

He nodded a brief good-bye and walked away. We waited until the lab door had shut behind him before any of us spoke. Shannon was first.

“Poor guy.”

“You heard what he said,” Josh answered. “They didn’t date long. And it was four or five years ago.”

“Still, to be thinking that she was somewhere else, alive and happy, and then to realize she’s been buried under the neighbor’s house all this time…”

She trailed off. The rest of us fell silent, too, and although I won’t presume to think I can read minds, I’m sure at least some of the others were thinking what I was thinking. Anywhere else, Brandon would be a suspect in Holly’s murder. He had dated the dead girl right before she disappeared. Because now, of course, it seemed much more likely that the reason she hadn’t attended her graduation ceremony was because she was already dead, not because she’d run off to California. And that meant that any law enforcement officer worth his salt would look at the people Holly had associated with just before her disappearance. Like her prom date. Whom we had just sent to break the news to Holly’s mother.

“You don’t think…?” I began.

“Of course not,” Josh answered, which pretty much took care of that question: He, at least, was thinking what I was thinking.

“I think Wayne needs to know,” Kate said. “I’m going to ride over to Becklea and talk to him. Avery?”

I nodded. “I’ll come with you. It’s my house, anyway. And I don’t have a car of my own.”

“Can I come?” Shannon asked. Her mother shook her head.

“You have class this afternoon, don’t you? Come home to dinner tonight instead. I’ll update you then. You, too, Josh. And…” She turned, “Ricky, would you like to come over for dinner?”

Ricky hesitated.

“We’ll bring him,” Josh said with a grin. “And Paige as well, while we’re at it.”

“What about me?” I asked plaintively. “And Derek?”

“Why not?” Kate shrugged. “The more, the merrier. We’ll order pizza, or something.”

“So much for home cooking,” Shannon said.

Her mother rolled her eyes. “Fine. I’ll make stew. Something that I can just throw together in one big pot. If you get there early-say, right after your last class-you can help.”

Shannon promised she would, and Kate and I took our leave. I waited until we were back in the car and actually on our way to Becklea before I asked the question I’d been ruminating over for the past ten minutes.

“You don’t think Brandon had anything to do with Holly’s murder, do you?”

“Of course not,” Kate said quickly. Maybe even a little too quickly. “He knew her, though. Having him investigate her murder is going to seem like a conflict of interest.” Her eyes were on the road as she navigated the station wagon out of the Barnham College campus.

“Tony the Tiger will have a field day,” I agreed.

“God, yes!” Kate shuddered. “But the Waterfield PD is so small, and Brandon ’s the only trained forensic tech they’ve got… It’s hard to imagine how Wayne will be able to manage without him. Especially on something like this.”

“Will he have to pull him?”

“I don’t see how he can avoid it,” Kate admitted. “If word gets out that Brandon used to date Holly, everything he did down in the crawlspace, everything he found, will be suspect. And because of the probable connection between Holly and Venetia, he won’t be able to investigate that murder, either.”

“What a big mess.”

She nodded. “You said it.”

When we got to Becklea, things were still much the way they’d been when I left earlier. Linda wasn’t there anymore, and neither was Irina, but Tony the Tiger was still hanging on like grim death. We found Wayne inside Venetia ’s house, and when he saw us, he came out onto the deck and closed the door behind him.

“I guess you’ve heard the news.”

Kate nodded. “ Brandon said Dr. Whitaker identified Holly from her dental records. And then when he saw the computer reconstruction Josh and Ricky did, he went white as a sheet. It was Holly in the crawlspace all right.”

“Are you sure Brandon should be working the case?” I asked.

Wayne narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean? Of course he should be working the case. He’s the best crime tech I’ve got. The only crime tech I’ve got. Why wouldn’t I want him working the case?” He divided an intimidating stare between the two of us.

“They used to date,” Kate said, unmoved.