None of that was even the worst part of the war. I was a nurse in the air force. The army nurses in the MASH units and evac hospitals-those women must have lost their minds or nearly so. They saw everything that came off the battlefield. The worst wounded usually never made it my way because they were never in good enough shape for plane flight. In fact, they usually died before they made it to our hospital.

I was in charge of triaging the injured for plane transport to another hospital, Hawaii or maybe even back home. The ones who were really bad couldn’t go on a plane, although that didn’t keep some doctors from trying to get them on one. There was no way to pressurize a plane for ground-level pressure. The best that could be achieved was pressure equal to three thousand or four thousand feet. You need more oxygen than that for certain wounds, especially burns and eye wounds. Oxygen tanks were not something we had in abundance, so there was triage. I would do an evaluation of their condition for plane flight. The ones who didn’t qualify had to go back to a hospital nearby to improve their condition, or just to die and return home in a box.

The bad news is that I saw a lot of horrible stuff. The good news is that I never had a patient more than twenty-four hours. It was an assessment assembly line and I was charged with making some difficult decisions in short order.

I met Jack there in Vietnam. He was an MP who did duty on the perimeter at the base where I was stationed in Da Nang. He used to play cards and hang out with that flyboy named Teddy Nikolaides. Teddy, Jack and I became a tight trio. We’d sit around and talk about home and dreams-and Teddy’s wife and kids.

Jack and I saw a lot of our buddies go into battle or fly off the airstrip and never return, but no loss hit us as hard as the loss of Ted Nikolaides. I don’t think either one of us ever really got our head around that one.

Ted had almost made it out of that horrible place-almost. I wondered now if he had finally made it out. Were the fragments I had seen and the skull I had touched really all that was left of Ted? Had he finally made it home to American soil?

Back at the hotel I secured the case with the skull mold in it and took a long hot shower. I put on fresh clothes-blue-jean shorts, a white cotton tank top and sandals. I was going to do what I had done each of the two previous times I had been to Hawaii since the Vietnam War. I was taking a trip to the Hawaii National Cemetery of the Pacific-to the Punchbowl.

The Punchbowl is the bowl-shaped remains of a volcanic crater just north of downtown Honolulu. In Hawaiian, the name for this place means “Hill of Sacrifice.” There are over thirty-three-thousand veterans buried in the floor of the crater. A memorial at the head of the cemetery consists of ten Courts of the Missing-marble courts containing the names of the MIAs from World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam-more than twenty-eight-thousand of them in all. In one of those Courts of the Missing, engraved on a marble wall, was the name of Theodore P. Nikolaides.

I would leave Hawaii for Austin the next morning, but first I would make my traditional trip to the Punchbowl, the Hill of Sacrifice, to find my friend’s name in the Courts of the Missing, and I would pay my respects.

Chapter Ten

Heavily jet-lagged and back in my house less than two hours, I received a call from Chris. There were more bones. This time not far from the edge of the running trail and the bridge that crosses Waller Creek. I taped my eyelids open, put on some jeans and boots and threw on an old, khaki-colored Keep Austin Weird T-shirt and bolted out the door.

It hadn’t been started in four days, but the ’Stang fired up like the little land rocket it was. As I roared down the road, I wondered what in blazes was going on. Could this victim be Doug Hughes?

I called my son on the cell phone. He was at the scene and he and Tommy were working this case as if it was related to the Red Bud case, until they could prove otherwise. He said the bones were in a jumble as with the Red Bud case, and it looked like a fresh grave.

It was 7:00 a.m. and traffic was already getting heavy, but I put the pedal down as I pulled up onto IH-35. As I wove in and out of traffic, speeding up, gearing down and shifting lanes, a motorcycle cop pulled alongside me. I just knew he was going to pull me over, but he motioned for me to follow him. That son of mine, always thinking. I smiled to myself as the officer turned on his lights and sirens and the traffic parted before us like the Red Sea before Moses.

We flew down the highway to the Cesar Chavez off-ramp. The officer’s Harley maneuvered easily through traffic as we continued our wild ride across downtown Austin, finally turning in at the parking area next to the old power plant on the riverbank. I thanked the officer for his escort and he smiled and waved as he pulled away.

Waller Creek fed into Town Lake here, and the running trails that banked the river crossed the creek via a wooden pedestrian bridge. I made my way down the trail to the grim group that had gathered near that bridge. As I walked up, I smiled at my son.

“That escort your idea?”

He chuckled and nodded. “I thought you might appreciate that. Besides, Mario, I know you and I didn’t want my mother getting pulled over for speeding or running down pedestrians with that hot rod you drive.”

“You are a good son.” I winked and patted him on the back.

I walked up to Chris Nakis, who stood in her usual dapper attire and lab coat, looking more serious than ever.

“What’s the word here?” I asked.

“Bad.” She shook her head. “Real scary bad. Two sets of bones in as many weeks.” She looked up at me, and our eyes met.

“I called Leo,” I told her. “It’s her day off, but I told her I wanted her down here. I want her to see this. I’ll bet this is Doug Hughes.”

“Who?”

“Lover of the first victim. They disappeared at the same time sixteen years ago. It just makes sense it would be him.”

“Hmm. That’s interesting.”

“What do you know so far?”

“Not much, just that the bones are old and the grave is fresh. The guys are digging carefully so as not to disturb any evidence.”

“It’s too much of a coincidence not to be related to the other case.”

“Yes, I agree.”

While Mike and Tommy questioned the woman who had found the “body,” Chris and I stood and watched as one of the forensic anthropologists worked on unearthing a bone.

“So, I heard you made a quick trip to Hawaii,” Chris said.

“How’d you know about that?”

“Mike told me.”

“Then he told you why I made the trip?”

“Yes. So, how did it go?”

“I made the mold I needed.”

Chris cleared her throat. “The skull was in good shape then?”

“Well, it was in five or six pieces, but one of the CILHI anthropologists had put it back together so I could work with it.”

“And the rest of the remains?”

“Not much to it. Less than twenty pieces of bone, one to two inches long.”

Chris looked down at her feet.

I continued. “The only DNA that’s usable is mitochondrial. None of Ted’s maternal family is alive or locatable now. The only thing the DNA was good for was matching all the pieces together. So, when I’m done, if the image is Ted’s, they’ll know all the remains belong to him.”

Chris nodded. “Well, you know if you need me for anything…I’m not sure what I could do, but if you need me…”

“Thanks.”

Leo’s Jeep screeched to a stop in the parking lot at the top of the bank. She bailed out and came jogging down the trail toward our position. When she got to the site, Chris filled her in on the details as she knew them.

Leo approached the site carefully to get a closer look. As she squatted next to one of the forensic anthropologists, he lifted an arm bone out of the dirt. He carefully bagged it and handed it to a forensic tech who was logging everything and laying all the separate bags into a black body bag. Leo stood up, stepped back and took in a wider view of the site. She looked out over the water with her hands on her hips. I saw the familiar trance come over her face. She stood that way for a minute or so and then shook her head as if she was shaking something off. She stepped over to where Chris and I were standing. Tommy and Mike joined us.