She looked up from her hands and looked upward. “Doug? Is it Doug?”

She still didn’t look at either one of us. Her eyes shot to the right wall. She was as strange as the boys had said.

“We don’t know yet. I’ll be doing the reconstruct, just as I did with Mrs. Waldrep. I mostly just wanted to let you know what was happening, and to see if there was anything else you think of that you hadn’t told the officers the other day.”

She sat for a while. She was looking at her hands again. She was becoming more emotional now. She began to cry. I reached into my purse and pulled out a tissue and handed it to her. She mopped up her tears with the tissue.

“I don’t know anything more than what I said the other day. He just disappeared and that’s all I know.”

She was sobbing now and I tried to comfort her, but she pulled away. She regained control of herself somewhat, and I decided to try for another question.

“Ms. Webster, do you know Doug’s brother Jimmy?”

“Of course,” she said. “He’s been a good friend to me.”

“You’ve seen him recently, then?”

She hesitated and became more nervous. She seemed confused. She looked down at the wadded-up tissue she held in her hands.

She hesitated a second and then said distantly, “He takes care of me. He helps me with things.”

“Like what things?”

She wadded the tissue into twists and knots.

“Just things,” she said. “I don’t think I feel very good now. I don’t want to talk anymore.”

Leo and I looked at each other, and Leo nodded.

“All right, Ms. Webster, I guess we’ll go.”

“When will you know if it’s Doug?”

She still looked down at the tissue.

“It will be several days, but I’ll ask the detectives to contact you and let you know.”

She nodded but didn’t look up.

We excused ourselves and left her sitting there fidgeting.

“Very strange girl,” I said when we got back in the car.

“That’s the understatement of the century,” Leo said.

“So, what’s your appraisal?”

“She has a serious mental problem. I don’t think she’s completely in touch with reality, and she has a kind of childlike or withdrawn nature. She even seemed to be drifting in and out of her grip when we were talking to her. If she’s had declining mental health all this time, she could have committed the crimes back then, and now she definitely fits as the kind of person who would carry out this disorganized and illogical reburial situation.”

“She acted genuinely surprised about us finding the second set of bones.”

“Maybe she is,” Leo said, “or maybe she’s so delusional it did surprise her.”

“Think Jimmy helped her?”

“I think he could have helped her, and that could be what she was talking about, or he knows what she did and he’s covering for her, or the other way around even.”

“Think there’s any possibility that Addie and Doug did run off, and someone else killed them?”

“Anything’s possible, Toni. I want to see the face on those bones we just found.”

“I’ll start on it as soon as we get back.”

“The guy we found yesterday had been shot multiple times, and it wasn’t in the head. In fact, the bullets scraped and bounced off his ribs.”

“So what does that mean to you?”

“It means whoever he was, he wasn’t executed like Addie. It means this guy was killed in haste and that wasn’t part of the killer’s plan.”

“That might fit if Lori were the killer. You know, she killed Doug in a rage, then executed Addie.”

“It’d be the other way around, the way I see it. She executed Addie, Doug caught her, so she killed him in haste-may have even regretted it instantly.”

“That could be the source of her reality gap.”

“It would also explain dumping Addie’s bones on Red Bud, while burying Doug to be discovered up on the trail.”

“I’ll do my work, and then we’ll see for sure if this is Doug Hughes that we’ve found.”

I had worked two days on this bust already. The first day, I had done all the grueling work of measuring, cutting and applying all the tissue-depth indicators, until the skull had the full “eraser measles.” Then I had tediously applied the clay across all the markers. Now I sat on my high stool in front of the workbench with a cup of hot hibiscus tea in my hands and looked at the almost completed work. I only had to finish and smooth a few areas and it would be done.

The head of this man was broad and round, the cheekbones big and high. The brow was low, but not particularly pronounced and the nose was like an upside-down anvil, with a strong long line down the middle, but with the sides flaring out at the nostrils. The lips were thick and the mouth large. It was a handsome face, but not in a pretty-boy way. It was a rugged face. Now the question would be, was it Doug Hughes’s face?

Chapter Twelve

One month earlier, on all local channels, the plea of a mother had been broadcast. Her name was Nadine Ferguson and her son had been missing for over sixteen years. The day of the broadcast had been his birthday. Mrs. Ferguson, now a widow, was seriously ill and dying of cancer. She only wanted to see her son one last time, or at least to know what had happened to him. Mrs. Ferguson lived in Houston, but her son had lived in Hempstead at the time of his disappearance. He was a good boy, she had said. He loved his simple life in Hempstead, working in a local clothing store as a salesman, walking and hiking in the local area observing and sketching birds. He hadn’t an enemy in the world and, in fact, everyone in Hempstead who knew him loved to be around him.

Brian Ferguson was thirty years old at the time of his disappearance from Hempstead. Now we knew that he was thirty years old at the time of his death. I had worked for three solid days to get the image out and get it right. Mike and Tommy knew as soon as I was done with it that it wasn’t Doug Hughes. I didn’t want to see his photo, in case I ever had to do another reconstruct that might be him. Tommy and Mike had pulled his Texas driver’s-license photo and compared it to my bust.

“It’s not him, Mom.”

I couldn’t believe it when Mike told me.

“That can’t be right.”

“It can and it is. It’s just not him, Mom.”

“Then who in blazes is it?”

“Don’t know, but we’re broadcasting the image and releasing it to all the papers.”

The image was only broadcast once when Mrs. Ferguson called in to the number on the screen to tell Tommy Lucero that the image on the bust was the face of her son. His Texas driver’s-license photo was pulled and compared. It was a match. His mother provided dental records for comparison and the forensic dentist in Chris’s office reviewed them. They were a match also. The bones belonged to Brian Ferguson.

As soon as I got the news, I called Leo.

“Guess Tommy told you, it’s not Doug Hughes. So, now what do you think?” I asked.

“I think we have a whole new mystery on our hands. I think we need to find out if there is any connection between Addie and this guy, Brian Ferguson.”

“What about Doug Hughes? Do you think any of this could have anything to do with why Doug is still missing?”

“Who knows? Until we find him, we won’t know. Tommy said Brian’s mother had put out some kind of plea for information on television about a month ago, right?”

“Yes.”

“No matter who the killer is, that was the trigger, Toni.”

“What do you mean?”

“That’s what I’ve been looking for. It’s like I said about the type of wounds that killed Brian, and where he was reburied. Killing Brian wasn’t part of his plan.”

“Okay.”

“The killer saw Mrs. Ferguson on TV and it probably made him feel bad. I think digging up Brian and reburying him where someone would find him-that was the purpose I was talking about.”