“Well, if you don’t need an invitation at his mother’s house, why would you need an invitation to come to your own childhood home? You can come over for dinner anytime you like.”
“Yeah, whatever.”
“You’re awfully grumpy this morning, young man.”
“Some of us had to get up early, shower and actually get dressed before we came down here,” he said, giving my casual attire the once-over.
Tommy laughed again. “Hey, man, don’t be dissing your mom like that. Toni’s totally cool, and a pretty good-looking chick, if I may say so.”
“Ick! You may not say so. This is my mom, and you’re my partner. Besides, you have a girlfriend.”
“I’m not dead, Mike. I may have a girlfriend, but I know a good-looking woman when I see one.”
“Thank you, Tommy.”
“You’re totally welcome, Toni. You raised this guy?”
“Yes.”
“Man, I would have thought you and Jack would have whipped more respect into him than this.” Tommy smiled, thoroughly enjoying himself.
“He's had issues lately, I guess.”
“Yeah, and my issue is, I’m the only guy on the force working homicides with my mom, and taking abuse from my partner simultaneously.”
I smiled, patted my son on the arm and said, “You’re such an abused child. Such a sad life.”
I started walking back to the car.
Tommy laughed out loud.
“Later, Toni,” Tommy yelled as I walked away.
I turned and waved as I got into the Mustang.
I stood at the back screen door, inhaling the fragrance of mountain laurel, redbud and ornamental peach blended by rainwater with the mustiness of oak and elm. It was three in the morning and the back of my neck was stiff from the five hours I had just spent reconstructing the face of a murder victim found near Hutto off of Highway 79. A thirtyish-year-old woman had been laid to rest in an untimely fashion in a grove of cottonwood trees. There she had spent the winter decomposing with the leaves, until two high-school kids hiked by and found her. Lieutenant Drew Smith of the Texas Rangers had asked me to put the woman’s face back on her skull in the hopes that someone might recognize her. Without her identity, there was no hope of finding her killer.
I dug gray clay shavings out from under my fingernails and rolled my head back in a circular fashion to loosen the sore muscles. The half moon peeked between branches of new growth overhead and the soft, intermittent dripping of water from the eaves and trees hypnotized me into meditation in my fatigue. My eyes glazed over and I drifted back in time to a day I remembered working in the garage with my dad. The car was an old ’50 Chevy that needed an oil change and the rain outside pounded down while Daddy instructed 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.