“You’re paying for it?”

“I’m going to offer to help them out. My son-in-law is going to do some of the demolition himself.”

“That’ll save some money. You know I’ll give you the best price I can, but these people gotta come away with some money in their pockets.”

“Absolutely. Thanks for looking at the plans. I’ll have Cindy call you as soon as she can.”

“Great.” Hollander slipped the prints in his briefcase. “So enough about me. Tell me what’s happening in the wonderful world of detective work.”

The waitress arrived with their food just as Mike had asked the question. She looked at Decker. “You’re a cop?”

Hollander said, “Best detective I ever worked with. Now he’s a lieutenant. If he had acted more politico, he could have made captain.”

“I blush,” Decker said.

“We like cops coming in here,” she said. “They keep an eye on the riffraff.”

The restaurant skirted the edges of Devonshire’s border. Decker gave the waitress his card. “If you have problems, give me a call.”

“’Preciate it. Enjoy the meal. It’s on the house.”

The men nodded. Hollander said, “So what’s been taking up your time other than bureaucracy?”

“Actually, we’ve got a couple of interesting ones in homicide.” Decker told him about the body in the flight’s wreckage that turned out not to be the body they were looking for.

“The flight attendant is still missing,” Decker told him.

“And you have no idea who the unidentified body is?”

“Not a clue. Sometimes in these kinds of crash scenarios you find extra ID. I’ve never heard of anyone finding an unexplained body.”

“Maybe it was a stowaway hiding in the baggage.”

“You know, I thought about that. Three things militate against it. First of all, there are really tough security measures now, so I don’t see her slipping through. Second, she had a nice-size bash on her skull. Third, she was wearing a very old jacket that was probably manufactured around 1974. If the body was in better shape, we could have had a forensic artist slap a face onto the facial bones. But the biological material is so delicate that the D.A. refuses to let the artist make a cast of the skull and face. If the bones crumble, we lose forensic evidence.”

“The bash mark on the skull.”

“Exactly. We’re thinking about doing some computer forensics but it’s never as good as putting a face on the bones.”

Hollander sat back in his chair and stroked his goatee. He looked very wise. “This is ringing a bell. It’s going to take me a second or so to bring it up.” He took a bite of his hamburger, ketchup dribbling onto his goatee. He dabbed it with a napkin but the hair still looked pink. “Good food for a coffee shop and they serve turkey burgers. Red meat for me nowadays is a no-no…ah, I got it.”

He put down his sandwich.

“I confess to missing my old profession now and then. You ever watch those true detective shows on TV?”

“What ones? Like that private detective on cable?”

“No, no, like Forensic Files or Cold Case Files or The New Detectives?”

“Occasionally one of them will catch my interest.”

“Yeah, most of the time it’s just dogged detective work and the bad guy confessing, or today it’s all DNA. But I saw something on one of the shows that was a similar situation to your case. The fingers had been removed or acid-washed and the skin of the face had been flayed off, leaving only the face muscles.”

“No way to ID the body.”

“Yep, that was the culprit’s plan. And it almost worked because the forensic artist couldn’t create a forensic face. She didn’t have the usual bony landmarks to work with and the D.A. wouldn’t let the police remove the muscle because it was forensic evidence.”

Decker was listening really carefully now. “Go on.”

“What they wound up doing was reproducing the skull in three dimensions from some kind of machine.”

“What kind of machine?”

“I’m sketchy on the details, Pete. I saw the show a while back…couple of years. But I remembered it because it was so different. They took X-rays and used the X-rays to make the three-dimensional copy of the skull. The police took the skull to the judge and the judge allowed it to be used for forensic purposes. The forensic artist used the copy skull to put a face onto the bones.”

“Did it work?”

“Yeah, someone recognized the face and they caught the guy.”

“Do you remember the case?”

He thought a long time. “It was an African woman who was living in the U.S., so she didn’t even have relatives that reported her missing. I think it happened somewhere in the middle of the country. Sorry, but I don’t remember names, but I’m sure there’s a copy of the show somewhere. It was either Forensic Files or Cold Case Files.”

Decker was writing furiously. “What is that? Court TV?”

“Forensic Files is on Court TV. I think Cold Case Files is A and E.” Mike took another bite of his food and chewed it slowly. “You could call up someone at the station that works with the shows. Maybe they would remember.”

“I’m sure I could order a copy of the show, if we could figure out what show you were watching and what case you saw. I’m thinking that the episodes might be listed online.” He looked at Hollander. “We could check it out. Would you mind coming back to the station house?”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

16

T HE SQUAD ROOM was two-thirds empty, the majority of the detectives out in the field investigating the ever-flowing tide of felonies. Like the ocean, there was a rhythm to crime, a high period followed by a low period that seemed to correspond with the phases of the moon.

The open space was divided up by groupings of desks with placards hanging from the ceiling to reveal the detail of the detectives working below the signs. The areas encompassed the usual divisional felonies-burglary, GTA, CAPS, juvenile and sex crimes, bunco, etc., with homicide tucked into a corner-private and rarefied. Shelving filled with casebooks lined a good portion of the wall space with several dog-eared district maps pinned at random spots along the drywall.

Marge Dunn had just received a packet of Roseanne Dresden’s phone records. The last call made from the missing woman’s cell originated in San Jose-12:35 A.M.-and she had connected to her house number, the line engaged for thirty-five seconds. Roseanne’s records begged the question: what was she doing in San Jose a little after midnight when WestAir said that she was on a flight from Burbank to San Jose the next morning at eight-fifteen?

It was possible that Roseanne flew into Burbank from San Jose on an earlier flight that morning, and never deplaned-which would explain why Erika Lessing never saw her.

Did an earlier flight even exist?

Logging on to WestAir’s Web site, Marge looked up flight schedules. The former flight 1324 had been retired. Instead there was a new flight-247-with the first departure from Burbank to San Jose now leaving at eight-thirty instead of eight-fifteen: a very thin sugar coat on a bitter pill, but who could blame WestAir for trying to make the public forget. More important, there was an earlier flight-246-that flew from San Jose to Burbank, it’s first departure at five o’clock in the morning. That meant that Roseanne could have come down from San Jose to Burbank and then turned around and gone back on the doomed flight 1324.

But why would Roseanne do a quick turnaround on a commuter flight unless she was working actively as a flight attendant? Marge circled Roseanne’s last call and wrote in the margins: Roseanne in SJ and trying to locate hubby? Did she talk to him?

Ivan could verify that. Then Marge noticed that the call was only thirty-five seconds. She wrote on the margins of Roseanne’s phone records.

Answering machine?

Did Roseanne’s husband get any message about her working agenda? Was that why he put her on the flight from Burbank back to San Jose? Had she left a message on the machine that she was in San Jose and was now working the route?