Читать книгу Shattered Image - J.F. Margos - Страница 11

The skull looked as if it was covered with pencil erasers. They were tissue-depth indicators, actually, and had been cut precisely to a depth for each portion of the face, based on statistics from a forensic anthropology chart. I had taken the basic information of race, gender and approximate age to decide which part of the chart to use. Now it looked as though her skeleton had some strange version of the measles. My next step would be to fill in between the indicators with clay, the top of each indicator showing me where to stop and smooth it off. It was like connect the dots for sculpture, although I would have to use my sculpting skills to make the raw, three-dimensional “data” look like a real human being. I was intently focused on my work, when the phone rang. I was so startled, I nearly fell off my stool.

I picked up the cordless handset that I had carried into the studio and was surprised to hear Irini Nikolaides on the other end of the line, distress in her voice. We exchanged the normal greetings of good friends before she broke the news.

“Toni, they may have found my Teddy’s bones in that horrible jungle.”

Stunned, I sat unable to form a thought, much less a word. Theodore Nikolaides had been a good friend to my husband and me in the Vietnam War. In fact, it was Ted, my compadre in faith, who had introduced me to Jack. “He’s a nice guy for you, Toni,” Ted had said—the matchmaker concerned that this woman serving in a battle zone should find a proper husband. I was a nurse then, helping put young boys back together hoping to send them home alive. Jack had been an MP there.

Teddy had talked to Jack about faith because of me. Jack hadn’t attended church in years and didn’t have any particular religious preference at the time. Ted thought he’d be a good match for me, but only if we could share faith with each other. Ted could talk to him about it—share his own experiences with Jack man-to-man. When Jack and I actually met, Jack’s conversations with Ted about faith were already taking hold. He had embraced his faith with his whole heart again and he and I had made a beautiful journey together in our lives.

Unfortunately, our matchmaker had not made the journey with us. As a pilot, Teddy flew reconnaissance missions close over the jungle treetops. One terrible day he flew out on what should have been his last mission before heading home. His hitch was up and he couldn’t wait to get back stateside with his wife and two kids. He was so excited. I could still remember that magnetic smile as he boarded his plane.

Then the word came back that Ted had been shot down and no ejection or chute had been seen. Other pilots reported seeing his plane crash on the top of a hill. It had skidded along a ridge with dense foliage. I knew that Ted, ever the hero, was trying to save himself and the plane. Determined not to give up, he must have struggled to keep the nose up and wings in the air, but it was too late to eject as he came close to the hilltop. So, Ted had committed himself to trying to land the plane. The wings had broken off as the plane began hitting trees, and then it had burst into flame. It wasn’t a spectacular fire because Ted was at the end of his mission and low on fuel, but it had been enough to ensure his death.

“Irini, what are we talking about here?”

“Those people at CILHI, they sent a team to that part where Teddy was last seen. They found bones and some other things and they think it might be him.”

CILHI stands for Central Identification Laboratory Hawaii, and they are the ID people for all military personnel missing in action. It’s an army operation located at an air force base just outside of Honolulu. They work to identify all MIAs from World War II, Korea and Vietnam.

“When will they know if it’s him?” I asked.

“Well, that is why I called you. They won’t know because there are not enough of the teeth to compare to Teddy’s dental records. You know, he had such good teeth, but they check the bad ones in these tests, not the good ones, and most of Ted’s teeth they didn’t find. So, now they can’t do the comparison. Also, the DNA is bad.”

“What do you mean?”

“They say they have to compare it to someone in his mother’s family.”

Ted’s mother had died in Greece. His father had brought him and his brother with him after she died. His mother had one brother back in Greece and they had lost track of him after World War II during the civil war that followed. Ted had talked about it many times. The only family he knew was his father’s family. Further complicating matters was the fact that Ted’s older brother, and only sibling, had a heart attack four years previously and died.

Irini continued, “I ask them why they don’t check it with someone else in his family or against the kids. They say it’s not the right kind of DNA. I don’t understand it.”

“It’s called mitochondrial DNA, Irini. It can only be compared against a person’s mother’s family. The other kind of DNA in your cells breaks down over time, so they probably can’t use it.”

“I don’t know anyone in Ted’s mother’s family. They left the uncle behind in Greece and we don’t know what happened to him.”

“I know. I remember.”

“Toni, the skull is good. They can’t use the DNA there for nothing, but I talked to them about you and they say they have worked with you twice before. They say because you work for the FBI sometimes, they use you for help.”

“That’s true, but what are you saying, Irini?”

“I am saying that you must help me and Teddy. You must go and make a sculpture of this skull and put the face there, so we can see if it is Teddy.”

“Irini, this is difficult work when I don’t know the victim, but…”

“No. His soul is restless. He cannot be at peace until they give me his bones and let me lay him to eternal rest. They will not give me the bones until they know it is him. The peace of his soul is with you, Toni. You must do this for him—to restore him, to bring him home, to set him free.”

I had a knot in my stomach and I was beginning to feel sick. The war had been put behind me. Jack and I had used our faith to heal us from the things that happened there, including the loss of our beloved friend, Ted. I hated it, but what Irini was saying was right. What she wasn’t saying was that I owed this to Ted because of his friendship to me and for bringing me to Jack. I had a great marriage for all those years, and Irini had lived alone, raising their children and having no closure over the death of the only man she had ever loved. I sighed. My chest felt tight.

“They have the skull, all of it?”

“Yes,” she said. “All of that part of the bones are in good shape. The rest they say is bad, but you don’t need the rest to make the face.”

“Okay, give me the name of the person in charge so I can call and set this up.”

There was a momentary silence on the other end of the phone. I heard the rustling of some paper, and then, choking back tears, Irini read the name and phone number to me of the man at CILHI who was in charge of “Ted’s case.”

She could barely speak when we hung up, but her last words to me were, “May our Savior bless you and guide your hands.”

I was noodling around in the garage with an old carburetor, trying to work through my angst, when I heard a vehicle pull to the curb and stop in a hurry. When Lieutenant Leonie Driskill drove her official vehicle, a rather cumbersome van loaded with equipment, she drove like the law enforcement officer that she was. When Leo got behind the wheel of her Jeep, tires would screech and squeal.

She bailed out of the Jeep with her sandy hair swinging in a ponytail down her back. She had just gotten off work. She was still wearing navy trousers and a white shirt, and her badge and gun were clipped to her belt. She was about five-five and she walked with a slight limp from her last fire battle in active combat. It had almost cost her her right leg. The doctors had said she probably wouldn’t walk and definitely wouldn’t be able to do anything more physical than that. No one ever told Leo Driskill she couldn’t do something without her trying that much harder. She had rehabbed her way back to health and extreme fitness. She lifted weights and ran and water-skied, and proved the doctors wrong.

Her limp gave her just a little bounce when she walked fast, and today there appeared to be an extra spring in her step besides the limp.

“What are you working on out here, Toni?”

“Just a carburetor overhaul on my old Jeep.” I wiped some of the grease off my hands with a rag and headed for the Go-Jo canister. I smeared Go-Jo all over my hands, loosening all the grease, and then wiped my hands clean with a dry rag.

Leo sauntered over to the workbench and started to inspect the carburetor.

“Touch that and you’ll be sorry.”

“I-eeee…wasn’t…” Her voice trailed off as if she’d been caught with her hand in the cookie jar.

“I just spent half an hour getting all those needles lined up just right so I could get that thing back together,” I told her. “You knock it over or mess it up and your name is mud.”

I turned around to see that Leo was leaning over the workbench with her hands behind her back, eyeing the carburetor closely. She looked like a heron perched on a log.

“You know, Toni, most people take stuff like this to a mechanic.”

“Yeah well, four things are true, kid. Most people don’t have a mechanic for a dad. Most people weren’t practically raised in a garage. Most people don’t know a thing about carburetors, and I’m not most people.”

“That’s the truth—the ‘you’re not most people’ part, anyway.”

“Are you here to harass me and disturb my auto-mechanican therapy session or do you have something important you’d like to impart?”

“Grump. You call me in the middle of my busy day and ask me to go look at a bunch of old bones dug up out of the river bottom, and when I come by to give you the benefit of my report, this is how I’m treated.”

I sighed. “Truce already. I can’t spar with you anymore today.”

“Hey, lighten up. I was kidding. What gives?”

“It’s just been a bad day. It has to do with old times in Vietnam. I’ll work it out. Distract me by giving me your brilliance on our Red Bud case.”

Leo nodded. “I’m afraid there’s no brilliance yet. There’s not much I can say because there’s not much to go on. But there were a few things that came to mind based on the apparent cause of death and the reburial.”

“Lay it on me.”

“Well, I looked at the photos of the burial site and I looked at the bones themselves and talked to Chris about the autopsy. I definitely tanked any idea that they were moved because someone thought they’d be discovered where they were. I think it’s significant that they were reburied in a shallow grave on the dam side of Red Bud. According to the photos, the bones were in a place where they would have washed away in the first floodgate release. The kayaker was the unknown quantity that foiled that plan.”

“Okay, so why do you think they were reburied and not just discarded—thrown into the river, for instance.”

“I think the fact that isn’t what happened is very significant. I think the deceased either meant something to the killer and he couldn’t do that, or maybe he felt too much guilt to do that, or maybe a little of both. I suspect he wanted to be rid of her, but he wanted nature to do the ultimate dirty work so he wouldn’t be responsible for it.”

“So, why dig her up and try to get rid of her after all this time?”

“That’s the twenty-five-thousand-dollar question. Something changed in the killer, or something else happened that caused him to dig her up and move her like that. He may have just wanted to be rid of the memory of it, or it could have been a combination of things that happened at once. When we figure that out, we’ll have all the answers.”

“What about the way she was killed? You said you thought she might have meant something to the killer, but it looks to me like he just executed her.”

“I think he did, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t mean something to him. In fact, he had more of a reason to kill her if she meant something to him. He may have even planned it out in his mind before.”

“Elaborate.”

“Maybe the killer believed she did something to him for which she deserved to be ‘executed’—and it’s possible that the deceased may not have even actually committed the offense for which she was killed.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that if the killer was paranoid, which is totally possible, and thought she did something to deserve being killed, then he probably thought about killing her for a while. It satisfied the paranoid feelings he had. In fact, it may all be in his mind anyway, and we may find in the end that this victim didn’t even do what the killer thought she did. This kind of killer would kill for some offense with or without any real proof, based solely on what he believed, because he convinced himself in his mind that it’s absolutely true, that someone is to blame, and he believed that the person deserved to pay.”

“That’s interesting. What gives you the impression the killer might be this kind of killer?”

“The way she was killed seems calculated and organized and I don’t see any passion in it. The lack of passion leads me to believe that he thought she deserved this in some way. In other words, it wasn’t done spur of the moment—thought went into it. Hence the execution style to the shooting. But this burial and reburial and what I see in that isn’t organized or thought out at all in my opinion—and he reburied her in a way that he wouldn’t be responsible for discarding her remains. It’s completely irrational. Plus, in my gut I feel that his attempt to discard her is part of his denial of guilt and that goes hand in hand with this kind of personality—‘Someone else is to blame in all this, not me. She deserves all of this.’”

“So, in a nutshell, he thinks she’s done something to him and he kills her. He plans the killing, but then later his actions—the reburial—are committed in response to some other event?”

“Right.”

“This helps a lot.”

“It’s all just my impression—a gut feeling at this point—based on an execution-style bullet hole and bones dumped and carelessly reburied in a shallow grave. I just let it run through my head and try to see the event the way it might have happened. Then I try to imagine why the person would have done the murder that way. What was his motive in carrying out these actions?”

I smiled. It was the way I worked a crime scene—letting it run through my mind, but I didn’t have the knowledge of behavior that Leo had, just an eye for detail.

“Anything else?” I asked.

“Nope. Just keep me in the loop, because now I’m tantalized.” She smiled broadly.

“Oh, one more thing.”

“Yeah?”

“We both have been referring to the killer as ‘he.’ Any chance the killer is a woman?”

“Sure. I was just using the ‘he’ in a more general sense, but a woman could have all the same issues and could be the killer. I’ll tell you, though, the statistics say it’s more likely to be a guy.”

“I hope my work sheds more light on it all.”

“Your work usually does, Toni.”

“I’ve already started the bust.”

“Good. So, got any root beer in this place?” Leo grinned.

“Brat. Come on inside and we’ll drink the best root beer anywhere.”

We went into my kitchen and I pulled two ice-cold IBC root beers out of the fridge. IBC is bottled in Plano, and it’s genuine old-fashioned Texas root beer. I grabbed two frosted mugs from the freezer and poured the soda down the sides of each mug for minimum suds.

“Let’s drink these on the patio. What do you say?”

“You’re twisting my arm, Toni.”

We sat down in the Adirondack chairs I had outside and got into a relaxed mode. I took a long, slow swallow of the bubbly stuff.

“Ahh, this is the best.”

“You know how to serve root beer, Toni.”

“Well, I’ve had a little experience.”

“So, what’s up with grumpiness and carburetor overhauls and Vietnam?”

I sighed and told her about Ted and the phone call from Irini.

“You know, I forget that you were in ’Nam,” she said. “You almost never talk about that. I even forget that you were a registered nurse.”

“When I came back from Vietnam I wanted to forget I was a registered nurse, too.”

“So, you got into forensics?”

“Well, it didn’t happen like that. I went back to school and got my art degree, then my master’s and Ph.D. It was a fluke that I got into this line of work. It used to not exist, you know.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s right.”

“I got into it because of Jack’s work as a detective, and my love of and involvement in art, particularly in sculpture.”

“That makes sense.”

We both took another long swallow of root beer and sat in silence for a few minutes.

“So, Toni, what was ’Nam like?”

“Blood and bombs and horrible smells—gasoline and jet-fuel smell in everything—and death, lots of death.”

“I guess you saw some terrible stuff.”

“Yes, I did, but I was a triage nurse for flying wounded boys to other hospitals or home, so I didn’t see the worst of it. The army nurses out in the field saw things I think would have driven me mad.”

“I’ve seen some pretty bad stuff in fires. I can’t imagine going to war like that. So, you and Jack just hung out with Ted most of the time?”

“When we were all off duty we did. There was this place there—just a dump where we ate and hung out. We’d spend hours there yucking it up and talking about how great it would be when we all got back home.”

“Wow. I’m sorry, Toni.”

“Yeah, it makes me sick sometimes. Ted never made it, and now Jack’s gone. It’d be a lot easier to handle Ted being found if Jack was still here with me. It really stinks.”

“I’m in touch with that emotion in a big way.”

Now I felt really bad. Here I was talking about all this to Leo, and her parents and brother were all dead, and her only living relative was her cousin, Pete. Her parents had been killed by a drunk driver on 2222, and her brother, formerly Tommy Lucero’s partner, had been shot to death in the line of duty just over a year ago.

“I’m sorry, kid, I wasn’t thinking.”

“Aw, don’t start walking on eggshells around me. I don’t own grief, you know. Vietnam was horrible. I’m sure Ted wasn’t the only person you knew there who didn’t make it. You have a right to feel what you feel about that.”

“Unfortunately, Ted wasn’t the only friend we had there who didn’t make it. He was the friend we knew and loved the most, I guess, but there were so many others. Oh man, marines there on the base who went off on patrol and they’d come back with a third of the guys gone, and two or three of those were friends of ours. Pilots that flew off and never came back—it was an endless stream.”

“So now Ted may have been found, and you have to help figure that out.”

“Yes.”

“And that takes you right back into the endless stream again.”

“Yeah.”

“I totally understand. Toni?”

“Yes.”

“You can talk to me about it anytime. Sometimes it’s better to talk about these things with someone who gets it. Know what I mean?”

“Yeah, kid, I do.”