The woman went weak, collapsing into her husband's arms, as Jana North waved her arms and said, "No, no, no! We're only here to complete her file, Mrs. Muncie. We simply want the dental records in her file."
"Then you've found someone-a body-fitting her description?" pressed the husband. "You want to compare her dental records with a corpse."
"No, not exactly," replied Jana.
"What then?"
"We're investigating a possible homicide, Mr. Muncie," began Lucas, careful not to stir anywhere near the truth-a mutilation murder.
"We want to rule your daughter and two other young women out by process of elimination, sir, ma'am," added Jana. "We need you to sign the release form for the records." Jana held out both the form and a pen. "Just sign on the bottom. I'll fill out the rest. It'll expedite matters…for your daughter's good."
"Lies…lies," replied the man. "Examining the dental records means you've got a corpse."
"All right…Thomas!" shouted the wife. "We do what they tell us. We got no choice. We got to cooperate." She cracked the screen door enough to take form and pen inside, where after a moment's examination, she signed.
"If we thought we had your daughter, sir," said Jana through the screen, "we'd simply have you travel downtown with us to identify her remains."
Mrs. Muncie had regained her composure, and Thomas simply walked off. Mrs. Muncie apologized for her husband in a whisper, and then she said, "Her dentist is Dr. Sullivan, 1240 North Belmont. I'll call ahead, so she will know you're coming." Finished, she pushed the form and the pen back through the cracked screen door and into Jana's waiting hands. Through the screen mesh, she added, "I want you people to let me know when Helga has been ruled out like you say, all right?"
"Absolutely, Mrs. Muncie," Jana assured her.
"Absolutely, really? You young people nowadays use that word to mean nothing-bahhh, absolutely! Everybody at that police station tells me they will absolutely get back to me, but it has been a week and not a word until you two show up on my doorstep asking for dental records. Two people I don't know. Where is Detective Ambrose? Where is Detective Sculley?"
Lucas wanted to point out that it hadn't yet been a week, only seventy-seven hours, but he curbed his tongue. Jana handed the woman her card. "You can call me tomorrow afternoon, and any time. Detectives Ambrose and Sculley work for me, Mrs. Muncie."
The woman stared at Jana as if seeing her anew.
Lucas thanked Mrs. Muncie for the name and address of the dentist, and they stepped off her porch. "Moments like this make me feel ill," said Jana. "It's so difficult dealing with the loved ones."
"Empty feeling inside, I know. Makes me feel like a scavenging crow." Lucas stepped up the pace to his waiting car.
Leaning in over the top of the car, Jana said, "We try to get the relatives to forward us all medical and dental records when the case becomes official. Short of that, we try to get them to sign a release, so we can obtain records on our own, but a lot of people at that early stage simply have a psychological block about getting it done, you know?"
"Can't say as I blame them. Can't imagine the pain of losing a child to oblivion, the not knowing, or losing a child to a vicious murderer and knowing, for that matter."
"Not sure which is worse."
They got in the car. Inside, Jana said, "Short of a DNA sample, orthodontia ID is still the most reliable method. Sometimes the teeth are all that survive by the time we uncover the decayed body of a missing person stuffed in a trunk, behind a wall, in a pipe, or anchored below some watering hole, river, or lake."
Lucas backed down the driveway, nodding at her discourse.
She continued, asking, "You hear about that case where we found three bodies within close proximity of one another down on the Brazos?"
"Down around Rosharon?"
"Three prostitutes all murdered by strangulation."
Lucas pointed the car in the right direction and drove for North Belmont. "Yeah, yeah, I recall…all clumped together only twenty or thirty yards apart, killed over a period of weeks."
"Dogs sniffed out the bodies from aboard a flatboat."
"Aboard a boat?" Lucas glanced at her. "I heard they were found in the brush on shore."
"No, no! They were weighted down with dumbbells lashed to them with wire fencing."
"Dogs sniffed them out?"
"Amazing noses those dogs, how they just lean out over the side of the boat and strike on the odor of a decaying body some fourteen, fifteen feet below the surface of running water. Some noses on those babies."
"If memory serves, wasn't one of the victims so badly decomposed you had to call in a forensic anthropologist to reconstruct the facial features over the skull to get a likeness for the papers and TV?"
"Another case, Lucas."
"Shit, after a while, after so many, they begin to blend together. Sad commentary on American life."
"State's talking about renting property from private farms and ranches to build more potter's fields to bury all the Jane and John Does," she said.
"Nahhh…heard they're thinking now of buying up lands around the penitentiary at Huntsville for new fields and putting the inmates to work as grave diggers."
"That'll never happen. Violation of their civil liberties. Can't turn the prison force into a state work force."
"Legislature's sitting now, and they could change that. This is Texas, after all." Lucas swiped the hair from his eyes. "Yeah, I recall the case now," said Lucas of her original question as they turned onto North Belmont Avenue. "Guy doing the killing out at the Brazos park, wasn't he the-"
"Ran the rowboat concession at the lake."
"Right…right sick too."
"Fucker was fat like Gacey, and he gave out free rides to the girls."
"Pelhan, yeah…now sitting on death row, appealing his conviction, right. Tapping into his civil liberties."
Jana confided, "I had the chance to shoot the bastard down like a dog when we busted in on him. He raised a gun to me. I should have let him have it."
"Don't worry. He's bound for the execution chamber- eventually."
"Yeah, but it's the eventually that pisses me off. Ten fucking years eventually, if not more, while the victims' families have to relive their grief and anguish over and over again. Man, I hate the creep's lawyer almost as much as I hate him."
"Understood," said Lucas, squeezing her hand.
"Got to tell you, this is my first case where all we have are eyeballs and teeth to go on."
"Don't forget the salami slices sent to me."
"Strangest nutcase you ever chased, I'll bet, hey, Lucas?"
"Watch for the address, will you? Don't want to miss it."
"By the time we get to the third address on your list, it'll be after hours for dentists."
"Then we'll just have to continue this tomorrow morning, if you're free, that is."
"After Dr. Sullivan's, I'd suggest Mira Lourdes's address."
"Right, it's closer than the Nance place."
The stop at Dr. Sullivan's for Helga Muncie's dental records went quickly, and they pushed on. They found Mira Lourdes's live-in boyfriend at the address in the file, disappointed on learning he was not her husband and so could not grant them access to medical records.
Dwayne Ira Stokes told his own tentative version of how Mira had simply disappeared without a trace. Their last conversation had been about a car that sat glumly neglected out in the driveway, a car she was trying to sell.
Stokes repeated himself a lot, Lucas observed. "My last conversation with her was like over the g'damn phone, and it like centered around that damned cursed car of hers."
"What about the car? Why do you say it was cursed?" asked Lucas.
"Because it was! Like everything that could go wrong with it, like did, man. So finally, I like convinced her to like sell it, you know, put a sign on the damn thing, place an ad in the Penny Saver, see."