“Besides outrageously tempting the taste buds. Sounds good. Need help?”
“Nah, you know my culinary expertise is nonexistent. I’ll do frozen.”
“Eve.”
She glanced over her shoulder.
He was frowning, and his gaze was narrowed. “It’s just Jane leaving? You’ve been pretty quiet the last couple weeks. Nothing else is wrong?”
And Joe noticed everything. She was tempted to deny it and put him off, but she couldn’t do it. They had been together for years, and their relationship was based not only on love but honesty. “Nothing that can’t be fixed.” She shrugged. “I guess I’m just going through some kind of emotional adjustment. I wanted everything to stay the same. I wanted to keep Jane close to me. Mine. Though I always knew she didn’t really belong to me. She was too independent and was ten going on thirty when we adopted her. And Bonnie was mine, but then she was taken.” She smiled. “And that spirit, Bonnie, who comes to visit me now and then is very much her own self now. Beloved, but only flashes of being mine.” Her smile faded. “But I’ll take it. I just want to keep her with me, too. I don’t want anything to change.”
“Why should that change?”
“It shouldn’t change. That’s what I told Bonnie. Nothing has to change.”
His brows rose. “Ah, your Bonnie. She said something to disturb you? When?”
“A couple weeks ago. She scared me. She said she didn’t know how long she’d be able to keep coming to me. She said everything was going to change.”
“How? Why?”
“She didn’t know. She just wanted to warn me.”
“Very frustrating.” He chuckled. “If your daughter has to pay you visits, I’d just as soon she not upset you like this.”
“That’s what I told her.”
He got to his feet and took her in his arms. “And so you should. Send her to me, and I’ll reinforce it.” He kissed her. “Though I doubt if that’s going to happen. She only appeared to me a couple times just to make sure I knew that you weren’t hallucinating.” He looked directly into her eyes. “I know you need Bonnie. She’s the anchor that keeps you here with me. You were spiraling downward and almost died before you had your ghost visits from Bonnie. She brought you back, and I thank God for her.” He paused. “But if for some reason she stopped coming, I want you to know that we’ll make it all right. I have so much love for you, Eve. I’m full of it, you’re my center. You always have been and always will be. If your Bonnie drifts away from you, I’ll just pour more of that love toward you. I’ll find a way to stop you from hurting. I promise you.”
He meant every word. The knight was about to mount his stallion and launch himself into battle, she realized. God, she was lucky.
She gazed up into his face, the strong square contour, the well-shaped lips, the tea-colored eyes that held both warmth and intelligence. So familiar, yet so new, every time she looked at him. “Hey, I’m just having a few twinges, nothing major. It just seemed when Jane got on that plane that the changes were starting. A sort of harbinger of things to come.” She pushed him away and turned back to the freezer. “But change can be good, too, can’t it? After all, Bonnie wasn’t definite about anything. Forget it.” She took out the lasagna. “Jane told me she’d call me as soon as she got off the plane in London. I think I’ll start working on the new reconstruction after dinner, so that I’ll be awake when she calls…”
* * *
But Eve’s cell phone rang before she even finished loading the dishwasher after dinner.
“Sheriff Nalchek,” she told Joe with a sigh. “You finish here. I may be more than a few minutes.”
“Dedication and enthusiasm,” Joe repeated with a grin. “At least he waited until after dinner.”
“Not necessarily. California is three hours earlier.” She punched the access button. “Eve Duncan.”
“John Nalchek.” His deep voice was brusque. “Sorry to bother you, Ms. Duncan. I just wanted to make sure that you’d received the skull for reconstruction today.”
“Yes, FedEx is usually pretty reliable.”
“What do you think of her?”
“I haven’t opened the box yet, Sheriff Nalchek.”
“Oh.” A disappointed silence. “But you’ll do it tonight?”
“Possibly.” No promises, or he might be calling her in the middle of the night. “Or tomorrow.”
Another silence. “Okay. I don’t want to rush you.”
The hell he didn’t. “There’s no rushing a reconstruction, Sheriff. There are several stages, measuring and processes that have to be done before the actual sculpting. It will take as long as it takes.”
“What stages?”
She tried to be patient. “The first stage is repairing, then I go to the measurement stage, which is vitally important. I cut eraser sticks as markers to the proper measurements and glue them onto their specific points on the face. There are twenty points in a skull for which there are known tissue depths. Facial-tissue depth has been found to be fairly consistent in people the same age, sex, race, and weight.”
“What happens next?”
“I take strips of plasticine and apply them between the markers, then build up all the tissue-depth points.”
“It sounds kind of iffy, like connect the dots.”
“If you wish to simplify it. I guarantee it’s not simple, Nalchek. And that’s only the beginning.”
“Sorry, I wouldn’t have sent her to you if I hadn’t believed you could do the job. But you are going to put her before the others on your list?”
“I told you I would.” She remembered what she had told Joe. Dedication and enthusiasm might work miracles for that poor child. “I know that you probably had a shock when you found that skeleton. It’s never pleasant. But you have to remember that we can do something about it if we work together. We can find her parents, we can find the person who killed her.”
“I wasn’t shocked, ma’am. I was in Afghanistan, and I worked as an EMT several months before I went to work with law enforcement. There’s nothing much I haven’t seen.” He paused. “And I told you yesterday that I know I can help her if you give me a face. I know it.”
His voice was so passionate that Eve asked, “Really? And how do you know it?”
“Sometimes you just know. Sometimes you—” He stopped. “Or maybe I just want it so bad. I looked down at that little girl’s skeleton all covered in dirt and mud, and I felt like she was calling to me. It was so damn strong, it rocked me. She was so … small and fragile. I wanted to pick her up and take her somewhere safe, where no one would ever hurt her again. Crazy, huh?”
“Not so crazy.” All her impatience had disappeared with his words. When her own daughter had disappeared, she would have wanted someone like Nalchek to be hunting for her. It was a cold world, and men who cared were rare and to be valued. “What can you tell me about her?”
“Nothing much. We think she’s nine or a little younger. She died of a blow to the head. She’s Caucasian, and she’s been buried for a good eight years or more. I’ve checked the missing persons reports at the time, and there’s nothing that matches up to the location or the time frame.”
“She might have been transported from almost anywhere in the state or beyond.”
“I know that. You asked me what I knew. I didn’t think you wanted guesses, ma’am.”
“No, I don’t.” Nine years old. Buried eight years. If she’d lived, she’d have gone to high-school proms by now. She might have had a boyfriend or had a crush on some rock star or movie actor. She’d missed so much during those eight years. “Thank you. It may help to know something about her.”
“I thought it might. I read a couple articles about you before I sent you the skull. You were quoted as saying that you liked to do anything that brought you closer to the victim. You said for some reason it seemed to make the sculpting process easier. The reporter made a lot of that remark.”
“He was looking for a hook for his story. I made the mistake of giving it to him.”
“It was a good hook. It was what made me send the skull to you. I liked the idea of someone’s caring enough to want to get close to a victim.”
“I feel sympathy for any victim, but the closeness of which I spoke only occurs during the actual sculpting process. That’s really the only part of reconstruction that has the potential for creativity.”