“That was a real cop,” Brandon said stiffly.
“Oops,” Shannon grinned.
I made a face. “Fine, but there have been lots of others. Every month or so, you hear about someone somewhere getting caught pretending to be a police officer. And if they catch that many, just think of all the ones they probably don’t catch.”
“She has a point,” Josh said. Brandon shrugged, apparently loath to admit something he couldn’t in good conscience deny.
“Did you find the stove?” I asked, in an effort to change the subject. Brandon sighed.
“Eventually.”
“Stove?” Kate repeated. I explained about the appliances that had been in the house when we bought it, and the substance that had been encrusted on the corner of the stove, then Brandon told the story about how he and Derek had stumbled around the dump for a good, long time looking for the discarded appliances before finally stumbling over them, almost literally.
“They’re downtown at the cop shop. I dropped Derek off at Cortino’s Auto Repair, so he could get his truck back, and then I came out here to officially sign over the skeleton to the ME’s office. They’re on their way.”
“I’ll take you down to the anthropology lab,” Josh said. “But come with me first. I want to show you something.” He gestured Brandon toward the building with the labs. Shannon, Kate, and I tagged along behind. Josh continued the conversation as we walked. “Any word from Dr. Whitaker?”
“Nothing yet,” Brandon answered. “I guess maybe he can’t match the records, and now he has to contact other dentists to see if they can. If he can’t figure it out, then I guess we’ll have to start tracking down dentists outside the state.”
“Things would be a whole lot easier if she was a local woman,” Kate remarked.
Josh nodded. “But if she was local, we’d know that she was missing. Waterfield isn’t the sort of place where someone just disappears and nobody notices. It’s more likely that Avery’s right and she was a runaway, maybe, or somebody on her way to or from Canada. Maybe she was hitch-hiking and got picked up by someone who killed her.”
“Someone local,” Shannon said. And added, before anyone could challenge her statement, “How else would the killer know that it was safe to bury her in the crawlspace under the Murphy house?”
“And how else would the killer be around to know that the bones had been found now?” I added.
Brandon grimaced. “I grew up here, you know. I really hate the idea of having to arrest someone I know for murder. Arresting them for DUI or fishing without a license is one thing, but murder…!”
“Maybe you’ll feel different once you know who it is,” Kate said encouragingly as Josh pulled open the door into the lab building and stood aside to let us all file in ahead of him. “And even if you don’t, I know you’ll do the right thing anyway.”
Before Brandon could answer, his cell phone rang. Excusing himself, he stepped back outside to take the call. “Probably the ME’s office to tell me they’re running late. I’ll catch up.”
When we got up to the computer lab, someone else was at Josh’s computer. Ricky Swanson was manning the keyboard, head bent over his work, fingers flying, totally absorbed. When he finally registered our footsteps on the concrete floor, he jerked around, startled, blue eyes peering out at us through strands of dark hair.
“It’s just us,” I said needlessly.
“Hi, Ricky,” Shannon added. “Wow.” She put a hand on his shoulder but looked past him to the face revolving slowly on the screen, her voice hushing. “Is that what she looked like?”
Ricky shrugged.
“ Wayne says these thing are not very accurate,” I offered, also looking past Ricky to the finished bust. “But this looks like a real person, anyway.”
It did. She also looked very different from earlier, when Josh had been the one in charge of creating-or recreating-her. Blue eyes were set in a pale face with high cheekbones and a perfect nose. Ricky had made the eyes deep set and slightly almond shaped, and had given his creation long, dark eyelashes and brows, and a bow-shaped mouth. Long, dark hair framed the face.
“Blue?” Josh said. “Why did you give her blue eyes?”
I guessed the reason Ricky had chosen to give his creation blue eyes was probably that his own eyes were blue. He didn’t admit that, though. “Looks right,” he just said, with a shrug.
“Are you sure she was this young?”
The girl on the computer didn’t look a day older than twenty, and might have been as young as fifteen or sixteen.
“No way to know. But you said she had long hair and a navel ring, so I don’t think she was very old.”
“She looks familiar,” I said, tilting my head. “Even more than when you were playing with her, Josh. I have no idea who she is, but I think I’ve seen her before.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Kate scoffed as Ricky looked from one to the other of us. “You’ve only been in Waterfield a couple of months, Avery. There’s no way you could have seen her.”
“True,” I admitted.
“Maybe she looks like someone else,” Shannon suggested. “Like an actress or TV personality. Angelina Jolie. Ashley Judd. The weather girl on channel eight.”
“Maybe.” We all looked at her again. “I think her mouth needs to be different.”
“How so?” Ricky wanted to know. I said I thought it needed to be bigger and not so pursed, and Ricky did his best to form what I wanted. The result was more Ashley Judd than Angelina Jolie, but Shannon nodded.
We all contemplated the screen, our heads cocked to one side, then the other.
“I don’t know her,” Kate said eventually.
“Me, either,” Shannon admitted. “For a second there, I thought I recognized something, but now I’m not sure. Maybe I’ve been looking at her for too long.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “She still looks familiar to me.”
Kate turned to me. “But you’re the only one of us-except Ricky-who couldn’t possibly have seen her when she was alive, so if you recognize her, then she’s probably all wrong.”
I shrugged. Maybe, maybe not. Behind us, at the far end of the room, the door opened, and Brandon came in. “… when I leave here,” Brandon said. We heard his shoes move across the concrete floor, the muted thumps of police-issue Oxfords.
Kate, Shannon, and I moved aside to give him an unobstructed view of Ricky’s reconstruction. Its creator looked a little defiant, his eyes furtively peering through the overlong bangs, but his jaw pugnacious.
Brandon stopped in front of the table. As I watched, the color leached slowly out of his cheeks.
16
The phone in his hand quacked, but Brandon didn’t react. For a second, it looked as if he was going to faint. I moved discreetly out of the way.
Then he pulled himself together and spoke into the phone again. “Boss? I’ll call you right back.” He looked around. “Who did this?”
We looked at each other. After a second, Ricky admitted that he had.
“Who’s this?” Brandon gestured at the screen.
“It’s the woman from the crawlspace,” I said, while Josh explained about the forensic reconstruction software. Slowly, a bit of color crept back into Brandon ’s cheeks.
“Sorry.” He sounded sheepish. “I knew who she was… it was just coming face-to-face with her like this.”
“Knew? How did you know?” I asked, at the same time as Ricky said, “Who is she?”
Brandon explained that Wayne had called him to say that the skeleton had been identified by Dr. Whitaker. “It’s Holly White.”
For a second, no one spoke.
“I thought she was in Hollywood,” I said.
“So did I,” Brandon answered.
“Who’s Holly White?” Josh wanted to know, looking from one to the other of us.
“ Brandon ’s girlfriend in high school,” I answered for him. “They went to prom together. I saw her picture in the newspaper yesterday. You did, too, remember? I showed it to you?”