Homicides were rarely solved unless the victim could be identified. Kyle had done a number of successful facial reconstructions in the past, though never working at such a disadvantage. This was a rare case. And yet it was a finite task: the pieces of bone had been given to him; he had only to put them together.
When Kyle began working with the skull in his laboratory at the college, the victim had been dead for approximately four months, through the near-tropical heat of a southern New Jersey summer. In his laboratory, Kyle kept the air-conditioning at 65 degrees Fahrenheit. He played CDs: Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier” and the “Goldberg Variations,” performed by Glenn Gould, most suited him. Music of brilliance and precision, rapid, dazzling as a waterfall, that existed solely in the present moment; music without emotion, and without associations.
The hair! It was fair, sun-bleached brown with shades of red, still showing a distinct ripply wave. Six swaths had been gathered at the crime scene and brought to his laboratory. Kyle placed them on a windowsill, where, when he glanced up from his exceedingly close work with tweezers and bits of bone, he could see them clearly. The longest swath was seven inches. The victim had worn her hair long, to her shoulders. From time to time, Kyle reached out to touch it.
Eight days: it would take longer than Kyle anticipated. For he was working with exasperating slowness, and he was making many more small mistakes than he was accustomed to.
His hands were steady as always. His eyes, strengthened by bifocal lenses, were as reliable as always.
Yet it seemed to be happening that when Kyle was away from the laboratory, his hands began to shake just perceptibly. And once he was away from the unsparing fluorescent lights, his vision wasn’t so sharp.
He would mention this to no one. And no one would notice. No doubt it would go away.
Already by the end of the second day he’d tired of Bach performed by Glenn Gould. The pianist’s humming ceased to be eccentric and became unbearable. The intimacy of another’s thoughts, like a bodily odor, you don’t really want to share. He tried listening to other CDs, piano music, unaccompanied cello, then gave up to work in silence. Except, of course, there was no silence: traffic noises below, airplanes taking off and landing at Newark International Airport, the sound of his own blood pulsing in his ears.
Strange: the killer didn’t bury her.
Strange: to hate another human being so much.
Hope to Christ she was dead by the time he began with the ax...
“Now you have a friend, dear. Kyle is your friend.”
The victim had been between eighteen and thirty years old, it was estimated. A size four, petite, they’d estimated her rotted clothing to have been. Size six, a single open-toed shoe found in the gravel pit. She’d had a small rib cage, small pelvis.
No way of determining if she’d ever been pregnant or given birth.
No rings had been found amid the scattered bones. Only just a pair of silver hoop earrings, pierced. The ears of the victim had vanished as if they’d never been; only the earrings remained, dully gleaming.
“Maybe he took your rings. You must have had rings.”
The skull had a narrow forehead and a narrow, slightly receding chin. The cheekbones were high and sharp. This would be helpful in sculpting the face. Distinctive characteristics. She’d had an overbite. Kyle couldn’t know if her nose had been long or short, a pug nose or narrow at the tip. In the sketches they’d experiment with different noses, hairstyles, gradations of eye color.
“Were you pretty? ‘Pretty’ gets you into trouble.”
On the windowsill, the dead girl’s hair lay in lustrous sinuous strands.
Kyle reached out to touch it.
Marriage: a mystery.
For how was it possible that a man with no temperament for a long-term relationship with one individual, no evident talent for domestic life, family, children, can nonetheless remain married, happily it appeared, for more than four decades?
Kyle laughed. “Somehow, it happened.”
He was the father of three children within this marriage, and he’d loved them. Now they were grown — grown somewhat distant — and gone from Wayne, New Jersey. The two eldest were parents themselves.
They, and their mother, knew nothing of their shadowy half sister.
Nor did Kyle. He’d lost touch with the mother twenty-six years ago.
His relationship with his wife, Vivian, had never been very passionate. He’d wanted a wife, not a mistress. He wouldn’t have wished to calculate how long it had been since they’d last made love. Even when they’d been newly married their lovemaking had been awkward, for Vivian had been so inexperienced, sweetly naive and shy — that had seemed part of her appeal. Often they’d made love in the dark. Few words passed between them. If Vivian spoke, Kyle became distracted. Often he’d watched her sleep, not wanting to wake her. Lightly he’d touched her, stroked her unconscious body, and then himself.
Now he was sixty-seven. Not old, he knew that. Yet the last time he’d had sex had been with a woman he’d met at a conference in Pittsburgh the previous April; before that it had been with a woman one third his age, of ambiguous identity, possibly a prostitute.
Though she hadn’t asked him for money. She’d introduced herself to him on the street saying she’d seen him interviewed on New Jersey Network, hadn’t she? At the end of the single evening they spent together she’d lifted his hand to kiss the fingers in a curious gesture of homage and self-abnegation.
“Dr. Cassity. I revere a man like you.”
The crucial bones were all in place: cheeks, above the eyes, jaw, chin. These determined the primary contours of the face. The space between the eyes, for instance. Width of the forehead in proportion to that of the face at the level of the nose, for instance. Beneath the epidermal mask, the irrefutable structure of bone. Kyle was beginning to see her now.
The eye holes of the skull regarded him with equanimity. Whatever question he would put to it, Kyle would have to answer himself.
Dr. Cassity. He had a Ph.D., not an M.D. To his sensitive ears there was always something subtly jeering, mocking, in the title “Doctor.”
He’d given up asking his graduate students to call him “Kyle.” Now that he was older, and had his reputation, none of these young people could bring themselves to speak to him familiarly. They wanted to revere him, he supposed. They wanted the distance of age between them, an abyss not to be crossed.
Dr. Cassity. In Kyle’s family, this individual had been his grandfather. An internist in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, whose field of specialization had been gastroenterology. As a boy, Kyle had revered his grandfather and had wanted to be a doctor. He’d been fascinated by the books in his grandfather’s library: massive medical texts that seemed to hold the answers to all questions, anatomical drawings and color plates revealing the extraordinary interiors of human bodies. Many of these were magnified, reproduced in bright livid color that had looked moist. There were astonishing photographs of naked bodies, bodies in the process of being dissected. Kyle’s heart beat hard as he stared at these, in secret. Decades later, Kyle sometimes felt a stirring of erotic interest, a painful throb in the groin, reminded by some visual cue of those old forbidden medical texts in his long-deceased grandfather’s library.
Beginning at about the age of eleven, he’d secretly copied some of the drawings and plates by placing tracing paper over them and using a felt-tip pen. Later, he began to draw his own figures without the aid of tracing paper. He would discover that, where fascination gripped him, he was capable of executing surprising likenesses. In school art classes he was singled out for praise. He became most adept at rapid charcoal sketches, executed with half-shut eyes. And later, sculpting busts, figures. His hands moving swiftly, shaping and reshaping clay.