Shattered Image (5 page)

A
fter my little campout on the patio, I decided I needed to get my rear into gear before I was going to be able to get my head together. One of the rooms in my house is set aside as a weight room with a bench and rack and a couple of machines for back and leg work, a roman chair for abs and low back and a pulley set up for more arm and chest work.

I suited up in my black cotton sweatpants and racerback top and did a fifteen-minute warm-up on the recumbent stationary bike. Thoroughly warmed up, I did a full set of stretches and hit the weights. I hadn’t been in the gym for days, so I went at it hard, doing a full-body workout, supersetting everything for maximum cardio benefit. When I was done with that, I got back on the recumbent bike and did another thirty minutes.

I was dripping in sweat when I was done, but I felt a hundred percent better—mentally and physically. I got into a steaming-hot shower and washed everything out of my system—at least temporarily.

Refreshed from my exercise and hot shower, I put on a clean pair of jeans and socks, a white cotton T-shirt and my favorite pointy-toed boots and went to the studio.

I sat on the stool in front of my drafting table and began to make a list of everything I would need to take with me to Hawaii. I would need a case in which to carry the cast I would make of the skull. I began to list other tools and supplies to pack.

I sat back and took a deep breath. Who was I kidding? What I would need most of all was the spiritual fortitude to face this task and all that it meant to me. I would need that to go back into the jungles of Vietnam in my mind.

I set my pen down on the drafting board and got the phone instead. It was time to call Reverend Iordani. I needed to walk and talk.

When Jack died from a sudden and unexpected heart attack six years ago, my world came apart like a house of cards. Reverend Iordani used to walk with me along the riverbank under the cypress trees. I don’t remember much of it. Life for me then existed in a fog, but I remembered the cypress trees and their peaceful effect.

I sat on a bench under the great spreading branches of one of those peaceful trees and waited. True to form and ten minutes late—they call it Greek time—Reverend Iordani came strolling down a grassy bank that led from the street to the trail along the river. He beamed at me and waved.

I got up and began to walk toward him. I kissed his hand and then we greeted in the traditional Greek way with the exchange of three kisses. As we began to walk, we talked about my two most recent cases: the woman under the cottonwoods and the one just discovered upriver on Red Bud
Isle. Reverend Iordani listened carefully, complimented me on my hard work and efforts and asked me about Mike.

Then he stopped under a large tree and said, “Toni, this isn’t why you called me, so tell me what this is really about.”

“Irini called me the other day. They think they’ve found Ted’s remains in Vietnam.”

The reverend knew all about Ted. Irini lived just outside of town in Dripping Springs, and she came to our church. He knew Irini well.

“Wow,” he almost whispered. He said, “May his memory be eternal.”

He had a hushed sound to his voice—a peaceful, calm demeanor. All of this was part of his normal way, but now it was more pronounced.

“They can’t make a positive ID on his remains for a lot of reasons, but there’s enough of the skull for a reconstruct,” I told him.

“That’s the only way they’ll know for sure?”

I nodded and looked down at my feet, making curlicue shapes in the dirt with the tip of my boot.

The reverend raised his eyebrows, stroked his close-cut beard and said simply, “I see.”

We made our way to a bench a few feet down the trail. Reverend Iordani’s counsel had helped me heal many wounds—wounds from ’Nam, wounds from difficult cases and wounds from Jack’s death. The reverend was twenty years younger than me and still raising his children, but he had spiritual wisdom, and it was wisdom I needed right now. We sat and began to talk about what I had been told about Ted’s remains. When I had finished with all of it, the reverend took another deep breath.

“Well, of course you have to do it,” he said.

I nodded. “I know that, but I need help to get through it. To go to Vietnam again, so to speak.”

He nodded. “Toni, you’re a spiritual person. I know you read the scripture and keep a strict rule of meditative prayer. I also know that you read the works of the spiritual fathers and continue to expand your knowledge of our faith, but there’s one thing I notice about you lately.”

I waited a moment for him to gather his thoughts.

He spoke slowly and softly, “All the work you do is great work. Your work is bringing peace to a lot of people and their relatives who are still on this side of life, but you never interact with any of these people anymore.”

“What do you mean, Reverend?”

“Toni, you’ve become disconnected from the living in the results of your service. It seems now your only connection is what you do for the dead. You were able to deal with the things you experienced in Vietnam by focusing on your service there, on its results and by focusing on others. Many times you’ve told me the stories of the relatives of the soldiers and how much it meant to them that you had been there when their loved ones died.”

“I know.”

“With this work you do, I think you’ve found a way lately to anesthetize yourself from that a little.”

“I see what you mean,” I said. It was hard to hear, but I realized that what he said was true. It was easier to deal with the pain of what I had seen and done in Vietnam and in my work here by distancing myself from it.

“Now it’s hitting close to home again with Teddy,” Reverend Iordani continued. “It’s hitting close to home and your thoughts are about what it will mean to you and what you will go through. Focus needs to be redirected to Irini, Greg
ory and Eleni, and what it will mean to them to finally have this resolved. Your service to others is the focus—away from yourself and to the needs of those you serve. It is only through selflessness that we can heal our internal pain.”

“Yes,” I said, looking down at the crushed granite on the trail. I pushed some of it around with the toe of my boot. Easier to say and to understand than to do.

He placed his hand gently on mine.

“I want you to go with me this afternoon. I have a visit to make to a local seniors’ home. I want you to meet some people.”

Maria Pappas was seventy-eight and her husband, George, was eighty-two. They were both small, frail people. Maria was only about five-one and George was maybe five-four, tops. They both had thick, dark, coarse hair peppered lightly with gray. George didn’t know anybody anymore and couldn’t do anything for himself. He lived at Riverview Assisted Living. Maria lived there with him and waited on him hand and foot. She had to do everything for him.

Their little apartment was very nicely decorated. It consisted of a sitting room and a kitchenette with a small table and two chairs, a bedroom and a bath. It was small, but Maria had made it warm and cozy with her furniture. Many beautiful pictures hung on the walls around us. An old and well-used Bible rested on a table near the door.

Reverend Iordani said some special prayers and then we all sat down in the sitting room to visit. Unhampered by the kitchenette’s limited resources, Maria had made us a wonderful snack of koulouria—Greek butter cookies—served us Greek coffee, took care of all of George’s needs, and all of ours. I tried to help her, as did Reverend Iordani,
but she wouldn’t have it. At seventy-eight, she had more energy then I did thirty years ago.

She spoke of the past, the good times with George. Her hands trembled when she lifted the coffee cup. She spent the entire visit reminiscing about those days. If George made a sound or moved, she attended to him immediately. I saw then that there was fatigue there, too, but she would not and could not give up. Something inside her gave her that energy—the energy to continue. Her energy came from love—selfless love.

Reverend Iordani was right. I had become disconnected. In turning too inward, I had become selfish with my service. Suddenly it occurred to me—watching Maria tend to George and listening to her talk about their old days together—I thought about Irini trapped in those days of Vietnam all this time, never able to fully move on. To move on would be to leave Teddy there, and she could never leave Teddy alone, any more than Maria Pappas would leave George. This wasn’t just about freeing Ted, it was about freeing Irini—and Irini could never be free until Ted came home where she knew he would be safe forever.

I
had laid down the initial layer of clay on the Red Bud victim and had stepped back to check it all over. I would leave for Hawaii in less than a week. I wanted to get this sculpture completed before I left, so photos of the face could be disseminated on television and in the papers, and a possible ID made while I was gone.

The face was round, with broad cheeks that had a slight flatness to them. The nose was short, narrow at the bridge and then flaring to become much wider toward the end. Her brow line was straight from the nose bridge, only arching slightly over the eyes. Her rounded face circled the broad cheeks to a soft, small chin. It wasn’t a glamorous or particularly remarkable face, but it was a sweet one. I was getting to know her and beginning to feel an even greater sorrow at thinking how this lovely woman could have been killed and dumped this way.

I was now at the stage where the intuitive part of my work would begin. The science of tissue depths had been
applied to all areas of the face. Normally, I would take into account clothing found with the victim and any other personal articles to give me an impression of the person as I finalized the face, but in this case, there was nothing but a jumble of bones in a makeshift grave, and one sad scrap of flowered cloth.

I thought about what Leo had said about the grave site and the method of death, and about the kind of killing she thought it was. This woman’s identity would tell us a lot about her life, with whom she might have been involved, or who she would have encountered that could have done this to her. Who was she and where had she been buried for those years before she turned up on the river’s edge at Red Bud Isle? Were it not for an early-morning kayaker, her bones would have washed down the Colorado River in anonymity.

I sat on the stool in front of my workbench just looking at the bust as it was. I sat there in my blue-jean cutoffs and an old, faded red T-shirt, with my bare feet propped up on the rungs of the stool. I let the image of the face as it was permeate my thoughts until I felt that I could “see” the person as she had been—until I could feel something of who she was.

When I look at faces I see shapes and the way those shapes come together to form the image of that person. Most eyewitnesses’ identifications of criminals are faulty, not only because of suggestions that might have been made, but mostly because of the way most people observe other people. They “snapshot” the view and then they do something that totally distorts the memory—they make a judgment about what they saw. They form an opinion.

I decided, based on my years of experience with faces, how I thought her eyes and nose should look—on the aspect of her expression. I had to breathe some artistic life
into the static clay reconstruct. I would work through the night to finish this one. I would have to add more clay to smooth the features of the face across the tissue-depth markers, without adding any depth that would distort the image. At the same time, some knowledge and experience would come into play to interpret what had been there before she died. It would be early morning before I was through with all that, but there would be time to catch up on sleep on the way to Hawaii next week. Meanwhile, there was hard work to be done and a lost woman to be found.

Drew Smith had called and asked if he could come by. There was a development in our Cottonwood case. I told him to come on over, and I went into the kitchen to put on a pot of tea. I checked the cookie jar and discovered that my son had managed to actually leave some of my sugar cookies there. There were enough for Drew and me to share while we drank our tea. I decided to brew a really good green tea with jasmine. It was one I had discovered recently and I thought Drew might like it. He was a real tea drinker, and it was difficult for me to find something original for him to drink.

While the water heated to a boil, I went into the other room to put on something more decent than cutoffs and a faded old T-shirt. I changed into a pair of good jeans and a black round-neck knit top.

The whistle on the teapot began to go off just as the doorbell rang. I turned down the fire on the stove and went to the door. Drew stood on my front porch in jeans and a red golf shirt with a blue windbreaker over it, and a manila file in his hand.

“Casual attire?” I said.

“Officially off duty today.”

“Oh. So, of course you’re working on your day off.”

“Contrary to popular titles, death does not take any holidays.”

I smiled and motioned for him to come in. He looked toward the kitchen and sniffed thoughtfully, a question in his brow.

“Green tea with jasmine,” I said.

He smiled. “Now, that’s a new one for me.”

Yes! I thought. Out loud I said, “
And
my homemade sugar cookies.”

Drew shook his head and smiled. “Now, Toni, you are going to just spoil me.”

“It gets better,” I said. “It’s your mama’s recipe for the cookies.”

“Oh no. I hope you don’t have very many of them, because I have just managed to take off five pounds I gained from slacking off at the gym last month. I had to work out double time for two solid weeks. If you’ve got Mama’s sugar cookies, I could regain the whole five pounds in one sitting.” And then he laughed.

Now I shook my head. “Well, lucky for you, my son was over here the other day and he polished off quite a few of them before I managed to run him off.”

“Thank goodness,” he chuckled. “All the time at the gym will not be wasted now.”

He smiled that great smile with his gentle overbite. Drew had married when he was twenty-one and divorced before he was twenty-seven. His wife had left him for someone else. Drew said it was because she couldn’t handle his police work—he had been a state trooper then.
Still, I wondered what that crazy woman must have been thinking. Drew was a treasure. I hated to be a matchmaker, but I just knew there must be a nice young woman out there for him somewhere.

I plated the cookies and poured our tea. Drew laid the file on the table and took off his windbreaker, hung it on the back of his chair and waited. He would never sit down until all the ladies in the room were seated. I sat and then he sat. I made a mental note to look much harder to find a nice girl for him. He would have been embarrassed to know that, but he would never know. I could be sneaky when I wanted to be.

We chatted for a while. He asked how Michael was and I asked about his mother. Mama Beatrice was doing well, he told me, but she was thinking about leaving Louisiana and moving to Austin to be closer to Drew. She was getting up in years and thought that living closer to her son would be wise. Drew’s sister lived in San Antonio and both of his brothers worked in Houston. Mama Beatrice didn’t like either of those places as well as Austin. Plus, I knew that Drew was the one of her children who took care of things for her.

I told Drew I’d be happy to help her find a place and relocate. I would love to have my friend Beatrice in the city. Drew said he’d take me up on that, and he’d keep me posted on her plans.

“So, what is new on our cottonwood case that has caused you to work on your day off?”

“She’s been identified.”

I set my teacup down. This was always the moment for which I worked and waited.

“Her name is Lisa Wells.”

I sat still for a moment. This young girl with whom I had become so connected and whose face had come to life
again under my fingertips—this young girl was reconnected with her name and her history.

“How did you find out who she was?”

“Her mother saw the photos of the bust on the local TV news and recognized her. She called the number on the screen, and wanted to come in and identify her daughter.”

I sighed a deep sigh. “Oh man.”

“Yeah. I had to explain to her as gently as I could that it would not be possible. Then I explained that I would need her daughter’s dental records and we would confirm the ID.”

“How did she take it when you explained?”

“Pretty hard. I cushioned the news as much as I could, but there aren’t a lot of sweet ways you can tell a mother that her daughter’s remains consist of bones that lay exposed in a cottonwood grove for months and have been picked clean by buzzards.”

I ran my hand through my hair and sighed again.

“Sorry, Toni.”

“No, it’s not what you said. I deal with that truth on almost every case I have. It’s…just thinking about that mother.”

“Yeah.”

“Where was the victim from?”

“She lived in Dallas with her boyfriend, but the mother, Gladys, lives in Athens, just east of Dallas.”

“So, do we have any clue who killed Lisa Wells?”

“We do. Her mother says she was living with a man named Johnathan Rowell. The police had been called to their home numerous times for domestic violence. Lisa had been hospitalized several times for broken bones. Each time, she went back to him and charges were dropped.”

“Great. So, has he been charged yet?”

“Now wait.”

I sighed.

“Let me finish. We collected as much evidence as we could from the crime scene. The body had been wrapped in a blanket, and we checked that against fibers we took from the trunk of Rowell’s car.”

“That’s a long shot. Plus, if the blanket belonged to them, why
wouldn’t
fibers from it be in the car?”

“The blanket didn’t belong to them.” Drew smiled.

“Give,” I said, shooting him a look.

“I showed the blanket to Mrs. Wells when she came down to claim the remains. She said she didn’t recognize that particular blanket, but that it looked similar to something that Rita’s mother had made.”

“And Rita is…?”

“Lisa’s best friend. Her mother handweaves blankets, rugs, you get the picture.”

“So…”

“So, I contacted Rita—Rita Gallekamp—Rita says the blanket was hers. It was new and her mom had made it for her. She brought it over to Lisa’s the night before Lisa disappeared. Rita’s husband was out of town, and Johnny was out playing cards and drinking with his friends, and Rita and Lisa had decided to watch a movie on TV, eat popcorn, and have some fun—you know, a girls’ night in. Rita gets cold easily and she brought the blanket because she said Lisa’s place was always cold. Johnny kept the apartment cold, and he’d get mad if Lisa turned the heat up.”

“Cheap?”

“Yep.”

“So, the place was always cold and she brought her blanket.”

“She also wanted to show it to Lisa because it was new and her mom had just made it for her and given it to her as a birthday gift.”

“So, how did it wind up wrapped around Lisa’s discarded body?”

“Rita left the blanket there by accident. She was going to go back and get it the next day, but then Lisa disappeared. She asked Johnny to look for it, but it was gone. Johnny told Rita that maybe Lisa had taken it with her. Rita’s mother was real mad about the blanket. Rita kept thinking that Lisa would call her, but they never heard from her, and Rita never got the blanket back.”

“Any chance Rita was involved in this?”

“Not in my book. Rita is happily married, and she was Lisa’s best friend since they were eight. According to Lisa’s mother, Rita couldn’t stand Johnny, and she had begged Lisa to leave him a million times. She still hates him. Also, she and her husband have since moved to San Antonio—the husband got transferred.”

“Hmm. Interesting. Still, the fiber is a long shot.”

Drew smiled. “We also have Johnny’s credit records for the time period when Lisa would have been dumped in that cottonwood grove. Hutto is a long ways from Dallas.”

“So, you’re looking for any receipts that tie him to the area near Hutto.”

“Bingo. Lisa’s mother said that to her knowledge they did not make any trips anywhere within three months before Lisa disappeared. Lisa and Johnny didn’t have much money, and he spent what they did have on drinking and playing cards with his friends.”

“So, you might have a chance if you can tie him to this area.”

“Right. Also, that handmade blanket was real different.”

“What do you mean?”

“State Crime Lab says the fibers are very unique, so a match would be a good, solid match.”

“Drew, he’s probably cleaned that car a million times since then.”

“We only need one fiber match to nail the creep.”

I nodded. “I sure hope that one fiber is there.”

“That’s not all I have up my sleeve, Toni.”

“What else?”

“We Luminoled that car—the trunk, the back seat, the carpets—all of it.”

Luminol was a chemical the police used to spray on suspicious areas in a crime scene, or somewhere they suspected bore a relationship to a crime—like a suspect’s car. Luminol attached itself to blood proteins, and when illuminated by the right kind of light, it fluoresced to reveal those blood proteins. That stuff would show blood proteins on a wall where the blood had been scrubbed and painted over with latex paint. It was a great forensic tool.

“So, you found something with the Luminol?”

Drew nodded. “There were some spots in the trunk, and we took samples. The lab analyzed all of it.”

“I hope it’s her blood.”

“Meanwhile, I didn’t give up on his credit card records.”

Drew had patience, too. He would never push a case to the D.A. until he thought he had it airtight. Early in his career, a young and overzealous Drew Smith had made that mistake and the killer had gotten off, never to be tried again. Drew had never forgotten the sting of double jeopardy, and he carried that sting into the diligence he brought to each case he handled.

So we knew her name was Lisa Wells. We knew who her mother was and how long Lisa had been missing. We knew where she had lived and with whom. We knew who we thought had killed her. We had gone from being completely mystified about the death of an anonymous woman whose remains were found in a grove of cottonwood trees, to knowing all these things about her—and we had made that jump to light-speed by televising a picture of the bust I had made from her skull. These were the kind of results I dreamed of on every case I worked.

“You found something in the credit card records.”

“Well, Toni, let’s not get ahead of my story.” He smiled mischievously and sipped his tea.