176454.fb2 The Face of the Assassin - читать онлайн бесплатно полную версию книги . Страница 4

The Face of the Assassin - читать онлайн бесплатно полную версию книги . Страница 4

Chapter 4

Glancing tentatively one more time at Alice, Haber leaned forward, carefully placed the box on the mesquite slab in front of her, and opened it, revealing the underside of a human skull cradled in a nest of shredded paper. Inserting her thumb into the foramen magnum on the underside of the skull, she lifted it out of the box. With her other hand, she took out the skull’s detached mandible, its horseshoe-shaped lower jaw.

With an odd expertise, she put the mandible just behind her suntanned bare knee, its two sides straddling her thigh like a beret, the teeth pointing away from her. Then she turned the skull upright, facing Bern, and held it on her thighs.

“It’s in good shape,” she offered, as if this were an audition. She looked down at the top of the skull.

He had already noticed that. It was in excellent shape. Rare. It looked as if it had been harvested from a hospital for academic purposes. Usually by the time he saw them, they had been through a lot of abuse, buried and etched by soil acids or worms, or left out in the open for months or years, teeth missing, gnawed by animals, bleached by the stresses of exposure. But this one was perfect in all respects, except for the separated mandible. It was pristine, all the teeth firmly in place.

Becca Haber had called early that morning and introduced herself. She said that she was from Atlanta and that she had just come into Austin. She told him she had a skull and that she hoped he would agree to reconstruct its face.

He’d asked her if she had been referred to him by someone at a law-enforcement agency. She’d said this was a personal situation. She had read an article about him in Atlanta a few years ago.

How did she happen to have the skull? he’d asked.

There had been a pause at the other end of the line.

“I’d rather explain that to you when I get there,” she’d said. Her voice had a southern lilt, but that hadn’t disguised the underlying hint of tension.

Now here she sat, holding a skull that looked eerily fresh. He didn’t reach for it, though he wanted to. Instead, he sat back in his chair and crossed his arms.

“Why don’t you start by telling me how you happen to have this,” he suggested.

“Sure,” she said, nodding. “I understand.” She squared her shoulders. “I bought it from a street kid in Mexico City.”

But she didn’t go on. At first, Bern thought she was reconsidering what she was about to say, but as he looked at her face, he realized that she was looking at him without seeing him. Something seemed to be happening. He waited.

As a forensic artist, he was used to talking with clients who were upset. The people who were brought to him were victims of rape or attempted murder or kidnapping or mutilation, or had been witnesses to such things. Re- creating in one’s mind the faces of the people who have done such things is often an excruciating experience, and sometimes the mind rebels at being asked to recall the horrors it has recorded. Memory is a fragile and mercurial thing, and responds most reliably, he’d found, to tender treatment. He glanced away, giving her time to gain control of her emotions.

Becca Haber looked up.

“I’m positive…” she said, looking down at the skull in her lap, “almost positive, that this is my husband.”

The corners of her mouth pulled down involuntarily as she fought her emotions.

Out of his peripheral vision, Bern saw Alice’s foot suddenly stop waggling. He glanced at her. She had stopped kneading her gum and it rested like a little pink pellet exactly in the center of her slightly parted lips. She was staring at Becca with slack-jawed fascination, as if she were watching the woman metamorphose into something alien right there in the stream of sunshine.

Becca Haber launched into a story that sounded like a million other stories. She had met her husband a couple of years earlier and had married him after knowing him only a few months. He was an artist. They’d had about half a year of glorious marriage, followed by a half year of hell, before they’d agreed to separate and see if things wouldn’t cool down.

He moved to Mexico City, where he had lived several years before. They sent each other E-mail messages every day; she flew down a couple of times for long weekends. Then, about four months ago, he’d stopped sending her E-mail. After a couple of weeks, she went down there. She found his house in perfect condition, but he was gone.

She stayed a few weeks, asking around about him, but his few friends said they hadn’t heard from him, either. The police couldn’t even stir up a modest curiosity about her panicked concern, implying these things happened all the time and that eventually he would come back when he got tired of the other woman.

Then one day when she answered the phone at his house, a man told her that her husband was dead and that he had proof, but she would have to pay for it. After a long negotiation, she found herself on a dark street somewhere in that vast city. A kid handed her a paper sack, and she handed him the money. She thought she was buying photographs of his bullet-riddled body. Instead, she was horrified to find the skull.

Becca Haber stopped here to gather her composure, but before Bern could speak, Alice, who had been squirming with increasing agitation, blurted, “Can you think of what if you should, Paul?” With an expression of disbelief, she asked, “Can you see through a flowing window on the outside of another thought that you believe?” She was incredulous. She turned her wide eyes on Becca. “I don’t think in a hundred wonders of it!”

Oh shit.

Alice scowled at Bern and screwed her mouth into a problematic pucker, as if she couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

“Jesus.” Becca was taken aback.

Bern was surprised by Alice’s reaction, too, but not for the same reasons as Becca Haber.

“Just a second,” he said to Becca, and he got up and went over to Alice and squatted down in front of her. Her sketch pad was in her lap, and she was still holding her pencil, though she had lost interest in the Kewpie dolls.

“Now listen, Alice,” he said softly, putting his hand on hers to get her attention. “It’s okay; it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Okay? It’s all right.”

“What doesn’t matter?” Becca Haber asked suspiciously.

“It doesn’t matter what I say to her,” Bern said, not turning away from Alice as he spoke to Becca. “She can’t understand me. I’ve got to make her understand the meaning of my words by the way I’m behaving, by my expressions.”

What he wanted Alice to understand was that what the woman was saying was okay with him. What Alice had to do was to control her agitation. She couldn’t disrupt the conversation.

It took some time. Alice kept wanting to look at Becca, moving her head from side to side to look around him as he tried to make eye contact with her to get her attention. It was as if Becca Haber had become the most outrageous thing Alice had ever seen.

He reassured her again, telling her that it was okay, that it didn’t matter.

Alice pulled her head back in dramatically mimed skepticism at his reassurances.

“You’re in ropes if that’s on this very side,” she said, flinging an incredulous look at Haber.

Bern took Alice’s oval face in his hands and gently guided her attention to the sketch pad in her lap. He began drawing a face, all the while telling her it didn’t matter, that it was all right.

Gradually, the face he was drawing took on an expression that was not immediately understandable, one of conflicting emotions, of mixed signals. As Alice noticed this and began to focus on the problem of figuring out this emotional puzzle, she began to calm down.

This went on for ten minutes or more, though it felt longer to Bern, who was acutely aware of Becca Haber’s close observation from behind. Finally after several jerky sighs, Alice became absorbed in trying to decipher the expression on the face that Bern had drawn.

After a few more minutes, he stood and returned to the coffee table.

“Look, I’m sorry,” he said, deliberately taking a different chair at the coffee table now. “I know it’s hard enough for you to talk about this without that kind of distraction. It must seem strange to you, I know. Sorry.”

“No, it’s okay,” Becca said, glancing warily at Alice. “Is she going to be all right? What was the matter?”

“Yeah, she’ll be fine. Who knows what the deal was,” he said.

Now Bern had a clear view of both Becca’s face and Alice’s. Becca took a moment to decide where to start over; then she leaned forward and put the skull on the table, facing Bern, and took the mandible off her knee and laid it beside the skull.

“You know, there’s probably a better way to do this,” Bern said. “If you need positive proof of identity, you’d be better off getting a DNA test.”

“Can’t,” she said, her hands now gripping the short lemon hem of her dress to keep it from working up.

“They can do it with bone now,” he said. “Mitochondrial DNA-”

“I’ve already been through all that,” she said. “He was an orphan. Abandoned. Parents unknown. Siblings, forget it. We don’t have any children. No medical records. No dental records.”

“He never went to the doctor or the dentist?”

“Not while I knew him.” She nodded at the skull. “There’s dental work there. Not much, just a little. But he never went to the dentist while I knew him.”

“What about before then?”

“I don’t know anything about him before then, except what I’ve already told you.”

Alice stifled a groan and rolled her eyes at Bern.