While she was busy ripping him a new one, Huckey’s face had gone very, very pale. She halted, breathing hard, having run out of air and insults. He stared at her, balling his fists, and for a moment she thought he might knock her lights out. But he didn’t.

“Now I’m going to finish the search,” she said, moderating her voice. “Do me a favor and don’t speak another fucking word to me.”

*

While she completed a cautious examination of the cave-in, Huckey left the tunnel and waited outside. Heading back to the entrance, she went into the rickety old wooden building and peered around the sun-flecked interior, taking more pictures. A set of massive iron gears and other strange machinery loomed in the darkness, covered with cobwebs and dust. But there was no hint that the dead man had ever set foot down here, and no clue about what he might have been looking for. They went back to where the rope was dangling down the cliff. Corrie set up the apparatus and jugged her way back up, followed by Huckey, who remained silent and dark.

She found the other two agents waiting at the top. Watts was some distance away, strolling through the ghost town.

“Find anything?” they asked Huckey, who brushed past them without answering. He climbed out of his harness, pulled up the rappelling rope and coiled it, and shoved it and the gear into the bag. He slung it over his shoulder.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” he said to his companions without turning around.

17

IN THE CRAMPED, quiet atmosphere of the pathology lab, Corrie paused and stepped back to admire her handiwork. This was the first time she had done a real facial reconstruction, outside of class, and she was pleased with how it was turning out. Even more, she was dying of curiosity to see the end result—to look on the actual face of a victim seventy-five years gone, brought back to life. It gave her a strange, almost religious feeling to be able to resurrect faces of the dead.

Every other method of IDing the body had failed. She had gotten good fingerprints, but there were no hits in the database. The man had had no dental work, and he seemed to have taken pretty good care of his teeth. The preliminary pathogen report showed no signs of disease beyond a touch of cirrhosis, and the toxicology labs came back clean. The DNA SNPs had turned up no hits, either, nor any intersections with commercial DNA databases. His racial makeup appeared to be generic Western European, most likely English/Scots/Irish. Reconstructing the face was a last resort—but she nevertheless had high confidence she could pull it off.

She had cast the cleaned-up skull in resin and used that as a foundation, filling in the undercuts with Plasticine, including the nasal cavity and orbital fissure. Then she’d put in clay eyeballs. Next came the key step—affixing twenty-one multicolored sticks vertically to precise points on the skull’s surface. Each of these sticks showed the average tissue depths for a person of his race (Caucasian), sex (male), age (about fifty-five), and build (skinny). Then, using Plasticine, she had laid on the facial muscles in sequence—first the temporalis, then the masseter, buccinator, and occipitofrontalis. She worked with great care, making sure everything was done as precisely as possible, because even the smallest deviation could make a person unrecognizable. It was amazing how the human eye could pick up the tiniest variations in the anatomy of the face—millions of years of evolution at work, no doubt.

“What are all these plastic sticks?” came a voice behind her. She just about jumped out of her skin, then spun around to see Lathrop coming up behind her and peering over her shoulder, the smell of Listerine quickly filling her nostrils.

“You gave me a start,” she said.

“You were working so intently I hated to interrupt. Now tell me what you’re up to, Corinne.” He indicated the many-colored sticks bristling from the skull. “Are those depth measurements?”

“Exactly,” she said, struggling to project an off hand air. “I have a long way to go.”

“Did you learn this at John Jay?”

“It was my specialty. Usually it takes two people to do this kind of thing—a forensic anthropologist and an artist—but I studied both in order to do reconstructions end to end.”

“Impressive,” said Lathrop. He pulled up a roller chair and sat down. “If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to watch. Back in the day, we didn’t study forensic facial reconstruction—it was still in its infancy.”

Corrie didn’t especially enjoy working with people watching her, but she said as gamely as possible: “If you want to watch, that’s fine.”

“Do you use any particular methodology?”

“I follow the method outlined by Taylor and Angel in Craniofacial Identification in Forensic Medicine. It’s old-fashioned, but I think it gives the best results—certainly better than the new computational forensics.”

“Indeed? Why is that?”

“The computational algorithms suck, at least for now. It’s not at all like the sci-fi forensic stuff you see on TV shows. The problem is, computer faces look too real, too specific. When you display them, they’re so realistic people don’t recognize possible variations. But with a model, they do. The slightly artificial, generic look of a model is actually an advantage, and it’s easier for someone to look at it and say, ‘Hey, that looks like Uncle Joe!’ For now, at least, you can lay putty and clay over bone with your fingers in a way computers can’t.”