Dark Rivers of the Heart

was direct, with a challenge that he found appealing. But her lips were so deliciously ripe.

She pushed a photograph across the desk.

Roy looked away from her lips.

The picture was a drastically improved, full-color version of the shot that he had seen on his attache case computer terminal the night before: a man’s head from the neck up, in profile. Shadows still dappled the face, but they were lighter and less obscuring than they had been. The blurring screen of rain had been removed entirely.

“It’s a fine piece of work,” Roy said. “But it still doesn’t give us a good enough look at him to make an identification.”

“On the contrary, it tells us a lot about him,” Melissa said. “He’s between twenty-eight and thirty-two.”

“How do you figure?”

“Computer projection based on an analysis of lines radiating from the corner of his eye, percentage of gray in his hair, and the apparent degree of firmness of facial muscles and throat skin.”

“That’s projecting quite a lot from such few—”

“Not at all,” she interrupted. “The system makes analytic projections operating from a ten-megabyte database of biological information, and I’d pretty much bet the house on what it says.”

He was thrilled by the way her supple lips formed the words “ten-megabyte database of biological information.” Her mouth was better than her eyes. Perfect. He cleared his throat. “Well—”

“Brown hair, brown eyes.”

Roy frowned. “The hair, okay. But you can’t see his eyes here.”

Rising from her chair, Melissa took the photograph out of his hand and put it on the desk. With a pencil, she pointed to the beginning curve of the man’s eyeball as viewed from the side. “He’s not looking at the camera, so if you or I examined the photo under a microscope, we still wouldn’t be able to see enough of the iris to determine color. But even from an oblique perspective like this, the computer can detect a few pixels of color.”

“So he has brown eyes.”

“Dark brown.” She put down the pencil and stood with her left hand fisted on her hip, as delicate as a flower and as resolute as an army general. “Absolutely dark brown.”

Roy liked her unshakable self-confidence, the brisk certitude with which she spoke. And that mouth.

“Based on the computer’s analysis of his physical relationship to measurable objects in the photograph, he’s five feet eleven inches tall.” She clipped her words, so the facts came out of her with the staccato energy of bullets from a submachine gun. “He weighs one hundred and sixty-five, give or take five pounds. He’s Caucasian, clean- shaven, in good physical shape, recently had a haircut.”

“Anything else?”

From the file folder, Melissa removed another photograph. “This is him. From the front, straight on. His full face.”

Roy looked up from the new photo, surprised. “I didn’t know we got a shot like this.”

“We didn’t,” she said, studying the portrait with evident pride. “This isn’t an actual photograph. It’s a projection of what the guy ought to look like, based on what the computer can determine of his bone structure and fat-deposit patterns from the partial profile.”

“It can do that?”

“It’s a recent innovation in the program.”

“Reliable?”

“Considering the view the computer had to work with in this case,” she assured Roy, “there’s a ninety-four- percent probability that this face will precisely match the real face in any ninety of one hundred reference details.”

“I guess that’s better than a police artist’s sketch,” he said.

“Much better.” After a beat, she said, “Is something wrong?”

Roy realized that she had shifted her gaze from the computer portrait to him — and that he was staring at her mouth.

“Uh,” he said, looking down at the full portrait of the mystery man, “I was wondering…what’s this line across his right cheek?”

“A scar.”

“Really? You’re sure? From the ear to the point of the chin?”

“A major scar,” she said, opening a desk drawer. “Cicatricial welt — mostly smooth tissue, crimped here and there along the edges.”

Roy referred to the original profile shot and saw that a portion of the scar was there, although he had not correctly identified it. “I thought it was just a line of light between shadows, light from the streetlamp, falling across his cheek.”

“No.”

“It couldn’t be that?”

“No. A scar,” Melissa said firmly, and she took a Kleenex from a box in the open drawer.

“This is great. Makes for an easier ID. This guy seems to’ve had special-forces training, either military or paramilitary, and with a scar like this — it’s a good bet he was wounded while on duty. Badly wounded. Maybe badly enough that he was discharged or retired on psychological if not physical disability.”

“Police and military organizations keep records forever.”

“Exactly. We’ll have him in seventy-two hours. Hell, forty-eight.” Roy looked up from the portrait. “Thanks, Melissa.”

She was wiping her mouth with the Kleenex. She didn’t have to be concerned about smearing her lipstick, because she wasn’t wearing any. She didn’t need lipstick. It couldn’t improve her.

Roy was fascinated by the way in which her full and pliant lips compressed so tenderly under the soft Kleenex.

He realized that he was staring and that again she was aware of it. His gaze drifted up to her eyes.

Melissa blushed faintly, looked away from him, and threw the crumpled Kleenex in the waste can.

“May I keep this copy?” he asked, indicating the full-face computer-generated portrait.

Withdrawing a manila envelope from beneath the file folder on the desk, handing it to him, she said, “I’ve put five prints in here, plus two diskettes that contain the portrait.”

“Thanks, Melissa.”

“Sure.”

The warm pink blush was still on her cheeks.

Roy felt that he had penetrated her cool, businesslike veneer for the first time since he’d known her, and that he was in touch, however tenuously, with the inner Melissa, with the exquisitely sensuous self that she usually strove to conceal. He wondered if he should ask her for a date.

Turning his head, he looked through the glass walls at the workers in the computer lab, certain that they must be aware of the erotic tension in their boss’s office. All three seemed to be absorbed in their work.

When Roy turned to Melissa Wicklun again, prepared to ask her to dinner, she was surreptitiously wiping at one corner of her mouth with a fingertip. She tried to cover by spreading her hand across her mouth and faking a cough.

With dismay, Roy realized that the woman had misinterpreted his salacious stare. Apparently she thought that his attention had been drawn to her mouth by a smear or crumb of food left over, perhaps, from a mid-morning doughnut.

She had been oblivious of his lust. If she was a lesbian, she must have assumed that Roy knew as much and would have no interest in her. If she wasn’t a lesbian, perhaps she simply couldn’t imagine being attracted — or being an object of desire — to a man with round cheeks, a soft chin, and ten extra pounds on his waist. He had met with that prejudice before: looksism. Many women, brainwashed by a consumer culture that sold the wrong values, were interested only in men like those who appeared in advertisements for Marlboro or Calvin Klein. They could not understand that a man with the merry face of a favorite uncle might be kinder, wiser, more compassionate, and a better lover than a hunk who spent too much time at the gym. How sad to think that Melissa might be that shallow. How very sad.