records on our own, but a lot of people at that early stage simply have a psychological block about getting it done, you know?'
'Can't say as I blame them. Can't imagine the pain of losing a child to oblivion, the not knowing, or losing a child to a vicious murderer and knowing, for that matter.'
'Not sure which is worse.'
They got in the car. Inside, Jana said, 'Short of a DNA sample, orthodontia ID is still the most reliable method. Sometimes the teeth are all that survive by the time we uncover the decayed body of a missing person stuffed in a trunk, behind a wall, in a pipe, or anchored below some watering hole, river, or lake.'
Lucas backed down the driveway, nodding at her discourse.
She continued, asking, 'You hear about that case where we found three bodies within close proximity of one another down on the Brazos?'
'Down around Rosharon?'
'Three prostitutes all murdered by strangulation.'
Lucas pointed the car in the right direction and drove for North Belmont. 'Yeah, yeah, I recall…all clumped together only twenty or thirty yards apart, killed over a period of weeks.'
'Dogs sniffed out the bodies from aboard a flatboat.'
'Aboard a boat?' Lucas glanced at her. 'I heard they were found in the brush on shore.'
'No, no! They were weighted down with dumbbells lashed to them with wire fencing.'
'Dogs sniffed them out?'
'Amazing noses those dogs, how they just lean out over the side of the boat and strike on the odor of a decaying body some fourteen, fifteen feet below the surface of running water. Some noses on those babies.'
'If memory serves, wasn't one of the victims so badly decomposed you had to call in a forensic anthropologist to reconstruct the facial features over the skull to get a likeness for the papers and TV?'
'Another case, Lucas.'
'Shit, after a while, after so many, they begin to blend together. Sad commentary on American life.'
'State's talking about renting property from private farms and ranches to build more potter's fields to bury all the Jane and John Does,' she said.
'Nahhh…heard they're thinking now of buying up lands around the penitentiary at Huntsville for new fields and putting the inmates to work as grave diggers.'
'That'll never happen. Violation of their civil liberties. Can't turn the prison force into a state work force.'
'Legislature's sitting now, and they could change that. This is Texas, after all.' Lucas swiped the hair from his eyes. 'Yeah, I recall the case now,' said Lucas of her original question as they turned onto North Belmont Avenue. 'Guy doing the killing out at the Brazos park, wasn't he the-'
'Ran the rowboat concession at the lake.'
'Right…right sick too.'
'Fucker was fat like Gacey, and he gave out free rides to the girls.'
'Pelhan, yeah…now sitting on death row, appealing his conviction, right. Tapping into his civil liberties.'
Jana confided, 'I had the chance to shoot the bastard down like a dog when we busted in on him. He raised a gun to me. I should have let him have it.'
'Don't worry. He's bound for the execution chamber- eventually.'
'Yeah, but it's the eventually that pisses me off. Ten fucking years eventually, if not more, while the victims' families have to relive their grief and anguish over and over again. Man, I hate the creep's lawyer almost as much as I hate him.'
'Understood,' said Lucas, squeezing her hand.
'Got to tell you, this is my first case where all we have are eyeballs and teeth to go on.'
'Don't forget the salami slices sent to me.'
'Strangest nutcase you ever chased, I'll bet, hey, Lucas?'
'Watch for the address, will you? Don't want to miss it.'
'By the time we get to the third address on your list, it'll be after hours for dentists.'
'Then we'll just have to continue this tomorrow morning, if you're free, that is.'
'After Dr. Sullivan's, I'd suggest Mira Lourdes's address.'
'Right, it's closer than the Nance place.'
The stop at Dr. Sullivan's for Helga Muncie's dental records went quickly, and they pushed on. They found Mira Lourdes's live-in boyfriend at the address in the file, disappointed on learning he was not her husband and so could not grant them access to medical records.
Dwayne Ira Stokes told his own tentative version of how Mira had simply disappeared without a trace. Their last conversation had been about a car that sat glumly neglected out in the driveway, a car she was trying to sell.
Stokes repeated himself a lot, Lucas observed. 'My last conversation with her was like over the g'damn phone, and it like centered around that damned cursed car of hers.'
'What about the car? Why do you say it was cursed?' asked Lucas.
'Because it was! Like everything that could go wrong with it, like did, man. So finally, I like convinced her to like sell it, you know, put a sign on the damn thing, place an ad in the Penny Saver, see.'
'And she was showing the car when she disappeared?' asked Jana.
'A neighbor saw her talking to a couple of people, yeah, and like she looked away to wipe a dish or something, and she looked back out to where Mira and these people were, and they were gone, but they left their car behind, so she- the neighbor-she like didn't think anything of it, you know. Why leave your car behind if you're going to abduct somebody, you know? That's like how Mrs. Paulis was thinking, she said. Me, I was at work at the time. I work retail, odd hours, always being called in even on what's 'spose to be my day off, which it was that night.'
'Mrs. Paulis is the eyewitness I told you about,' Jana told Lucas.
'They all three took off in the cursed car,' added Stokes.
'And supposedly the abductors left their car behind?' Lucas asked, his tone incredulous.
'That's right.'
'But the car she was selling is sitting in your driveway right now,' began Lucas, pointing at the unfortunate, sad- looking Saab, its body littered with rust and dents. The FOR SALE sign was still in the rearview window.
'Right, that's it. Damn car has a curse on it. Like a bad penny, it keeps coming back, but not Mira, she didn't come back. She took off with this couple and like never came back! I mean, at first, I thought maybe she just ran off; like we haven't been getting along too good lately, like sniping and backbiting, no biggy, but like annoying twenty-four-seven all-the-time stuff, you know.'
Lucas thought if he heard the words like or you know come once more out of Dwayne's mouth, he would strangle the kid. Dwayne appeared much younger than Mira's twenty-eight years. Lucas guessed him at 'like twenty-two or three.'
'Maybe we should talk to this neighbor of yours, Dwayne,' suggested Jana. 'Get more details from her. You say it was a couple. Do you mean a man and a woman or two men?'
'A man and a woman. That's what was so bizarre about it, why like Mrs. Paulis didn't think much of it, you know.'
'There's no record of any of this in the Missing Persons file, Dwayne,' Lucas pointed out.
'That's 'cause Mrs. Paulis's on vacation. The only one here having fun-in the Caribbean Sea someplace they say. Missing Persons people talked to me. Told the same story, but they said they needed to hear it from the party of the first part, some shit like that, but Mrs. P, she was booked on a cruise, and now she's in Jamaica, 1 think.' He laughed lightly, displaying a missing tooth. 'Where I'd like to be,' he added, 'Yeah, baby, Jamaica….'
'You don't remember me, Dwayne?' asked Jana. 'I was — with the two detectives who questioned you that night.'
'Oh, yeah, wait on a minute…sure, now I recall. You kinda stood back, and you checked out the car.'
Lucas exchanged a side glance with Detective North, his accusing eye stem on hearing that Missing Persons officers had already gone over this ground and it seemed nothing had come of it. Jana ignored the accusatory glint in Lucas's eye and said to Dwayne, 'Do you have a copy of the ad Mira placed in the newspaper?'
'I got a copy on the porch, yeah.' He went to fetch it. Returning with the thin local Penny Saver, he pointed
