Suddenly, he got up from the stool and hurried up the steps and out of the studio. A few years earlier, maybe four years ago, he had been working on a pergola that stretched along one side of the terrace. He’d been working alone, as usual, and needed an extra pair of hands to hold a raw cedar four-by-four while he drilled a hole at one end of it for a bolt. Tess had been helping him, but she had run into town to the hardware store. Rather than waiting for her, he contrived a complex balancing act for the beam. It slipped, and he fell from the top of the pergola and the beam fell on top of him as he landed. It broke his jaw.
Now he was in the bedroom, going through boxes stored in one of the closets. Somewhere in here he had the X-ray films of the lower part of his head.
When he found them, he hurried back to the studio, turned on the light table, and grabbed the photographs he had made of the skull. At the time he broke his jaw, he had insisted, despite the pain, that the X rays be done life-size and with particular care to avoid distortion. As a forensic artist, he couldn’t resist the opportunity to have an accurate record of his own skull. Now he realized that it might have been the most fortuitous thing he had ever done.
In actual fact, using photographic negatives for comparison was rarely practical. For the comparisons to be helpful, you had to have two perfectly photographed skulls, without any of the perspective distortions that were usually present in photographs. In Bern’s experience, that had never happened before. Until now.
With his heart hammering, he laid his own negatives over the skull’s negatives that he had done earlier and began aligning the lower part of the eye sockets, noting the precise angles of the orbital edges, the shapes of the frontal sinuses, and going from point to point down the skull. The teeth provided the startling finale.
The skulls matched.
Bern’s legs went rubbery, and he sat down hard on the stool, unaware of what he was doing. Stunned, he stared at the glow of the light table, which seemed to take on a creepy pale aura. He didn’t even know how to think about this. What in the hell was his frame of reference here? The possibilities? The implications? This was beyond strange. Way beyond strange.
He swallowed. He stood shakily. Bracing his arms, palms down, on the light table, he looked at the two overlaid skulls. But he saw only one. Oh Jesus. He flipped off the light.
He thought of Alice’s preternatural reaction to the sketch. He thought of Becca Haber. His thoughts went directly to her quick departure after he had committed to reconstructing the skull. That wasn’t right. Thinking back now, that was suspicious. Shit, she was suspicious.
He went to his desk and found the piece of paper on which she had written the phone number of the hotel where she was staying. He dialed the number and asked for her room.
“Yes, sir,” the night clerk said.
Silence.
The night clerk came back on. “How do you spell that name, sir?”
He spelled it.
“Sir…”
Bern felt it coming.
“We don’t show anyone by that name as a guest with us.”
He put down the phone. There was no use in checking anywhere else. He looked at the piece of paper. She had written it herself. If he had written it… maybe… but he hadn’t. Immediately, he cast his thoughts back over former cases. What was going on here? Did this have something to do with one of his former cases? Was somebody doing something here, coming back at him for something they thought he’d done? Someone who felt like they were wrongly convicted because of one of his drawings or reconstructions? Is that what this was?
He sat down at his computer and flipped it on. He went to his index and started with A. One at a time, he called up each case and thought about it, re-created it in his mind, remembered it, brought it back to life. Who were the oddballs? Who were the bitter convictions? Who were the angry ones?
Fifteen years flew through his head. Names, stories, and faces came to mind that he hadn’t thought about in years. The files were reminders of a sad and murky world, of ruined lives, of unthinkable deeds, of men and women who had spent their last living moments in some madman’s private hell. But there were happy endings, too; a child found, a lost relative relocated, an unsolved crime finally puzzled together to give closure to a tortured family.
After a little more than an hour, he had no ideas whatsoever. There was nothing here that even hinted at the creepy coincidence that was sitting on the light table a few feet away.
Without a cue, he remembered the gin and tonic he had dropped, and the broken glass. He got up and went to the broom closet, got a roll of paper towels, a dustpan, and a hand broom, then crossed the room to clean up the mess.
While he searched around for the scattered glass, he replayed Becca Haber’s performance, which is the way he now thought of her interview. Okay, so what was the purpose of her visit? To get him to do the job. Why?
He threw the glass into a trash can with a loud crash, and then began mopping up the gin that had splashed nearly to the edge of the sofa. He could see the slivers of glass glinting in the paper towel, and was careful to get all of it, thinking of Alice, who liked to walk around barefooted.
When the mess was finally cleaned up, he put everything away and turned off all the lights except a lamp near the sofa. Then he went outside and stood on the deck and looked out at the lake.
For a moment, he tried to be aware of everything around him. A motorboat moving away from the marina and into the darkness headed up the lake. From a home on a point of land to his left came the faint, comforting sound of music traveling across the surface of the water. It was a summer sound, and it brought to mind youth and love and possibilities. From the woods nearby, a little screech owl sent its strange warbling concerns out over the water.
Suddenly, it hit him like a slap to the side of the head. Everything… everything paled into insignificance in the light of one shocking and incomprehensible reality: The skull on the workbench inside the studio was identical to the one that contained his own brain… and the entire existence of what he had always understood to be the one and only Paul Bern.
Chapter 11
It was just after 3:30 when Bern’s racing mind slipped over the edge into dreams, and he was able to get a few hours of sleep. He didn’t wake up until 8:15.
Before he even got out of bed, he rolled over and picked up the telephone and called the hotel again. He knew there would be a different desk clerk on duty by now. Again he asked for Becca Haber, and again he got the same “no one here by that name” response.
Incredible. But he had already decided what he needed to do next. He sat on the edge of the bed and dialed another number.
“Texas Department of Public Safety.”
He asked for Ines Cortinas.
“Crime Lab. This’s Ines.”
“Ines, Paul Bern.”
“Hey, Paul,” she replied, “it’s been a while. I’ll bet you want something.”
“A quick question.”
“Shoot.”
“You can do DNA testing using a bone from a skull, right?”
“Yeah. Well, mitochondrial DNA, not nuclear.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Mitochondrial is less specific. It’s passed on only through the female line, and we can’t distinguish between individuals. If we hit a match, we’d know the skull belonged to the descendants of a certain female line, but we wouldn’t be able to ID the skull itself or even tell if it was male or female. We’d just know it was a member of a particular female lineage.”
That wouldn’t do Bern any good.
“You have a skull?” she asked.
