Shattered Image

by J. F. Margos

  “Yes—within our human limitations.”

  “Then you re-create that image in your work, Dr. Sullivan.” He smiled broadly now.

  “No, Dr. Carroway, I only restore an idea of the physical part of that image. The most essential part of the image in us can only be re-created by the Master Himself.”

  “Requires a higher power, then, eh?”

  “Requires a sacred touch,” I said.

  Dr. Carroway nodded his head.

  “I like that. I’ll have to think about it more when you’re gone.”

  “Good.”

  “But I may have lots more questions for you later,” he said, winking.

  I winked back, and said, “Bring them on and I’ll do my best to give you proper answers.”

  While we waited for the material to firm up around the skull, Dr. Carroway offered to show me the personal effects they had found with or near the remains.

  He retrieved another box and opened the lid. Inside was part of a dog-tag chain with no dog tags, an American quarter, a button off of a flight suit and part of the pilot’s helmet. None of it was absolutely personal to Teddy. I picked up the button, turned it over in the palm of my hand and wondered. I put the button back into the box and picked up the piece of dog-tag chain.

  All I could think of was what had probably happened to all the things that weren’t found with the remains. Of course, the flight suit and all the fabrics he was wearing would have burned, or deteriorated and biodegraded. Villagers carried off parts of the plane, jewelry and American dog tags. Wild animals would have carried off other things, and that’s what I just couldn’t think about now. I wanted to sit down and cry, but that wasn’t exactly a professional response. The segment of dog-tag chain slipped through my fingers back into the box.

  When I looked up at Dr. Carroway again, he had a sympathetic expression on his face. My expression must have been more transparent than I thought.

  I looked back down at the box of personal effects and said, “Well, none of it is absolutely identifiable as something that would have belonged to Nikolaides.”

  “No,” he said softly.

  If the situation continued that way, I knew that I would not be able to retain my composure, so I changed the subject—rapidly.

  “Well, let’s check the mold and see how we’re doing.”

  I walked back to the table where the form lay, and I put my finger in the bottom of it to check the consistency of the plastic material. It wasn’t ready yet.

  “Not quite yet,” I said, praying he wouldn’t want to discuss anything relating to Ted personally.

  “So, Dr. Sullivan, tell me how you got into this line of work. I know you were an artist, but how and why did you come to this work after being a nurse in the war?”

  I could have hugged him.

  “When I came home from ’Nam, the last thing I wanted to do was nursing. Other nurses felt differently and continued, but I couldn’t. So, I went back to school and got my art degrees. Art was my true love, so that part of it was a natural choice.”

  “After getting out of nursing, why did you choose to go into something…well, that takes you into dealing with death again.”

  “Good question. What I saw in ’Nam was a lot of horror, but it was bloody horror, and it was human suffering. Forensic art and sculpture isn’t bloody and the suffering is already past, at least for the departed. I don’t take care of the families or friends of the victims, so it’s totally different to me.”

  Suddenly, I could hear Reverend Iordani’s words to me replaying in my head, and it hit me hard. I must have looked as if I was drifting off, because Dr. Carroway interrupted my thoughts again.

  “So, you said your husband was a police officer. I’m assuming that’s what led you into this.”

  “Yes, it is. Jack used to discuss his tough cases with me, and I had a knack for helping him solve them—an artist’s eye for details, I guess. Anyway, we were exposed to this new science of forensic reconstructive art, and I decided I wanted to learn it. I spent some time with two really terrific forensic reconstructive artists, and then began to do some work on my own. My artistic credentials and my husband’s connections allowed me access to the right people to teach me the skills.”

  “Now you’re one of the best in the country.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that…”

  “No, Dr. Sullivan, you are regarded as one of the very best in the country. I checked.”

  I felt myself blushing. I looked down at my feet, cleared my throat and said, “Well, I work hard and enjoy what I do.”

  The material in the form was firmed up, so I cut the form open and gently lifted the skull out of the impression. It was a good impression. It would now harden fully and I could transport it back to Austin where the remainder of the work could take place.

  “Wow, that’s really interesting,” Dr. Carroway remarked, looking at the fresh mold.

  “Yes, the mold looks good.”

  “Have you ever had one turn out bad?”

  I laughed. “Oh yeah. That’s when you ditch it and start all over.”

  We both smiled.

  I packed up all my supplies, and Dr. Carroway called the sergeant major, who escorted me out of the building to my waiting cab. On my way back to the hotel, the memories of ’Nam began to flood in.

  The first horror that revisited my mind was the smell. You never forget the smell and it’s something you really can’t describe. It’s sour and stale—a decayed smell. It was the smell that came with blood, burn wounds, infections and death. It’ll wrench your gut up into your throat. As if the smell wasn’t bad enough, the images that come along with it finish you off and you’re retching and in the dry heaves in no time flat. I already felt sick after my morning at the CILHI labs. The remembrance of that smell was compounding my queasiness. The remembrance of it was so real, it was as if it was there in the cab with me.

  The dentists had the worst duty. The mortuary was nearby and a lot of the dead were burn victims—napalm and air crashes on the landing strip. They had to be identified by dental records. Those poor dentists would throw up three or four times just doing the ID on one body. I don’t know how any of them ever ate anything while they were in ’Nam.

  None of that was even the worst part of the war. I was a nurse in the air force. The army nurses in the MASH units and evac hospitals—those women must have lost their minds or nearly so. They saw everything that came off the battlefield. The worst wounded usually never made it my way because they were never in good enough shape for plane flight. In fact, they usually died before they made it to our hospital.

  I was in charge of triaging the injured for plane transport to another hospital, Hawaii or maybe even back home. The ones who were really bad couldn’t go on a plane, although that didn’t keep some doctors from trying to get them on one. There was no way to pressurize a plane for ground-level pressure. The best that could be achieved was pressure equal to three thousand or four thousand feet. You need more oxygen than that for certain wounds, especially burns and eye wounds. Oxygen tanks were not something we had in abundance, so there was triage. I would do an evaluation of their condition for plane flight. The ones who didn’t qualify had to go back to a hospital nearby to improve their condition, or just to die and return home in a box.

  The bad news is that I saw a lot of horrible stuff. The good news is that I never had a patient more than twenty-four hours. It was an assessment assembly line and I was charged with making some difficult decisions in short order.

  I met Jack there in Vietnam. He was an MP who did duty on the perimeter at the base where I was stationed in Da Nang. He used to play cards and hang out with that flyboy named Teddy Nikolaides. Teddy, Jack and I became a tight trio. We’d sit around and talk about home and dreams—and Teddy’s wife and kids.

  Jack and I saw a lot of our buddies go into battle or fly off the airstrip and never return, but no loss hit us as hard as the loss of Ted Nikolaides. I don’t think
either one of us ever really got our head around that one.

  Ted had almost made it out of that horrible place—almost. I wondered now if he had finally made it out. Were the fragments I had seen and the skull I had touched really all that was left of Ted? Had he finally made it home to American soil?

  Back at the hotel I secured the case with the skull mold in it and took a long hot shower. I put on fresh clothes—blue-jean shorts, a white cotton tank top and sandals. I was going to do what I had done each of the two previous times I had been to Hawaii since the Vietnam War. I was taking a trip to the Hawaii National Cemetery of the Pacific—to the Punchbowl.

  The Punchbowl is the bowl-shaped remains of a volcanic crater just north of downtown Honolulu. In Hawaiian, the name for this place means “Hill of Sacrifice.” There are over thirty-three-thousand veterans buried in the floor of the crater. A memorial at the head of the cemetery consists of ten Courts of the Missing—marble courts containing the names of the MIAs from World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam—more than twenty-eight-thousand of them in all. In one of those Courts of the Missing, engraved on a marble wall, was the name of Theodore P. Nikolaides.

  I would leave Hawaii for Austin the next morning, but first I would make my traditional trip to the Punchbowl, the Hill of Sacrifice, to find my friend’s name in the Courts of the Missing, and I would pay my respects.

  Chapter Ten

  Heavily jet-lagged and back in my house less than two hours, I received a call from Chris. There were more bones. This time not far from the edge of the running trail and the bridge that crosses Waller Creek. I taped my eyelids open, put on some jeans and boots and threw on an old, khaki-colored Keep Austin Weird T-shirt and bolted out the door.

  It hadn’t been started in four days, but the ’Stang fired up like the little land rocket it was. As I roared down the road, I wondered what in blazes was going on. Could this victim be Doug Hughes?

  I called my son on the cell phone. He was at the scene and he and Tommy were working this case as if it was related to the Red Bud case, until they could prove otherwise. He said the bones were in a jumble as with the Red Bud case, and it looked like a fresh grave.

  It was 7:00 a.m. and traffic was already getting heavy, but I put the pedal down as I pulled up onto IH-35. As I wove in and out of traffic, speeding up, gearing down and shifting lanes, a motorcycle cop pulled alongside me. I just knew he was going to pull me over, but he motioned for me to follow him. That son of mine, always thinking. I smiled to myself as the officer turned on his lights and sirens and the traffic parted before us like the Red Sea before Moses.

  We flew down the highway to the Cesar Chavez off-ramp. The officer’s Harley maneuvered easily through traffic as we continued our wild ride across downtown Austin, finally turning in at the parking area next to the old power plant on the riverbank. I thanked the officer for his escort and he smiled and waved as he pulled away.

  Waller Creek fed into Town Lake here, and the running trails that banked the river crossed the creek via a wooden pedestrian bridge. I made my way down the trail to the grim group that had gathered near that bridge. As I walked up, I smiled at my son.

  “That escort your idea?”

  He chuckled and nodded. “I thought you might appreciate that. Besides, Mario, I know you and I didn’t want my mother getting pulled over for speeding or running down pedestrians with that hot rod you drive.”

  “You are a good son.” I winked and patted him on the back.

  I walked up to Chris Nakis, who stood in her usual dapper attire and lab coat, looking more serious than ever.

  “What’s the word here?” I asked.

  “Bad.” She shook her head. “Real scary bad. Two sets of bones in as many weeks.” She looked up at me, and our eyes met.

  “I called Leo,” I told her. “It’s her day off, but I told her I wanted her down here. I want her to see this. I’ll bet this is Doug Hughes.”

  “Who?”

  “Lover of the first victim. They disappeared at the same time sixteen years ago. It just makes sense it would be him.”

  “Hmm. That’s interesting.”

  “What do you know so far?”

  “Not much, just that the bones are old and the grave is fresh. The guys are digging carefully so as not to disturb any evidence.”

  “It’s too much of a coincidence not to be related to the other case.”

  “Yes, I agree.”

  While Mike and Tommy questioned the woman who had found the “body,” Chris and I stood and watched as one of the forensic anthropologists worked on unearthing a bone.

  “So, I heard you made a quick trip to Hawaii,” Chris said.

  “How’d you know about that?”

  “Mike told me.”

  “Then he told you why I made the trip?”

  “Yes. So, how did it go?”

  “I made the mold I needed.”

  Chris cleared her throat. “The skull was in good shape then?”

  “Well, it was in five or six pieces, but one of the CILHI anthropologists had put it back together so I could work with it.”

  “And the rest of the remains?”

  “Not much to it. Less than twenty pieces of bone, one to two inches long.”

  Chris looked down at her feet.

  I continued. “The only DNA that’s usable is mitochondrial. None of Ted’s maternal family is alive or locatable now. The only thing the DNA was good for was matching all the pieces together. So, when I’m done, if the image is Ted’s, they’ll know all the remains belong to him.”

  Chris nodded. “Well, you know if you need me for anything…I’m not sure what I could do, but if you need me…”

  “Thanks.”

  Leo’s Jeep screeched to a stop in the parking lot at the top of the bank. She bailed out and came jogging down the trail toward our position. When she got to the site, Chris filled her in on the details as she knew them.

  Leo approached the site carefully to get a closer look. As she squatted next to one of the forensic anthropologists, he lifted an arm bone out of the dirt. He carefully bagged it and handed it to a forensic tech who was logging everything and laying all the separate bags into a black body bag. Leo stood up, stepped back and took in a wider view of the site. She looked out over the water with her hands on her hips. I saw the familiar trance come over her face. She stood that way for a minute or so and then shook her head as if she was shaking something off. She stepped over to where Chris and I were standing. Tommy and Mike joined us.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Nothing more than what I told you the other day,” Leo said. “Remember what I told you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But I was hoping you’d have more to add this time.”

  “No more to add. It still feels the same, except for one thing.”

  “So, elaborate.”

  “I said before I thought the killer wanted to get rid of the victim without being responsible for getting rid of her. There’s something different here.”

  “Why does someone do this?” Chris asked.

  “You mean, the reburial action?” Leo asked.

  “Exactly.”

  Leo shook her head. “I don’t know for sure, but I feel a real purpose in this one. He wanted this one found. So, the burning question now is—why? Why did this one need to be found?”

  “What makes you so sure this one was supposed to be found?” Tommy asked.

  Leo turned and spread her hands out over the scene. “Look at it. The body is next to the running trail. It’s on high ground, there’s no coverage from brush or trees—there’s not a snowball’s chance in August this body was going to wash down into the creek or the river. People jog by here all the time—it was only a matter of time before the dirt shifted enough to reveal bone. The only thing more obvious would be leaving it on the trail, but then the coons or other animals might carry parts off.”

  “Okay, okay,” Tommy said. “I see all that, but maybe he thought he buried the bones
deep enough, or maybe he just wasn’t thinking clearly.”

  “No,” Leo said. “Look at the scene, Tommy. This is out in the wide open, next to the trail, on this little ridge above the creek. There’s no way you hide a body here. The other one was buried on Red Bud Isle in a heavily wooded area, on the opposite side from where people crossing the bridge would see it, and in the path of the waters coming out of the floodgates. He was thinking—boy, was he thinking…but what, why? Why did he hide the first one and bury this one in plain sight?”

  Leo and I were both hooked on this case. The finding of more bones that morning left us with more unanswered questions than before. After we left the scene at Waller Creek, Leo wanted to go to Red Bud Isle and actually walk the scene there. I agreed. She followed me in her Jeep and we parked in a small gravel-covered parking area just off the road. As we got out of our vehicles we heard a soft splashing sound. I looked, and rowing down-river on the other side of the isle was a canoeist with a long gray ponytail. Leo caught it, too. I shuddered and looked at her.

  “Interesting.”

  “Could he be visiting the burial site.”

  “Could be, or he could just be rowing on the river like he said he does.”

  “This is a ways upriver from the rental place.”

  “True. But this is also where everybody else rows when they rent those canoes.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “I didn’t say I did either, just saying it’s possible that it’s nothing.”

  We walked through the thick foliage on the isle down to the edge that faced the Tom Miller Dam. There was another small islet off to the right, but straight in front of us was the silent wall of the dam. The day was overcast, but there was no rain, and it was cool and still. There were few birds out, and it seemed unusually quiet in that spot. The crime scene tape had been removed, but the area from which the bones had been recovered was barren—devoid of vegetation—the red-clay surface bearing the scars of Addie Waldrep’s second grave. A blue heron, startled by our arrival, departed from a log floating near the other small islet, and flew gracefully past the end of Red Bud Isle as he ascended along the face of the limestone cliffs.