The Face of the Assassin Part 5

A warm flush spread over him. It wasn't exact, but the accuracy of the proportional relations.h.i.+ps was unmistakable. It was easy to see why he had tended to put his own exact features on this skull. Everything indicated that he should have. It was all there. He had indeed understood what he was looking at when he had been sketching the naked skull and then reclothing it with clay flesh. The bony architecture had told him that his own face had every right to be there.

He could hardly pull himself away from the mirrors, where the reverse angle emphasized the similarities between his own face and the reconstructed face even more. Jesus Holy Christ. What was he supposed to think?

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 h.e.l.l was his frame of reference here? The possibilities? The implications? This was beyond strange. Way 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. s.h.i.+t, 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. 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 oddb.a.l.l.s? Who were the bitter convictions? Who were the angry ones? 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 oddb.a.l.l.s? 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 h.e.l.l. 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 gla.s.s. 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 gla.s.s, 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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.

"I know someone who does."

"Is it old?"

"I doubt if the thing's a year old."

"No kidding? Well, has it got teeth, then?"

"Yeah, all of them."

"There you go. We can do a regular nuclear DNA test using the teeth. We can extract the pulp from the inside of the tooth, and then we're on the way. No need to go the mitochondrial route."

"Any particular tooth the best?"

"A molar. They have more pulp to harvest. And, of course, no fillings. Preferably no work at all on the tooth we test."

"What about time? How long would it take?"

"Sounds like a rush."

"Yeah."

"We could do a nuclear short tandem repeat test in . . . maybe a day. Two days."

Bern thanked her and was off the line in a few minutes. While he showered, he worked it out. He didn't know what the h.e.l.l was going on here, but he did know that he didn't want people he worked with regularly to be aware of it, whatever it was. The DPS crime lab was out.

He made coffee, hurriedly ate a couple of pieces of toast, and then returned to the studio, where he photographed the reconstruction from every angle he could manage. Then he disa.s.sembled the lower jaw and located two molars that were without fillings. He removed them and put them in a small Ziploc bag. Checking his watch, he picked up the phone and called Southwest Airlines and booked a flight to Houston. Then he dialed another number in Houston and had a short conversation before hanging up and heading for Austin-Bergstrom International.

Two hours later, he arrived at Hobby Airport in Houston. He took a cab to the GTS labs in the Texas Medical Center complex and filled out the necessary paperwork for having a DNA string run on the two molars. He paid extra for a rush to get the results the next day. From there, he went to another private genetic-testing lab just off North Loop West. There, he filled out the paperwork to have a genetic string run on himself, again paying extra to have the results by the next day.

From there, it was short cab ride to Willow Lane in the upscale Meadow Wood section west of the Galleria. On a street nearly covered over with old water oaks, he had the taxi drop him off at a two-story Georgian home, its dun-colored walls carefully adorned with precisely trimmed fig ivy.

While he was still walking up the sidewalk, the front door opened and Gina stood in the doorway, smiling at him.

"You handsome devil," she said, opening her arms to hug him. She was the prettiest seventy-four-year-old woman he would ever see. Her smile was as beguiling now as it had been thirty years ago, when he fallen in love with her as a small boy, and her hair just as blond, as well.

Aunt Gina had cut an elegant swath through Houston's society set, marrying three men of significant wealth and influence, the departure of each leaving her appreciably better off financially than the previous one. The first, her real love, had died in a car crash in Mexico. The other two marriages were unconscious searches for something as happy as the first, and both ended in divorce. From then on, she dated profusely, while understanding the wisdom of remaining a single woman.

They had lunch together in her bright dining room, which overlooked her beloved rose garden, catching up on news of each other. Then following dessert and a lull in the conversation, she leveled her bright eyes at him across the table and her smile softened.

"What brings you here, Paul?" she asked. "You seem to have something on your mind."

He nodded and swallowed the last bite of his cream tart, the last half of a strawberry.

"I want to talk about my parents," he said. "My biological parents."

She tilted her head to the side and her face took on a look of endearment. "Oh, dear boy, it's taken you such a long time."

"Well, it never seemed important before. Sally and Ted raised me, loved me, nurtured me. They were my parents, and I thought they deserved my loyalty."

"So you've just kept your wondering to yourself?"

"They didn't offer to tell me. I took my cue from that."

She laughed gently. "You were always so obedient, Paul. You should've kicked your heels up once in a while. Well, they had different att.i.tudes about adoption in those days, and G.o.d knows your mother wasn't the adventuresome sort. She wasn't about to buck conventions. Ted, either, as far as that goes. They were dear people, though, and they did what they thought was best for you."

"I knew that. I just didn't want them to feel as if all that they had done for me wasn't enough."

"But now you want to know."

"They've been dead a dozen years now," he said, and let it go at that.

Gina smiled again. That was the way it was with her. She had learned a long time ago that life went down better with a smile, and she had always had a ready one. He tried to smile, too, but he found it hard to hide the weight of what was waiting for him on his workbench back in Austin.

She nodded, understanding. Then she looked out through the tall windows to the sunny garden. Her thoughts drifted, and he wondered if he would ever know what she was thinking at this moment. Gina's buoyant att.i.tude about life made it possible for her to survive her disappointments with aplomb. But it did not mean that she didn't feel the ache all the same.

She sighed and looked at him again.

"I'm afraid you're going to be frustrated," she warned him. "There's just so very little to know."

"There are ways to research things these days," he said. "Things we've never had before."

"They're not going to help you," she said. She paused, then shook her head slightly, ruefully. "You were abandoned at a hospital in Atlanta," she said. "Your biological mother, G.o.d bless her little heart, just walked into that old Lanier Memorial Hospital and left you in a little chair in the maternity ward. The ward nurse got a call saying you were there." She smiled wanly and shook her head. "That's all there was to it, Paul. It just doesn't go any further than that."

He didn't know what he was supposed to think about that. He didn't feel anything in particular.

"And we tried to pursue it," she added. "Your mother and I. When you were about four, we went to Atlanta and tried to find out if there was anything more. We saw the official Lanier report about that night. Just a little ol' piece of paper saying what had happened. Six lines. No more. You were handed over to child protective services, or whatever the people in Georgia called it back in those days. Your mother and daddy adopted you when you were only six days old. And that was all there was to it. When you were just a little over two years old, they moved back to Texas."

"You checked it out?" He found it hard to believe that there was no way to go any further with it.

"We tried. We tried very hard. You know your mother. She just thought if she could find your biological mother, she could do something good for the poor thing. She, Sally, was so thankful to have you. She stayed in touch with that agency-child protective services, whatever-for years to see if any woman ever inquired about that night. But n.o.body ever did."

Bern was surprised again. He had always a.s.sumed that if he ever wanted to know who his real parents were, he would be able to find out. It was a shock to discover that that door had closed for good. In fact, it had never even been open in the first place.

"I suppose," Gina said, "that in a very real way, you really were born to Sally and Ted. I mean, you practically had no history at all before they took you in."

Bern just sat there. It wasn't what he'd been expecting.

He took a final sip of coffee to cover his surprise and disappointment. He said nothing, and in the silence he could hear the heavy old grandfather's clock that Gina had s.h.i.+pped back from Heidelberg on her first honeymoon ticking in the living room.

She saw that this abrupt end to his search had caught him off guard, and he knew that she realized that he had probably imagined a far more compelling history for himself.

"I guess you didn't expect this," she said softly.

"No, I didn't," he said.

"I wish I had something for you," she replied. She reached across and laid her hand on his, her right hand, which was never without the beautiful Colombian emerald ring that matched her eyes. "If I'd known you were coming to ask me that question," she added, "I would've made up a most wonderful lie for you, dear boy, something that would have made you happy."