David Lindsey - The Face of the Assassin

He decided against it, but he couldn’t resist doing a little more detailing, articulating the individual hairs in the eyebrows, and using the tips of the bristles of a toothbrush to lightly texture the area of the face where a beard would grow. By the time the gin was gone, he felt like he had taken it about as far as he should.

It was a little after 8:00 P.M. when he finally ate dinner on the terrace outside the dining room, a light meal of warmed-up quiche and a fresh green salad. The summer days were long and it was still more than an hour before dark, though the shadows from the house and studio now stretched far out into the water and the light on the hills across the lake was taking on the amber tones of the dying sun.

He had had a couple more gin and tonics since the first one, and now he made another as he finished putting the dishes in the dishwasher. He was feeling the drinks as he crossed from the terrace to the deck outside the studio. On the lake, the last of the sailboats were heading for the marina, which was just out of sight around the bluffs to the south, and the lake was growing still and glassy in the cove where Alice had been swimming.

As he pushed on the panel in the glass wall and stepped into the studio, the light of the reflected sunset was flooding everything inside in a honey haze. He was no more than a few steps into the room when he stopped and saw his own reflection in two of the three mirrors around the workbench.

It was odd that his image was perfectly framed in that one brief moment. Odder still was that he had caught his own reflection in a frozen moment, as in a snapshot. Profile. Frontal. His features softened in the muted honey light. It was a weird moment: The world stopped; his reflection gave no sense of movement or of life. It was as if he were looking at a wax image of himself.

Then with a sudden dizziness that he did not attribute to the gin, he realized that he was looking at the reconstructed sculpture that he had finished only hours before.

In an instant, he understood what Alice had seen in the drawing that disturbed her, why she had furiously refused to look at the sculpted head. With very careful calculation and with all of his experience and talent brought to bear on the task, he had meticulously reconstructed the skull that Becca Haber had brought him, only to discover that when the skull belonged to a living person, that person had lived with his face.

The glass slipped out of his hand.

The glass hit the concrete floor with a sharp smack-and-shatter. Bern didn’t even notice. Shards of glass crunched under his shoes as he moved past the coffee table toward the reconstructed skull as if mesmerized, his eyes fixed on the face he had made but hadn’t seen. At least he hadn’t seen the face within the face. He had been intimate with its technical construction but not with its spirit. It was Alice who had seen the spirit of the thing.

Focused on the sculpture, to the exclusion of all other sensory awareness, Bern went to the workbench and turned on the lights. He sat down on a stool in front of the face and looked at it, his eyes moving over the details of its features as if they were the fingers of a sightless man. Good God. It was as if he had had some kind of myopia when he was building the face, some kind of break in visual-cognitive synapse, much like Alice’s disconnect from words that she had heard all of her life but could no longer comprehend.

But now, suddenly, he had been startled from a daze. He remembered that from the very beginning he had fought the tendency to reproduce his own features on the skull. What the hell was this? What was going on here?

He moved the stool over beside the face. After readjusting two of the mirrors, he sat down beside the reconstruction and put his own face inches away from it, side by side. He looked in the mirrors.

A warm flush spread over him. It wasn’t exact, but the accuracy of the proportional relationships 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 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?