David Lindsey - The Face of the Assassin

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.

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.

“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 hell 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 disassembled 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.”