Faye Kellerman - The Burnt House

“Can I get you a cup of coffee?”

“You know…I think I forgot to eat my lunch.” She walked over to an industrial sink and washed her hands. It took her quite a while to get all the clay off her fingers and out of her nails. When her hands were spotless, she dug inside a brown paper bag and pulled out a baloney sandwich with lettuce on white bread. “Wow, I’m hungry.”

“Can I get you something to drink?”

“No. I have my soda.” She pulled out a can of Coke and a bag of potato chips.

Decker said, “I do believe that you are the first woman I’ve met who drinks regular soda.”

She took another bite of her sandwich, opened the bag, and daintily pulled out a chip. “I’m not into food so much. I don’t have a very good palate. My friends all say I eat like I’m a ten-year-old.” She opened her soda and drank it with a straw. “They have a point.”

“Hey, what you’re eating looks pretty good to me.”

“You want a bite?”

“No, no.” Decker smiled. “I’m good, thank you.”

“No palate, but God more than made up for it in the visual department. This job is really a calling.” She ate another chip. “It’s not enough just to be artistic. You also have to be acutely tactile, to feel the face taking shape under your fingers and let it guide you rather than the other way around.” She finished her sandwich and ate a few more chips. Then she wiped her hands and face with a napkin and patted her stomach. “I feel much better. Well, back to work.”

“How much longer are you going to work?”

“I really don’t know. If you want, you can come back in a couple of hours. There might be more to show you.”

“Around six?”

She picked up a scalpel. “That seems perfect.”

AT 6:10, JANE had emerged from a fuzzy clump of mud into something distinct. She had a wide nose, a pointed chin, a wide mouth, a hint of cheekbones, and a prominent brow. Without taking her eyes off the bust, Lauren said, “What do you think?”

“I think you’re amazing.”

“Thank you. Do you have a moment to talk?”

“Of course.” He took a seat next to the artist. “What’s up?”

“Well, I’m having a conversation with her and we haven’t reached a conclusion. I thought that maybe we could brainstorm.”

“Sure, if you think it will help.”

“First thing is that Jane has a broad forehead and pronounced cheekbones. I think she has Latina or Native American ancestry. Maybe Alaskan.”

“Interesting. The pathologist thought she might be Hispanic.”

“I have to agree. Secondly, in the seventies, there weren’t as many anorexic women as there are now. Plus, her being so young…I gave her a little more cheek fat. What do you think?”

“I think that’s fine.”

“Okay.” Lauren smiled. “So let’s move on. You’re thinking that she was murdered in the midseventies.”

“During or after 1974. That was the date of the sweatshirt.”

“Okay, so I was doing a little research. In that era, disco was pretty big. I’ve listened to a little Barry White and Donna Summer. Priscilla and the Major were not considered disco, right?”

Decker smiled. “Correct. Think of disco as John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever.”

Lauren nodded but her expression was a blank.

“White suit, big hair, big crystal globe ball in the center of the dance floor.”

“It sounds like a bar mitzvah.”

“Uh…yeah, kinda. Disco was the ultimate dance music. Priscilla and the Major were soft rock.”

“Yes, they sound like soft rock. So that modifies the hairstyle from something more extreme to something more conservative. I’ve been looking at some fan magazines around that time. Charlie’s Angels was a really big TV hit.”

“Indeed it was.”

“If you think the young woman was a little bit innocent and maybe fad oriented, I’d consider the three stars of the TV series. What we have is three really different types of hairstyles-we have Jaclyn Smith, who had the classical long wavy brown hair. We have Kate Jackson, who had dark, blunt cut hair parted in the middle, side bangs…kind of perky and Ivy League college student. And then there was Farrah Fawcett-Majors, who wore her hair…well, I don’t know what you’d call it. It was like hair all over the place. There were bangs and side wings and layers and flips. I would think that would be a very hard hairdo for the average girl to manage.”

Decker smiled. “Man, this is a quick hop down memory lane. I will tell you this. Farrah Fawcett-Majors’s hairdo inspired a very popular look. There were lots of women with major-league side flips.”

“Like Jennifer Aniston’s layers in the early 2000s.” Lauren thought a moment. “If she is Latina and conservative, I don’t see her as the blond, blue-eyed Farrah Fawcett-Majors type. I was thinking that maybe she’d have the long brown hair of Jaclyn Smith.”

“Honestly, Lauren, at that time, everyone was trying to look like Farrah Fawcett-Majors, regardless of hair or eye color. She was the big one.”

“So why don’t I do this?” Lauren suggested. “I can put all three Charlie’s Angels hairdos on Jane-the blond Farrah with all the flips, poker straight like Kate Jackson, and long and wavy like Smith. That way we can take pictures of Jane with all three hairstyles and it might increase our chances of finding who Jane really is.”

“Good idea. You can also modify the hair and eye color. She may be a natural brunette, but there are a slew of blondes from a bottle.”

“Okay. If we do Farrah Fawcett, we’ll give Jane blondish hair and blue eyes. For Jaclyn, let’s try out darker blue eyes but dark hair. Kate will be brown eyes and brown hair. I have one final comment, Lieutenant. We might try a few pictures with Jane wearing glasses. Contacts were expensive back then. Even though the bigger glasses were coming into vogue, I think large rims would have overpowered her face. I’m voting for small granny glasses.”

“Whatever you think.”

Lauren pulled out a box of pastels and began to sketch. Twenty minutes later she had concocted a sketch of a young woman with dark eyes, dark hair, but a modified Farrah Fawcett hairdo. An oval-shaped face with a broad forehead; rimmed granny glasses sat on the bridge of her nose. Her lips were stretched into a wide smile that showed teeth. But it was her eyes that gave Decker pause; not the color, but the expression. They connoted someone who was chronically cheerful, an individual who couldn’t possibly conceive of anything ever going wrong.

The forensic artist regarded her finished product. “Let me try to reproduce this look on our Jane Doe clay model.”

“How long will that take?”

“Another half day at least. I’d like to sleep on it overnight. Why don’t you come back tomorrow in the late afternoon?”

“That sounds like a plan. Let me recap just to get it straight in my head. What you’re going to do is set out all sorts of possibilities for Jane…all kinds of wigs of seventies hairstyles, different eye color, different hair color, different glasses, no glasses, but all the models will be wearing the same pink jacket and the mood ring. Then we’ll take photographs of all the different permutations. Hopefully, we get a couple of them right enough to jolt someone’s memory back into a time warp.”

Lauren nodded. “What I think everyone wants is for somebody to lift a finger and say, ‘Aha! I know her!’”

“Exactly,” Decker said. “Someone who’ll finally give Jane the recognition she deserves.”

S HE HAS A face.” Marge spread the photographs on her desk and sorted them by hairstyle. “Several of them, actually.”

“Several looks, but the same face.” Decker was standing behind Marge’s back, peering over her shoulder. His jacket was open and he had strapped his gun harness to his chest, but he wasn’t armed. He usually didn’t bother wearing his piece when he was doing desk work. “Lauren did an excellent job.”