Adrienne Giordano - The Rebel

“Yes,” Paul said. “It’s been sitting here waiting for someone to work on her.”

Amanda brought her attention back to the skull on the table. Detective McCall had told her the anthropologist had determined the victim was a white female, and the flatness of the face and the long, thin nasal openings appeared to represent that.

“She’s a Caucasoid,” Amanda said.

“Yes.” He pointed to an area at the back of the skull. “In terms of injuries, there’s a small, depressed spot here. Looks like she was hit with something small, but it was a forceful impact. From the shape of the wound, it could have been a hammer. It fractured her skull.”

“Poor thing.”

“Whoever buried her didn’t dig far enough. That’s why the dog dug up the skull. We never found the rest of the bones. Animals may have gotten to them and dragged them to another spot. That field is too big to dig up the entire thing looking for her.” He held his hand out. “This is what we have.”

Amanda’s stomach twisted. “If they’d buried her deeper, she might never have been found.”

“Probably not.”

“I’ll do another sketch. See if it’s any different than the last one. I brought everything I need.” She pointed her pencil at the table. “Can I work here?”

“That’s fine. Holler if you need me.”

“I will. Thanks.”

Paul wandered off to a lab table with a giant microscope on the far side of the room. From the looks of all the equipment stacked on shelves and the shiny tables, he had plenty to do.

She dug her iPod from her purse, shoved the earbuds in place and scrolled her music library. For this, she knew exactly what she needed. A nice classical mix. She poked at the desired playlist, aptly named DESPERATE, and got down to business.

From her briefcase, she pulled a small stack of tracing paper, pencils and her copy of the tissue-depth table for Caucasoids. In the file Paul had left her, she located the life-size frontal and lateral photographs of the skull, set them side by side on her drawing boards and taped the corners. Over the frontal photograph, she placed tracing paper and began outlining the face while Chopin’s Nocturne No. 2 softly streamed through her earbuds.

Song after song played as she carefully outlined, corrected and outlined again, taking her time, double-checking each element until it was time to call Paul over to help with tissue-depth markers. Then she’d begin filling in the face, adding the contours of the jaw and cheeks and then the eyebrows and hairline. The tiny details she could add later, but for now she focused on a blueprint to work with. Little by little, each element brought some new aspect to the face, giving it lifelike qualities.

The hair. Detective McCall had told her they’d found a few long, dark hairs with the body. How long, she wasn’t sure, but she’d try shoulder length. After outlining the overall shape of the hair and filling in the length based on the hair found at the scene, she added subshapes—loose waves in the front—and then blended dark and light tones for contrast.

Chopin shifted to Beethoven again. Could that be? More than two hours’ worth of a playlist? And she still had to fill in the details on the frontal eye–nose area. She stopped shading and glanced around. Paul had moved to a desk in the corner of the lab, clearly unconcerned about the approaching end of the workday.

Amanda sat back and stretched her shoulders as a beautiful young woman with sharp cheekbones and a small button nose stared back at her.

A woman with a hole in the back of her skull.

Stomach knotted, Amanda closed her eyes, forcing herself to detach. To not get sucked into the mind-ravaging warfare this case would create. Her mother had done this work on a regular basis, felt this pull of longing and heartbreak. Amanda supposed a person eventually got used to it. After all, the cause was noble, if not emotionally eviscerating.

She opened her eyes to someone whose family had yet to know her fate. Amanda thought back to those first brutal days without her mom, to the shock and anger and bone-shattering ache that came with sudden and tragic loss.

To this day, she didn’t fully understand—probably never would—how her mom had thought suicide was the only option. Obviously, the emotional place her mother had reached was too dark, too painful to find her way free. Her work as a forensic artist probably hadn’t helped, but Amanda would never truly know why her mom had done what she did.

At least Amanda had a place to visit. A place to sit and talk and grieve.

A proper grave site.

She ran her fingertips over the edge of the paper she’d sketched on. This woman’s family had no answers. Maybe they assumed she was dead. Maybe not. Maybe down deep they held on to hope that she’d walk back into their lives.

And that tore into Amanda like a rusty chain saw. At least she knew her mother was gone.

“I’ll bring you home,” she said.

Chapter Four

While David stood beside her at the lab table, Amanda stored her drawing boards, wondering what kind of coward buried a woman and walked away, leaving her body to be ravaged by animals and the elements.

She didn’t know. Didn’t care to. All she knew was sitting in that lab, staring at the skull, sketching based on estimations of tissue depth, she’d experienced a buzz, the high of having the ability to change the course of an investigation—something her mother used to talk about. Amanda had never experienced it. Never quite understood the lure of forensic work. As a kid, she’d thought it all seemed...morbid...and she hadn’t grasped what her mother found so intriguing.

Until today.

She thought about her workbench back in the studio where a forensic workshop registration—the one she kept putting off—was weighted down by a giant conch shell she’d found on a trip to Florida when she was nine. A shell her mother had uncovered while wading in the surf.

I know, Mom. I know. Every day she’d been without her mother, she’d never doubted her presence.

Beside her, David stepped closer and she glanced up, their gazes locking because when he pinned those haunting dark blue eyes on her, she couldn’t resist the pull of them reaching right in and paralyzing her.

Something she didn’t want to feel. With anyone.

“Everything okay?”

“Fine.”

Breaking eye contact, she studied the intricate stitching on the shoulder of his jacket and the way the seam fell at exactly the right spot, the cut so perfect for his big body that she realized it might be nice, sometime soon, to have sex.

And wow. What a mess her mind was today. She couldn’t deny there was a certain heat between them. From the time she’d opened her front door, she’d felt it. That simmer.

“This project,” she said, keeping her voice low so she wouldn’t be overheard by Paul, who patiently waited for them to get packed up. “It’s complicated.”

Receiving her message that she didn’t want Paul eavesdropping, David dipped his head lower. “The sketching?”

No. You. “It’s more than that.”

Because with him she felt things, tingly things that made her system hum, gave her a little high. If only she liked that high. Highs and lows, in her experience, shattered lives. But it had been so long since she was beyond her personal safe zone. Since she allowed herself to immediately feel a certain way about a man. About this man. Feelings like that messed with her emotions, brought her to places that terrified her. For ten years she’d worked to not turn into a person tortured by her own emotions.

But David kept surprising her. In a good way. In a way that made something warm and gooey chase away the cold, empty heartbreak she’d felt in the lab. That alone was worth...she didn’t know. She’d simply never met anyone who affected her this way. And so quickly.