Chasing the Night - Iris Johansen [81]
And for all those other thousands of innocent victims Rakovac was planning on destroying.
Chapter
13
“Food,” Catherine said firmly. “You’ve skipped two meals, and I promised Joe I’d keep you fed.”
“‘Stoked,’” Eve said. “Isn’t that the term you used?”
“Whatever. You’ve been working for a solid twelve hours without a break.”
“I’m in a hurry. You’ll agree there’s a certain urgency to my getting this finished.”
“You still need food. I have a ham sandwich and a salad for you. Just eat it, and I won’t bother you again for another four or five hours. Okay?”
“Okay.” Eve wiped her hands on her cleansing cloth and moved away from the worktable to the kitchen table across the room. She needed the break anyway. Her eyes were stinging from focusing on the precise measurements, and the back of her neck was starting to ache. “What would you do if I said no?”
“Nag.” She sat down across from Eve. “The alternative is force-feeding, and I’m trying to avoid it. It tends to arouse massive resistance.” She lifted her cup of coffee to her lips. “But you wouldn’t let it go that far. You have the sense to know that you need fuel to keep on going.”
“There you go again. ‘Stoke.’ ‘Fuel.’” She picked up her sandwich. “But you’re right, I’m sensible. Sometimes.” Her gaze wandered back to the reconstruction on the table across the room. “I do tend to get involved.”
“Yes, like the way you became involved with me. Venable warned you against it, didn’t he?”
“You know he did. I even tried to listen. It didn’t work out,” Eve said. “But that wasn’t the kind of involvement I was talking about.”
“Your work,” Catherine said. “That reconstruction that looks like—”
“A nightmare.” It wasn’t difficult for Eve to realize the impact her work on the skull had on Catherine. Right now she was at the stage when she’d just put in the depth markers that resembled dozens of swords sticking out of the skull. It looked as if the skull were being tortured. “I told you that I didn’t want you to watch me working on it. I was afraid it would hurt you.”
“I tried not to do it. I couldn’t help myself. There was a kind of morbid fascination.”
“There’s nothing morbid about what I’m doing,” Eve said quietly. “I’m bringing him home. I don’t care whose child he turns out to be. He’ll have a face, an identity, and I hope eventually a name. Perhaps someone will remember him and think of him with love. That’s all I care about.”
Catherine nodded. “I know it is.” She looked back at the reconstruction. “You always give your reconstructions a name.” She paused, then forced herself to continue. “What did you call him?”
“Not Luke,” Eve said. “Even if I hadn’t wanted to hurt you, I would never call a reconstruction by the name of someone who is a possible. I’m always afraid it might influence the sculpting in the final stage. His name is Jeremy.”
She could see the relief on Catherine’s face. “That’s a nice name.” She studied the reconstruction more carefully. “I’m trying to be objective, but it’s not easy. I’ve got this weird maternal feeling that you’re torturing my child. Why those stick-pins?”
“Depth markers,” Eve corrected. She finished her sandwich and leaned back in the chair. She wanted to get back to work, but she could spare a few moments to ease Catherine’s disturbance. “What do you know about forensic sculpting?”
“Not much. I read up on the age progression because I knew I was going to ask you to do it.” She grimaced. “But I never wanted to see you do this voodoo.”
“It’s not voodoo. There’s a science to it up to a point, when instinct takes over.”
“The stick-pins,” Catherine prompted. “AKA depth markers. Why do you do that?”
“They’re tissue-depth markers. They’re made of ordinary erasers. I cut each marker to the proper measurement and glue it onto its proper point on the face. There are over twenty points of the skull for which there are known tissue depths. Facial tissue depth has been found to be fairly consistent in people of the same age, race, sex, and weight.”
“How do they know?”
“There are anthropological charts