Rhineberger opened a container and removed Jane Doe’s upper and lower jawbones. Her teeth showed extensive dental work, sixteen to eighteen amalgam fillings. When he set the maxilla on the mandible, matching the grooves and worn surfaces where they met, we could see the extent of her overbite and the crooked eyetooth on the left. “Can’t believe nobody recognized her by the description of the teeth. Charlie says it was all probably done a year or two before she died. You can see the wisdom teeth haven’t erupted yet. He says she probably wasn’t eighteen.” He placed the bones back in the container, leaving the lid off.
Her personal effects scarcely covered the tabletop. This was all that was left of her, the entire sum. I experienced a sense of puzzlement that any life could be reduced to such humble remnants. Surely, she’d expected far more from the world—love, marriage, children, perhaps—at the very least a valued presence among her friends and family. Her remains were buried now in a grave without a headstone, its location marked by lot number in the cemetery ledger. In spite of that, she seemed curiously real, given the sparse data we had. I’d seen the black-and-white photograph of her where she lay on the August-dry grass, her face obscured by the angle of her body and the intervening shrubs. Her midriff, a portion of her forearm, and a section of her calf were all that were visible from the camera’s perspective, her flesh swollen, mottled by decomposition as though bruised.
I picked up the plastic bag that contained a lock of her hair, which looked clean and silky, a muted shade of blond. A second plastic bag held two delicate earrings, simple loops of gold wire. The only remaining evidence of the murder itself was the length of thin cable, encased in white plastic, with which her wrists had been bound. The tarp was made of a medium-weight canvas, the seams stitched in red, with metal grommets inserted at regular intervals. It looked like standard-issue—a painter’s drop cloth, or a cover used to shield a cord of firewood from rain. In one corner, there was a red speck that looked like a ladybug or a spot of blood, but on closer inspection I realized it was simply a small square of red stitches, where the thread had been secured at the end of the row. From these few tokens, we were hoping to reconstruct not only her identity but that of her killer. How could she be so compelling that eighteen years later the five of us would assemble like this in her behalf?
Belatedly, I tuned into the conversation. Stacey was laying out our progress to date. Apparently, Mandel had gone back and reviewed the file himself. Like Stacey and Dolan, who’d actually discovered the body, he’d been involved from the first. He was saying, “Too bad Crouse is gone. There aren’t many of us left.”
Dolan said, “What happened to Crouse?”
“He sold his house and moved his family to Oregon. Now he’s chief of police in some little podunk town up there. Last I heard he was bored to tears, but he can’t afford to come back with housing prices here. Keith Baldwin and Oscar Wallen are both retired and Mel Galloway’s dead. Nonetheless, it’s nice to have a chance to revisit this case. You have to think after all these years, we might shake something loose.”
Stacey said, “What’s your take on it? You see anything we missed?”
Mandel thought about that briefly. “I guess the only thing I’d be curious about is this Iona Mathis, the gal Frankie Miracle was married to. She might know something if you can track her down. I hear she came back and sat through the trial with him. She damn near married the guy again she felt so sorry for him.”
Stacey made a pained face. “I don’t get the appeal. I can’t even manage to get married once, and I’m a law-abiding citizen. You have an address on her?”
“No, but I can get you one.”
11
Dolan dropped me off at the office before he took Stacey home. Stacey’s energy was flagging and, in truth, mine was, too. As I unlocked the door, I noticed a Mercedes station wagon parked in the narrow driveway that separated my bungalow from the next in line. The woman in the driver’s seat was working on a piece of needlepoint, the roll of canvas resting awkwardly against the steering wheel. She looked up at me and waved, then set her canvas on the seat beside her. She got out of the car, reached into the rear seat, and pulled out a shopping bag, saying, “I was beginning to think I’d missed you.”
I waited while she locked the car door and headed in my direction. She looked familiar, but I couldn’t remember how I knew her. I placed her in her early sixties, trim, attractive, nicely dressed in a lightweight red wool suit. Her hair was medium length, tinted a deep auburn shade and brushed loosely off her face.