Murder Among the Angels (6 page)

“The wife ordered the death mask in the mobster case,” he said. “But the police insisted on being there when I took the impression. They didn’t want the body disappearing. The police officer who was assigned to stay with the body had been trying to identify the skull of a young boy, and asked me if I wanted to try doing a reconstruction of the face from the skull.”

“I guess it must have seemed like a natural progression: death mask to soft tissue reconstruction,” Jerry commented.

“To him, it did. I confess that it didn’t seem like such a natural progression to me, at first. I’d never done anything like that before.” He led them back to the reconstruction at the beginning of the display, which was that of a young black boy. “This was the boy. The family identified him from the reconstruction. They were so grateful: it gave them such relief to know for sure what had happened to him. After that, I was hooked.”

“Where’s your reconstruction of our first Jane Doe?” Jerry asked. “I’d like to show her to Miss Graham.” He turned to Charlotte. “She’s the one whose skull was found last summer on top of the gravestone at St. James’s.”

Charlotte nodded.

“Down here,” said Lister, leading them down to the other end. “I’ve arranged them chronologically.” At the end of the row of tables, he paused before a sculpture of a beautiful young blond woman, with clear blue eyes fringed with dark, thick lashes, and an enigmatic smile.

“She looks a bit like the angel statue,” said Charlotte.

“Yes, she does,” Lister agreed. “I was surprised that she came out that way. I wondered if I might be doing too many angels. But if that’s the way she came out, that’s the way she came out.” His glance shifted to the package in Jerry’s shopping bag. “And now,” he said, “what have you got to show
me
?”

Jerry set the shopping bag down on the table and removed the bubble-wrapped package. Then he peeled back the tape and lifted the skull from its plastic nest. “Here she is,” he said as he handed the skull to Lister. “Jane Doe the second. Also found on a gravestone in a local cemetery.”

Lister carefully lowered the skull into an unoccupied cork collar next to the sculpture of the first Jane Doe. Then he leaned over to study the skull, examining it from all angles. “It’s a she, all right,” he said. “You can tell from the smoothness of the brow ridge. Caucasian, mid-twenties.”

“Like our other young lady,” said Jerry.

“Yes,” Lister concurred as he ran his fingers over the skull’s surfaces, caressing each bump and fissure as if he were a blind man trying to get a sense of a new acquaintance, or a phrenologist doing a reading. “She’s lovely,” he said. “Which cemetery did you find her in?”

“Zion Hill,” said Jerry. “A woman found her the day before yesterday while she was walking her dog. That’s the cemetery that’s right over there,” nodding toward one of the tall windows. He walked over to the window and looked out. “I understand it was once all one tract of church property.”

“Yes, it was,” said Lister, who was still studying the skull. “From Zion Hill right down to the river.” He looked up at Jerry. “Was it the fat, blond woman with the frisky black and white dog?”

“Mrs. Snyder,” said Jerry, with surprise. “How did you know?”

“I see her walking that dog on the tracks practically every morning,” Lister replied. “Any body parts turn up recently?”

Jerry nodded. “What Leonore calls a butt, and a lower arm. The butt turned up in a shad net; the lower arm washed up at the yacht club. But since there’s no neck, we can’t match the cut marks. The cut marks on the body parts did match those on the body parts of the other victim, though.”

“Where were the other body parts found?”

“Fort Tryon Park,” Jerry replied, naming the park that fronted on the river just north of the George Washington Bridge. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the bodies weren’t dumped in the river at the same place.”

Charlotte knew the Hudson was famous for its eccentric currents. A tidal river almost to Albany, the current could flow either north or south, depending on the tides. The Indians had called it “the river that flows both ways.”

“How much did the butt weigh?” asked Lister.

“About ten pounds,” Jerry answered.

“Then it probably went in somewhere close to where it was found,” Lister said. “A body part weighing that much wouldn’t have traveled far.”

As he spoke, a thought suddenly struck Charlotte. “I assume the butt, as you call it, must have had flesh on it to weigh that much,” she said.

Jerry nodded.

She looked down at the gleaming skull. “But the skull’s bare.”

Jerry nodded again. “The killer must have macerated the skull.”

“Macerated it?” she said.

“Boiled it to remove the flesh,” Lister explained. “Usually you throw in a little detergent to help dissolve the fat and get rid of the smell,” he added with a little grin. “Tide is good; Fab, anything with enzymes.”

“To get your wash whiter than white,” said Jerry.

Charlotte shuddered.

Lister was still bent over the skull. “I think your killer used something more than just detergent, though. This skull is like the other one in that it’s unnaturally white. I would bet that both of them were bleached.”

“But why would somebody bother?” Charlotte asked. To say nothing of bothering to leave it in a cemetery with a bouquet of lilies of the valley, she thought.

Lister shrugged. “That’s not my department. I leave that up to the shrinks. But skulls
are
my department, and I think we may be in luck here.”

“What do you mean?” Jerry asked.

“If you can’t match the skull to the body parts, the next best thing is to have a skull with some unique identifying feature,” he said. “I call your attention to the victim’s chin.”

Charlotte and Jerry bent down to look at the skull.

“The underside,” Lister added.

At first Charlotte didn’t see anything, but as she tilted her head to get a better look at the underside of the chin, she noticed a faint rectangle etched into the bone. “I see some lines,” she said. “What are they from?”

“A surgeon’s knife,” he replied. “She’s had plastic surgery. A complete facial reconstruction, I would venture to guess. The rectangle on her chin is from a chin reconstruction.”

“No kidding!” Jerry exclaimed as he leaned over to take another look.

“I’m guessing here—you’ll have to confirm this with Leonore—but it looks like a wedge-shaped section has been added to the chin, which would have had the effect of making it longer. But that’s not all.”

“What else?” Jerry asked.

“See this abraded area?” He pointed to an area under the eye socket where the surface of the bone was rougher than elsewhere. “Again, I’m guessing. But I think there was an implant here. To build up the zygomatic bone.”

Jerry whistled softly.

“It’s the prominence of the zygomatic bone, or cheekbone, that gives a woman that high-cheekboned look that is so desirable,” he said. Then he pointed to the ridges above the eye sockets. “Same thing here. Brow implants on the superorbital ridges.”

“That would explain why the flesh was removed,” Charlotte observed. “The murderer may have been worried that the victims could be identified through the facial implants.”

“Exactly,” said Lister. “Only a trained eye would notice that the implants had left their mark on the bone. Now for the most interesting part.” He slid the cast of the first victim’s skull over next to the skull that had just been found. “Look at this,” he said, pointing at the cheekbones.

Charlotte and Jerry leaned over again to look at the first victim’s skull. The surface of the cheekbones was rough, exactly as with the second skull.

“Same thing,” Jerry said.

Lister nodded. “I had noticed the abrasions before, of course, but I wrote them off to some natural anomaly. You often find unusual surface patterns on skull bone. But to find it in a second skull can’t be dismissed so easily. Especially with the additional evidence of the chin implant.”

“And especially in the case of a second skull that’s been found under identical circumstances,” Jerry said.

Lister nodded. “Now it’s back to the drawing board. I’m going to have to do another reconstruction for our first young lady. Build up her cheekbones.” He looked over at Jerry. “Have I given you something to run with?”

“I’ll say,” Jerry said.

Lister had given them something to run with, all right. But where did they start? Having spent most of her life in Hollywood, Charlotte’s first thought was that the victims had undergone cosmetic surgery in order to alter their identities. She thought of it as the
Dark Passage
scenario, after the movie that had starred Humphrey Bogart. But Bogart had played a criminal who wanted to elude the law, which would hardly seem likely in the case of two young women in their twenties. The only reasonable explanation she could come up with was that the young women had been patients of the same plastic surgeon, and that he had killed them because he had botched their surgery: a homicidal variation on the old saw that doctors bury their mistakes. In her research on plastic surgeons, Charlotte had come across an interview with the angry patient of a California plastic surgeon who had used liquid silicone injections, which were now against the law, to reconstruct her face. The silicone had migrated from the places where it had been injected to other parts of her face, turning her into a hideous monster. Half a dozen corrective operations had not solved the problem, and she and the other patients whose surgery the plastic surgeon had botched were suing him for malpractice. She knew of several cases of botched plastic surgery herself. She remembered in particular a beautiful woman who thought her nose (which Charlotte considered flawless) needed to be more fashionably retroussé. As a result of her own vanity (or perhaps insecurity), she had ended up with a nose that squiggled down the front of her face, and through which she had trouble breathing. The botched nose job was a constant reminder to herself and others of the folly of tampering with nature, especially when nature had been more than generous to begin with.

Her point to Jerry was that a few irate patients could jeopardize a plastic surgeon’s reputation. And any threat to a reputation that brought in an annual income that could run into seven figures would be motive enough for murdering one’s dissatisfied patients.

Then there was the possibility that the dead young women hadn’t been mistakes, but experiments that hadn’t lived up to their creator’s expectations: the Mr. Hyde scenario. The converse of the premise that a plastic surgeon whose reputation was damaged would stand to lose millions was that a plastic surgeon with a reputation for working miracles could stand to
gain
millions. Charlotte knew for a fact that the California plastic surgeons, in particular, were on the cutting edge of the profession, so to speak, and had been known to employ techniques that were considered experimental by the more conservative element of their profession. Charlotte herself would have considered a botched experiment an argument for killing her plastic surgeon, but the argument was just as strong for having it the other way around.

Although Charlotte and Jerry discussed all this on the drive back to the police station, they accomplished little else that day. More time than Charlotte had expected had been taken up by their visit with Lister, as a result of which she had to forego their lunch in order to make it back to the city in time for an afternoon appointment with her agent.

But she promised Jerry that she would be back to take him up on his lunch invitation, and to do what she could to help him out.

As she repeated the drive up the Saw Mill River Parkway two days later, Charlotte found herself pondering the face-lift question once again. The reason she had even considered a face-lift in the first place was that she was worried that she wouldn’t get work if she looked too old. But if her meeting with her agent was any indicator, she needn’t have worried. The offers were pouring in: movie scripts, television specials, regional theater. She seemed to be in greater demand than ever before. It wasn’t youth that was the issue anyway, she decided. It was vitality. Women sought out that taut look because they wanted to convey the impression of energy, of being able to compete. It wasn’t the fact that their faces had aged that was the issue, but that they looked weary and careworn. And just as being told that she’s beautiful can make a woman feel beautiful, altering a woman’s appearance to make her look younger could no doubt help her feel more energetic. But not having enough energy had never been a problem for Charlotte. It was her energy that had propelled her to the top of her profession, and had kept her there for nearly fifty years. And it was her energy that would keep her going for another ten—would it be importunate of her to ask for another fifteen?—despite the crepy folds around her eyes, despite the fatty deposits under her chin, despite the scars that life had inflicted on her skin and on her psyche. As Francis Bacon had said: “There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.”

She still hadn’t made up her mind. The jury on the “to lift or not to lift” question was still out. But the scales were no longer as balanced as they were when she’d first reconsidered the question.

4

Charlotte arrived at the Zion Hill police station at eleven-thirty, ready for Jerry to put her to work (to say nothing of being ready for a good meal). She found Jerry on the verge of calling Leonore Herman, the state forensic anthropologist, whose offices were located in Albany. Jerry had asked Lister to send her the skull of the second victim via Emergency Medical Services after he had finished making his cast. Lister was an experienced student of the configuration of skulls, but he wasn’t a forensic anthropologist, and Jerry wanted to confirm Lister’s conclusions about the cosmetic surgery before going any further with that aspect of the investigation. In his telephone conversation with Dr. Herman, Jerry had also suggested that she take another look at the skull of the first victim, which was stored with the remains of other unidentified murder victims at the offices of the state medical examiner.