Authors: Carol Thurston
“Start over,” she answered without hesitation. “Follow every lead, turn over every stone.” The laughter in his eyes told her she hadn’t let him down, either.
He nodded. “Good. Now eat.”
She did, but a sense of lightness so unexpected and unfamiliar that she couldn’t help wondering where it had come from made her want to laugh, too. Partly it was relief. It also had to do with the fact that Max had actually been worried. About her.
He caught her watching him. “What?”
“Do you really think I might be
the
best?”
“Easily.” He teased her with his eyes. “But I’ll withhold final judgment until I see those photographs.”
Kate woke to a blinding yellow light and realized she’d gone to bed with the drapes open. Sam was gone, so she threw back the covers and went to the window. The surface of the pool glistened undisturbed under the early-morning sun, and just the sight of that lush green grass made her toes itch.
A few minutes later she crept out the bedroom door, face scrubbed and teeth brushed, hoping Sam wouldn’t hear her and wake Max. As she reached the bottom of the stairs, the dog came bounding out of a room a little way beyond and she bent to fondle his ears. That was when she realized Max was talking on the phone, so she motioned for Sam to go outside with her.
In the backyard she peeled off her sweats and dived in, surfaced and then struck out for the far end, where she did an underwater flip and headed back the way she’d come, holding to a steady rhythm of stroking and breathing. She could feel her brain begin to take up oxygen, lap by lap, until some noise made her lift her eyes out of the water. She saw Max first, then Sam, barking like a fool.
“What’s up?” she gasped, letting the water smooth her hair back from her face.
“Time to get this show on the road. We’ve got to take your film to be developed, go by my office, and get to the Health Sciences Center by eleven.”
“I can fix my own breakfast, Max, and take the film. Just leave me a map, if you have one.”
“Uh-uh.” He extended a hand to pull her out of the water. “Appointment at Health Sciences is yours, not mine.”
“The friend who’s looking for an illustrator?”
“Nope. I did talk to him, though, and he wasn’t a bit happy when I said you were busy today and would call him tomorrow. Think he’s worried you may get away.”
“I didn’t bring anything but a few drawings of Tashat, but a freelance assignment
would
help tide me over while I look
for a full-time job.” She wrapped the towel around her waist as they started toward the house. “So who is this mysterious appointment with?” Max shook his head. “You don’t know or you’re not going to tell me?”
“Can’t. Better for you to see for yourself.” Sam ran ahead and jumped against the screen door, making it bounce open, then stuck his nose in to keep it from closing. “Smartest dog I’ve ever known,” Max mumbled as he held the door for her. “Have you considered going into business for yourself? I’ll bet you’d have all the work you could handle once word got around, probably get commissions from all over, not just Houston. You’d have flexible hours and a lot more freedom to pick and choose, not to mention more money. All you’d have to invest in is a computer to access whatever databases you need, a printer, and maybe a scanner.”
“How much would all that cost?” She had been toying with the idea since she first went to Denver, but hadn’t been able to convince herself that she could get work on a regular enough basis to pay her monthly bills, let alone save for an emergency.
“A couple of thousand. Depends on how much memory you need.” He glanced at his watch. “I can show you mine, but later. Right now you better get dressed.”
As they drove down Main Street, Max began to name the buildings that made up the Medical Center, on their left. “Women’s Hospital first, Hermann Hospital behind that, then Ben Taub, where all the stabbings and gunshots end up.” Next were several gray, multistoried buildings, each indistinguishable from its neighbor. “Diagnostic Center Hospital,” he continued, “Houston International, UT, and St. Luke’s, all about as sterile on the outside as they are inside.” He stopped for the light at a busy intersection, then continued for a couple blocks before turning into the driveway of a Spanish-style one-story building set back from the street. Screened by a grove of trees and shrubs, it had the appearance
of a large private residence. Except for the sign out front.
Max drove around to the back of the South Main Imaging Center and pulled into an empty parking space near the door. “I’ll just wait here—” Kate began.
He was shaking his head before she finished. “Marilou wants to meet you, the voice on the phone.”
Kate opened the car door and was struck again by the soft, almost tropical air, too warm for most of the clothes she had brought. Her choice had been further narrowed by the mysterious UT appointment, which called for something conservative, so she’d opted for her fringed black wool skirt because it was sedate but short enough not to be too hot, and a red-and-white-striped men’s shirt, plus shadowy black hose and black suede flats.
Max guided her down a long hallway to the reception desk, a counter facing both the waiting room and “inner sanctum” presided over by a tall woman with short, flaming red hair—an exotic flower in full bloom. She glanced up as they approached and stopped talking in mid-sentence.
“My God, I think she’s actually gone speechless,” Max whispered.
A brilliant smile transformed the woman’s entire face. “Kate McKinnon, I presume.” She stuck out her hand. “I’m Marilou Bobbitt. We’ve talked on the phone.” Her West Texas twang sounded so incongruous coming from such a striking-looking woman that Kate could hardly keep a straight face.
Kate nodded. “I recognize your voice. No wonder Max is so relaxed about his practice, with you to protect his virtue.”
Marilou flashed Max a raised eyebrow, then gave Kate an openly reappraising look. “I see now why he went into decline when you slipped the hook.”
“Why don’t you make yourself useful around here for a change,” he suggested to Marilou with a grudging smile. “Introduce Kate to Aaron and Jose for me while I make a
couple of phone calls.” He touched Kate’s shoulder as he edged past her. “I won’t be long, but watch your step. That hair’s not red for nothing.”
Kate laughed, envious of the easy give-and-take between them, which had to be based on more than familiarity. Max’s “Girl Friday” looked to be in her early forties, but there was something so engaging about her earthy friendliness that as they walked in the opposite direction Kate felt free to ask the one thing she really wanted to know.
“Your hair is naturally curly, isn’t it?” Marilou nodded. “Then would you mind telling me how you keep it from going crazy in this humidity?”
Marilou glanced at Kate’s wildly curling hair. “Believe me, honey, it’s all in the cut. I had the same trouble when I first came here, until I found a wizard with a scissors. He’s expensive, but so are all the others who don’t know doodly-squat about how to cut hair. Would you like his number?”
“Sure, why not?”
Marilou rapped on the molding of a doorway that opened into a control room situated between two scanners, where a man in a white coat sat at one of the consoles. “Brought someone to meet you,” she told him. “The infamous Kate McKinnon.” Marilou turned to Kate. “This is Aaron Krueger, head honcho in the T and A department.”
“Kate,” he acknowledged as he unfolded his tall, slim frame. Fair-skinned, with gray eyes and graying hair, he had a receding hairline that made him look ten years older than Max. “Don’t mind her,” he advised, rolling his eyes at Marilou. “What she meant is that I do mostly interventional radiology with breast and prostate cancer patients.” He hardly paused. “Did you bring any photographs of that head?”
“We just left the film to be—”
“Where is she?” a deep bass voice called from the hallway
“The Third Musketeer,” Aaron mumbled for Kate’s benefit
“You’re the famous Kate McKinnon?” Max’s other part ner asked from the doorway. A short, compact bundle o energy with a shock of wavy black hair, Jose Carrasco had
the thick chest and shoulders of an athlete—a prophetic assessment on Kate’s part since she learned later that he specialized in sports injuries.
Kate smiled at Marilou.” ‘Infamous’ is the word, I believe.” She remembered Max telling Dave that he’d shown some of the X-ray images to his partners, but apparently she had been a subject of discussion as well, especially after she “slipped the hook,” as Marilou put it.
For a second Jose stood grinning, giving her the onceover, especially her legs. “Max gets so carried away when he talks about your drawings we figured there had to be something he wasn’t telling us.” He glanced at Aaron. “Now we know, huh?” It wasn’t until he came across the room to give her a buzz on the cheek that Kate noticed the limp.
“You’re going to end up swallowing that loose tongue of yours, Carrasco,” Max warned from the doorway. He didn’t even look at Kate, just motioned for her to come. She promised to come back with her photographs of Tashat and some drawings, accepted the phone number Marilou slipped to her, and hurried to catch up with Max.
By the time they got off the elevator on the fourth floor of the UT Health Sciences Center, anticipation was causing her heart to race. Max guided her past several doors opening off the wide hallway, most of them equipped with lab benches, centrifuges, and other equipment, plus the usual white-garbed technicians. Tonight might be New Year’s Eve, but everything continued pretty much as usual in a hospital where treatment and research went on side by side.
Even so, she was completely unprepared for what she saw when he steered her through a doorway on their left—the bank of computer monitors, viewboxes striping the walls like a ribbon of windows, and an array of skulls lined up on a long lab bench, all sizes and shapes, each on its own pedestal. Disembodied. Some grossly deformed. Bizarre.
“Kate, this is Tom McCowan,” Max said over her shoulder. “And this is Kate McKinnon.” He moved her with him across the big room. “Tom’s the one with the software I told
you about. Uses it to plan his craniofacial reconstructions, each step that needs to be taken and in what order.”
It came to her then that the tall man in V-necked greens was in the business of correcting God’s mistakes—rearranging the underlying structure of a malformed face by moving the eye sockets closer together to give a little girl some depth perception instead of the vision and appearance of a bird, or taking a piece from the bulging forehead of a teenage boy to give him a chin—the kind of magic that reclaimed more souls from a living hell than any preacher could ever hope to save.
Then she saw a head she recognized—Nefertiti!—and all hell broke loose inside her own head.
“You didn’t tell her?” the surgeon asked Max.
“I decided to let you take all the credit.”
“Then let’s get to it.” McCowan straddled a stool and rolled it into position at the computer. “Watch that monitor over there,” he instructed Kate, pointing to show her which one. A few seconds later a straight-on view of Nefertiti’s face appeared, just as she looked in the famous painted bust in the Berlin Museum.
“First we peeled the tissue away from her skull using the same tissue-depth figures you use to build the tissues up.” An invisible hand began to peel the flesh from the points where Kate had applied the guides to Tashat’s skull.
“That’s incredible,” she breathed, unable to take her eyes off the monitor. Once the skull was stripped bare it began to rotate from an anterior to left oblique anterior view, then left profile, eventually making a complete circle.
“Then we plugged the dimensions Max got from Tashat’s skull into our program.” McCowan pointed to a monitor to the left of the first one. “And got this. Look familiar?”
Kate glanced back and forth between the two skulls, comparing the curve of a line here with the same line there, the size of one opening against the same opening in the other skull. Except for size, they were so similar she decided to look for differences instead.
Max reached around her to point. “See the shape of the
nasal sill? And the cheekbones.” He raised his voice. “Can we have both of them in profile, Tom?” Tashat’s skull rotated first, then Nefertiti’s. “I remembered you saying that her jaw reminded you of Nefertiti. Take a look at the angle of the jawbone and extension of the chin. That’s why.”
As the significance of what Max was saying began to sink in, Kate waited for him to draw a more explicit conclusion. Instead, he asked Tom McCowan to change the viewing angle so they could look down at the top of both skulls.
“We ran into a small problem here,” McCowan admitted. “Had to approximate the depth of Nefertiti’s skullcap because of that crown. With Tashat we know the cap is longer front to back than side to side. But we can compare the cheekbones. In Mongoloids they tend to slope back and project out, producing the flat face of the Oriental. With these two the slope is almost identical, which tells us they
both
could have been either Negroid or Caucasian, or some mix of the two.”
“Caucasian, from the shape of the nasal sill,” Kate put in.
“Show him your pictures,” Max suggested. It seemed an interruption, but she got the oversize color prints out of her purse and handed them to Tom McCowan.
He took his time looking, sliding each one under the stack to keep them in order. Kate noticed his flat, splayed fingertips, and wondered, not for the first time, why so many surgeons’ hands had fingers like that. When he got to the one of Tashat wearing the blue war crown, McCowan let out a soft “Wow!”
The next thing she knew he was striding across the room to turn the bust of Nefertiti enough to eliminate the distraction of the missing iris in her left eye. Then he held the same view of Tashat up beside it.
“The similarities are striking,” Kate agreed, “but we don’t know if your Nefertiti is an exact duplicate of the head in Berlin, or even if the original is true to life.”
“The German consul in Houston called Berlin and got a name for us,” Max put in. “A professor, Dr. Dietrich Wildung,
who happens to be chief curator of their Egyptian collection and a very nice guy. He also speaks fluent English. The big surprise was learning that they’ve scanned most of their important pieces.”