11th hour

Chapter 103

Claire turned her car into the lot on Harriet Street, parked in the space with her name stenciled on the asphalt. It was after ten in the morning, the first time in a year that she’d been late for work.

The reception room of the Medical Examiner’s Office was churning; the new girl with big brown eyes was at the desk juggling the constantly ringing phones. Messengers came and went. Cops milled around, waiting for bullets and other forensic material to take out to the lab.

Claire waved at the receptionist, went through the glass door to her office, hung her coat and voluminous bag on a rack in the corner, and sat down at her desk.

She was dialing Lindsay when the brown-eyed girl knocked on the door and opened it. She came toward Claire with a flat package in her hands.

“This just came, Dr. Washburn. It’s marked urgent.”

Claire took the package, looked at the return address. It was from Ann Perlmutter, the forensic anthropologist at UC Santa Cruz.

Claire sliced open the package with a scalpel and found six disks, each in its own case. And there was a letter from Dr. Perlmutter.

Sorry this took so long, Claire. Call me if you have questions. Ann

Claire inserted one of the disks into her computer’s DVD drive. A picture of a woman appeared on the screen, so lifelike it could have been a photograph — but it was a computer-generated 3D facial reconstruction of one of the skulls from the Ellsworth compound case.

This 3D-imaging technique was a kind of miracle, and Claire knew how much time, skill, and artistry had gone into creating this likeness.

A 3D representation had been made of each skull by a laser scanner that utilized light, mirrors, and sensors to capture the image and generate a wire-frame matrix. Information from CT scans of living persons was added, and the sophisticated software program distorted reference points on the 3D skull to correspond with points on a reference CT scan, creating a facial shape for each skull.

The six bare skulls that had been exhumed from the Ellsworth garden had faces now. These representations could not be 100 percent accurate — but they would be close.

The face on Claire’s screen had been labeled JANE DOE EC 1. The woman had rounded eyes, a wide forehead, a small nose, and long, wavy hair.

In real life, Jane Doe EC 1 had had a family, and soon, Claire hoped, she would have a name.