Skin Deep

77

The call came at four that afternoon.

It was the eighteenth day that Steve had been alcohol-free. On his fifteenth, Dana had called to congratulate him. He suspected that she was dating other men, but she refused to elaborate or name names. And Steve no longer asked. With some things ignorance was bliss.

A month had passed since her operation. The swelling of her nose was no longer noticeable, and the discoloration was gone. The combined effects of the rhinoplasty with the earlier lid lift and other procedures were startling.

Dana looked like a different woman. Her skin had always been smooth. But the tightening around her eyes and the reduction of her nose had opened up her face, creating the eerie sensation that he was addressing someone with only a vague resemblance to the woman he had married. At once he was dazzled by the youthful beauty that her surgeon had fashioned and distracted by the transformation. She appeared, at moments, to have two faces superimposed.

When the call came in, Steve was writing a report on another case. The Farina investigation had yielded no new leads. A few weeks ago, the District Attorney had issued a statement that the death was being investigated as a possible ritual or serial crime linked to some cold cases. He invited the public to leave messages with the Boston Crime Stoppers tip line. Any information, no matter how small, could prove useful and, as usual, investigators took callers seriously. Tips could be submitted anonymously, although police promised better service if callers identified themselves. But either way, citizen tips were aggressively investigated.

As with the hundreds that had poured in with the murder of Terry Farina seven weeks ago, each one had been investigated. And most turned out to be duds. As the weeks passed, the calls became infrequent.

In the meantime, Steve worked on other cases but kept the case alive by occasionally sending out alerts to state and local police departments throughout southern New England, requesting any information on cold cases that might assist in the investigation of the serial stocking murders. For weeks nothing had come in until that afternoon.

The message that afternoon was forwarded to Steve. It came from a forensic anthropologist at Harvard named James Bowers. He was leaving for a conference that afternoon but would be back in his office on Monday to speak to him in person.

He had called to say that ten years ago the Massachusetts State Police had asked him to help identify a woman whose skeletal remains had been discovered off Hogg Island at the mouth of the Essex River. Divers looking for lobsters had discovered her skull, vertebrae, and partial rib cage entangled in an abandoned lobster pot. Despite the fact that the remains had yielded DNA markers, no identity had been made with any known missing person on record. Yet it was determined that the remains were those of a Caucasian female in her thirties or forties. Nothing else of the woman had been found—no clothing, affects, boat, or life jacket—except for scraps of material enmeshed with the bones and chemically identified as containing 87 percent nylon and 13 percent Lycra. Her death had been ruled suspicious.

Steve called the return number and left a message that he would like to talk with Bowers when he returned on Monday. Perhaps it was the credentials of the caller. Perhaps it was his sixth sense kicking up. But Steve felt a flicker of promise that took him through the weekend.