Smokescreen Read online

  “Right.” He smiled at her over his shoulder, his amber eyes shining with mischief. “You’re first on the list. Can I take you, Mom?”

  She wished he could. She didn’t know what she was going to do without him and Joe for a month. “I wouldn’t fit in your duffel. But we can Skype.” She made a shooing gesture. “Get going.”

  He laughed and ran down the hall.

  She turned back to the reconstruction with a sigh. Noise. Laughter. Family. She was going to miss all of it. She reached out and gently touched the reconstruction’s cheekbone. “Sorry, Nora. You’re important, too. I’m just having a few issues at the moment.”

  “Then come with us.” Joe was standing in the doorway, looking at her. “A month is a long time.” He crossed the room and took her in his arms. “Or let me come back to you.” He kissed her. “Screw that seminar. I’ll go next time.”

  “Scotland Yard doesn’t offer them that often. And everything is cutting-edge when they do.” Joe was a detective with ATLPD and was always interested in all the bells and whistles connected with crime fighting. “And the timing is just too good to miss. Jane is taking Michael to that dig in Wales, and you’ll at least be close enough to keep an eye on them.”

  “Come on, Jane adores Michael. And she’s introducing him to digging for ancient Roman treasure at that Welsh castle. Treasure and playing in the dirt. A ten-year-old’s dream. He wouldn’t miss me.”

  “He’d miss you.” She kissed him again. “Just as I will. But I’m not ten, and I’d feel better if one of us is near him. So would you.” Michael had become the center of their lives since the night he’d been born, but neither of them could deny that he was…unusual and always a challenge. “And you can never tell which way he’s going to jump.”

  “Tell me about it,” Joe said dryly. “You could come and work in London.”

  “And then you’d feel guilty about spending all those hours at the Yard.” She gave him a quick kiss. “I’ll tell you what I told Michael. Skype. Go finish packing. I need to clean up before I take you to the airport.” She grimaced. “And I gave in and agreed to give an interview at one this afternoon. Annoying, but it was the only time the reporter could fit me into her schedule. I’ll take her out on the porch and try to get rid of her as quickly as possible. But you guys are on your own until we leave here at two.”

  “We’ll manage.” He kissed the tip of her nose. “Reluctantly. Why the interview? Does it have anything to do with Nora? She’s not even finished.” He frowned, puzzled. “And you don’t usually give interviews anyway. You say it’s a waste of your time.”

  “It is a waste. They tend to focus on me and not the victim.”

  “Imagine that,” he said mildly. “The foremost forensic sculptor in the world who is both charming and beautiful. How could you possibly compare to a hideous skull that’s been buried for decades?”

  “Not beautiful, interesting-looking. And I’m not charming, that would require effort. I always opt for kind and intelligent. You must already be missing me if you’re resorting to flattery.”

  “You’ve got that right.”

  She cleared her throat. “Me too.”

  “So why the interview?”

  “It’s Jill Cassidy. I liked the story she did on that DFACS scandal. She never gave up and fought those politicians who were ignoring the child abuse and fraud claims all the way.”

  Joe nodded slowly. “I remember. She won a Pulitzer for it.” He gently touched her hair. “I should have known it would have something to do with kids. She wants to do some kind of profile on you?”

  She shrugged. “I guess she does. We didn’t discuss it. I said I could give her an hour if she insisted on its being today. It seemed worthwhile. I don’t think she’d waste my time on trivial junk.”

  “You mean like telling the public how brilliant and famous you are? Heaven forbid.” He was heading down the hall. “Not only trivial, but totally boring…”

  Eve shook her head as she watched him disappear into the bedroom. Wry, mocking, yet as full of mischief as their son. Nothing boring about Joe. She was already missing him. Their relationship had taken them through valleys and mountains, and they had come out of both with a closeness and love that no longer faltered no matter what strain was put upon it. She frowned as she had a sudden thought. Good Lord, what if that interview involved Joe and Michael? The last thing she needed was a journalist looking for a tell-all piece that violated her privacy. She could not permit it.

  Don’t jump to conclusions.

  If she saw that was the way the interview was heading, she’d just end it immediately. She wasn’t shy about protecting her family’s privacy.

  And she’d taken the interview because Jill Cassidy had shown herself to be a responsible journalist. Joe had been joking about Eve’s being boring, but it was true that she was not someone whom social media would find particularly fascinating. She was not only a workaholic, she was too complicated…and very private.

  She just had to hope she wasn’t getting mixed signals from Jill Cassidy…

  * * *

  “Hello. I’m Jill Cassidy.” The young woman at the door was smiling warmly at Eve as she shook her hand. “Please call me Jill. I can’t tell you how eager I’ve been to meet you, Eve Duncan. Thank you for agreeing to see me.”

  “Come in. I’m sorry I can’t give you very long. I have to take my husband and son to catch a flight.” Eve was studying the reporter and feeling distinctly relieved. Jill Cassidy must be late twenties or early thirties, a little on the thin side, with medium-length brown hair and wide-set blue eyes. Full lips that had a touch of sensitivity and humor and clear, glowing skin. But those eyes were steady and honest, and Eve felt the honesty was also very real. She was dressed in dark slacks and a simple white blouse that made her appear businesslike yet perfectly natural and unassuming. “I expected you to be older. You won that Pulitzer two years ago.”

  “I got lucky. Right story. Right timing.” She was looking around the open living room and kitchen. “This is wonderful.”

  “It’s home,” Eve said simply.

  “That’s why it’s wonderful. You can feel it. I’m traveling most of the time, so my home is usually the nearest hotel.” She gestured to the smiling portrait of Eve dressed in her old blue work shirt on the wall beside the window. “That’s terrific. Relaxed, but there’s still a sense of purpose. Your daughter, Jane MacGuire, painted it?”

  Eve’s eyes widened. “Yes. You’re right, Jane is terrific. Her career as an artist is zooming these days. How did you know about her?”

  “I do my homework.” Her gaze was wandering around the room. “You have a longtime relationship with Joe Quinn, a police detective whom you married eight years ago. You have a ten-year-old son, Michael; and besides Jane MacGuire, whom you adopted when she was about Michael’s age, you and Joe Quinn took in another young girl, Cara Delaney, and made her your ward. She’s not with you now either, since she’s a promising violinist and she’s on tour.” Her gaze returned to Eve’s face. “Now, I found her background to be very interesting indeed.”

  Eve stiffened, instantly on guard. That remark had been too full of meaning to miss. “Really? But you asked to interview me, didn’t you? I don’t consider my husband or children to be fodder for the press. I believe you’d better leave.”

  She shook her head. “Do you think I’d have mentioned Cara Delaney if I’d meant to cause you problems? I just had to make certain you knew that I could hurt you if I chose and had no intention of doing so. Otherwise, you’d be worried all the time I was talking to you that I was going to cause some kind of scandal by revealing that your ward is the granddaughter of Sergai Kaskov, a known figure in the Russian Mafia.” She gestured impatiently. “I don’t care about that. All I care about is that you’re brilliant and have devoted most of your career to helping children who have been murdered and abused. Evidently, somewhere along the way, you’ve also been able to build a life for yourself and your family tha
t I envy with all my heart. Good for you.”

  “You couldn’t have hurt Cara.” Jill Cassidy seemed to be sincere, but Eve was still wary. “She wouldn’t give a damn about scandal. All she cares about is the music. Though you’d find the rest of the family very protective and might find yourself in an extremely uncomfortable situation.” Eve stared at her. “You could have just not mentioned my family at all. This was all very deliberate.”

  She nodded. “Because as I said, I do my homework. You’re sharp and very protective. You’d start questioning what I was asking of you the minute you realized I wasn’t being totally honest with you.”

  Eve frowned. “That’s not quite clear.”

  “And you like everything crystal clear,” Jill said brusquely. “And you said we don’t have much time. Can we sit down somewhere and talk?” She smiled crookedly. “Unless I’ve completely misread you, and you’re going to throw me out?”

  “I came close a few minutes ago,” Eve said slowly. “I’m still not sure about you. I believe I might have to do a little homework on you, too.”

  “It’s a good idea,” Jill said soberly. “Don’t trust me. I promise I’m not trying to hurt you or your family. But you don’t know me.” She smiled. “And all that honesty might be intended to disarm you. But can we still sit down and talk? That won’t hurt you.”

  Eve hesitated. And that honesty was disarming her, she realized. Her first wariness was fading, and she was beginning to like Jill Cassidy. “We can talk.” She gestured toward the porch. “I’ll give you a cup of coffee on the porch. It’s our only guarantee of privacy. Joe and Michael might be all over the place while they’re packing.”

  “Great.” Jill started to turn away; and then her attention was caught by the skull reconstruction on the worktable across the room. “You work here?” She moved across the room. “I thought you’d have a separate studio.” She was reaching out and touching the skull. “May I?”

  “It appears that you may,” Eve said dryly. “And will.”

  Jill looked at her. “I just wanted to see your work. She’s not finished?”

  Eve shook her head. “Close. But Nora will take a few more days.” She gazed at her curiously. “How did you know she was female?”

  “The lips. The nose. Both very feminine. The rest is blurred and incomplete, but she’s there, waiting to be born.”

  “No, she’s not. Nora was born six years before a monster decided to snatch that life away from her. Now all I can do is help her to try to find someone who loved her as much as that monster hated her and send her home.” She added grimly, “And hope I can find the monster and send him to the electric chair.”

  “Amen,” Jill murmured. “I understand you’ve managed to do that a number of times.”

  “Not enough. Never enough.” She gestured to the porch door. “There are too many monsters out there.”

  “Yes, there are.” Jill was still staring at the reconstruction. “You called her Nora. You have some idea who she was?”

  “No, I always name my reconstructions. It helps me to connect with them.” She started for the door. “Now I have a question for you. You appear familiar with skulls and reconstructions. You not only have a good eye, you know what to look for. Have you been taught?”

  Jill shook her head. “Heavens no. Self-taught on the Internet because it’s both your profession and your passion. But the key word is familiarity. I only wanted to know what I was seeing.”

  “Are you planning a series of articles instead of just interviewing me?”

  “No.” She grinned. “And that’s two questions.” She opened the porch door. “I’ll wait on the porch while you get me that cup of coffee. But I’ll give you a teaser to make you want to hurry it along.” She looked back at Eve. “I don’t want to interview you at all. I want to offer you a job that I hope I can convince you to take. Gross misrepresentation. If you’re too pissed off to even let me try, you can toss me in that beautiful lake. Okay?”

  Jill didn’t wait for an answer. She closed the door behind her.

  * * *

  “I don’t have time for this,” Eve said as she handed Jill her coffee five minutes later. “You picked the wrong day, Ms. Cassidy.”

  “We’ve gone back to formality?” Jill asked. “At least you didn’t choose the lake option.”

  “I considered it.”

  Jill tilted her head. “But you were curious. You have a certain amount of respect for me and were willing to risk being disappointed. But you also have an innate curiosity, which is natural considering your profession.”

  “That curiosity will be fading away if you don’t satisfy it soon. You don’t wish to interview me.” She asked bluntly, “What the hell do you want with me?”

  “Basically the same thing you’ve done during your entire career,” she said quietly. “I want you to identify a number of skulls and bring resolution and peace to their families and loved ones.” She paused. “I want you to bring them home.”

  “I already have a waiting list of cases,” Eve said impatiently. “I don’t need any more. There are other forensic sculptors you can hire.”

  “But they’re not you.” Jill leaned forward. “And they won’t give those children the skill and dedication you would. They were murdered, and now they’re already being forgotten.”

  “Children? Plural? How many children?”

  “Twenty-seven.”

  Eve felt a ripple of shock. “A mass murderer?”

  “Oh, yes. Though not what you might think.”

  Twenty-seven children. It made Eve sick to her stomach. “Then tell me what I should think.”

  “Maldara.”

  Eve went still. “My God.”

  Jill slowly nodded. “Though I haven’t seen any sign of God in Maldara since the moment I stepped off the plane two years ago. What do you know about Maldara?”

  “What everyone knows. Two warring groups in the depths of the Congo struggling for supremacy. Civil war. Blood. Gore.” She swallowed. “Another Rwanda. So many deaths. The ruling party managed to triumph about eighteen months ago.” She searched for a name. “The Kiyanis I think. Their president was able to persuade the U.N. to support her.”

  “Yes, Zahra Kiyani is very persuasive,” Jill said. “Over six hundred thousand people died in Maldara during that conflict, and only fifty thousand were laid at her door. She was Teflon.”

  Only fifty thousand. Eve could only vaguely remember the details of that horror she had seen on TV and the Internet two years ago. “Men, women, and children. Butchered. I didn’t want Michael to watch it.” She lifted her head as a sudden thought occurred to her. “Children. You want me to do reconstructions on the children of that massacre?”

  “Not all of them. You’d be there for decades.” Jill’s lips twisted. “There are far too many. But there’s a school in the village of Robaku, near Jokan on the northern border, where I’ve been doing volunteer work. Twenty-seven students were killed by a machete brigade led by Nils Varak, a mercenary who was hired by the Botzan faction because it was practically on the Kiyani doorstep. The children were chopped to pieces. Then the school was burned to the ground.”

  “Terrible,” Eve said, sick. It wasn’t difficult to envision the terror and pain that must have enveloped the children that day.

  “Yes, every minute of it was terrible,” Jill said jerkily. “Some of the children weren’t dead when the fires were lit. Varak was too impatient to wait. He wanted to lure the people from the village to the school with the screams.” She drew a shaky breath. “But you’re in a hurry. I have to tell you why I need you. Almost half the villagers were killed that day, most of them parents. But some are left, and there are other relatives, grandparents, uncles, aunts, who also loved those children. But after the massacre, those relatives were devastated. They don’t even know which of the children are their own. The damage was too great. The government of Kiyani offered a common grave, but they’ve refused the offer. They want to bury their own childr
en in the village where they were born.” She added softly, “It seems the feeling is universal. They want to bring their children home, Eve.”

  Eve nodded. The story had touched her unbearably. “Have they tried DNA?”

  “It was a bloodbath. With the fires and scattered remains, only a few had enough quality DNA left to be matched. And even those parents wouldn’t be satisfied. These are simple village people, Eve. They don’t want to be given a piece of paper with a DNA result. They’re willing to wait for the years it will take to DNA the bodies, but not the skulls. They want to see, to touch, to recognize.” Her eyes were glittering with moisture. “They need you, Eve.”

  “Not necessarily me, Jill. I’m good, but I’m not the only one who could do this. Besides, it would be a massive undertaking to gather those remains and send them to me. The U.N. should hire several forensic sculptors and set up studios on-site at Robaku. That would be the quickest way to get it done.”

  “The quickest, not the best. Having you do it would be the best.” Jill shrugged. “And U.N. funding isn’t an option. They’ve already refused to approve anything but the least expensive methods of disposing of those children. Maldara has turned into one huge cemetery they don’t want to face. If a mass grave wouldn’t be such bad press, they’d probably even approve that over working with DNA.”

  Eve felt a ripple of shock. “That’s pretty harsh.”

  “It’s the way of the world,” Jill said wearily. “The U.N. has too many fires to put out for sentimentality. They regard Maldara’s fate as settled, so they want to put a period to it and move on in the most economical way possible. That’s only good business. Zahra Kiyani would even like everyone to forget about that massacre and has been pushing to move the villagers to another location. I’ve been writing story after story about Robaku to keep the interest and sympathy high and not let the wishes of those relatives be forgotten.”

  “There are many charitable organizations not connected to the U.N.,” Eve said. “I’ve worked with a few over the years. Ask for money and volunteers.”