There were photographs of Amanda’s apartment, her person, and samples of her handwriting. Mallory’s precision in the neat placement of every item was overridden by the softer personality of Amanda. The shot to his heart was the picture of the old wooden cradle Amanda had purchased for her unborn child.

He looked at the autopsy photos and looked away. The crime site photos were more palatable. But every artifact of the death had become intensely personal, for now he knew this woman as few people could have known her in life.

The best of the death photos was centered on the board. The damage to the skin of her face he overlaid with a memory of the photo Riker had shown him when she posed as a living model. He superimposed the rosy live flesh over the white and the dead. When the living image lay over the death mask, it had the unsettling effect of the photographic woman suddenly opening her eyes.

His mind did a little dance and jog away from reality and then came back to it with caution, tripping all the way, falling now as the wound to the side of her head bled through the double image. He winced at the living expression juxtaposed with the clotted blood. The brown blazer she died in bore the drippings of the wound in a great bloody stain draped over one shoulder.

She was smiling. That bothered him. He found he could alter the smile to a more appropriate expression and still be true to the likeness. Now her facial arrangement seemed only friendly and slightly inquisitive. ‘What now?’ it asked. He held this new image of her for too long – so long that it would remain in memory for years.

He scanned the items of the apartment inventory and found a bottle of her perfume on the list. He found it again in the photograph of her bathroom counter. She wore the scent of roses. The perfume bottle bore the logo of an old and prestigious house. He remembered seeing a bottle of that scent among the sequined costumes and the make-up boxes in the cellar where the illusions of Maximillian Candle were stored.

Her husband was staring at the computer screen when she walked into the room.

Pansy Heart came up behind him softly. Noise of any kind irritated him. Over his shoulder she read the words, YOU LIAR, YOU LIAR, YOU LIAR. The words filled out the entire screen. She looked up to the slot at the top of the screen, which labeled this file as a personal message.

He turned on her. His face was red with anger.

‘Don’t you ever sneak up behind me again!’

She backed away quickly, stilling the hand that rose almost of its own accord when it sensed an oncoming blow. But he only turned his face back to the screen. He pounded on the console and sent the books and papers flying. She knelt on the carpet and began to crawl on all fours, retrieving every fallen thing.

‘Get out of here!’ he yelled. ‘Get out!’

She backed away from him, still on her knees, then stumbling to a stand, now scurrying off down the hall. As she entered the bedroom, she was met by her own reflection hurrying toward her. She stopped before the full-length mirror and fit her fist into her mouth to keep from crying out loud.

When had she dropped so much weight?

With her hair pulled back the way he insisted she wear it, and with the new thinness of her body, and now that expression of a hunted animal, she had come to be a living likeness of Judge Emery Heart’s dead mother.

The braille printer scrolled out the message, filling sheet after sheet with two damning words.

Eric Franz sat very still, eyes fixed on a scene inside his head, a horror movie that never ended. A bright snowfall cascaded by the wide front window, large flakes illuminated by the building’s exterior lights. He turned from the window and ripped the scrolling sheets from the printer.

And now it snowed outside and inside as he created his own small storm of white flakes of paper being torn into ever smaller bits. He worked in the dark.

His hands were full when he returned to the front room of his apartment. Charles unloaded his small cache on the coffee table. Of the ingredients for making a woman, Riker’s contribution had been half a pack of cigarettes left behind this afternoon. According to the medical examiner’s report on Mallory’s wall, Amanda had been a smoker. There were no cigarettes on Mallory’s meticulous inventory. Amanda might have given up the habit when she knew she was pregnant, but her manuscript was filled with imagery of smoke, matches struck in the dark when she woke alone to hug her knees and rock her body and hold herself in her own arms through the long night into a morning of filled ashtrays and dust motes swirling in the blue smoke and the gray light.

Cousin Max’s contribution had been the bottle of rose scent from the old wardrobe box in the basement. Old Malakhai’s Louisa had gone everywhere in the scent of gardenias. Amanda Bosch had gone about in roses.

He called up Amanda’s face on a patch of wall, the eidetic images of life over death, which were fixed in memory.

Now what was Malakhai’s recipe!

He should have started with a massive head injury like the one Malakhai had sustained in the Korean conflict. Such a wound was definitely concomitant with all the most bizarre aberrations, such as the stigmata.

Well, if he had no physical trauma, he certainly had his own injuries to the heart and the mind. And perhaps this was Mallory’s contribution to the unholy stew.

Next on the list would be the years of Malakhai’s solitary confinement in a Korean prison cell, the terrible isolation he had suffered, emerging finally from that cell with a phantom Louisa.

Charles reflected on his own years of isolation. A sprawling university campus was as close to the six-foot square cell as he could come. He thought of his years of being the freak child among the tall students ten years his senior. And then came the years of isolation in the sheltering womb of Effrim Wilde’s think tank before making his escape into real life and his own consulting firm.

For most of his life, he had been a thing apart, an alien in a culture of socially adept people. All of this would nearly approximate Malakhai’s isolation from the world. But he needn’t go back so far in time. There was the ache of loneliness each time Mallory quit a room.

Another contribution, thank you, Mallory.

If anything should happen to Mallory, she could never be reconstructed as Malakhai had done for Louisa, as he would attempt to do for Amanda Bosch. No one had access to Mallory’s thoughts and feelings. Nothing must ever happen to her.

Oh, fool.

He had forgotten the music. The concerto had been a prime ingredient in Malakhai’s creation of Louisa. In childhood, it had been the trigger of his own imagination. His copy of the concerto had been worn to shreds. But the music was so much a part of him he had never thought to replace the recording. There was an old 78 vinyl record in the basement somewhere, as well as the old turntable for that period of technology.

Ah, but wait. If Amanda Bosch was to be a mental construct, perhaps he should practice first with the music. He had only heard the piece a thousand times in his life.

Now he had all the ingredients of Malakhai’s madness. The music, the scent, and the loneliness.

Yes, he could manage it.

He lit one of Riker’s cigarettes and set it to smoking in the ashtray. He concentrated on Amanda’s face, recreating the image he had composed in Mallory’s office, the pictures of life imposed on death. And now the eyes of Amanda Bosch stared into his own. Photographic memory assisted him with every detail of those sad eyes. She had only the flatness of any photograph he could call up, for he was no Malakhai. But even in this poor translation, she was compelling. The eyes communicated much of her, even in the poverty of only two dimensions. Mystery was there, and profound loss.