September 27, 10:45 a.m.

Portland , Oregon

Not surprisingly, a number of forensic artists find their way to the profession because of an interest in criminology. These were the kind who stayed up late watching crime and cop shows, feasting on criminology. They had artistic skills, of course, but artistry wasn’t the driving force for their careers.

Margo Titus, a good-looking brunette who always wore her hair up in a messy bun, with frameless glasses on a gold chain around her slender neck, was from the other camp. She’d been an artist first. She drew Sparky in the margin of a magazine reader response card when she was eleven years old, waiting for her mother in an Idaho doctor’s office. She wore all sixty-four of her prized Crayolas to nubs, even the ugly flesh-toned one. She won two school competitions for her artwork by the time she was in junior high. One was a sculpture of a woman walking a dog that landed her in a coffee-table book, KID ART!

There was no mistaking it. Margo Titus was going to be a fine artist, a sculptor. She was going to sell her pieces in galleries in New York. She was so talented that if she stuck with it, she was told by all her teachers, she could be the artist that generations would remember.

“You are the kind of student that teachers dream of having but once in a lifetime,” said her high school mentor, a woman who wore knee-length skirts and copper bangle bracelets. “You are going to do all the things I dreamed about when I was your age.”

Dreams, Margo learned, do die. Her pieces never caught fire like she and others had hoped. They were dismissed as too provincial. Sweet but forgettable. She ended up moving back to Boise and waitressing at a downtown martini bar for a couple of years before going to Boise State for classes in forensic science, inspired by a TV show spotlighting how artists could put their skills to use in helping others.

“The most important thing in the world isn’t how a piece of art goes with your couch and love-seat set,” she told an artist friend when she made up her mind.

Three years later she was doing facial reconstruction out of a studio she called The Face Lab Inc., in Portland.

Kendall Stark contacted Margo to work the Little Clam Bay case. They’d met at a Seattle conference several years earlier. When Margo answered the call and the two women exchanged some personal updates, Kendall was very direct on two key points.

“We have a limited budget up here, but we also have a case that needs solving.”

“I’m sure I can work within your parameters, Kendall. What’s the case?”

“A young woman, early twenties, found floating in one of our local estuaries. We’ve put the word out, but, you know, sometimes a description isn’t enough.”

“Decomp?”

“No. Not too bad.”

Margo knew that sometimes a morgue photo required a little help too. Facial expressions, the way a person’s mouth and eyes work together to form a true representation of what he or she looked like in life, were sometimes crucial to finding out just who they were.

“There is some tissue damage. The coroner thinks it was animal activity.”

“How bad?”

“Parts of the mouth and nose.”

“Eyes in place? Brows?”

“Yes. Barely.”

“That’s fine. I’ve worked with a lot less.”

“I know that they closed the case on Ridgway’s ‘last victim’ because of you,” Kendall said, indicating the case profiled in a police journal that featured Margo’s work. The article had recounted the discovery of a small skull near Star Lake in south King County, Washington. Over time, seven more bodies had been found in the vicinity, most together in a single cluster of grisly mayhem that shocked the Pacific Northwest nearly as much as the Ted Bundy murders had over the previous decade.

The article had concerned the skull of a young African American woman-or maybe even only a girl. No other personal effects. No bones. No nothing. Just the dark gray skull found by hikers among the sword and bracken ferns that fill in the lush undergrowth. The “last victim” went unnamed until six months after the trial, when Margo took up the challenge because, according to the article, “every mother deserves to know what happened to her daughter, no matter what. I don’t care if this girl was a prostitute or a gangbanger. At one time she was someone’s precious baby girl.”

It turned out that the Star Lake location was Green River Killer Gary Ridgway’s body dump site. Margo’s work gave the victim back her name: Tammy Whitman.

Kendall admired the humanity and respect for the victim that was an essential part of Margo’s work. Being murdered was heartbreaking enough. To be a victim with a Jane or John Doe bracelet in some Podunk morgue was an insult to whatever life that person had led.

Or to those loved ones or friends who were out there, wondering just where he or she had gone.

“I’m assuming that a 2-D image is acceptable,” Margo said. “How soon can you send me facial measurements? Photos?”

“How does this afternoon suit you?”

Margo laughed. “This is one of those you-need-it-yesterday requests, isn’t it, Kendall?”

“Not really. Sooner is better than later.”

“All right. Get me the material, the coroner’s contact info, and I’ll see what I can have for you in, let’s see…a day or two?”

“Next time you’re in town, martinis on me,” Kendall said.

After she hung up, Kendall went looking for Josh Anderson. Help was on the way. Without knowing who the victim was, there was no way they’d catch the killer.

Everything always started with the ID.

Most of her contemporaries worked solely on the computer, but Margo Titus still loved the way colored pencils and Conté crayons felt against the smooth surface of high-quality rag paper. She found greater success in bringing the material to life by using the old-school methods that she’d first picked up to make her reputation, her legacy, as a fine artist. After working to specific measurements on a transparency atop the photographs, she’d draw, color, and then scan the image for manipulation in Photoshop.

On a row of shelves above her worktable were three sculpted heads that she called the “Janes.” Although they’d been found in three different states, they shared the unique bond of being Jane Does. All three were crafted with such realism even Margo thought their eyes followed her about the room. Sometimes she wondered if their vigilant gazes were meant to remind her that she’d failed to determine who they were.

Who is missing you three?

Next to the Janes was a framed portrait of Margo’s husband, Dan, and their sons, Jacob and Eli. Below the shelves was a corkboard decorated with the whimsically macabre drawings of her boys, depicting their mother at work in her studio. Heads on the table. Morgue photos scattered like confetti. A paintbrush in hand.

I’d love to be a fly on the wall when the boys are talking about my work at school, she’d thought more than once.

She looked down at the photos and the autopsy report, all of which she’d printed out.

“You won’t be one of the Janes,” she said. “Not if I can help it.”

Margo stirred some sugar into her licorice tea and turned on her CD player. The liquid notes of a Stan Getz samba filled the air. She’d have played it louder, but she didn’t want to miss a call if her boys or husband tried to reach her. There was something soothing about the samba, with its sliding percussion overrun by a soaring saxophone. It gave her a calm energy.

“Let’s see who you are, little one,” she said as she undertook her distinct blend of science and art.

She had no one to consult with as she began to work. In cases she’d worked for the Portland and Boise police departments, she’d had the opportunity to interview witnesses who’d seen a perpetrator. She would inquire carefully, probing into the memory of the viewer. It was a collaborative process as the witness offered up the cues of recognition fixed in his or her memory. The slant of a brow. The flare of the nostrils. Lines on a forehead. So much information was held in a person’s recollections that the true skill came in digging it out as much as the application of any artistic skills.