And there was his partner, the little blonde. Liska. She was a pistol. He liked the look of her, but she was too old for his tastes, and he had no doubt that messing with her would be like grabbing a wildcat by the tail. Way too much trouble. He didn’t mind a little sporting fight in his girls, but one that could seriously mess him up? No, thanks. Maybe when she was eighteen or nineteen . . .

The blonde giving the news was more his speed—wide-eyed, young, idealistic. He could easily picture her in his control. He could see those wide eyes even wider and filled with terror. He could feel the blood start to heat in his veins. She could be one for Doc Holiday.

Doc Holiday. He liked the name, the play on words.

Growing up, he had been a big fan of Westerns—Gunsmoke and Bonanza on television, and all the old Western movies. Gunfight at the O.K. Corral had always been a favorite when he was a kid. Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. He owned the DVDs of the two movies made in the nineties—Wyatt Earp and Tombstone. He preferred Tombstone’s Kurt Russell over Kevin Costner as Wyatt Earp, but he thought Dennis Quaid should have won the freaking Oscar as Doc Holliday in the Costner film. Val Kilmer’s portrayal of the dentist/gunslinger had been way too gay for his taste.

Not that the historical Doc Holliday had anything to do with the Doc Holiday who left dead girls on the side of the road.

That was his doing.

Doc Holiday. Gerald Fitzgerald.

He hadn’t gotten nearly the publicity he could have for his exploits. He was much more prolific than anyone would ever give him credit for. But that was the trade-off. He could be careful and successful, or careless and caught.

He had no intention of getting caught. Not by anyone. Not ever. He was very skilled. He was very smart. He thought of himself as a professional. He didn’t make mistakes. The risks he took were calculated. He always had a plan.

He had one now.

13

“What time did you last eat?” Liska asked.

The forensic artist was a short, doughy, twentysomething young man named Nam Pham, whose actual job was as a computer nerd in the business technology unit.

As in most police departments, there was no salaried position for a forensic artist in the MPD. City budgets didn’t allow for that kind of extravagance. There wasn’t enough work to warrant a full-time artist here. In fact, there were only a handful of salaried, full-time positions for forensic artists in the entire country. It was standard op—and far cheaper—to make use of someone with artistic talent who was already getting paid for doing something else within the department.

Pham had been a poli sci major and an art minor in college. The department had footed the bill for a couple of seminars in forensic art. He had paid out of pocket for additional training, just to get the opportunity to do the job. He had been doing suspect composite drawings for the last eight or nine months in addition to his regular duties.

He looked at Liska with confusion.

“When did you last eat?” she asked again.

“About an hour ago,” he said, apprehension dawning. “Why do you ask?”

Liska didn’t answer. She would have worried about the contents of her own stomach this morning, considering the hangover, but she was feeling too mean to get sick, aggravated by the situation of the case. She hated the politics that manipulated a high-profile investigation. There should have been no place for it, and yet they had to play that game just to get what they needed in order to do their jobs. It sucked.

They followed Möller down the hall toward the room where Jane Doe 09-11 lay waiting. Pham glanced around, trying not to look as uncomfortable as he was to be at the county morgue.

“Have you ever seen a dead body?” Liska asked skeptically. Everything about Nam Pham was annoying her now. His hair was too thin. His shirt was too green. He looked clammy.

“Yes,” he said defensively.

“And I don’t mean your grandmother in a casket.”

“Um, then, no.”

“Great,” she muttered.

“I can work from photographs,” Pham said. “I mean, really, I need to work from photographs. It takes time to get it right. I need to study the angles. You could have just brought me the photographs. It really isn’t necessary for me to see the actual body.”

Liska grabbed a packaged gown off the service cart parked in the hall and hit him in the stomach with it like a quarterback handing off a football.

“Put this on, and try not to puke in your mask.”

The room Möller took them into was cold and smelled strongly of burned flesh and a terrifying death, a smell that hit like a fist and forced its way down a person’s throat. Liska scowled as if she might frighten it away. Nam Pham turned green.

Möller, already in scrubs, getting an early start on the day’s autopsies, shrugged and apologized as he waited for them to gown up.

“A house fire in Whittier,” he said, waving a hand at the charred remains of what had once been a human being, now lying on a gurney like some strange, grotesque, twisted driftwood sculpture. “Someone cooking meth for New Year’s supper.”

“Meth cooked the cook,” Liska remarked. “That’s a crispy critter if ever I’ve seen one. Man, I’d rather roll around in week-old, maggot-infested roadkill than smell that smell. I couldn’t have your job, Doc.”

“What smell is that, Sergeant?” Möller asked. ME humor. “Barbecue?”

Nam Pham pressed his mask to his mouth and muffled a gag.

“Any leads yet on our Jane Doe?” Möller asked, moving on toward another door.

“Nothing,” Liska said. “If she’s going to be missed by someone, I would think that someone would be pretty worried by today. We can only hope if she has loved ones, they live in the area.

“We’ve got to get this sketch done and out there on the Internet, on TV, in the newspapers,” she said.

Möller led the way into a cold-storage room where several bodies lay covered on steel tables. He looked at Pham.

“Have you done reconstruction work, Mr. Pham?”

“I took a course,” Pham said weakly, his eyes fixed on the draped human form the ME stood beside.

Möller arched a brow as he picked up the corner of the sheet. “You’re about to take another.”

Even the green drained from Nam Pham’s complexion as he got his first look at their Jane Doe.

Liska counted half under her breath. “Three . . . two . . . one . . .”

Pham’s knees started to buckle. He yanked down his mask, turned, and grabbed on to a laundry cart and threw up into it.

Möller sighed. Liska rolled her eyes.

“I think perhaps your artist is a bit overfaced,” Möller said. “No pun intended.”

Liska stepped over and cuffed Pham hard on the shoulder. “Suck it up, nerd boy. You’re all I’ve got. And you’re all she’s got, too.”

She curled a hand into the collar of his shirt and pulled him back to the table like a recalcitrant third grader. “Do you understand now why I insisted you come here and see her in the flesh?”

“To make me puke?” he said miserably. He was staring just to the left of the victim’s head, concentrating on not seeing her.

“This isn’t about you. It’s about her. Look at her,” Liska ordered, yanking on his collar like she was pulling on the leash of a dog. “Look at her!”

Pham took a breath as if he were about to put his head underwater and looked straight at the disfigured mess that was their victim.

“If I just showed you a photograph of this girl’s face, what would you see?” Liska asked. “You’d see a monster. You’d see a character from The Walking Dead. You’d see something that your brain would tell you wasn’t real.