“But she is real. This girl is real,” she said. “She’s not a zombie. She’s not a movie prop. This was a living, breathing young woman. You need to get that. She had a life and someone took it away from her.

“I need you to give it back to her, Nam,” she said. “I need a drawing of a real live girl. Do you understand me?”

“How?” he asked, shrugging away from her. “How am I supposed to do that? Half her face is missing! She doesn’t even have a nose!”

Liska had made the same argument to Kovac. A bad sketch could be worse than no sketch at all. But they had so little to go on, they had to grab on to something, to start somewhere.

“You’ll have to concentrate on what she does have, not what’s missing,” she said. “Get the jawline from the good side, get the one good eye and make two. Get the hair right. She had piercings. Draw them with jewelry in place.”

“If I give you a drawing and it doesn’t resemble what the victim looked like in real life, won’t that be doing more harm than good?” Pham asked. “Her family won’t recognize her.”

“I have to trust that you’re gifted, Nam. I have to hope that someone recognizes her haircut or the arch of her eyebrow,” Liska said. “I have to hope that someone will find enough similarities in the features, add that to the tattoo on her shoulder, and come up with a name.”

“No results with her fingerprints?” Möller asked.

Liska shook her head.

“The whole face needs to be reconstructed,” Pham argued. “What I come up with is going to be a guess. You need to reconstruct her skull.”

“That can be done,” Möller said. “I can disarticulate the head from the body. We can soak the skull in acid to clean the flesh from the bone. Of course, there is a considerable amount of damage to the skull itself, and the flesh is all that’s keeping it together in places. But then it’s like a jigsaw puzzle. We glue it back together.”

“And when we find her family, I get to explain why we decapitated their loved one and dissolved what was left of her face in acid,” Liska said.

“If no one can identify her, there is no family which needs an explanation,” Möller pointed out.

Liska tried playing that line through her mind in an imaginary conversation with Captain Kasselmann. Even in her imagination he wasn’t receptive.

“You need a forensic sculptor,” Nam Pham said.

“Yeah?” Liska said. “Well, I don’t have one. I have you. And I need a drawing. Today.”

•   •   •

NAM PHAM TOOK his own photographs of Jane Doe. Liska had to give him credit. As squeamish as he was, and as horrific as Jane Doe’s face was, he stood in there and took pictures from every possible angle. And Möller, as busy a man as he was, assisted, positioning the battered skull, arranging the dead girl’s hair with the gentle hand of a man who had daughters of his own.

This was what it would take, she knew. This was what they would have to do. They had to become this girl’s family. They didn’t know her name or the circumstances of her life or her death, but they had to become her family. They had to be the first line to keep her connected to the world of the living, or else she simply ceased to exist and the universe closed the tiny void left by her light going out, and it would be as if she never mattered. No one should ever die as if his or her life never mattered. Until they found a family to mourn her, the people dealing with her case would be her family.

When Liska had first come into Homicide, Kovac had drilled into her that the person they worked for wasn’t their immediate boss, wasn’t their chief, wasn’t the collective population of the city of Minneapolis. The person they worked for was the victim. They had to become the voice for the voiceless, the avengers for those who couldn’t avenge themselves. That truth was no truer than when their victim had no name.

Avenger sounded so much more dramatic and grandiose than cop. Avenger was a word to describe a comic book hero, not a civil servant. Like the character Kyle had created for his comic book stories, Ultor. Avengers had names like Ultor, not Sam or Nikki. They looked like gladiatorial gods and wielded superhuman powers.

Liska would have settled for the power to see the past, to see who this girl had been and what had happened to her. But she had no such power. She would have to use the tools she had, the most prominent being tenacity and determination. She would have to leave the comic book heroes to her son.

14

R U OK?

Kyle typed the words into his phone, then stared hard at the recipient of his text message. She sat two tables down in the next row, facing him, pretending to read her history book. Brittany Lawler: blond, pretty, popular, with big blue eyes that were like lakes on a cloudless summer day.

They were in the library. No talking allowed. No phones either, but everyone brought them anyway, turned them to silent mode and spent the study hour texting or on Facebook or Twitter. The librarians didn’t care as long as there wasn’t any noise.

He could tell by the way her eyebrows pulled together that she had gotten his message. She frowned. She knew exactly where he was sitting, but she didn’t look his way.

I C U, he typed and sent.

She frowned harder. Her thumbs worked the keyboard.

His phone vibrated in his hand.

Quit stalking me

Not stalking, he typed. Caring

Quit caring then

Trying 2 help

Don’t need ur help

O right. Cuz u have such good friends. Not.

She held up her phone so he could see it, turned it off, and put it facedown on the table. She picked up her history book and made a show of pretending to read it.

Kyle sighed and turned his attention back to his sketch pad. His fictional world made so much more sense to him. His alter ego, Ultor, was decisive and in control. He saw a problem; he took care of the problem. He identified a victim and became that person’s champion. Ultor was wanted, needed, appreciated. Only the bad guys fought with him—and they always lost. There was always a struggle, a fight, and Ultor did not always come out unscathed, but he always came out of the fight victorious. He was a hero and people loved him for it.

In real life—in high school, at least—people didn’t always want to be helped. Real life was more complicated.

Kyle worked his pencil over the paper, patiently adding detail to the scene. Ultor was muscular and angular, with broad shoulders and narrow hips. His arms and legs were sculpted. His belly was flat and cut, the six-pack showing through the skintight T-shirt he wore. His brow was low, his eyes narrow, his jaw wide and shadowed.

In this scene Ultor was putting himself between the girl he was protecting and the villain’s henchman. One arm reached back, putting the victim behind him. One arm stretched forward, directing the forceful beam of energy from the palm of his hand into the face of the attacker. Ultor was the center of the scene, the source of power. Everything else was pushed away from him by that power. Through the strength of the lines of Ultor’s body, Kyle had captured that sense of power and the tension that resulted from that power.

He was pleased with the look of the drawing. He paused for a moment to study it closely, and it dawned on him what it really said about his hero: that through his strength he protected the weak and fended off evil, but in doing so he isolated himself. Ultimately, Ultor was alone in his act of heroism.

The thought gave Kyle an empty feeling in the pit of his stomach. Was that the price of heroism? By definition a hero went above and beyond what an ordinary person would do. In doing so the hero separated himself from others in order to save them. He set himself apart. And while he might gain the admiration and adoration of those he saved, at the same time he distinguished himself as being different from them.