Criminal

had applied it for her.
    Amanda opened her mouth to speak, then stopped herself.
    “Go on,” Pete said. “There are no silly questions in here.”
    “Can you tell if she’s left- or right-handed?”
    Pete beamed at Amanda as if she was his star pupil. “There will be more muscle attachment to the bone on the dominant side.”
    “From holding a pen?”
    “Among other things. Why are you asking?”
    “When I paint my fingernails, one side always looks better than the other. With her, both sides look perfect.”
    He smiled again. “This, my dear, is why more women should be in my field.”
    Amanda doubted any sane woman would ever do this job—at least not one who ever wanted to get married. “Maybe she has a friend who painted her fingernails?”
    “Do women really groom one another? I assumed Behind the Green Door was taking cinematic liberties.”
    Amanda ignored the observation. She carefully put Lucy’s hand back down on the table. It was so easy to focus on the parts rather than the whole. She’d let herself forget that Lucy Bennett was an actual human being.
    This was to be blamed in part because Amanda had not yet looked at the girl’s face. Amanda forced herself to do so now. She felt her early steeliness, but there was a tandem emotion of what could only be called curiosity. With the blood washed from Lucy’s face, she looked different. As in Roz’s photo, the skin still hung loosely to the side, but something beyond the obvious was not right.
    “Could you …” Amanda didn’t want to sound morbid, but she pushed through it. “Can I see her teeth?”
    “Most of them were broken in the fall. What are you getting at?”
    “The skin on her face. Is it possible to move it back to—”
    “Oh, of course.” Pete went to the head of the table. He gripped the loose flesh of the cheek and forehead and pulled it back over her skull. Lucy had bitten her lip in the fall. Pete returned it to the proper position. He used his fingers to tack the skin into place around the eyes and nose, like a baker kneading dough. “What do you think?”
    Amanda realized it was exactly as she had expected. This woman was not Lucy Bennett. The scars on her wrist weren’t the only indication. The open sores on her feet had a familiar pattern, like a constellation of stars. Barring that, there was the face, which clearly belonged to Jane Delray. “I think we need to get Evelyn back in here.”
    “How intriguing.”
    Amanda left the room through the swinging doors. The lab was empty, so she pushed open the other set of doors leading into the hallway. Evelyn was several yards ahead, close to the entrance. She was talking with a man wearing a navy blue suit. He was tall, over six feet. His sandy brown hair touched his collar. The tailoring of his clothes was obviously professional. The jacket curved into his back. The flared pants hovered over his white loafers. He was finishing a cigarette when Amanda joined them. Evelyn shot her a look, her eyes practically bulging from their sockets.
    She was talking to Mr. Blue Suit.
    “Mr. Bennett.” Evelyn’s voice was pitched higher than usual, though she was doing a good job of hiding her excitement. “This is my partner, Miss Wagner.”
    He barely glanced at her, keeping his eyes on his white loafers as he stamped out the cigarette. “As I said, I just want to see my sister and leave.”
    “We had a few more questions,” she began, but Bennett cut her off.
    “Is there a man I can talk to? Someone in charge?”
    Amanda thought of Pete. “The coroner is in the back.”
    Bennett’s lips twisted in distaste, whether at the thought of the coroner or what he saw in Amanda, she wasn’t sure. And it really didn’t matter. The only thing she could focus on was how arrogant and unlikable he was.
    Amanda said, “Dr. Hanson is preparing the body. It’ll only be a few more minutes.”
    Evelyn picked up the lie. “You won’t want to see her how she is now, Mr. Bennett.”
    “I don’t want to see her period,” he snapped back. “As I told you, Mrs. Mitchell, my sister was a drug addict and a whore. What I’m doing here is a mere formality so that my mother can have some peace at the end of her life.”
    “His mother has cancer,” Evelyn explained.
    Amanda let a few seconds pass out of respect for the man’s mother, but she couldn’t stop herself from asking, “Mr. Bennett, can you tell us when was the last time you saw your sister?”
    He glanced away. “Five,