I am the embalmer they call when there is no face left.
Crushed bone, peeled skin, the dermis fire has cooked to leather — bring it to my prep room and I will give it back the dignity it had at viewing.
Detective Auguste Marigny is the one NOPD calls when there are no leads left.
He can put his hand on a body and tell you what it saw last.
We worked together three years.
I rebuilt the evidence on twenty-seven cold-case corpses; he read whatever the dead had to say about them; the Cold Case unit closed every file.
Then the twenty-eighth body came in.
A young woman, face beaten past recognition.
I sutured, sculpted, restored every landmark of her face. Marigny laid his palm on her cold hand.
A second later he was white, and the cuff of his other hand had closed around my wrist.
He said, "Delphine. She says the killer is you."
I looked down at the face I had just finished — the face I had spent nine hours putting back together — and finally recognized her.
She was the girl who died at my hands seven years ago.
The first time Auguste Marigny came to find me, his shirt looked like he'd pulled it out of a dumpster on the way over.
He was standing at the loading bay behind Aucoin & Sons with a photograph pinched between two fingers. The photograph was a body that had spent some time in a fire.
"Can you fix it?" he asked.
I had gloves on. I didn't reach for the picture.
"I can fix it. I don't take private work for the police."
He laid his badge wallet on the prep table instead. Under the overhead lamp his eyes had the red wiring of a man who hadn't slept in two days.
"It isn't private work. It's a life."
The case had sat in NOPD Cold Case for four months. No ID, no missing-persons match, no family pushing the file. The fire had eaten everything you could fingerprint, dental, or photograph.
I worked nine hours on the right hand. Where the dermis had cooked away from the web between the thumb and index finger, I rebuilt enough surface to make a tattoo legible again.
It was a small crescent moon. Maybe an inch across.
Marigny looked at the crescent moon for a long time. Then he reached down and took the dead woman's hand.
I thought he had snapped — they get like that, the cold-case ones, three a.m. in a stranger's prep room with their fourth coffee.
But he closed his eyes, and after a long moment he said, quietly: "Red shipping container. The smell of the river. A man in a black rain slicker."
Three days later they picked the slicker up out of a houseboat in Bayou Bienvenue.
After that, the precinct started calling him the séance. Never to his face.
Around the same time, the parishes started calling me the makeup lady for dead people.
Marigny didn't call me either. He called me Ms. Aucoin, and when he needed me on a case, he rapped three times on the stainless steel of my prep table with his knuckle.
"Borrow your hands, Ms. Aucoin?"
I hated the half-dead way he carried himself around my workroom.
I hated more that he could put his hand on a corpse and hear something the rest of us could not.
But I was broke. My father had left a debt that had compounded like a bad infection. The loan shark in Gulfport had sent men twice to the funeral home in the year after my father went off the bridge; they had thrown red paint on the front door of Aucoin & Sons the second time, two days before a family viewing.
Every check Marigny cut me as a forensic consultant pulled me back from the edge by a week.
That is why I worked with him for three years.
Until they brought Lila Toussaint to my table.
Lila Toussaint. I read the name off the intake sheet from the ME at Earhart.
Female. Twenty-six. Cross-match in the missing-persons database had hit on the second pass. Reported missing seven years ago.
The scalpel slipped half an inch.
Sunny Boudreaux looked up from the foot of the table. "Del. Your hand."
I set the scalpel back on the tray.
"Didn't sleep last night."
She didn't push. She bent the overhead lamp lower so the light fell square on the work field.
The face had been worked over thoroughly. Not a car wreck. Not animal scavenging. Not a hammer or a tire iron.
The soft tissue of her cheeks looked like it had been scraped down in passes. The nasal bridge had been broken twice. The mandible had been dislocated and pushed back into something the mortuary calls placed but not seated. Around the orbital margins there were old scars, healed white, under the new damage.
Somebody had not been trying to kill her. Somebody had been trying to make sure no one would ever recognize her face again.
I had rebuilt too many of these faces. Hate leaves a cleaner signature than a wound does.
Sunny said, almost to herself, "Somebody really had a thing against her."
I didn't answer.
Because I knew Lila Toussaint.
Seven years ago she had stood at the bottom of our porch steps on St. Philip Street in a white cotton sundress on a humid June night, smiling up at me under the yellow porch bulb. Tulane scholarship girl, sweet voice, a chip in her front tooth I'd noticed when she'd waited my table at Café Envie one summer.
She had said, "Your daddy's debt, Del. It can be settled tonight."
After that night she vanished.
Three days later my father went off the Crescent City Connection at four in the morning.
My life, from that summer on, was the staircase you fall down: each step landed in blood that wasn't quite yours but never washed off.
I had thought all of this had rotted underground long ago.
It was on my prep table by four a.m.
And I was about to rebuild her face into what it had looked like seven years ago, when she'd smiled at me in a sundress.
I set the last suture at four-eleven.
Sunny stood at the foot of the table looking at the finished work and didn't say anything for a long moment.
"She's pretty," she said finally. "She's really pretty."
Three sharp raps came from the corridor side of the prep room.
Marigny.
He came in and saw the face on the table. His expression did not move.
He only asked, "Can I?"
I nodded.
He took her hand.
He did not get ten seconds in. He let go like he'd touched a stove burner and went backward hard into the instrument cabinet. A tray went off the top shelf and bounced once on the concrete floor.
I was still staring at the tray when the cold steel of his handcuffs closed around my left wrist.
His voice came out hoarse. "Delphine. She says the killer is you."
The surgical lamp over the table was the kind of white that bleaches color out of skin.
Sunny was crying.
She shouldered into Marigny's chest, hands flat on his sternum, pushing. "Detective, you got it wrong. Del was with me all night. She doesn't even — she doesn't — Del wouldn't."
Marigny did not look at her.
His other hand was on my shoulder, pinning down through the bone with a steady pressure that wasn't quite cruelty and wasn't quite anything else.
"The last person Lila Toussaint saw," he said, "was her."
Sunny's color went out from under her freckles like someone pulled a plug.
I looked up at him. "You saw me kill her."
"I heard her say it."
"She said my name?"
Marigny did not answer.
The silence was worse than the accusation.
Four detectives came through the loading bay door inside the next minute, two uniforms and two plainclothes, with Wes Theriot at the head of them. Theriot was the Cold Case supervisor, which made him Marigny's boss on paper. He looked at me with the face of a man who had been waiting a long time to watch this exact thing happen.
"Ms. Aucoin. We're going to ask you to come with us."
I shifted the cuffed wrist. "I'd like to bag and seal the body first."
Theriot smiled, not pleasantly. "You want to touch the body now?"
I looked over at Marigny.
He looked at the wall.
That was the moment I understood what three years of late-night cold-case work had been worth.
Three years. Twenty-seven cases. The shorthand of standing shoulder to shoulder in front of an open cooler drawer at two a.m. None of it weighed as much as one sentence from a corpse.
The sun was up by the time they walked me out of the loading bay onto Rampart.
Somebody had leaked. There were people on the sidewalk by the camellias, more than there should have been for a working morning, half of them holding their phones out at chest level.
"That's her?"
"They say she does the makeup on dead people and turns around and kills folks on the side."
"Pervert."
Sunny ran out behind us in her clogs, no jacket. "Del! Del."
I looked back.
The cell phone in her hand had slid halfway down out of her sleeve. The screen was still lit. There was a half-typed message on it, recipient field filled in.
The recipient was Theriot.
The message said: she just recognized the body —
I stopped on the curb.
Sunny pulled the phone in fast against her stomach.
Marigny saw it too.
For the first time that morning his face cracked, just along the inside corner of one eye.