Delacroix lifted a small black remote and clicked it.
Along the wall, the cold-storage drawers began to roll out one by one on their stainless rails. Twenty-seven of them, in a long ragged line.
There were no bodies in them.
Each drawer held a stack of clear evidence pouches. Each pouch was tagged with a case number I knew by heart. Each pouch held photographs, transcripts, and a small spool of recording wire.
Three years of work.
Delacroix walked to the first drawer. "Case one. Bayou Bienvenue. Your suspect was the houseboat tenant, yes — that part was real. But the red shipping container and the black slicker Detective Marigny heard from her? That was a cue I planted in the restorative protocol I taught you. The protocol you used on the hand."
He moved down the row. He opened the second drawer.
"Case seven. Locked-room fall from the eighth floor of the Pontalba. Your decedent's fractured phalanx was reset in the specific way I taught your apprentice class. Detective Marigny then heard her say window. The truth is she never looked at the window."
The cold I had been carrying since the lobby footage came up through the soles of my shoes.
Every case had closed. Every defendant had been convicted. Most had confessed.
But if the dying memory the detective heard had been shaped before he got there, then how much of what we had each called truth for three years was truth and how much was somebody else's editorial.
Marigny's weapon did not move. "How."
Delacroix turned and looked at me.
"Delphine's hands."
I felt the wall come up against my back without remembering having moved.
"Every time you restored a face, Delphine, you followed the closure sequence I taught you. You believed the sequence was anatomical. The sequence is also a suggestion. The final residual neural firing in the decedent — what Detective Marigny picks up as a last memory — can be steered, toward a chosen image, by the order and pressure of the closures. You were the steering wheel."
His eyes turned back to Marigny.
"And you read the chosen image as truth."
I thought of three years of taking those evidence bags off Marigny's desk. I had believed I was helping the dead speak.
My hands might have been editing what they were allowed to say.
My mother was crying. "It isn't your fault, Delphine."
Delacroix corrected her gently. "It isn't a fault, no. She is the most complete work I have ever made."
I picked up the scalpel from the cart.
I laid the bevel against the radial artery on the inside of my own wrist.
Every person in the room stopped moving at the same time.
Delacroix, for the first time, frowned. "Delphine. What are you doing."
I looked at him.
"You want my hands," I said. "Ruin them. Your lesson ends."
The blade went into the skin.
Blood started to come down the inside of my forearm and onto the floor.
Marigny barked, "Delphine. Put it down."
For the first time in five years, Delacroix's gentleness broke.
"Stop."
It was the right second.
Marigny pivoted and put a round through the overhead lamp.
The lab went black.
I went for my mother in the dark. I had the scalpel under the nylon at her left wrist before the glass had finished hitting the floor and her hand was free a second after that.
The side door of the lab went in. Theriot and his perimeter team came through fast, weapons up.
The next ten seconds were what muzzle flash, shouting, and breaking glass sound like when somebody has cut the lights.
Arms closed around me from behind.
My father.
He was crying. His mouth was right at my ear. "Del-baby, come with Daddy. Dr. Delacroix said if you come with us we can be a family again."
I drove my elbow up into the soft place under his sternum.
He let go.
I turned and looked at the man who had spent twelve years of my life letting me carry his debt, letting me identify his face on a stretcher, letting me hate Lila Toussaint for what he had set in motion.
"My father is dead," I said.
He froze.
"He died," I said, "the day I signed the cremation forms."
Pain came across his face that, for one bad second, made me a daughter again.
Behind him, Delacroix had already moved. The blade in Delacroix's hand opened a clean horizontal across my father's throat.
"Useless," Delacroix said, almost kindly.
The blood came down the front of the janitor's uniform.
My father went to his knees.
He reached for my hand on the way down.
I did not take it.
Marigny pivoted on Delacroix. Delacroix dropped a small metal canister and stamped on the trigger pin.
White fog blew up between us.
The smell that came out of it was the sweetish chemical smell of an embalming-room solvent gone wrong, and the inside of my throat closed.
I got my mother's arm across my shoulders and we went backward toward the door, my eyes burning, my vision going to grain.
Before I went under, I saw Delacroix standing in the white fog and watched his lips shape three words at me, with no sound:
You'll come back.
I came up in a hospital bed at Tulane Medical.
Marigny was in the chair by the rail. He had his left arm in a sling, and the strap had pressed a red line into the side of his neck.
He looked at me opening my eyes and said, without preface, "Delacroix is in the wind."
"My mother."
"Safe. Mild dehydration. Mental status not great. Talking, though."
I let my head sink back into the pillow.
He laid a manila folder on the blanket beside my hip.
"The supplemental on Toussaint came back. She was kept alive on a long-term sedation cocktail. Multiple healed injuries on the trunk and limbs. She was in captivity the entire seven years."
I closed my eyes.
Lila Toussaint had not died seven years ago.
She had been held for seven years.
She had been kept alive long enough to be turned into a knife and put into my hands.
Marigny said, "There's something else. The restoration on the face you worked — most of it wasn't yours. Someone else sculpted her in the days before death. The bone re-positioning, the soft tissue contouring under what you closed — that was done by another restorative artist."
I opened my eyes.
"The face she saw in the mirror," I said. "The one her last image was of. That face was built by Delacroix."
"Yes."
He held a beat.
"And the face he built her into," he said, "was yours."
The room got very quiet.
I remembered being seventeen, sitting in the plaster studio at the Institute, while Delacroix laid alginate over my face and the breathing straws went up my nostrils. He had said it was practice. He had said every restorative artist needs to know their own face better than any other.
He had been making a template.
For twelve years he had been building me into something that could be slid down over another woman's destroyed face.
The door went.
Theriot was in the doorway. His expression had moved into a country I had not seen on him before.
He handed Marigny a clear evidence bag.
"In the basement of the academic building."
In the bag was a small black digital recorder, the kind NOPD techs carry in the field.
Marigny hit play.
Delacroix's voice came out of the little speaker, soft, conversational, the way he had used to walk me through closure of an eyelid.
"Lila. Open your eyes. Look in the mirror."
A woman's voice came through the same speaker, broken into half-sounds.
Delacroix, gentle: "Remember this face. When you go, you tell Detective Marigny — the killer is her."
Lila Toussaint's voice, very far away, very tired.
"Not — not her — not —"
The recording stopped.
I sat in the hospital bed with the cotton blanket up under my elbows and felt something inside my chest get knocked out.
Seven years ago, Lila Toussaint had walked up to my porch in a white sundress and tried to settle my father's debt for me, and I had hated her for seven years.
In the last minute of her life she had tried to clear me.
Delacroix had edited her out.