Shattered Image. J.F. Margos
the hero, was trying to save himself and the plane. Determined not to give up, he must have struggled to keep the nose up and wings in the air, but it was too late to eject as he came close to the hilltop. So, Ted had committed himself to trying to land the plane. The wings had broken off as the plane began hitting trees, and then it had burst into flame. It wasn’t a spectacular fire because Ted was at the end of his mission and low on fuel, but it had been enough to ensure his death.
“Irini, what are we talking about here?”
“Those people at CILHI, they sent a team to that part where Teddy was last seen. They found bones and some other things and they think it might be him.”
CILHI stands for Central Identification Laboratory Hawaii, and they are the ID people for all military personnel missing in action. It’s an army operation located at an air force base just outside of Honolulu. They work to identify all MIAs from World War II, Korea and Vietnam.
“When will they know if it’s him?” I asked.
“Well, that is why I called you. They won’t know because there are not enough of the teeth to compare to Teddy’s dental records. You know, he had such good teeth, but they check the bad ones in these tests, not the good ones, and most of Ted’s teeth they didn’t find. So, now they can’t do the comparison. Also, the DNA is bad.”
“What do you mean?”
“They say they have to compare it to someone in his mother’s family.”
Ted’s mother had died in Greece. His father had brought him and his brother with him after she died. His mother had one brother back in Greece and they had lost track of him after World War II during the civil war that followed. Ted had talked about it many times. The only family he knew was his father’s family. Further complicating matters was the fact that Ted’s older brother, and only sibling, had a heart attack four years previously and died.
Irini continued, “I ask them why they don’t check it with someone else in his family or against the kids. They say it’s not the right kind of DNA. I don’t understand it.”
“It’s called mitochondrial DNA, Irini. It can only be compared against a person’s mother’s family. The other kind of DNA in your cells breaks down over time, so they probably can’t use it.”
“I don’t know anyone in Ted’s mother’s family. They left the uncle behind in Greece and we don’t know what happened to him.”
“I know. I remember.”
“Toni, the skull is good. They can’t use the DNA there for nothing, but I talked to them about you and they say they have worked with you twice before. They say because you work for the FBI sometimes, they use you for help.”
“That’s true, but what are you saying, Irini?”
“I am saying that you must help me and Teddy. You must go and make a sculpture of this skull and put the face there, so we can see if it is Teddy.”
“Irini, this is difficult work when I don’t know the victim, but…”
“No. His soul is restless. He cannot be at peace until they give me his bones and let me lay him to eternal rest. They will not give me the bones until they know it is him. The peace of his soul is with you, Toni. You must do this for him—to restore him, to bring him home, to set him free.”
I had a knot in my stomach and I was beginning to feel sick. The war had been put behind me. Jack and I had used our faith to heal us from the things that happened there, including the loss of our beloved friend, Ted. I hated it, but what Irini was saying was right. What she wasn’t saying was that I owed this to Ted because of his friendship to me and for bringing me to Jack. I had a great marriage for all those years, and Irini had lived alone, raising their children and having no closure over the death of the only man she had ever loved. I sighed. My chest felt tight.
“They have the skull, all of it?”
“Yes,” she said. “All of that part of the bones are in good shape. The rest they say is bad, but you don’t need the rest to make the face.”
“Okay, give me the name of the person in charge so I can call and set this up.”
There was a momentary silence on the other end of the phone. I heard the rustling of some paper, and then, choking back tears, Irini read the name and phone number to me of the man at CILHI who was in charge of “Ted’s case.”
She could barely speak when we hung up, but her last words to me were, “May our Savior bless you and guide your hands.”
I was noodling around in the garage with an old carburetor, trying to work through my angst, when I heard a vehicle pull to the curb and stop in a hurry. When Lieutenant Leonie Driskill drove her official vehicle, a rather cumbersome van loaded with equipment, she drove like the law enforcement officer that she was. When Leo got behind the wheel of her Jeep, tires would screech and squeal.
She bailed out of the Jeep with her sandy hair swinging in a ponytail down her back. She had just gotten off work. She was still wearing navy trousers and a white shirt, and her badge and gun were clipped to her belt. She was about five-five and she walked with a slight limp from her last fire battle in active combat. It had almost cost her her right leg. The doctors had said she probably wouldn’t walk and definitely wouldn’t be able to do anything more physical than that. No one ever told Leo Driskill she couldn’t do something without her trying that much harder. She had rehabbed her way back to health and extreme fitness. She lifted weights and ran and water-skied, and proved the doctors wrong.
Her limp gave her just a little bounce when she walked fast, and today there appeared to be an extra spring in her step besides the limp.
“What are you working on out here, Toni?”
“Just a carburetor overhaul on my old Jeep.” I wiped some of the grease off my hands with a rag and headed for the Go-Jo canister. I smeared Go-Jo all over my hands, loosening all the grease, and then wiped my hands clean with a dry rag.
Leo sauntered over to the workbench and started to inspect the carburetor.
“Touch that and you’ll be sorry.”
“I-eeee…wasn’t…” Her voice trailed off as if she’d been caught with her hand in the cookie jar.
“I just spent half an hour getting all those needles lined up just right so I could get that thing back together,” I told her. “You knock it over or mess it up and your name is mud.”
I turned around to see that Leo was leaning over the workbench with her hands behind her back, eyeing the carburetor closely. She looked like a heron perched on a log.
“You know, Toni, most people take stuff like this to a mechanic.”
“Yeah well, four things are true, kid. Most people don’t have a mechanic for a dad. Most people weren’t practically raised in a garage. Most people don’t know a thing about carburetors, and I’m not most people.”
“That’s the truth—the ‘you’re not most people’ part, anyway.”
“Are you here to harass me and disturb my auto-mechanican therapy session or do you have something important you’d like to impart?”
“Grump. You call me in the middle of my busy day and ask me to go look at a bunch of old bones dug up out of the river bottom, and when I come by to give you the benefit of my report, this is how I’m treated.”
I sighed. “Truce already. I can’t spar with you anymore today.”
“Hey, lighten up. I was kidding. What gives?”
“It’s just been a bad day. It has to do with old times in Vietnam. I’ll work it out. Distract me by giving me your brilliance on our Red Bud case.”
Leo nodded. “I’m afraid there’s no brilliance yet. There’s not much I can say because there’s not much to go on. But there were a few things that came