“Yes, there are.” Jill was still staring at the reconstruction. “You called her Nora. You have some idea who she was?”
“No, I always name my reconstructions. It helps me to connect with them.” She started for the door. “Now I have a question for you. You appear familiar with skulls and reconstructions. You not only have a good eye, you know what to look for. Have you been taught?”
Jill shook her head. “Heavens no. Self-taught on the Internet because it’s both your profession and your passion. But the key word is familiarity. I only wanted to know what I was seeing.”
“Are you planning a series of articles instead of just interviewing me?”
“No.” She grinned. “And that’s two questions.” She opened the porch door. “I’ll wait on the porch while you get me that cup of coffee. But I’ll give you a teaser to make you want to hurry it along.” She looked back at Eve. “I don’t want to interview you at all. I want to offer you a job that I hope I can convince you to take. Gross misrepresentation. If you’re too pissed off to even let me try, you can toss me in that beautiful lake. Okay?”
Jill didn’t wait for an answer. She closed the door behind her.
* * *
“I don’t have time for this,” Eve said as she handed Jill her coffee five minutes later. “You picked the wrong day, Ms. Cassidy.”
“We’ve gone back to formality?” Jill asked. “At least you didn’t choose the lake option.”
“I considered it.”
Jill tilted her head. “But you were curious. You have a certain amount of respect for me and were willing to risk being disappointed. But you also have an innate curiosity, which is natural considering your profession.”
“That curiosity will be fading away if you don’t satisfy it soon. You don’t wish to interview me.” She asked bluntly, “What the hell do you want with me?”
“Basically the same thing you’ve done during your entire career,” she said quietly. “I want you to identify a number of skulls and bring resolution and peace to their families and loved ones.” She paused. “I want you to bring them home.”
“I already have a waiting list of cases,” Eve said impatiently. “I don’t need any more. There are other forensic sculptors you can hire.”
“But they’re not you.” Jill leaned forward. “And they won’t give those children the skill and dedication you would. They were murdered, and now they’re already being forgotten.”
“Children? Plural? How many children?”
“Twenty-seven.”
Eve felt a ripple of shock. “A mass murderer?”
“Oh, yes. Though not what you might think.”
Twenty-seven children. It made Eve sick to her stomach. “Then tell me what I should think.”
“Maldara.”
Eve went still. “My God.”
Jill slowly nodded. “Though I haven’t seen any sign of God in Maldara since the moment I stepped off the plane two years ago. What do you know about Maldara?”
“What everyone knows. Two warring groups in the depths of the Congo struggling for supremacy. Civil war. Blood. Gore.” She swallowed. “Another Rwanda. So many deaths. The ruling party managed to triumph about eighteen months ago.” She searched for a name. “The Kiyanis I think. Their president was able to persuade the U.N. to support her.”
“Yes, Zahra Kiyani is very persuasive,” Jill said. “Over six hundred thousand people died in Maldara during that conflict, and only fifty thousand were laid at her door. She was Teflon.”
Only fifty thousand. Eve could only vaguely remember the details of that horror she had seen on TV and the Internet two years ago. “Men, women, and children. Butchered. I didn’t want Michael to watch it.” She lifted her head as a sudden thought occurred to her. “Children. You want me to do reconstructions on the children of that massacre?”
“Not all of them. You’d be there for decades.” Jill’s lips twisted. “There are far too many. But there’s a school in the village of Robaku, near Jokan on the northern border, where I’ve been doing volunteer work. Twenty-seven students were killed by a machete brigade led by Nils Varak, a mercenary who was hired by the Botzan faction because it was practically on the Kiyani doorstep. The children were chopped to pieces. Then the school was burned to the ground.”
“Terrible,” Eve said, sick. It wasn’t difficult to envision the terror and pain that must have enveloped the children that day.
“Yes, every minute of it was terrible,” Jill said jerkily. “Some of the children weren’t dead when the fires were lit. Varak was too impatient to