couldn’t speak for themselves.
Kelsey neared Blake’s condo and glanced around for Trent Lohman’s car. She didn’t see it, but she hoped he was here. The gate to the courtyard Blake shared with his neighbor stood open. Kelsey mounted the Saltillotile steps leading to his door. The condo had a split-level floor plan, with the master suite down and the living area and guest room up, overlooking the River Walk. The festive sounds of a mariachi band drifted up from a restaurant as she rang the bell and waited.
Blake opened the door with his BlackBerry pressed to his ear. Typical.
She stepped in without comment and noticed the rolling suitcase parked in the hallway. Was he coming or going? His travel schedule was no longer her business, so she didn’t ask. She walked into the living room, where his laptop sat on the glass coffee table beside a half-finished Heineken.
“Yeah . . . yeah . . . No, that’s good. We’ll put that in.” He shot her a look of apology as he stood in the foyer.
Kelsey sank onto the couch. He was watching basketball playoffs and she idly checked the score. At last, he ended the call.
“Sorry.” He sat down beside her. “That was Trent. He’s on his way.”
“You two working on a big case?” Kelsey deposited her purse on the table alongside the accordion file.
“Aren’t we always? Here, I want you to see this.” He shifted his laptop to face her, and Kelsey watched video footage of a dark-haired young man sitting in a courtroom.
“This is James Hanan’s arson trial, back in Tennessee, when he was only nineteen.”
“They filmed it?”
“It was news in Memphis. He set fire to a church outbuilding, got sent up for three years, out in one.”
“He looks really different.”
“From what? A corpse?” He smiled at her.
“You can tell a lot from a skeleton.” She opened the file and pulled out an eight-by-ten photograph. It had been taken in an autopsy suite in Manila at the country’s main forensic center. The skeleton lay spread out on a steel table. All the bones had been cleaned. She handed the picture to Blake and then passed him a close-up of the skull.
“I only have photos, unfortunately,” she said. “The bones themselves are with the Filipino authorities. I’d recommend going through the embassy if you want to send someone out to look at them.”
“These are the implants?” Blake hunched over the picture, which showed small pockets of silicone arranged beside the skull.
“They were recovered with the skull. Notice the marks on the mandible and the nasal bones here? Those are from an osteotome, or bone chisel. After his surgery, he would have had a receding jaw and a very narrow nose, totally unlike how he looks in that video.” She handed over another picture. “Here’s a back view of the skull where you can see the entry wound in the parietal bone. Someone shot him in the back of the head.”
The stony look on Blake’s face prompted Kelsey to voice what had been on her mind for weeks now.
“The extensive plastic surgery has me concerned,” she told him. “Why would he go through all that effort and expense, unless he planned to resurface someplace? Someplace where authorities were on the lookout for him, such as America.” She didn’t want to sound alarmist, but she could tell from Blake’s guarded expression that he’d thought about this, too.
The computer screen changed abruptly, and she glanced at it. The new footage was taken in a wooded area. A line of men in green fatigues lay in the dirt, shooting at paper targets with machine guns.
“This is from a training camp in Indonesia.” Blake put the photos aside. “He’s the second one from the right.”
“Hard to see with the beard.”
“I asked Trent for confirmation on this ID. He knows our tech who specializes in facial recognition software. We’ve had it analyzed and managed to get IDs on everyone you see there. See this guy?” He pointed to one of the men who was