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brother, formerly Tommy Lucero’s partner, had been shot to death in the line of duty just over a year ago.
    “I’m sorry, kid, I wasn’t thinking.”
    “Aw, don’t start walking on eggshells around me. I don’t own grief, you know. Vietnam was horrible. I’m sure Ted wasn’t the only person you knew there who didn’t make it. You have a right to feel what you feel about that.”
    “Unfortunately, Ted wasn’t the only friend we had there who didn’t make it. He was the friend we knew and lovedthe most, I guess, but there were so many others. Oh man, marines there on the base who went off on patrol and they’d come back with a third of the guys gone, and two or three of those were friends of ours. Pilots that flew off and never came back—it was an endless stream.”
    “So now Ted may have been found, and you have to help figure that out.”
    “Yes.”
    “And that takes you right back into the endless stream again.”
    “Yeah.”
    “I totally understand. Toni?”
    “Yes.”
    “You can talk to me about it anytime. Sometimes it’s better to talk about these things with someone who gets it. Know what I mean?”
    “Yeah, kid, I do.”

Chapter Four
    S ergeant Major Tomlinson called me back from the CILHI labs in Hawaii. CILHI’s staff includes thirty anthropologists, four forensic odontologists (dentists) and numerous other forensic scientists. They also employ other experts on an as-needed basis, which can include any legitimate expert requested by the family of a missing service person. I had been used twice previously to reconstruct the faces of two servicemen recovered from Laos and Cambodia.
    The Sergeant Major remembered me. With his typical military courtesy, he continually addressed me as “Dr. Sullivan” because of my Ph.D. in art. It made me uncomfortable. I had worked hard to complete my formal education, but I considered the informal education of my life’s experiences to be more important, and that education had been completed by “Toni,” not Dr. Sullivan.
    We spoke about my phone conversation with Irini. He was familiar with the case and gave me all the details from his perspective.
    It had been a long road to find remains that might actually belong to Teddy. Three times before, CILHI had thought they would bring Ted home. The first time, they dug at a site they thought was near his supposed crash site, but they found nothing. They conducted more interviews with the locals and continued searching for the right site.
    The second time they were supposed to go in and search a site, there were political problems and they weren’t allowed in. The third time, with political problems resolved, they went in to search the second site and labored again with no results.
    More interviews with locals and more research had pointed them to this new site. Here they had found fragments of bones, pieces of the airplane—some parts of it had been cannibalized by the locals for use in homemade farming equipment—and they also found other personal items that had definitely belonged to a U.S. serviceman. They sifted the soil in that location for months and collected everything they could find. Now they just needed a way to prove that what they had found were the remains of Captain Theodore P. Nikolaides.
    As Irini had said, few teeth were recovered and the ones they found were only Ted’s good teeth and not the ones they needed to make a positive match to his dental work. The nuclear DNA had deteriorated, but that was expected. The mitochondrial DNA was totally usable, but there was no one with whom they could compare it. They had used that DNA, however, to match the bone pieces and the skull—that was a match. Knowing that all those parts belonged to the same person meant that once the ID had been made through my facial reconstruction, all thematching pieces could be said to belong to someone—he would have a face, a name, a history and a family and friends.
    If these were Ted’s remains, he would get