Page 20 of Badlands (Nora Kelly #5)

C ORRIE PUSHED AWAY the overhead boom mic, walked over to the sink, stripped off her nitrile gloves, and dropped them in a bio-waste container, then soaped and washed her hands and forearms for thirty seconds.

After drying them, she walked over to her workstation and sat down.

Beyond the computer monitor, against the far wall of the forensic lab, stood a row of refrigerated lockers where bodies were kept.

She had maintained self-discipline during her exam, confining herself to observations and evidence.

Now, sitting at the desk, it was time to give herself some slack and—hopefully—try to process and analyze what she had just seen.

She and Watts had carefully packed up the body and evidence, which they had tied into a litter lowered by a hovering FBI chopper.

The evidence had included the lightning stones, as well as the victim’s discarded clothing and other bits and pieces that might be relevant—including the carcasses of the two coyotes, in case there were human remains in their stomachs.

Everything had been flown back to the Albuquerque FO and transported to the forensics lab.

Those coyotes were also in the fridge, and Corrie would have to dissect them soon, a job she was not relishing.

Opening a new document on her screen, she paused, putting her thoughts in order before typing up a prelim forensic report.

Many details would have to await the test results, but Corrie had a clear picture of the basic facts.

The body was no more than two to three months old.

The girl had almost certainly died, like Molly Vine, of heatstroke and dehydration.

Like Molly, she had shed her clothes—cheap and newly bought.

She appeared to be in her late thirties, African American, in good health, well-groomed and fit, with no obvious signs of pathology.

While she had walked into a different area of badlands than Molly—and this time on Navajo Nation land—she’d nevertheless ended up near a strikingly similar geological formation.

The elements in common were remarkable, especially the lightning stones and the badland terrain chosen to die in.

Her nude body had been lying on its side, in a quasi–fetal position, but given the angle of her legs, Corrie believed she might have originally arranged herself in a lotus position, maybe holding one lightning stone in each hand, before she toppled over from heatstroke.

Coyotes had pulled her apart and chewed off half her face.

Unlike Molly, her teeth did show dental work.

Corrie had recovered excellent fingerprints from one hand, but there were no hits in the databases.

The two-to-three-month window meant that there might still be recoverable footage of her somewhere, as well as eyewitness memories, gas station receipts, and other avenues of investigation not available in Molly’s case.

She already had asked Bellamy and O’Hara to check out security footage at big box stores within a fifty-mile radius, showing a woman purchasing clothes.

Now that there were two points of comparison, Corrie hoped to retrace their walking routes back to their starting points.

At Corrie’s request, Homer Watts was already working on this problem with topo maps.

Taking a deep breath, Corrie began typing, getting her observations down while they were still fresh in her mind.

Eventually, her fingers slowed on the keyboard and halted.

She pushed back from the terminal, thinking.

There was a brand-new instrument in the lab that she’d been dying to try out, a FireLight 3D imaging and CBCT scanner.

Even though half the victim’s face was gone, she wondered if it might work if she scanned the other side and then flipped it, as if in a mirror, to reconstruct the face.

As a forensic tool, this kind of imaging was still in its infancy, but the machine used an array of eight dedicated IR cameras plus a sophisticated AI program to scan, align, and reconstruct both existing and missing features.

It was still said to be inferior to an old-fashioned forensic reconstruction using clay, but supposedly, with the addition of facial modeling AI, getting close.

Temporarily closing her report, she rolled the gurney to the FireLight machine and positioned the camera array over the victim’s upper body.

It scanned it from multiple directions with IR light, which took about thirty seconds.

When the imaging was completed, she initiated the analysis and waited in the silence of the lab while the computer, goosed by AI, delved into databases containing countless images, identifying and comparing hundreds of tiny anatomical reference points, to create a preliminary 3D reconstruction of the victim’s face.

It took a while, requiring a lot of computational bandwidth.

Once the initial scan was done, it was up to Corrie to refine it, based on her own forensic reconstruction principles.

Thanks to her interest in photography, Corrie had developed a familiarity with Photoshop, and the FireLight software was comfortingly similar.

She used the program’s software to symmetrically apply the intact portions of the face to the missing areas.

As the process neared completion, Corrie watched as the software assembled layers of bone, muscle, and tissue—much as she did in clay—to build back the original face.

Once this was done, she called up a suite of AI-assisted manipulation tools and requested that the program add the age, fitness level, adipose tissue data, skin color, and racial data.

A window popped up, admonishing her to wait while the machine did the necessary rendering.

Fifteen seconds later, a complete face materialized, staring back at her, shocking in its photorealism.

The scalp in particular was badly mauled, but she had recovered enough samples of hair to know the hairstyle had been cornrows on the scalp transitioning into many long, braided strands.

She instructed the software to render three variant cornrow hairstyles and then printed them out.

She stared at the face, of a Black woman in her late thirties with regal cheekbones, ebony skin, liquid eyes, and long, naturally colored hair.

Of course, this was only a computer reconstruction, and Corrie was still skeptical of how accurate it was.

She could always go back, reconstruct it the old-fashioned way, and compare the two.

That would be an interesting exercise—especially after they had ID’d her and had a good photo.

But for now, this would be enough.

In ten minutes, she was upstairs at her desk, feeding the image, as well as some dates and other data, into the NamUs database.

And in another ten minutes, she had a hit: Mandy Driver, thirty-eight, who’d graduated from UNM with a PhD and worked as a geological consultant for a large, diversified energy company.

Corrie stared, astonished.

Driver had been Carlos Oskarbi’s personal research assistant in the year before he left the university.

And she had been reported missing by her father two months ago, to the day.