Chapter One

      The bones talked to her while she worked. As Dr. Erin Casey painstakingly examined the human cranium on her worktable, the story of a life began to unfold for her.

      The skull was small and lightweight, which told her the remains were female, and the width of the hipbone concurred. Further examination revealed a small indentation on the pubic bone, indicating that the woman had given birth to at least two children.

      The unidentified female was someone’s mother.

      How old were her children? Did they still wonder what had happened to their mother? Did they sometimes lie in bed at night, missing her so badly they ached? Did they still dream about her?

      Behind her goggles, Erin’s eyes closed briefly as an image of her own mother flitted through her mind. She’d been dead for nearly a year now, but sometimes the loss still seemed too much for Erin to bear. Sometimes the urge to talk to her mother was so strong, the need so great, that Erin would find herself lifting the phone to her ear, only to realize all over again that if she dialed her mother’s number, a stranger would undoubtedly pick up.

      Madeline Casey had been everything to Erin—a devoted mother, a best friend, a trusted confidante. The two of them had been on their own from the time Erin was just a baby, moving from city to city for the first few years of her life, running, she now knew, from a past that had colored her life in ways she was only beginning to understand.

      Perhaps that was why she’d accepted a faculty position at Hillsboro University, a small, private college in Chicago, the city where Erin had been born and where her mother had grown up. Erin had family here, but none of them would recognize her if they met her on the street or heard her name. She hadn’t seen any of them, including her father, since she was nine months old, nor they her. And Erin’s mother had long ago legally changed both their names, not so much for safety’s sake—though that had undoubtedly been a consideration—but in an effort to sever all ties with a family that had been morally and legally corrupt.

      Erin felt no bitterness about the separation. She understood her mother’s motives all too well. The reason she’d moved back to Chicago had nothing to do with renewing ties with her father or his family. Far from it.

      She’d come here solely because of her mother. From the moment the offer from Hillsboro had been presented to her, Erin had sensed her mother’s presence would be strong here. Madeline had grown up in Chicago, gone to school and fallen in love here. She’d married and given birth to two children here. When she’d moved away, she’d left a part of her heart behind, and in some strange way, Erin knew this was where she would finally find a sense of herself, here in the shadow of her mother’s past.

      And, of course, the state-of-the-art laboratory of which Erin was in charge had played no small part in her decision. Funded almost entirely by a wealthy, anonymous donor, the Forensic Anthropology and Human Identification Laboratory, usually referred to as FAHIL, rivaled the one at the University of Tennessee, where Erin had received her doctorate in physical anthropology and where the famous “body farm” was located.

      All in all, she considered her move to Chicago from the sometimes sweltering climate of Knoxville to be a wise one. The campus was small with the usual petty jealousies and academic backstabbing, but in the two months that Erin had been on staff, her reception had been fairly warm. She suspected the ease with which she had been accepted had more to do with the reputation she’d earned at the Anthropological Research Facility in Knoxville than with her personally.

      As one of only a handful of board-certified forensic anthropologists nationwide, her presence at Hillsboro was something of a coup. Her name had quickly been added to the Chicago Police Department’s consultation list, as well as law enforcement agencies all over Illinois and the Midwest. Hillsboro’s board of trustees were very aware that a high-profile case could bring donors out of the woodwork.

      Case 00-03, the unidentified mother on Erin’s worktable, was her third consultation with CPD, and though it didn’t promise to be high-profile, there was something about the woman’s remains that had captured Erin’s imagination.

      The skeleton had been discovered less than a week ago, beneath an old house that was being torn down in Chinatown. Erin hadn’t been invited to examine the skeleton in situ, but instead, the remains had been dug up and transported in a black plastic bag to the pathology lab at the Chicago Technology Park. The pathologist on duty had quickly concluded there wasn’t enough tissue remaining on the bones for an autopsy to be of much use, so Erin had been called in.

      Carefully, she took facial measurements, narrating her findings for the video camera that recorded every nuance of her examination. The notes would later be transcribed and included in the report she would give to the police.

      The broad face, squared winglike cheekbones, and small low-bridged nasal bone were characteristics of the Mongoloid race. Since the skeleton had been found in Chinatown, Erin knew there was a very good chance the remains were Asian.

      An Asian mother of at least two children.

      The story continued to unfold.

      Next, Erin began to determine the woman’s age by studying the degree of fusion in the femur, the closure of the cranial sutures, and the—

      “Dr. Casey?”

      Absorbed in her work, Erin jumped at the unexpected sound of a human voice. The bones talked to her, but they never spoke out loud.

      She glanced up. Gloria Maynard, her secretary, stood tentatively inside the lab door, her expression wary. She didn’t like coming down here. The shelved bones and skulls patiently awaiting identification made her nervous, but then death made a lot of people nervous. But not Erin. If anything, she took comfort in the knowledge that stripped of skin, tissue, and muscle, human beings were all pretty much the same underneath.

      Including the tall, good-looking man who hovered outside in the hallway, just beyond the open door.

      Erin frowned. She didn’t like strangers invading her private domain, for security reasons among others. “What’s going on?” she asked Gloria.

      The secretary glanced over her shoulder. In spite of her discomfort, her eyes danced excitedly. “There’s a detective outside to see you. I told him to wait in your office, but he insisted on coming down here. He said he needed to talk to you about an urgent case—”

      The man pushed past Gloria into the lab, as if too impatient to wait any longer. Erin didn’t much care for his attitude, but whoever he was, he certainly had excellent bone structure, she’d give him that. She automatically cataloged his features. Wide shoulders, narrow waist, lean hips. Moving to his face, she noted the high cheekbones, the well-defined brow, and the piercing blue eyes, so striking against his dark coloring.

      His impatience emanated from every nerve ending in his body. He looked incapable of standing still. He wore a sport coat with charcoal trousers, and his hand swept restlessly down his striped tie as his gaze roamed every nook and cranny of the lab, undisturbed, he would have her think, by the rows of human skulls grinning silently from the shelves.

      Satisfied with what he’d seen, his blue gaze came back to rest on Erin. Her stomach fluttered, not from attraction or sexual awareness she was quite sure, but from apprehension. Somehow she knew the man’s presence here in her lab did not bode well for her future peace of mind.

      “So you’re the bone lady,” he said, in a voice deepened not so much by age—Erin judged him to be in his early thirties, possibly two or three years older than she—but by confidence and authority, a man who liked telling others what to do.

      She bristled instantly. “No,” she told him coolly. “I’m not the bone lady, although I thank you for the compliment. That moniker belongs to another forensic anthropologist, one I admire very much.”

      “Fair enough,” he said easily, although his gaze seemed to