“Okay, so no prettier image.”
She smiled. “Nope. That’s for my art on the side. Like when I’m doing portraits of wolves and people. Then I can add more fun details.”
“Gotcha. I always wondered about that. Do you need anything? I’ve got to do some investigating.”
“No, I’m good, Adam. Thanks.”
“Sierra! You need to get over to the personnel office and take care of that paperwork. They’re all over me about that this morning,” the chief called out.
She smiled at Adam. “I’ll have to take care of these sketches in a little bit. Off to fill out paperwork.”
“I’m glad you’re working with us,” Adam said.
“Just wait until you see what I come up with on the sketches of the bodies in the morgue,” she said, then took off for the personnel office.
Chapter 10
After Sierra filled out the paperwork and had officially become a full-time staff employee of the bureau, Adam and Tori took off to learn about a stolen boat that someone had purchased illegally. Meanwhile, Sierra studied the picture the police had taken of the man they had removed from the water, right after he had been discovered. She did a new sketch of him, since his face was much more preserved than after he had been out of the water for some time at the morgue. When she compared the new sketch with the one she’d done at the morgue, she was pleased to see that the two were really compatible. Maybe she could do Willy’s job after all. At least she was feeling more confident in her abilities.
Her boss left his office and joined her at her desk, a cup of coffee in hand. “How are you coming with the sketches of the guys in the morgue and the one of the carjacker?” her boss asked.
“Adam just sent me the photo of the man caught under the debris in the river. I was redoing the sketch since the picture shows him before his body deteriorated and gives a much better visual.”
Her boss looked over her other work. “Looks good. Scan them in and then we’ll make sure they get out. I got word that the owner of the stolen vehicle just came to at the hospital. Adam will meet you over there. He needs to get a statement from him too.”
“Okay, I’ll head over to the hospital.” After she signed the sketches of the three men in the morgue and scanned them in, she gave them to an officer who would send them out. She hung on to the carjacking one though, wanting to see if it looked the same as the eyewitness’s account after she spoke with him. She hoped he was well enough to talk and could remember accurately what he’d seen.
With her sketch pad sitting on the passenger seat, Sierra drove to the hospital. She hoped she could get a better sketch of the carjacker before his face had been destroyed in the car accident. Then she could compare her original sketch with the witness sketch and see if she had been on target. If so, she would feel even better about her ability to draw postmortem sketches. The real test was putting them out for the world to see and finding someone who could identify them.
When she walked into the hospital lobby, she saw Adam looking serious as he texted someone on his phone, frowning, but as soon as he saw her coming, he smiled as if she had brightened his whole day.
“Where’s Tori?” Since they’d left to do an investigation together, Sierra had assumed they would both be here.
“She’s still questioning the man about a boat he purchased. I needed to speak with our victim concerning the carjacking. A police officer at the house where the man purchased the boat without a bill of sale had to come to the hospital because his wife is in labor and he dropped me off.”
“Oh, okay.”
“Mr. Kinney, the carjacking victim, is on the fourth floor. Come on,” Adam said.
When they reached the victim’s room, they found a woman and two teen girls visiting him, all three of them looking worried. Mr. Kinney had a bandage wrapped around his head and bruises on his face and looked like he’d had a bad beating.
Adam introduced himself and Sierra.
Mr. Kinney introduced them to his wife and daughters, and then his wife said, “I’ll take the girls downstairs to the cafeteria. We’ll get a bite to eat and then return in a while.”
Mr. Kinney sighed and looked vastly relieved that his wife and daughters would leave during the interview. They kissed and gently hugged him, then left the room. Sierra assumed he wouldn’t want to go over the details in front of his family.
“Why don’t you do the sketch of the assailant first, and then I’ll ask my questions,” Adam told Sierra.
She was glad he’d offered for her to go first because she thought she might put the man more at ease before Adam had to question him, not to mention that she wanted his recollection of the man’s description as soon as possible.
“What do you remember about your assailant?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Mr. Kinney said. “It all happened so fast. I was on the road when my car got a flat tire. I pulled over on the shoulder and began changing it when a black car pulled up behind mine. I thought they were just Good Samaritans. A passenger got out of the car and said he would help me change the tire.”
“They?” she asked and glanced at Adam, surprised that there had been more people involved in this since the boss hadn’t mentioned it.
“How many were involved?” Adam asked.
“Uh…” Mr. Kinney glanced from Sierra to Adam, and she swore he looked a little panicked. Smelled like he was too, which confirmed he was suddenly highly stressed.
“There were two other men in the car,” Mr. Kinney finally said. “Uh, one driver, and one front-seat passenger at least. I couldn’t tell if there was anyone else in the car. The guy who hit me was in his midtwenties, crooked nose, looked like it had been broken across the bridge once. I’m six foot and he was a couple of inches shorter than me. His hair was a light brown, shaggy, blue eyes, chilling. He had a long chin and it had a cleft in it.”
She was visualizing how she’d seen the dead man after he wrecked the car. He could have been in his midtwenties; it was hard to tell. Crooked nose? She couldn’t make it out because his face had been so badly cut. Five ten? She didn’t know. But light-brown, shaggy hair and blue eyes? Mr. Kinney was really wrong about that.
“Are you sure about the hair and eyes?” It seemed like Mr. Kinney was describing someone entirely different. He probably wasn’t remembering it right because of his head injury. She was afraid her sketch of the body would have to do then. In reality, the carjacker had short-cropped hair, nearly black, and dark-brown eyes.
“Uh, well, yeah, but you know, I might have things a little mixed up.”
“That’s understandable. Go ahead.” She was supposed to make the eyewitness comfortable, not make him doubt himself. If his recollection wasn’t as good as her visual of the carjacker, she would just go with her own sketch.