The Art of Death by Margarite St. John

it was not Lynda Bergstrom that Madeleine focused on, for suddenly she noticed the man sitting next to Anthony at the end of the row. It was the ship captain from the art gallery. She gripped the edges of the podium as if anticipating an earthquake. Who in hell was he? How long had he been in the room? Why was he even present? Did Anthony realize he was sitting right next to the elusive man, the sunburned figure with the dead eyes who’d followed her for hours at the art gallery last night?
    Madeleine did her best to pull herself together, directing her answer to Lynda Bergstrom. “If I hadn’t known Nicole and the circumstances of her swimming accident, I wouldn’t know the answer. But because I was present when she was swept away by a riptide and know that at that time she wasn’t wounded, I can say affirmatively that the crack was not a perimortem wound -- that is, one that occurred just before death -- but postmortem damage from the body being tossed around in Lake Michigan for years afterward.”
    Lynda Bergstrom hadn’t even sat down before the ship captain shot to his feet with an enigmatic smile, a challenging look. Even from twenty feet away, Madeleine could clearly see his stony eyes. Though the moderator didn’t seem to notice the man, Madeleine, breathless, stared at him. Was he going to repeat his claim of the night before that he’d seen her and Nicole in the water on July Fourth? And then what? Would he make the same alarming claim as Kimmie, that there had been a fight?
    The man began to speak in that flat monotone that set the hairs on the back of her neck on end. Though Madeleine willed Anthony to turn his head and look at his neighbor, he stayed focused on something else. The ship captain’s words reached her ears like a mad tyrant’s scrambled radio broadcast, incoherent but menacing. She could not make sense of his question.
    The room slowly tipped on its side and fractured into a thousand points of light. Madeleine Harrod, winner of the Directors’ Citation of the Association of Forensic Artists for excellence in facial reconstruction in the case of Nicole Whitehead, fainted dead away.

Chapter 15
Jane Doe
Saturday, May 11, 2013

    Madeleine’s faint was momentary. She awoke to the sound of worried murmurs and chairs scraping on the floor. She allowed the moderator and one of the Association’s officers to help her to feet, then sat on a folding chair with her head down, taking deep breaths, until the dizziness went away. She waved off a glass of water that someone tried to put into her hands.
    The moderator asked if there was a doctor in the house. Anthony had already left his chair and was at the dais in seconds. “Can you walk?”
    Madeleine nodded that she could. His arms around her shoulders, Anthony led his lady love out through the curtains behind the dais to the hotel elevator and up to their suite.
    “You’ve got to start eating breakfast,” Anthony said, helping her out of her suit and into a robe. He led her to the bed. “Carbs for energy, protein for endurance. A pot of coffee doesn’t do it. You should know that.”
    “That wasn’t the problem,” she murmured.
    “Then what?”
    “That ship captain again. This time you had to see him.”
    Anthony, puzzled, shook his head.
    She frowned at him. “He was sitting beside you to your left. He shot to his feet, ready to ask a question right after I answered that woman from Ohio about whether Nicole’s wound was postmortem or not.”
    Anthony took a chair, picked up the phone, and asked for room service. While he was placing an order, Madeleine closed her eyes in frustration at his failure to have noticed the sunburned man who was dogging her. She was also very tired, but she had enough energy to ask if he’d taken her Jane Doe statuette with him.
    Anthony returned the phone to its cradle and checked his watch. “No. Your computer’s still downstairs too. The conference won’t adjourn for a few more minutes, but I’ll go