Yuki is an assistant DA and I knew anything we said was off the record — but was it off the pillow?

Yuki was dating Jackson Brady.

Yuki was sleeping with my boss.

I said, “Don’t tell Lieutenant Wonderful, okay? He wouldn’t like this.”

“I hear you,” Yuki said, grinning at me. She patted my arm. She promised nothing.

Claire turned up the lights, passed out bottles of water, told us that the six skulls were in paper bags to prevent condensation and that the long-haired Jane Doe’s remains were in the cooler so that the soft tissue didn’t decompose further.

Claire said, “I’m going to give all seven heads a thorough exam in the morning, but I also hired a forensic anthropologist to consult. Dr. Ann Perlmutter from UC Santa Cruz. You’ve heard of her. She was a special consultant identifying bodies in mass graves in Afghanistan. If anyone can work up identifiable faces on bald skulls, Ann can.”

“How long will that take?” I asked.

Claire shrugged. “Days or weeks. Meanwhile we’ll work with Jane Doe’s face. Photoshop her a little bit. Put her on our website.”

“I can create a Facebook page for her,” said Cindy.

“Not yet,” I said, trying to rein in Cindy’s racehorse tendencies. “Give us a chance to ID her in real life, keep her parents from finding out that she’s dead by seeing her page on the Web.”

I told Cindy and Yuki about the numbers 104 and 613, showed them a photocopy of the index cards we’d found with the first two heads. No numbers had been found with the other heads.

“So, two numbers only. Maybe it’s a game,” said Yuki.

“So you think the killer is into Sudoku?” I said.

“You’re funny,” Yuki said, giving me a soft punch in the arm.

“But you said there were no numbers with any of the other remains,” Claire said.

“To me that means whoever dug up the heads left the numbers,” I said. “These are two distinct acts — burying and exhuming. They may have been done by different people.”