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MEBANE — Cases don’t come much colder, in any sense, than John Doe 98-21372.

Detective Tim Horne keeps the file he inherited in a box under his desk. Every time he moves his foot, he hits it.

“Just so I don’t forget it,” the Orange County Sheriff’s Office investigator said. “I have a small child myself.”

On Sept. 25, 1998, a groundskeeper for a billboard company was mowing along the Interstate 85/ Buckhorn Road exit and discovered something in the long summer grass at the edge of the woods.

It was the scattered remains of a skeleton, a 10-year-old child, with tube socks and new boy’s sneakers still on the child’s feet. Folded neatly in the pocket of a pair of khaki shorts was $50 — two $20s, one $10.

In a macabre jigsaw of a crime scene, half the pieces were missing, the other half were broken. And for 11 years since — until the unveiling Saturday night at N.C. State of a facial reconstruction by one of the world’s leading forensic artists — detectives had no picture to guide them in putting the puzzle together.

Not only was there no clue to John Doe’s real name, but detectives couldn’t even describe his face until a North Carolina child advocacy group commissioned renowned Philadelphia artist Frank Bender to create the reconstruction.

On Saturday night, in a first glimpse of what probably will be the last such work by Bender, a terminally ill artist with an 85 percent identification rate, detectives were to see art meet science. From what was just a hollowed, mummified skull, Bender produced a lifelike painted sculpture.

“This is the last one,” Bender said Friday in a phone interview from his home. “Most people with terminal cancer and eight months to live might not have even attempted this. But I didn’t want to turn this down if I could help identify him.”

Bender said the boy, age 10 to 12, had longish brown hair and a severe overbite that may help identify him. He was Caucasian, possibly Hispanic, and Bender has the feeling the boy was killed by someone he knew.

“I would say more than likely a caretaker — aunt, uncle, father, stepfather. That’s usually the way it goes,” Bender said.

“That’s why they don’t show up (as missing). You’re thinking, 'Oh, the parents are going to be doing everything under the sun to find them.’ ”

The people who organized the event believe someone will come forward.

“It could be that somebody sees that bust and says, 'Yes, I remember that child, and he disappeared right around then,’ ” said Mike Craig, a former police officer who founded N.C. SMART, the nonprofit missing-and-abducted response team that commissioned Bender. “Then, the investigation starts anew at that point.”

Bender, 68, is credited with solving dozens of murders and disappearances for the FBI, Scotland Yard and America’s Most Wanted.

Before doing a reconstruction, the former commercial photographer and classical artist studies the autopsy notes and takes a series of minute measurements of the skull’s bone structure. He then calculates the average tissue densities and builds them up with clay.

Then comes the mysterious part: Bender’s intuitive ability to sense what a person looked like without a visible clue. Born out in case after case, it is a sixth sense that confounds investigators who have otherwise exhausted their leads.

Leslie Denton, who organized Saturday’s event for Guardian Digital Forensics, pointed to the famous Jane Doe homicide victim in Boulder, Colo., who was finally identified in 2009 — 55 years after her remains were found beside a creek.

Bender’s facial reconstruction portrayed the unknown victim as blond-haired and blue-eyed. She was later identified as Dorothy Gay Howard of Arizona, who was 18 when she disappeared in 1954.

“Frank told us that she would have blue eyes,” Denton said, “and she did. How did he know that?”

Bender, describing his process to a USA Today reporter, once said his fingers “take over” when he sculpts a bust, and he essentially “becomes” his subject.

He has helped solve numerous murders and serial killings, including a string of women’s deaths in Mexico. Bender has helped nab high-profile fugitives such as John List, Colombian crime kingpin Alphonse Perisco and Warlocks motorcycle chieftain Robert Nauss.

Bender began this career through a chance anatomy lesson at the morgue.

Now, he is living under hospice care with mesothelioma linked to asbestos exposure, and his wife also has been diagnosed with inoperable cancer.

Suffering from a bout of the flu and unable to travel to Raleigh, Bender said the Mebane case likely will be his last reconstruction. Perhaps it is a fitting swan song: Child victims, to him, are always the most compelling.

“A child is so innocent. They have a whole life ahead, and it’s taken away,” he said. “It all bothers me, but they bother me the most.”

Likewise, the riddle of the remains near I-85 has haunted Craig, who lives a few miles from where the nameless child’s bones were found. Craig’s first and only child was born three weeks before he heard the story on the news.

He thinks of the nameless child every day driving by. Sometimes he parks on the service road, cuts his engine and considers the possibilities.

“It just doesn’t compute. If you can wrap your head around somebody discarding a child like trash, then you can get your head around the who and what and why and how,” Craig said.

Somewhere, he suspects, a parent or grandparent misses this child and grieves for him.

“He doesn’t have a home. The family doesn’t know where he is. For me, that’s just not acceptable.”

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com