An Image of Death

by Libby Fischer Hellmann

  “Now we convert from time-lapse to real time.” He explained that the machine would calculate the rate at which the tape had been recorded and automatically convert it to real-time motion. He typed in a couple of numbers, then clicked on the words create and render. When a new icon appeared on the left monitor, he hit Play.

  Suddenly the Chaplinesque jerkiness was gone, and the woman on the tape was moving in real time. She entered the room naturally, sat on the chair, got up smoothly and switched on the light.

  “That’s unbelievable!” I blurted out.

  “You’re incredible.” Davis leaned forward, her eyes locked on the monitor.

  Dolan grinned. “That’s what they all say the first time.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said, ignoring his crack. Video normally records and plays back at thirty frames per second. The tape of the murder had been recorded at a much slower rate—maybe five frames per second. But it was playing as if it had been recorded at normal speed. “Where did the extra frames come from?”

  Dolan looked amused. “There aren’t any. Essentially, the system figured out what rate it was recorded at and changed the playback speed.”

  I nodded. The image wasn’t that much sharper, but because it was playing at normal speed, we were able to take in more. For example, I could tell the woman’s t-shirt had some kind of logo on the front. The room seemed to be better defined, as well. As Dolan advanced through the video, I noticed something black and blurry streaking up one of the walls. “What’s that?” I asked.

  Dolan paused and played with more menus. The image came into focus. “It’s a crack.”

  Davis peered over my shoulder. “A big one.” Zigzagging from floor to ceiling, it looked like a bolt of lightning that had somehow been captured and imprisoned.

  “Happens in houses with weak foundations.” Dolan rubbed his hands together and looked my way. “You see that anywhere?”

  “Sorry. No.”

  “Okay. Let’s take a look at that shirt. Clothes are one of the biggest identifiers we have.” He stopped the tape and played with more menus.

  “What are you doing now?” Davis asked.

  “Making a freeze frame of the scene. Actually ten seconds of a freeze frame. Then I’ll put it on the time line and magnify it.”

  A moment later we were looking at a still image of the woman, much larger than the original. Though her face was turned away from the camera, her t-shirt was visible. But the logo was still murky; it looked like a smudge of dirt.

  “Hold on.” Dolan traced an electronic square around the smudge and dragged it to the other window. “This is a target box.” He clicked on the left-hand monitor where yet another series of menus appeared. “The effects palette,” he explained. “With filters you’re not gonna believe.”

  He pulled down several menus with words like sinc and catrom. As each filter was applied to the target box, gradually the smudge condensed and gathered together. The image became brighter and sharper until finally, the mark on the shirt was visible. An arrow. No, more like a check.

  “A Nike logo!” I breathed.

  Davis couldn’t take her eyes off the monitor. “You pulled that image out of nowhere!”

  “Yup.” He flipped to the before and after shots. A smudge. Then the logo. The difference was dramatic. He laced his hands behind his head and gave us a smug smile.

  “There’s only one problem,” I said.

  “What’s that?” Dolan asked.

  “There’s about a hundred million people on earth with the same shirt.”

  “So let’s keep going,” Davis challenged. “Find something else.”

  “Pushy broad.” Dolan grinned, but it wasn’t as smug. “First lemme make you a photo of the shirt. You want a Polaroid or CD?”

  She paused. “A Polaroid. For now.”

  He pushed a few buttons. The color printer on the monitor stand whined and slowly spat out a still.

  “What about when the woman looks up at the camera?” I asked. “Can we get an enhanced—I mean clarified—shot of her face?”

  Dolan advanced to the scene in which the woman looked up at the camera. Again he created a freeze frame, magnified it, then dragged a target box over her face. After a few minutes with the effects palette, we saw her face more clearly. She looked young. About Davis’ age. Huge dark eyes, even darker circles rimming them, pale skin where it wasn’t bruised or swollen. Dark, wavy hair framed her face. I wondered if she was foreign. Hispanic maybe.

  I felt Davis watching me. “You’re sure you’ve never seen her before?” she asked.

  “I’m sure. I would have remembered.” I touched my forehead. “The eyes.”

  “What about the location? Anything familiar about the room?”

  “Nothing.” I studied the shot of the woman again. Something was marring her face. Something subtle around her mouth, which was slightly open. What was it? I leaned forward. “She’s missing a tooth!”

  Dolan leaned forward, too. “Damn!”

  “Let’s see.” Davis squinted at the monitor. “Hey, you’re right. What’s the name of those ones in front?”

  “Incisors,” I said.

  She nodded, made a note, then said to Dolan, “Gimme a shot of that.” Dolan ran off a print and handed it to her. She motioned with her free hand. “Let’s check out the intruders.”

  Dolan selected a shot of the men, but after working on it for over an hour, we came up empty. The killers’ clothes were nondescript—no Cubs hat or other identifiers, and the ski masks hid their faces. The big man’s mask had dark circles around the eye and mouth holes, but Dolan said there could be thousands of masks like that. It could be red, he said, with blue markings. Or maybe the reverse. The other man’s mask was solid—black, probably—and his hair was long and stringy.

  “What about the limp?” I asked. “The big guy’s?”

  “What about it?” Dolan snapped.

  His wheelchair suddenly seemed to fill the room. “I—I—can you tell anything about it? Where he might be injured, for example?”

  “Other than his right leg, no. Could be his knee. Or hip. Who knows?”

  Dolan concentrated on the gun. Although he couldn’t get a make on it, he was sure it was an automatic. “You can see the slide.” He pointed to an area inside the target box. “Could be a Sig.”

  As the tape ended, Davis slumped and stared at the screen, her earlier enthusiasm gone. I felt drained, too.

  “What do you think she was doing there?” Dolan asked after an uncharacteristically thoughtful silence. I wondered if it had gotten to him, too.

  “Waiting,” Davis answered.

  “For what?” he scoffed. “The bus?”

  She shook her head. “Whatever it was sure as hell wasn’t what she got.”

  A sour taste rose in my mouth. No one should get what she did. I started to turn away from the monitors, when Dolan let out a sharp cry. “Look!”

  Jericho raised his head. His dog tags jangled.

  I spun around. We were at the end of the tape, and the woman was splayed across the floor, one arm above her head. Blood was seeping across her shirt. The scene looked the same as before.

  Dolan pointed. “There! On her wrist.”

  I squinted. This time I could make out a dark area on the inside of her wrist. It looked more like a shadow than anything concrete. If Dolan hadn’t pointed it out, I would have never noticed it.

  “I’m gonna check this out.”

  Again, he froze, magnified, and sharpened the image, but there seemed to be an urgency to it this time. Even Jericho lumbered over to see what was up. Ten minutes later, a new image popped up in a window.

  Davis and I crowded in to look.

  “It’s a tattoo!” I said. Dolan nodded. Davis seemed to be holding her breath. “What is it?” I asked.

  “Looks like a torch,” Dolan said. “With some stars around it.” He traced the image with the arrow from the mouse: a long, conical base with wavy lines rising up from the top
. It looked a little like the torch on the Statue of Liberty without the disk in the middle. Just above the flames were two five-pointed stars. It was a small tattoo, probably no bigger than two inches, but the design had been carefully inked.

  “Is that some kind of gang symbol?” I asked.

  Davis hiked her shoulders. Dolan shook his head.

  “You’d think the Latin Kings would have a crown,” I said.

  “What are you talking about, Latin Kings?” Dolan growled.

  I looked over. “I don’t know. I kind of—well, I thought she might be Hispanic.”

  “Hispanic…Italian…South American…Foreman, there are more gangs in Chicago than rats in New York City.” Dolan sniffed. “And that doesn’t include the imports.” He rubbed a finger across his mustache. “But I’ll bet you one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “If it is gang-related, Davis here’ll figure it out.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  It didn’t hurt the night they got the tattoos. Of course, the liberal amounts of vodka they’d anesthetized themselves with might have helped. They hadn’t planned it in advance; Arin had no intention of leaving the base with Mika. It was just another lonely evening, their husbands off on maneuvers. The men were always off doing something. The life of an up-and-coming Soviet army officer was busy.

  Arin couldn’t complain. She was living a life of luxury: perfume from France, music from America, shoes from Italy. She drew a silk scarf across her face. The soft material kissed her cheek. Her husband was a lieutenant at the Vaziani base in the republic of Georgia, and her father-in-law was the major general. She could have anything she wanted.

  But trinkets and privileges didn’t make up for Sacha’s absence. How many times had she reached for him at night, only to feel empty air instead? How many days had she spent weighted down with an ache in her heart? If she’d known how much time they’d be apart, perhaps she wouldn’t have been so quick to leave Armenia.

  Mika poured out the last of the vodka. Arin tossed it down. Funny, she never thought she could be friends with a real Russian, much less marry one. Her parents had taught her to be wary: Russians were uneducated, uncultured, and violent. Godless, too. Then again, everyone was godless to Arin’s mother. She still said her prayers every morning.

  But Sacha wasn’t like other Russians. Neither was Mika. She and Arin had much in common: both plucked from their homes by their men—Mika from Moscow, she from Yerevan; both young and pretty, Arin dark and lithe, Mika a sturdy blonde. Mika’s eyes were slightly crossed, and she had a small scar on her lip that she covered with cosmetics. Arin never found out how she got it.

  Then there was Vladik, Mika’s husband. Like Sacha, he was a lieutenant. Were it not for the pale eyes that sharply contrasted with his skin and dark hair, Arin might have thought him a black Russian. Her mother used to sniff that the royal house of Georgia was descended from Africans; why not Russians, too? But Vlad never talked much about his family, and Arin didn’t know what part of Russia he was from.

  Tonight Mika and Arin were restless. Her father-in-law, who expected Arin to dine with him when Sacha was gone, was off at some conference. Major General Dimitri Yudin was an important man, often attending meetings in Geneva and Brussels, especially now that Gorbachov was pushing for arms control. And her mother-in-law was visiting family back in Russia. So Arin and Mika had dinner together and shared stories of how they’d met their husbands.

  Arin had met Sacha after the 1988 earthquake. Her aunt, a doctor, asked her to volunteer at the hospital after the quake struck the northern part of the country and claimed 25,000 lives. The Soviet Army rushed troops in for disaster relief, but poor food and lack of field sanitation had caused mass illnesses among the men. The rescuers had to be rescued.

  The first time she saw Sacha, she knew he was the one. He was pale and weak and nearly delirious with fever, but she couldn’t look away. With his blond hair and fair skin, so different from her dark, Gypsy looks, she thought at first he might be a fallen angel. It was only when she felt hot and cold at the same time and her insides grew wet and slippery that she realized, angel or Russian, she wanted him.

  She spent all her time at the hospital, sponging him with cool cloths when he was sweating. Covering him with blankets when he shivered. Forcing him to drink the water they’d shipped in from Turkey. When he tossed and turned, occasionally groaning or murmuring words she didn’t understand, she sat on the edge of his bed and soothed him.

  Finally, the fever broke, and he opened his eyes. Arin had never seen such deep pools of blue. She continued to visit every day, bringing oranges and cakes from home, once in a while a piece of chocolate. She chattered about school, her friends, her family. Eventually, he was strong enough to go for walks. She took him down the tree-lined boulevards of Yerevan, pointing out the volcanic tuffa that made the buildings pink. Showing him Mount Ararat, which you could see from almost any spot in the city.

  It was during their walks that Sacha started to talk. He didn’t want a career in the military. He was a musician, and he wanted to play in a rock band. To become as famous as the Stones. Arin grinned. She loved Mick Jagger. She had a bootleg cassette of Tattoo You. It was one of her most prized possessions.

  As Sacha got stronger, they ventured farther, sometimes taking the bus to the parkland on the city’s eastern edge. Each day they sat closer together, and one day, his hand casually grazed hers. The next day, he pinned her behind one of the monuments and kissed her, long and deep. When she could breathe again, she kissed him back. The next day she took him into an abandoned church not far from the hospital. They were married four months later.

  Now, caught up in the memory, Arin smiled and started humming “Start Me Up,” the first track on Tattoo You.

  “I know that song,” Mika said thickly. She was stretched out, half drunk, on the floor.

  Arin explained. It was their song, hers and Sacha’s. She would sing or hum it whenever she wanted Sacha to touch her. To “start her up,” she’d sing in broken English. Usually he would comply.

  “Tatuirovka? Tattoo?” Mika asked.

  “Da.”

  Mika rolled over and pushed up to her elbows. “Now that is an excellent idea.”

  Arin tilted her head. “What?”

  Laughing, Mika rose unsteadily to her feet. “Put on your shoes and come with me.” Her eyes shone. “Do not worry. The men will love it.”

  A few minutes later, she and Mika were en route to Tbilisi, forty kilometers away. Their ride dropped them off at the top of a cobblestone street in the old city. Tottering in flimsy shoes, Arin clutched Mika’s arm as they stumbled down the rise. Sacha said the old city was supposed to look like Paris—whatever that looked like. Here, though, someone’s laundry was strung across a porch. You wouldn’t see that in Paris, she was sure. “Where are we going?”

  “A place that Vlad knows.”

  Arin frowned. Vlad was a charmer, but there was something wild and dangerous about him. Sometimes she caught him staring at her with those pale blue eyes. But just as she would begin to say something, he would break into a crooked smile and make some wonderfully funny comment or joke. He was a born leader, Sacha said, a soldier who knew how to dangle the carrot as well as the stick. He could be ruthless, particularly when it came to dyedovschina, the fierce hazing of new recruits. But the men in his unit were devoted to him, and Mika said he would rule the world one day. She was only half joking.

  As they passed narrow buildings separated by even narrower streets, Arin’s head felt light and spongy. She hoped they didn’t have far to go. Thankfully, Mika turned into an alley and stopped at a dimly lit shop. Arin could just make out pictures, cartoons really, tacked to the shop’s window. Across the alley was a video parlor, featuring the latest titles from Japan. Next to it was a seedy-looking souvenir shop. A radio somewhere was playing sad music.

  The man who opened the door eyed them suspiciously, but after Mika explained, he grunted and swung the d
oor wide. Arin was troubled by the gritty, dingy look of the place, but Mika seemed at ease, and Arin was too drunk to pick a fight. After negotiating the price—Mika could talk anyone into anything—she lay down on the table and unbuttoned her blouse.

  She and Arin had decided on the design on the ride into town. The tattoo would include two stars on either side of a flaming torch. Arin remembered seeing the same design on some of the soldiers’ arms. When she asked Sacha about it, he said Vlad had come up with it. The two stars represented the stars on a lieutenant’s shoulder board. The torch symbolized fire. Fire was a powerful, masculine energy, Sacha had said. Uncontrolled, it was destructive and unpredictable, but when it was used properly, it could vanquish anything. Just like the soldiers in their divisions. But she wasn’t expected to understand, Sacha added. She was just a woman.

  But Arin did understand one thing. A tattoo would mark her as his. Forever. And that was what she wanted. When it was her turn, she rolled up her sleeve and lay on the table. Squeezing her eyes shut, she ignored the sting of the needle, imagining instead how she would reveal the tattoo to Sacha. She would wear a long-sleeved sweater until bedtime. Then she’d slowly draw it over her head and flick her wrist toward him. She’d ask him to kiss it, maybe salute it, too. Then they’d make love. Fiery, passionate love.

  She smiled to herself. If he liked it—and she was sure he would—maybe she’d get another. On her left breast next time. Just above her heart.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  By the time Dolan made Polaroids of the tattoo, it was after two. I shrugged on my parka while Davis gathered up the tape and photos and slipped them into evidence bags. She and Dolan made their way across the living room, chatting about invoices and next steps. As we reached the front door, Dolan nodded in my direction.

  “You’re okay, Foreman.”

  I tried not to let on how pleased I was. “How long have you been doing this?”

  “About three years.”

  “Only three? You seem to know—”

  “I was a cameraman in Nam. Back when we still shot film. Shot the siege at Khe Sahn with an Arri-16.”