“What’s that mean?”
“She’s a composite photograph. Do you know what a composite is? It’s like pasting several photographs on top of one another, except that you can see through them. ‘Venus’ is a combination of seven different photographs. Qualities from each.”
Let’s not get into details, Dart thought, examining the Vargas-like round breasts, wide hips, narrow waist, long legs, and square shoulders. “Tom’s Fantasy Girl” seemed more appropriate, although the photographic quality of the image made this woman appear absolutely real. Knowing that she was not made the effect disarming.
“I’ll show you,” Templeton said as he sat Lewellan down into a chair in front of an oversize computer screen. Dart and Abby stepped back, allowing Templeton to take over. The man called up a file on the computer, and five vehicles appeared on-screen. Below them was an interesting-looking contraption-a cross between the space shuttle and a Porsche that on examination contained some element of each. “This is exactly what we’re going to do,” he explained. “You and me,” he said as went about scanning each of the five mug shots that Lewellan Page had identified as the man that she had seen outside of Gerald Lawrence’s apartment on the night of his hanging.
With the photographs on-screen and in front of Lewellan, he asked, “Do you recognize these, Lewellan?”
She nodded.
“We’re going to see if we can combine these into the man you saw. Okay?”
“Okay.”
Templeton talked her through a careful examination of each of the mug shots, asking her to identify exactly which feature of which shot looked most like the man she had witnessed. He began with the shape of the head; Lewellan picked the third man. Tommy Templeton placed a series of black dots around this face, omitting the hair, and then clicked a button on the mouse and connected them all. After a few mouse-controlled instructions, this same face, hairless and without ears, appeared in the empty box at the bottom of the large screen. Dragging a small black square across the screen with the mouse, he then erased the contents of the face itself, and only the shape of the head remained. This empty head looked ghostly and odd to Dart, who stood behind the two of them.
Abby’s fingers brushed against Dart’s hand, and she slipped hers into his, and they hooked together, holding hands.
“The chin’s not right,” Lewellan told the former police artist.
“Okay. Let’s change that.” He erased the chin. “Here,” he said, handing her an aluminum pen with a wire attached. “Do you want to draw it?”
She tried several times and on her fourth attempt appeared satisfied. Templeton worked with the image for a moment-his artist’s eye knowing how to improve it-at which point she declared, “That’s good. That’s real good!”
They worked together, light pen and mouse, and highlighted two different sets of eyes, each of which Lewellan felt contained something of the man she had seen. Templeton instructed the computer to merge the two. The computer then animated the evolution from photo A to photo B, stepping through a series of frames. With each successive frame, the eyes of photo A grew more similar to those in photo B. Lewellan studied each of these individual frames, selected one, and Templeton then merged these eyes into the empty face in the bottom box. This concept of ever-changing, slightly altered frames was what made morphing so effective, Dart realized. With an Identi-Kit, the witness was only given a choice of eyes number 1, eyes number 2, etc. With morphing, the features of several different faces could be made to evolve into a single face, with no one feature of the final composition exactly as it was in any of the others.
“The department should have this,” Dart let slip as the face in the bottom box slowly grew to something recognizable. Tommy Templeton’s eyes flashed darkly-the argument for better technology, among other issues, had contributed to his early retirement.
An hour later the suspect’s face had eyes, eyebrows, and hair. They took a break and stood on the porch, and Templeton smoked three cigarettes in a row. Lewellan and Tommy Templeton talked about the special effects in Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park. Dart watched a small plane make for the horizon. Abby Lang, her coat wrapped around her as a blanket, drank in the late-afternoon sun.
They resumed their work by concentrating on noses. This time, it took three successive morphings to produce a nose that satisfied Lewellan, and then only after Tommy Templeton had touched it up with a computerized “airbrush.” Dart had wandered off to study some of the artwork, and it was only as he returned to check up on their progress that he realized the eyes were familiar to him. This realization stopped him cold. The suspect still lacked a mouth and ears.
“Are you okay?” Abby asked.
It was dark out. Dart didn’t know how long he had been standing there lost in thought, but it had been at least forty or fifty minutes.
Templeton and Lewellan Page took another break to rest their eyes, and Templeton found some pretzels for them to eat. When the two went back to work at the computers, Dart and Abby took Mac for a walk. Mac walked like an arthritic boxer, hobbling along, his collar jingling.
“Do you want to spend the night tonight?” she asked. Dart had been doing more and more of that lately. They had not discussed their relationship on any serious terms, but he thought about her often, and he missed her when a couple of days passed without contact.
“I’d like that,” he said.
“Good. Me too.”
He told her he would need to drop Mac at his apartment and offered to pick: up some dinner on the way back over. She told him that she would cook chicken if he made a salad, and with that they had dinner planned. He felt a slight pang of guilt, and he missed Ginny, and it made him wonder if she had gotten any further with her attempt to compile the list for him, and how he hadn’t heard from her in a few weeks.
“You’re off somewhere,” Abby said.
“Just thinking, that’s all.”
They returned to the house in silence. She took his hand again. She wore gloves. Dart did not. “We could use more time like this,” she said.
Dart wasn’t sure how to reply to that, so he let it go. He led the dog back to the car. “How many kids grow up like Lewellan?” he asked sadly. “She had never seen the woods except on television. Her entire image of the outside world is from television. What kind of society are we creating?”
“‘Save one life, you save the world,’” she quoted.
“It’s overwhelming,” he said.
“She’ll never forget this experience,” Abby offered. “Maybe by losing Gerry Law we gain Lewellan Page.”
“I doubt it,” Dart admitted.
“Yeah,” she agreed. “Me too. But it was a nice thought.”
They reentered the house. Tommy Templeton’s voice could be heard congratulating the girl. The two, still on their break, were looking at a coffee table book of wild animal photographs.
“Are you going to look?” Lewellan asked Dart.
“Is it done?” Dart asked.
“Not quite,” Templeton asked.
Abby sat down with the girl and the book, and Templeton came over to Dart and motioned Dart out onto the deck, which produced an immediate anxiety in the detective.
Tommy Templeton’s face, part shadow, part light, looked like a mask and offered Dart a disturbed expression. “We’re getting close,” he said, though it sounded more like a warning.
“What is it, Tommy?”
“Maybe nothing.”
“What?”
“I’m not sure.”
“The face?” Dart asked.
“Yes.”
“It looks familiar,” Dart stated.
Templeton nodded. “The eyes.”
“Who?”
Templeton shook his head.
“Who, Tommy?” Dart repeated.
“Doesn’t make any sense, and besides, the rest of the face doesn’t work at all.”
“Who?”
“I can’t make it out,” he said, “but it sure as hell seems famili
ar to me.”
Dart nodded. “I know. The eyes.”
“Yeah. Weird, isn’t it?” the man asked.
Dart didn’t answer. He asked, “Do we trust this?”
“I do. She’s good,” came the reply, “which is not exactly what you’re asking, is it? Is this the face she saw, or is it someone she has seen since and has convinced herself otherwise? We both know the score with eyewitnesses, Joe, don’t we? They’re about as reliable as the mail. But she has a face in her head-I guarantee you that. Whether it’s real or imagined, I can’t tell you.”
Half an hour later, Templeton called Abby and Dart into his studio.
His heart pounding strongly, Dart approached the computer screen, but Templeton directed him away. “The printer,” Templeton said, pointing. “We’ve enlarged it. It’s just coming out.”
The four of them stepped up to the laser printer, where a piece of paper was being slowly ejected, upside down so that only the white of the paper showed. Dart wanted to grab it and flip it over, but he waited for it to finish printing. Templeton picked it up and turned it over.
The image was that of a face. It looked so much like a photograph that Dart briefly forgot that it was not. Lifelike and human. Dart reached out and touched the sheet of paper, feeling an incredible sense of relief.
The face was jowly, the brow strong. The high cheekbones reminded him of an Irishman. Try as he did, he could no longer make the face into that of Walter Zeller. Even the eyes looked different. He felt giddy. He felt high, as if he’d been drinking.
“There’s your man,” Templeton said, handing Dart the image.
“That’s him,” Lewellan Page confirmed.
Dart felt both confusion and happiness. It was one time he felt thrilled to be wrong about the identification of a suspect.
But his stomach rolled and his bowels loosened when, at the door, saying good-bye, Tommy Templeton leaned in close to him and whispered, “I’d like to play with this image, Joe. I’ll fax you a copy if I get anything.”
“But I thought-” Dart complained. His euphoria popped like a balloon, his objection interrupted by Templeton.
“Inside every face, there’s another face,” Templeton cautioned in a sinister tone of voice. “Call it instinct, call it a hunch … This isn’t the face that I expected.”
Abby saw the two men whispering and caught eyes with Dart, her face a knot of concern. Lewellan Page ran out to the car and opened the back door and petted the dog.
“Let me work with it,” Templeton told the detective. “I’ll give you a call.”
Leave it alone, Dart wanted to say. But he nodded, wishing that secrets could stay hidden, and that a person’s face could never change.
CHAPTER 16
“There’s no question in my mind that the rug in Payne’s study was vacuumed sometime just before the suicide, but not being a detective,” Bragg said sarcastically, “I don’t see how that might bear upon the investigation.” Teddy Bragg looked better today, more color to his face, less to his eyes. He smelled like cigarettes. The file for the Halloween suicide, Harold Payne, lay open on his desk. The small office was cluttered with paperwork. A Lucite microscope, a forensic science award, sat in the corner gathering dust alongside a canning jar containing a pancreas suspended in a clear fluid. Dart had never asked about the pancreas, but he’d seen it there for years. Lights glowed on a small FM clock radio, indicating it was switched on, but the volume was evidently turned down.
“Before the suicide?” Dart asked curiously.
“Definitely prior to the shooting, yes. We’ve lifted blood splatter from the surface of the rug.”
“What’s the point?” Kowalski asked irritably.
Bragg answered, “The point, detective, is who vacuumed that rug, when, and why? We checked with the wife, who explained that the housecleaner had been there the same day; but for reasons that I’ll get into, that doesn’t cut it.”
“She was in there-the wife,” Dart reminded, “ahead of our arrival.”
“Yes, so she could be lying.”
Kowalski glanced over at Dart with a look that penetrated. Perhaps, Dart thought, he too understood that this might lead back to Zeller.
Bragg cautioned, “We know by the vacuum pattern-the width of the swath-that it wasn’t any of the machines in the house. Furthermore, we’ve checked the bags of the two machines and IDed wool fibers with the proper dye lot to match the study rug-and that tells us two things: one, the rug was vacuumed, possibly that same day; two, someone else using a different machine vacuumed the rug after the housecleaner but before the suicide.
“The upstairs canister vacuum,” he continued, “would appear to have resided upstairs and only worked the upstairs.” To Dart he said, “You know how I hate inconsistencies like this. It’s petty bullshit, I know. But it bugs the crap out of me.”
Kowalski complained, “It doesn’t matter.” He added, “Not to me. Does it affect your ruling in any way?”
“Roman, great minds think alike,” Bragg said. “I asked myself the same question: Does any of this matter? The kill is by his own hand, it’s clean-in a manner of speaking-and convincing. So what do we care?”
“Exactly.”
“But we do care,” Bragg contradicted. “All because of one tiny piece of evidence.”
Kowalski’s brow knitted. “What’s that?”
“You see,” Bragg said to Dart, “these portable battery-charged vacuums don’t get up much horsepower. These Dustbuster things. Oh, they’re fine for crumbs on the counter, or spilled sugar, but you put them to work on an Oriental wool rug like we find in Payne’s study, and they just don’t measure up-not when measured against our industrial-strength twenty-amp variety. It’s like one of those cheap television ads on cable: You vacuum an area with yours, and we’ll go over the top of the same area with ours and lift a good amount of material that your vacuum missed. And that’s just what happened.” He met eyes with both men-in Bragg’s Dart could see a contained but eager excitement. Scientists have to get their kicks somewhere, he thought.
Ted Bragg motioned for them to sit tight and went off in search of something. He returned a moment later with two wax paper bags. He placed them down on a light table and set a ruler between them. He then carefully opened each bag and drew the contents out onto the light table with a set of plastic chopsticks. He was careful and exact with his actions. “On the left is what we vacuumed from the study. On the right is what came from the door mat outside the kitchen door in the garage.”
Seeing the evidence before him, Dart began to piece together Bragg’s evidence. The pile from the study included dust, crumbs, hairs, and an abundance of fibers, mostly wool by their curled appearance. The doormat in the garage had netted some sticks, dust, and what appeared to be a small blob of oil and dirt. But both groups shared similar items: small elliptically shaped pieces of vegetation.
“Pine needles?” Dart asked.
“You see?” Bragg encouraged. “I told you it’s interesting.”
“You call that interesting?” Kowalski challenged.
“We haven’t divined the species,” the lab man reported, maintaining his attention on Dart. “But, as you can see, a similar vegetation was found both in the study rug and on the garage doormat.”
“So what?” Kowalski complained irritably.
“On the very top of the garage doormat,” Bragg clarified. “Determining a person’s actions-what a person may or may not have done-is a responsibility we both share-you, from a wide variety of evidence and witnesses; me from the translation of the physical sciences. I can tell you a couple of interesting facts, Roman, and maybe you can make sense of them for me.”
Kowalski looked like a kid in the schoolyard who didn’t want to play; he pursed his lips and looked around nervously for somewhere to steal a smoke.
“That rug in the study had been vacuumed-it’s not something I can necessarily prove but it’s something I know to be a fact. Our examination of the machine us
ed to vacuum that rug earlier in the day came up negative for any such organics. And yet our subsequent vacuuming of the same area produced this as-yet-unidentified organic matter, most likely some kind of conifer needle. We also picked up a trace amount of phosphorus and nitrogen compounds-common potting soil, Detective. Similar organic matter and soil was discovered atop the garage doormat, suggesting someone had wiped his or her feet on the way into the house. I questioned the wife; it was not she. A little tough to question the victim, but there was nothing on the soles of his slippers to suggest a similar organic matter. We returned to the home and inspected eleven pairs of boots and shoes: all negative.”
Kowalski said nervously, “So the wife was screwing the gardener in the old man’s study and they made a mess of things. They cleaned up, but not so good. Maybe the old man found out and put a bullet through his lid.”
Bragg nodded agreement as he said, “Might be, except that the gardener put the beds up for winter three weeks ago, and a search of the premises revealed no such potting soil. The beds were heavily mulched. Oat straw. We picked up no trace amounts in our vacuum filters.” He hesitated and said, “What we did come up with was this.” He produced a clear plastic container. There were small blue crystals inside. “It’s a salt and fertilizer compound sold as deicer. The blue is a dye they add for marketing purposes. The compound melts ice but doesn’t kill common plants, flowers, or grass.” He summarized: “Three items-the conifer needles, the potting soil, and the rock salt. It’s enough of a signature, Ivy, if you bring me a suspect.”
The unspoken message interested Dart more than the facts: Ted Bragg had invested an inordinate amount of time in this case that otherwise would have been considered a “grounder.” His poorly staffed forensic sciences division was a busy place; they put investigations to bed as quickly as possible. Bragg, or his assistant, Samantha Richardson, had returned to Payne’s, possibly more than once, in search of evidence. It revealed to Dart how unsettled the man was with his discoveries.
All that Bragg could do was present the evidence in hopes of interesting the lead detective. Ultimately, it was the lead detective’s call whether to pursue that evidence. He clearly saw Kowalski as the weak link.
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