by David Archer
She shook her head. “If I had access to the original digital file, I could, but not from one that's been printed. The layers have been erased, so all that's printed out is the top layers you see on the screen.” She scrolled the image to the blurred-out face. “Now, there is a very slim possibility that Herman can figure out what distortion was applied to this part and undo it, so we can see the face. Let me put him on it, and then we can get a couple hours of sleep.”
Sam nodded. “That sounds like a good idea to me. I'm beat, but even a couple of hours will get me in better shape to deal with this.” He waited until she stopped typing, then took his wife's hand and led her to their bedroom. Sam set an alarm on his phone for eight AM, and they were both asleep within minutes.
The sun was getting high by the time the alarm went off, and Sam woke to find Indie already up and in the shower. He went to the kitchen and started a pot of coffee, and had just finished when she came out. He grabbed clean clothes and went for his own morning ablutions.
When he had finished, Sam went back to the kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee. Indie was already at the table with her own, and she smiled as he sat down.
“Would you like some breakfast?” she asked. “I can whip up some scrambled eggs and sausage.”
He nodded. “Fuel for the investigative engines,” Sam said, and Indie grinned. “Sounds good, Babe.”
She stood and leaned down for a kiss as she walked past him to the refrigerator, and Sam took the chance to pinch her bottom. “Ouch!” she squealed, and slapped his hand, but the smile on her face told him that she liked his attentions.
Sam grinned as he watched her moving about the kitchen. Indie had beautified his life, he often told himself, and watching her was one of his favorite pastimes. She blushed a lot when she caught him just looking at her, but that was because she'd never had a man look at her so lovingly, and she knew it. A beautiful woman is watched a lot, even stared at and ogled, but it won't be until she finds the man who looks past her beauty that she'll know the look that only comes through love-colored glasses. Indie enjoyed knowing that Sam thought looking at her was a great way to spend time or take a break from work.
Sam was in love, and so was Indie. It meant that they could trust each other and depend on each other, and they'd proven themselves over and over.
The sound of sausage sizzling in the skillet was almost musical to Sam, and when Indie slid a plate of eggs and sausage links in front of him, he inhaled deeply of their aroma and moaned in delight. “Baby, you make something as simple as this smell and taste like a hundred-dollar plate at a fancy restaurant. I'm so glad I was smart enough to marry you!”
“Yeah, me too,” she said. “Who else would get you out of trouble the way I do?”
Sam grinned, but dug in to eat, and Indie did the same. When Kenzie was gone to stay with her little friends down the street, they didn't need so many words to communicate their feelings to each other; the look in Sam's eyes when he glanced at her, the glow in her own when he happened to look up and find her watching him—words couldn't express those things well enough.
They finished breakfast, Sam loaded the dishwasher, and they went out to the office. Indie sat down at her desk, while Sam took the chair he'd put beside her in the early morning hours. She turned to the computer. “Okay, Herman, show me what you got!”
The screen lit up when she touched the mouse, and there were several links on the page. Indie looked at the data beside each one and pointed at the first. “Herman did several versions, trying different formulas to undo the scrambling that was done to the faces. Each link is one of the results. Ready?”
Sam nodded, and she clicked the first link. An image came up that was almost the same photograph, but with a slightly distorted face visible. Indie looked at it, then glanced at Sam. “Look familiar at all?” she asked him.
He shook his head. “I can't make out eyes or lips,” he said, “and they're the two most recognizable features. Of course, we probably don't know the people in the pictures, anyway.”
“True, but I'm betting that these people are not just your average citizens,” Indie said. “My gut instinct is that they're going to be at least a little bit well known, so there's a chance we might have seen them on TV or something.”
Sam shrugged. “I hope you're right.”
She clicked the next link, but it was even more distorted than the first one. She went through them, one by one, some of them better and some of them worse. Each of them was distorted in a different way, as Herman, the program Indie used for her hacking and cracking, had tried different algorithms to undo the damage done by the sender.
It was the eighth photo that suddenly made them stop and stare. It was almost perfectly clear. “Okay,” Sam said, “I'm thinking you were right. I don't know who she is, but I swear I've seen that face before.”
“Yeah,” Indie said, “same here. I don't know her, but I know I've seen her somewhere. TV, you think?”
Sam nodded. “Could be,” he said, and then he laid a hand on her shoulder. “Hey, can Herman do facial recognition? Would he be able to spot other pictures of this woman?”
Indie made a face. “He can do basic stuff. If we had an idea of some website where we might find more pictures of her, it's possible. Got any ideas?”
“Not right at the...” He suddenly froze and looked at her, and together they said, “Facebook!” Indie turned back to the computer and set Herman to scanning female Facebook members within fifty miles, using his facial recognition algorithms to look for pictures that resembled the woman like the one on the screen.
“Done,” she said, “but I'm sure it's gonna take a while.”
Sam nodded. “That's fine, at least we're doing something. Send that one to Karen, and let's see about the others.”
Indie nodded, emailed the picture to Karen Parks, and then put the second photo into her scanner. She captured the image and told Herman to apply the same algorithm used on the one they'd chosen, and a moment later, the new, less-distorted picture began to appear. It took a moment for it to come into focus completely.
This was the other woman. Once again, Sam had the nagging feeling that he should know her, but his memory was failing him. Indie stared at it for a few seconds, then shook her head. “Nothing. You?”
“This one doesn't even look familiar. I wonder how I'm supposed to find people from messed-up photos, when I have no clue who they could be even when the photos are unscrambled.”
Indie added it to Herman's facial recognition queue, then sent it to Karen and loaded the last photo. Herman did his thing, and the image came in. They were looking at the almost perfectly clear face of a man in his fifties.
Sam let out a low whistle. “Okay, this guy I know,” he said. “That's Caleb Porter; he was a lawyer here in town, ‘til he got nailed for embezzling millions of dollars from a few of his clients. He sold off everything he had and managed to pay them back, so he only served about a year in prison. When he got out, though, it turned out he'd found Jesus in the joint and he started a church out in Aurora. Super guy. His church makes a lot of money, but he's well known for giving it all away, everything but what he needs to keep it going.”
Indie nodded. “I know him,” she said. “Kenzie and I stayed at their shelter for a little while, but the way they're set up, you can only stay two weeks at a time. I got into one of the others that didn't have that restriction, so I never went back, but I can tell you that the people there are as good as they come. They treated us great, and the ladies cried when I had to take Kenzie and leave.”
“Well, at least it gives us a place to start. I wish we knew which one of these people would be first on the list. Send that to Karen, and ask her to call me when she gets it. I doubt she's even out of bed yet.”
Indie nodded and did what he said, then looked up at him. “Where do we go from here, Sam? Any ideas?”
Sam sat and thought for a minute. “Well, I'm guessing that the killer expected us to unscramble
these photos, so he'd guess that I'll know Porter, I think. He might think I'd know them all, but I doubt it; he'd want to choose people that would make this harder for me, not easier. By putting Porter into the mix, he's probably expecting me to focus on him as the one I know best.” He ran his hands over his face and sighed. “I wish we had any other leads on the women. I'm pretty sure one of them will be first.” He sat forward again, and said, “Let's see if we can put together anything about this guy's MO. Let's look at all unsolved murders over the last fifteen years, I'd guess about a fifty-mile radius.”
Indie typed at Herman and turned him loose. The screen began to fill with links as he found things that matched her search parameters. Indie looked at Sam. “I told him to check news sources, but also to scan through police files. Sometimes they don't let any information out about certain cases, and if this guy has a specific MO, they might have a file on him.”
“Karen didn't think so, but she isn’t in cold cases. If our guy did something in her district in the past two years, she'd have a file on it, for sure, but anything older than that would go to the basement.” The basement was a police nickname for the cold-case squad, based on the fact that their office was down in the lowest level of the building.
“Okay, it seems kind of odd,” Indie said, “that she'd assume the police wouldn't have come across this guy, somewhere along the line, doesn't it?”
“I think she's basing her assumption,” Sam said, nodding, “on the fact that there hasn't been any sort of press activity regarding a long-running series of related killings. There's no doubt police have come across his individual killings before, but the cases haven't been connected, whether from lack of due diligence on the part of the officers involved, or simply because they just didn't seem to be related for one reason or another. If Karen doesn't know of any such related cases, we're gonna have to assume he's slipped through the cracks, somehow.”
“Okay, so I let Herman do his thing, then. Any guidelines you want me to give him?”
“We're gonna get a lot of results; we need to think of ways to filter them down. Let's start with any files closed by exception. What that means is that the cops know who did it, but there's a reason they can't make an arrest. Could mean there isn't enough evidence to get a conviction, or that the evidence was compromised and can't be used, or even that the killing was sanctioned by the government.”
“Okay, we'll cut those out,” Indie said. “How about if we eliminate all files with a prime suspect, too? Most of those would probably be right, wouldn't they? So they wouldn't be our guy, right?”
“At least some of them, yes. What we need are the ones that happened here in our area with no known motive, no suspects. We can look for patterns in them, see if anything seems to fit this guy.”
Indie tapped keys for a few seconds, and then hit the enter key. “Even for Herman, this will take a little time,” she said. “What else can we do?”
Sam thought. “What about the note?” he asked. “Think your super scanner can find anything on it?”
“Let me try.” She took the note from its envelope and laid it on the scanner. A moment later, it began to hum as the light moved down it. It took almost five minutes to scan the whole thing and render the image. Once again, it was far larger than a normally scanned document, and Indie began moving it around as she studied it for anything that might lend a clue to where it had come from or who had sent it.
“There's little bits of stuff all over it,” she said, “but I don't know what it is. We could send it to a lab for analysis, but that would probably take weeks...”
“We don't have weeks,” Sam said, “and I have more confidence in you and Herman than in the police lab. I've seen the mistakes they can make that let criminals walk free, so I'd rather trust you with this.”
Indie looked at him. “I can't do all the things they can do, though, Sam,” she said. “There may be chemical residue on this that could tell us exactly where it came from.”
“And the lab took samples from it last night, remember? They did enough tests to say there was no DNA on it, so I'm sure they have enough samples to check for chemicals and such. Tell me what you think you're seeing.”
Indie turned back to the screen, hiding the smile she couldn't contain. She stared at the screen as she manipulated the image, watching the dots and blotches that represented the impurities in the paper.
“That looks like a crystal, maybe salt or sugar. Our guy might have put this together while he was eating dinner.”
“That doesn't help us. What else do you see?”
“Well, that could be a speck of black pepper, which fits with salt and sugar. Could mean he was eating, or having a cup of coffee. Let's see what else I can find.” She continued scanning the document, moving it around on the screen so that she could see it all. There were several other spots that seemed to catch her attention. “Look at this,” she said. “It's a discoloration of some sort, not sure what it is. Any ideas?”
Sam stared hard at the screen. “I'm not sure,” he said. “Almost looks like a blot of mustard, don't you think?”
Indie shrugged. “Could be. Definitely looks like mustard. It's just that it's so small, that's what makes it hard to tell.”
“So, what we’ve got is evidence that our perpetrator was having lunch somewhere,” Sam said. “I'm thinking that he wasn't at home, simply because most people would be more careful at their own homes then they would be at a restaurant or someplace like that.” He leaned in closer to look again. “Yeah, looks like mustard to me.”
Indie moved the image around some more, and pointed out a few other spots that seemed unnatural. After a moment, she pointed to another one. “Here's one,” she said. “That's a fiber from something, and I would bet that it's from a pair of gloves. Seems like we have a man who likes to eat with gloves on. Wonder how many restaurants see that on a daily basis?”
“Okay, now that's interesting,” Sam said. “I would have expected him to use rubber gloves, or plastic, but not cloth gloves that would leave fibers behind. That seems like a pretty amateurish mistake.”
Indie nodded. “It does, doesn't it? The trouble with that is, we are dealing with a serial killer who has not been caught in 15 years, or so he says. That makes it seem pretty unlikely that he would make such a stupid mistake. Sam, I think he deliberately threw you a clue, here.”
Sam shrugged. “Not much of a clue, when I don't have any way to identify what kind of fiber it is. Unless you or Herman can do so in some magical way that I'm not aware of?”
“Nope, sorry,” she said. “Our magic doesn't go that far, I'm afraid. Best I can do is point these things out and let you figure out what to make of it. Remember, you're the private investigator, here, not me. It's up to you to play Sherlock Holmes. I'll stick to being Watson.”
Sam laughed. “Well, it doesn't tell us a whole lot, but it does give us something to work with. I can ask Karen to have officers checking with restaurants to see if they remember someone eating with gloves on last night. You never know, they might come up with something that way.”
Sam took out his phone and dialed Karen's number. As he'd half expected, it went to voicemail. “Karen, it's Sam. Listen, Indie found a fiber on the note that looks like it might have come from a nice pair of gloves, and there's salt and pepper and a splotch of mustard on it, too. Wonder if you can get someone checking restaurants, see if anyone recalls seeing someone eating a sandwich or hotdog or something with gloves on, or putting gloves on after eating. Thanks, let me know.” He hung up.
With nothing more to go on, Sam decided to pay a visit to the preacher, Caleb Porter. He told Indie where he was headed, had her print out copies of the note and photos to take with him, then kissed her goodbye and went out through the garage to get his Corvette. As he backed out of the garage, he noted that the air was cooling off; fall was upon them, and when you’re a mile high, that means winter isn't that far away. He rolled the window up, but didn't turn on the AC as he usually d
id. Just letting some air come through the vents was cool enough.
2
The ride to Pastor Porter's church wasn't a long one, and Sam was there in just about forty minutes. The church was in an old factory building, one that Porter had talked a former client into donating, and then managed to get volunteers to contribute time and money on the remodeling. Sam knew that many people considered him a con man, but apparently, this particular prophet managed to keep some honor in his home town, because he had more than a million dollars a month coming through his offering plates.
The church was said to be “always open,” so Sam parked the Vette as close to the front doors as he could, then used his cane as he walked up to it. A tall man inside opened the door for him and asked if he could be of service.
“Possibly,” Sam said. “I'd like to see Reverend Porter. My name is Sam Prichard, and I'm a private investigator.”
The man's eyebrows went up. “Oh-oh,” he said, “don't tell me the Pastor's in some kind of trouble.”
Sam smiled. “Not that kind, anyway. I'm not here to investigate the church or Reverend Porter, just to ask him some questions that might help on a case I'm working on.”
The man stuck out a hand and Sam shook it. “In that case, I'm happy to take you to him. I'm Darrel Unger, by the way, a Deacon here. Follow me, he's in his office.” Unger led the way down a long hall, and turned to look at Sam over his shoulder as they walked. “Is this connected to one of our church members? I'm not asking what it is, I'm just curious.”
Sam grinned; he'd known a lot of curious people over the years, and in his experience they always wanted desperately to know whatever it was they swore they weren't trying to find out. “I'm afraid I can't say,” he replied honestly, and Unger sighed and nodded, continuing on in silence.
They came to an area that had several offices laid out rather nicely, and he led Sam to the biggest of them. The sign on the door said, “Rev. Caleb Porter, DD”, and Unger knocked politely before pushing it open. Porter sat at a desk inside, a Bible open in front of him. He looked up and smiled, and Sam thought the smile seemed quite genuine.