An Image of Death (10 page)

“Which means you don’t know when it was recorded?”

“No.”

“Or how?”

“What do you mean how?”

“I mean how often the tape was recorded over.”

“How could I, Dolan?” Her voice spiked. “You know how we got it.”

“Yeah, yeah. Okay.” He examined the tape, then leaned over and slid it into a deck. Seconds later, the image of the woman in the room appeared on a monitor above our heads. Compared to normal TVs, the monitors in an editing suite have more lines and pixels, and render a sharper image. Though he hadn’t done anything to the tape, the image looked better already.

We watched the scene play out. I’d seen it several times, but I was drawn in again. The woman’s fatigue, the way she cased the room, the eagerness with which she greeted her killers—at least initially—was so familiar I could predict what she would do and when. It was discomforting, as if I knew her in some visceral, fundamental way. I stole a look at Davis, but her face was impassive. Dolan was quiet, too, making occasional notes on a yellow pad, until we got to the scene where the gun went off.

“Who screened this tape?” he barked.

“I did,” I said.

“So did I,” Davis added. “And Deputy Chief Olson.”

“How many times?”

Davis and I exchanged glances. “Twice, maybe three times.”

“Who put it on pause?”

She frowned. “We all did. Why?”

He glared at me. “You, too?”

I nodded.

“
You
should have known better.”

“What are you talking about?”

“See where it gets blurry?”

I squinted. Just as the gun was visible in the shot, the image
did
become slightly blurred. But you could only see it if you were looking for it. Dolan looked at me expectantly, shades of challenge on his face.

I stared at the screen, wondering what the hell he was talking about. Then I got it. “Shit.…You’re right.”

Davis looked worried. “About what?”

I ran a hand through my hair. “When you put a tape on pause, the tape stops running, but the heads of the machine don’t. They keep revolving. That causes friction on the tape where it’s paused and can make the tape degrade. I should have remembered that when we were screening it.”

Dolan dipped his head in acknowledgment.

Davis jumped in. “But we had to pause it. We were trying to identify the weapon.”

Dolan pointed to the image on the monitor. “You should have waited until you brought it to me. Avoid any risk of damage.”

Davis’ mouth tightened. “I didn’t know.”

“Next time you will,” Dolan said imperiously. He rewound the VHS and clicked on a few icons.

Davis and I exchanged another glance. I shrugged. “When do you start the enhancement?”

“After it’s digitized.” Two buttons on the monitor glowed red. “But we don’t use that word,
enhance
. We say
clarify
. Goes down better in court.”

Ten minutes later, the digitizing was done. Dolan double-clicked on an icon, and the image, now in a digital format that could be manipulated more easily, popped up in a new window on the right. A second window popped up beside it. Underneath both windows was a bar with an icon that looked like a hamburger in the center. When he clicked on it, a new set of menus appeared on the left.

“What now?” I pushed my chair closer.

“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.”

C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN

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.