I asked, getting excited.
He nodded, moving the mouse some more, adjusting the gray tones.
“Is this live?”
“No. The video camera’s already captured the impressions and they’re saved on the hard disk. But don’t touch the paper. I haven’t processed it for prints yet. Im just getting started, keep your fingers crossed. Come on, come on.” He was talking to the enhancer now. “I know the camera saw it fine. You gotta help us out here.”
Computerized methods of image enhancement are a lesson in contrasts and conundrums. A camera can differentiate more than two hundred shades of gray, the human eye less than forty. Just because something isn’t there doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
“Thank God with paper you don’t have to worry about background noise,” Vander went on as he worked. “Speeds things up considerably when you don’t have to worry about that. Had a time of it the other day with a bloody print left on a bed sheet. The weave of the fabric, you know. Not so long ago the print would have been worthless. Okay.”
Another tint of gray washed over the area he was working on. “Now we’re getting somewhere. You see it?”
He pointed at slender, ghostly shapes on the upper half of the screen.
“Barely.”
“What we’re trying to enhance here is shadow versus eradicated writing, because nothing was written and erased here. The shadow was produced when oblique light hit the flat surface of this paper and the indentations in it- at least the video camera perceived shadow loud and clear. You and I can’t see it without help. Let’s try a little more enhancement of the verticals.”
He moved the mouse. “Darken the horizontals just a tad. Good. It’s coming. Two-oh-two, dash. We’ve got part of a phone number.”
I pulled a chair close to him and sat down. “The area code for D.C.,” I said.
“I’m making out a four and a three. Or is that an eight?”
I squinted. “I think it’s a three.”
“That’s better. You’re right. Definitely a three.”
He continued to work for a while and more numbers and words became visible on the screen. Then he sighed and said, “Rats. I can’t get the last digit. It’s just not there, but look at this before the D.C. area code. ‘To’ followed by a colon. And right under it is ‘from’ followed by another colon and another number. Eight-oh-four. That’s local. This number’s very unclear. A five and maybe a seven, or is that a nine?”
“I think that’s going to be Jennifer Deighton’s number, “I said. “Her fax machine and telephone are on the same line – she had a fax machine in her office, a single sheet feed that uses ordinary typing paper. It appears she wrote out a fax on top of this sheet of paper. What did she send? A separate document? There’s no message here.”
“We’re not finished yet. We’re getting what looks like the date now. An eleven? No, that’s a seven. December seventeenth. I’m going to move down.”
He moved the mouse and the arrows slid down the screen. Hitting a key, he enlarged the area he wanted to work on, then began painting it with shades of gray. I sat very still while shapes began to slowly materialize out of a literary limbo, curves here, dots there, and t’s boldly crossed. Vander worked silently. We barely blinked or breathed. We sat like this for an hour, words gradually getting sharper, one shade of gray contrasting with another, molecule by molecule, bit by bit. He willed them, coaxed them into existence. It was incredible. It was all there.
Exactly one week ago, barely two days before her murder, Jennifer Deighton had faxed the following message to a number in Washington, D.C.:
Yes, I’ll cooperate, but it’s too late, too late, too late. Better you should come here. This is all so wrong!
When I finally looked up from the screen as Vander hit the print button, I was light-headed. My vision was temporarily blurred, adrenaline surging.
“Marino needs to see this immediately. Hopefully, we can figure out whose fax number this is, the Washington number. We’ve got all but the last digit. How many fax numbers can there be in Washington that are exactly like this except for the last digit?”