‘Marino!’ I exclaimed when I got him on the line.
‘Huh? What happened?’ he blurted as he came to.
I told him.
‘Shit. It’s three friggin’ o’clock in the morning. Don’t you ever sleep?’
He seemed pleased, and I suspected he figured I wouldn’t have called him if Wesley had still been here.
‘Are you okay?’ he then asked.
‘Listen. The hands are palm up,’ I said. ‘The photograph was taken at close range. I can see a lot of detail.’
‘Like what kind of detail? Is there a tattoo or something?’
‘ Ridge detail,’ I said.
Neils Vander was the section chief of fingerprint examination, an older man with wispy hair and voluminous lab coats perpetually stained purple and black with ninhydrin and dusting powder. Forever in a hurry and prepossessed, he was from genteel Virginia stock. Vander had never called me by my first name or referred to anything personal about me in all the years I had known him. But he had his way of showing he cared. Sometimes it was a doughnut on my desk in the morning or, in the summer, Hanover tomatoes from his garden.
Known for an eagle eye that could match loops and whorls at a glance, he was also the resident expert in image enhancement and, in fact, had been trained by NASA. Over the years, he and I had materialized a multitude of faces from photographic blurs. We had conjured up writing that wasn’t there, read impressions and restored eradications, the concept really very simple even if the execution of it was not.
A high-resolution image processing system could see two hundred and fifty-six shades of gray, while the human eye could differentiate, at the most, thirty-two. Therefore, it was possible to scan something into the computer and let it see what we could not. Deadoc may have sent me more than he bargained for. The first task this morning was to compare a morgue photograph of the torso with the one sent to me through AOL.
‘Let me get a little more gray over here.’ Vander said as he worked computer keys. ‘And I’m going to tilt this some.’
‘That’s better,’ I agreed.
We were sitting side by side, both of us leaning into the nineteen-inch monitor. Nearby, both photographs were on the scanner, a video camera feeding their images to us live.
‘A little more of that.’ Another shade of gray washed over the screen. ‘Let me bump this a tad more.’
He reached over to the scanner and repositioned one of the photographs. He put another filter over the camera lens.
‘I don’t know,’ I said as I stared. ‘I think it was easier to see before. Maybe you need to move it a little more to the right,’ I added, as if we were hanging pictures.
‘Better. But there’s still a lot of background interference I’ d like to get rid of.’
‘I wish we had the original. What’s the radiometric resolution of this thing?’ I asked, referring to the system’s capability of differentiating shades of gray.
‘A whole lot better than it used to be. Since the early days, I guess we’ve doubled the number of pixels that can be digitalized.’
Pixels, like the dots in dot matrix, were the smallest elements of an image being viewed, the molecules, the impressionistic points of color forming a painting.
‘We got some grants, you know. One of these days, I want to move us into ultraviolet imaging. I can’t even tell you what I could do with cyanoacrylate,’ he went on about Super Glue, which reacted to components in human perspiration and was excellent for developing fingerprints difficult to see with the unaided eye.
‘Well, good luck,’ I said, because money was always tight no matter who was in office.
Repositioning the photograph again, he placed a blue filter over the camera lens, and dilated the lighter pixel elements, brightening the image. He enhanced horizontal details, removing vertical ones. Two torsos were now side by side. Shadows appeared, gruesome details sharper and in contrast.
‘You can see the bony ends.’ I pointed. ‘Left leg severed just proximal to the lesser trochanter. Right leg’ — I moved my finger on the screen — ‘about an inch lower, right through the shaft.’