by Jeff Edwards
Tommy shook his head. “No way. The Hitachi 1250 has a scan rate of seventy-five frames per second. That’s Industry Standard. I used my computer to tally the number of frames in that recording. There are exactly 112,500 frames recorded on that chip. Twenty minutes worth of video data. Every frame is in sequential order. There are none missing, and there aren’t any extras. No way has that recording been edited.”
“Okay,” I said. “So the recording is clean. What else did you find out?”
Tommy took a bite from his burger and chewed vigorously. He started talking again before he swallowed. “I started looking for evidence that someone else was in the room, like you told me.”
“Did you come up with anything?”
He flipped a switch and a still frame of Michael and the hotel room sizzled into view above one of the decks. “I used a 3-D raytracing routine,” Tommy said. “I told my system where the light sources in the room were, including reflective surfaces like those mirrors on the wall, and the chrome chassis on that blood test machine.” He pointed to various images in the scene. “Once the software knows where the light is coming from, it knows what size and shape the shadows are going to be. I set up a routine to cancel any shadow caused by the guy who killed himself. Any shadow not accounted for by the furniture or the guy would have to be from someone else.”
“Did you find any?”
He squirted a shot of Coke into his mouth to wash down the burger. “Nope. Every shadow in that recording came from a known source.”
I sighed. “So there couldn’t have possibly been another person in that room?”
Tommy shook his head rapidly. “I didn’t say that. I just said I couldn’t find any proof of it using shadow mapping. If our mystery person stayed well behind the camera and didn’t have any light sources behind him, I wouldn’t really expect to see any extra shadows.”
He took another bite of the burger. This time he chewed and swallowed before continuing. “Next, I checked for reflections covering the area behind the camera. I went over the mirrored walls and the blood machine again. I came up dry. Whoever positioned that camera knew exactly what they were doing. It’s like it was planned down to the millimeter.”
“So there were no reflections?”
“Not at first,” Tommy said. “I had the system check every frame, and then I checked them myself. The computer didn’t get a fix on anything, but on my pass, I found this.”
He punched a couple of keys, and the image of Michael jumped to life and fast forwarded to the part where he pulled the kitchen knife out of his pocket. Tommy slowed the recording to a crawl, and then stopped it. He watched a time code readout on his deck, and advanced the video frame-by-frame.
“Here.” He used his keyboard to drag a wireframe box around the knife and enlarge it. The image of Michael’s hand and the knife grew until it eclipsed the rest of the picture. By the time it stopped growing, the image was so grainy that it looked like abstract art. Tommy stroked the keyboard and the computer began enhancing the image.
When it reached maximum resolution, I could see the knife clearly. There, reflected in the carbon chrome blade, I could see a face. I couldn’t see it clearly enough for positive identification, but I was certain that it was a woman. A woman with long dark hair.
“Is that her, Tommy? The woman who was in the shop when the camera was purchased?”
Tommy shrugged. “I can’t tell for sure. Maybe. I think so.”
“Can you increase the resolution any more?”
“Nope. This is as good as it gets.”
“How about if you had better equipment? Or maybe a vid lab. Could they do it?”
“The limitation isn’t my equipment or my training,” Tommy said. “It’s the camera that the recording was shot with.”
“But you said the H-1250 was a good camera.”
“It is, for a home video camera. But it isn’t anywhere close to broadcast quality standards.”
He shook his head. “The best equipment in the world won’t pull out an image any cleaner than that, not even with the original chip.”
“And that’s the only frame in the recording that shows her face?”
“Yep. I’m sorry, but that’s the best I can do.”
“You did a great job, Tommy.” I pulled out my wallet and handed Tommy a hundred marks. He accepted the money with a look of surprise and delight.
“You’ve earned it,” I said. “You got me far more than I hoped for.” I turned to leave.
“Wait a second,” Tommy said. “There is one more thing, but I’m not really sure what it means.”
He reached over and turned on the flat-screen monitor. After a few seconds, it warmed up and a two dimensional picture appeared: Michael Winter’s left hand holding the gun to the side of his own head.
“This is going to look a little strange, since you’re probably not used to seeing stuff in 2-D, but you can spot what I’m going to show you better on a monitor than in a hologram.”
He fiddled with the controls on the second deck. “To save time, I’ve already enlarged and enhanced the part I want to show you. I’ve got this part of the recording isolated so we can loop back and look at it as many times as we want. Now, scope this out.”
Tommy pressed a button. Michael’s hand held the Glock to his head. His finger tightened visibly on the trigger and the recording looped back and started over again.
I watched it run through about five times. “I don’t get it,” I said finally. “What exactly am I looking for?”
Tommy punched a couple of more buttons. “Okay, let’s slow it down a little.”
I watched the scene in slow motion several times. “I must be blind, Tommy. What are you trying to show me?”
He pressed another button and a grid of fine red lines appeared on the screen, superimposed over the recording.
The image crawled by under the red grid. I still couldn’t see what Tommy was aiming at. “Tommy, what... Wait a minute.” The scene crawled by again. “Okay... okay, I’ve got you. His hand is wiggling.”
I looked up at Tommy. He was nodding.
I shrugged. “So Winter had the shakes,” I said. “I’d have the shakes too, if I was about to blow my own head off.”
“Uh-uh,” Tommy said. “Not the shakes. Keep watching.”
He pointed at the screen. “See? The wrist keeps torquing back and forth. Each time it bends a little less, becomes a little steadier. After about a second, it stops altogether and steadies right out.”
I watched the recording a few more times. “Okay, I see what you’re talking about. Winter was making minute adjustments to the position of his gun hand. What does that mean?”
Tommy slurped the last of the Coke out of the squeeze bulb, sucking the soft plastic container until it collapsed upon itself. He pulled the bulb away from his lips with an audible pop and tossed it into a large plastic recycling bin. “I’m not sure what it means, but I know what it reminds me of.”
He stood up and led me to a metal door set in the wall behind the stock shelves. On the other side of the door was a set of metal fire stairs. We climbed them to the roof.
The sun was low on the dome, but there was more than enough light to see by.
Three satellite dishes, two small and one large, formed a lopsided triangle on the rooftop.
Tommy walked over to the nearest of the small antennas. He consulted a red LED readout on the dish’s motorized base. “Right now,” he said, “this antenna is locked on Earlybird 21. I’m going to tell it to look for Satcom 63. Watch this.”
He punched a code into a keypad on the unit’s base. The dish drove around to a new angle, centered up and locked into a new position.
“There. Did you see that?”
“What?”
“Here, let me do it again. Watch closely.” He keyed a new sequence and the dish powered back around to its original position.
Not only did I see it, but this time I heard it. When the antenna neared its new position, i
t went through a brief series of oscillations before locking up on the new angle. Its movements were remarkably similar to the recorded movements of Michael Winter’s gun hand. I could hear the motor changing pitch as it adjusted the position of the dish in ever smaller increments. Like Michael’s hand, the dish steadied out in less than a second.
I pulled out a cigarette and shot Tommy a questioning glance. He nodded, so I lit it.
“Okay, I see the similarity,” I said. “What’s causing it?”
“In the satellite dish, it’s error nulling. You find it a lot in old analog electronics. You know anything about electronics?”
I shook my head.
Tommy sighed. “Okay, let’s try it this way. You ever have somebody scratch your back? They never hit the right spot the first time, do they? You have to kind of guide them to it. ‘A little to the right... No, too far! Back the other way a little... Okay, now down a little bit.’ See what I’m saying?”
I nodded.
“So, analog error nulling routines are like that. The control circuit talks to the servomotor. ‘Go left... Good... Keep going... Whoops! Too far! Back to the right a little... Uh-oh, too much, move left just a hair... Great! That’s it! That’s the spot!’ The overshoot-and-correction cycle causes the servomotor to oscillate. If the circuit is tweaked properly, the oscillations will get progressively smaller, until they stop entirely. The servomotor has driven the load to the correct position. The whole thing happens pretty fast.”
I blew a billow of smoke. “So what does this have to do with Michael Winter’s gun?”
Tommy looked down at his feet. “You’re gonna laugh.”
“No I won’t Tommy. If you’ve got a theory, I want to hear it, no matter how crazy it sounds.”
“Is it possible... Is there any way to be sure that the man in that vid was really a man? Could he have been like, a robot or something?”
The question took me by surprise. “Why? What makes you think he wasn’t human?”
Tommy cleared his throat softly. “I think his gun hand was running an error nulling routine, like a machine would. It’s like the gun had to be pointed at just the perfect angle, and his hand kept following the error signal until it nulled out. The hand steadied up after it was in exactly the right spot. It’s like it wasn’t human.”
I thought about it. It certainly sounded absurd, but then, this entire case was pretty weird.
“I don’t think so, Tommy. I’ve seen about two thousand pages of police paperwork on the body, including the coroner’s report. I even have a vid of the autopsy. Those guys ran DNA sequencing, retinal imaging, dental work comparisons, and a hundred other tests. I don’t think a robot or an android—if such a thing were possible—could fool that many people.”
“Maybe they’re all in on it,” Tommy said. “Maybe they all know he was an android, or whatever, and they faked the data to make him look human.”
“I don’t see how the data could all be fake,” I said. “It would take thirty or forty people working together to make it airtight. That many people can’t keep a secret for very long.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Tommy said. “But I can’t help thinking that the entire recording feels like a setup. Like it’s an illusion.”
I nodded absently and tilted my head to look at the dome.
The setting sun was a ruddy ball, reflected a hundred times in the faceted panels above us. Its rays dappled the underside of the dome with a kaleidoscope of shifting colors. It was a magnificent sunset, a vibrant watercolor painting in breathtaking neon blues, pinks, purples and yellows.
Tommy followed my gaze. “It’s the pollution,” he said.
“Huh?”
“The sunset. It looks that way because of the pollution. That’s what my pop says, anyway. He says before the Industrial Revolution, sunsets and sunrises weren’t anything special. Like the pollution suspended in the atmosphere is supposed to refract the light or something. You think that’s true?”
I shrugged. “Not something I know a lot about,” I admitted. “But, if your dad says it’s true, it probably is. He strikes me as a pretty smart guy.”
Tommy nodded without looking at me.
I wondered if it really were true. I hoped not. This sunset is brought to you by the Westchem Corporation. Jesus. Even the pretty colors of the sunset were a mask covering something ugly.
I felt like I was standing at the center of a maelstrom of fakery and misdirection. Murders that looked like suicides. Vid recordings that were contrived, but not edited. Disappearing cigarettes. Software agents that changed color like chameleons. Illusions. And behind every one of them lay death.
I took another hit from my cigarette and stared up through the dome at the poisoned watercolor sky.
CHAPTER 16
“I’m sorry, what did you say?” I could tell that Sonja was talking, but over the roar of the shower and the rain forest special effects, I couldn’t make out her words.
She slid the shower door open and stepped in, fully dressed. The warm spray instantly soaked her to the skin. Her casually pretty blouse and skirt went from modest to provocatively clinging in the space of one heartbeat. “I said I’m cooking tonight. Do you like spaghetti?”
“Are you crazy?”
She ran her hands through her soaking wet mop of hair and pulled it away from her face. A stray lock drew itself up into a tiny curl above her right eyebrow. “Crazy? That’s a distinct possibility.”
She glanced around at the forest projection. “A jungle? I’ve never done this in a jungle before. I think I like the idea.” She slipped her arms around me and snuggled up to my chest.
“Listen, Sonja. I don’t think I’m ready for this.”
She bit my neck gently and raked the fingernails of one hand slowly down the front of my body. “I don’t think you’re ready for it either, so you just go ahead and finish your shower. You take care of your business, and I’ll take care of mine. You’ll never even know I’m here.”
Part of me still resisted this closeness. A voice inside my head begged for more time. Time to understand the conflicting feelings bouncing around in my chest. Time to get used to the idea that my life had not ended with Maggie’s.
Another part of me very much wanted Sonja to stay.
I tilted her face up toward mine and kissed her, gently at first, then with growing ferocity. The night before, I’d been the passenger. This time, it was my turn to drive.
I took my time undressing her, peeling her soaking clothes off a piece at a time and dropping them to the floor of the shower stall.
I teased her unmercifully, pushing her to the brink and then backing off at the last second. After a half dozen near misses, she was positively frantic. “Stop teasing you bastard. Stop... teasing...”
At the instant that she passed the point of no return, I told House to switch the water from hot to icy cold. She screamed loud enough to make my ears ring, but she never stopped moving. Her feet locked around the backs of my calves, she shuddered and bucked and rode my body like a wild creature.
When it was over, she clung to me under the freezing spray of water. Every few seconds, her body convulsed a tiny bit. It occurred to me that she might be crying, but I couldn’t tell for certain.
Sonja’s spaghetti sauce was excellent. I might have used a few more onions and a bit less oregano, but I didn’t say so. All in all, I liked her recipe better than mine and I told her as much.
Dinner was relaxed. The tension that had stretched between us at breakfast was gone, perhaps washed down my shower drain.
Afterward, we curled up in the den on my pit sofa and listened to Rusty Parker’s No Sense in Hangin’ Around. In my opinion, Rusty was one of only a handful of gifted blues artists born in the twenty-first century.
His smoky acoustic guitar wove back and forth across the bass rumble of his voice with an ease that was almost serpentine. As far as I was concerned, he was one of the few remaining signs that there was still hope for the human race.<
br />
Sonja snuggled up under my arm and lay her head on my chest like it was the most natural thing in the world. She closed her eyes. “What made you decide to be a sculptor?”
I thought for a long time before answering. “That’s not an easy question,” I said. “Until Maggie died, I never even thought about it. I certainly never considered myself artistic. But Maggie’s death left this void in my chest, and the only things that I could find to fill it with were anger and booze.”
Sonja’s hand found mine and gave it a gentle squeeze.
“You can only pretend to be dead for so long,” I said. “Then you’ve got to either open your eyes and stand up, or roll over and finish dying.”
I shrugged. “Sculpting offered me a lot of things that I needed. It was hard work. It kept my hands busy, and my mind. It gave me a sense of direction. A reason for climbing out of bed in the morning. Looking back, it was probably therapy more than anything. And then, one day I sold one of my pieces, and that opened up another entire dimension I hadn’t even considered. It’s not about money, it’s about making a difference—no matter how small—in someone else’s life.”
“How many pieces have you sold?”
“Eighteen,” I said. “No, wait. Nineteen altogether.”
“I’m trying to imagine how powerful that must feel,” Sonja said. “Every day, people you don’t even know look at your art, and it touches them. Maybe it makes them happy. Maybe it makes them sad, or lonely, or angry, but it touches them.”
I nodded.
“I’m surprised that you came to it so late,” Sonja said. “I’ve always thought that artists are born instead of made. That their talent sets them apart, even as children.”
“Not me,” I said. “When I was a kid, I couldn’t even use finger paints.”
Sonja stifled a giggle. “I’m trying to imagine David Stalin as a little boy. Did your friends call you Davey?”
“Joe.”
“Joe? Your middle name is Joseph?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Josephus?”
“Nope.”
