Blue Labyrinth

23

Terry Bonomo was the NYPD’s crack Identi-CAD expert. He was also a wiseass in the true Jersey-Italian tradition and, consequently, one of D’Agosta’s favorite people on the force. Just sitting in forensics, among the computers and displays and charts and lab equipment, D’Agosta felt his spirits rise. It felt good to be away from the musty, dim confines of the Museum. It also felt good to actually be doing something. Of course he had been doing things, trying to identify the visiting “professor”—while his forensic team scoured the bones and tray for latents, DNA, hair, and fiber. But creating a composite sketch of the phony Dr. Waldron’s face was different. It would be a major step forward. And nobody was better at facial composites than Terry Bonomo.

D’Agosta leaned over Bonomo’s shoulder and watched as he worked with the complex software. Across the table sat Sandoval, the Osteology tech. The job could have been done in the Museum, but D’Agosta always preferred to bring witnesses down to headquarters for this kind of work. Being in a police station was intimidating and helped a witness focus. And Sandoval — who looked a little paler than usual — was clearly concentrating.

“Hey, Vinnie,” Bonomo said in his booming New Jersey accent. “You recall the time I was putting together a portrait of a suspected murderer — using the testimony of the murderer himself?”

“That was legendary,” D’Agosta said with a chuckle.

“Jesus H. Christopher. The guy thought he was being cute, pretending to be a witness to a murder rather than the killer. His idea was to put together a bullshit portrait, throw us off. But I began to smell a rat almost as soon as we started.” Bonomo worked while he talked, tapping away at the keys and moving around the mouse. “Lots of witnesses have bad memories. But this clown — he was giving us the exact opposite of what he looked like. He had a big nose — so he said the bad guy’s was small. His lips? Thin. So the perp had thick lips. His jaw? Narrow. Perp had a big jaw. He was bald — so the perp had long full hair.”

“Yeah, I’ll never forget when you caught on and started putting in the opposite of what he said. When you were done, there was our perp, staring up at us from the screen. By trying to be clever, he’d fed us his own ugly mug.”

Bonomo brayed a laugh.

D’Agosta watched him working on a facial rough, based on Sandoval’s answers, as a new window popped up here, an additional layer was created there. “That’s quite a program,” he said. “Improved since the last time I was in here.”

“They’re always upgrading it. It’s like Photoshop with a single purpose. Took me three months to master it, and then they redid it. Now I’ve got the sucker nailed. You remember the old days, with all those little cards and the blank face templates?”

D’Agosta shuddered.

Bonomo hit a final key with a flourish, then swiveled the laptop around so Sandoval could see it. A large central window held a digital sketch of a man’s face, with other smaller windows surrounding it. “How close is that?” he asked Sandoval.

The tech stared at it for a long time. “It looks sort of like him.”

“We’re just getting started. Let’s go feature by feature. We’ll start with the eyebrows.”

Bonomo clicked on a window containing a catalog of facial features and selected BROWS. A horizontal scroll of small boxes containing representations of eyebrows appeared. Sandoval picked the best match, and then a bunch more appeared, all variations on that, and Sandoval picked the best match again. D’Agosta watched as Bonomo went through the exhaustive process of winnowing down the look of the suspect’s eyebrows: shape, thickness, taper, distance between, on and on. Finally, when both Bonomo and Sandoval appeared satisfied, they moved on to the eyes themselves.

“So what’s this perp supposed to have done?” Bonomo asked D’Agosta.

“He’s a person of interest in the murder of a lab technician at the Natural History Museum.”

“Yeah? Of interest how?”

D’Agosta recalled Bonomo’s incurable curiosity about the details behind the faces he had to create. “He used a phony identity to access the Museum’s collections, and perhaps kill a technician. The identity actually belonged to this college professor in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Doddering old fart with trifocals. He almost soiled his underwear when he learned someone had stolen his identity and was now wanted for questioning in a murder.”

Bonomo let out another loud bray. “I can just see it.”

D’Agosta hovered as Bonomo went through the interminable process of sharpening the nose, lips, jaw, chin, cheekbones, ears, hair, skin color and pigment, and a dozen other features. But he had a good witness in Sandoval, who had seen the fake scientist on more than one occasion. Finally, Bonomo clicked a button and the Identi-CAD program brought up a series of computer-generated variations of the final face from which Sandoval could choose. Some shading and blending, a few additional tweaks, and then Bonomo sat back with an air of satisfaction like that of an artist completing a portrait.

The computer seemed to have frozen. “What’s it doing now?” D’Agosta asked.

“Rendering the composite.”

A few minutes passed. Then the computer gave a chirrup and a small window appeared on the screen that read RENDERING PROCESS COMPLETE. Bonomo clicked a button and a nearby printer stirred into life, spooling out a sheet containing a grayscale image. Bonomo plucked it from the tray, glanced over it, then showed it to Sandoval.

“That him?” he asked.

Sandoval looked at the picture in amazement. “My God. That’s the guy! Unbelievable. How’d you do that?”

“You did it,” said Bonomo, clapping him on the shoulder.

D’Agosta peered over Bonomo’s picture at the sheet. The facial portrait it contained was almost photographic in its clarity.

“Terry, you’re the man,” he murmured.

Bonomo beamed, then printed half a dozen more copies and passed them over.

D’Agosta squared up the sheets on the edge of the table and put them in his case. “Email me the image, okay?”

“Will do, Vinnie.”

As D’Agosta left with Sandoval in tow, he thought that now it was just a question of trying to match this sketch to the twelve thousand people who came and went from the Museum on the day of the murder. That was going to be fun.