Blue Labyrinth

42

Margo Green took a seat at a large conference table in a forensic suite on the tenth floor of One Police Plaza. The suite was an odd combination of computer lab and medical examination room: terminals and workstations stood cheek by jowl with gurneys, light boxes, and sharps disposal cases.

Across the table sat D’Agosta. He had summoned her from the Museum, where she’d been spending her off afternoon analyzing the anomalous compound found in the bones of Mrs. Padgett and dodging Dr. Frisby. Beside him sat a tall, thin Asian man. Next to him was Terry Bonomo, the department’s Identi-CAD expert, with his ubiquitous laptop. He was swiveling back and forth in his seat and grinning at nothing in particular.

“Margo,” D’Agosta said. “Thanks for coming. You already know Terry Bonomo.” He gestured at the other man. “This is Dr. Lu of Columbia Medical School. His expertise is plastic surgery. Dr. Lu, this is Dr. Green, an ethnopharmacologist and anthropologist currently working at the Pearson Institute.”

Margo nodded at Lu, who smiled in return. His teeth were dazzlingly white.

“Now that you’re both here, I can put the call through.” D’Agosta reached for a phone at the center of the table, pressed its SPEAKER button, and made a long-distance call. It was answered on the third ring.

“Hello?”

D’Agosta leaned toward the speaker. “Is this Dr. Samuels?”

“Yes.”

“Dr. Samuels, this is Lieutenant D’Agosta, NYPD. I have you on speakerphone with a plastic surgeon from Columbia Medical and an anthropologist connected with the New York Museum of Natural History. Could you please share with them what you told me yesterday?”

“Certainly.” The man cleared his throat. “As I told the lieutenant, I’m a pathologist with the Indio Department of Corrections here in California. I was undertaking the autopsy on the John Doe suicide — the man suspected in the murder of the employee at your Museum — when I noticed something.” He paused. “I first established the mode of death, which, as you know, was rather unusual. As I was completing a gross examination of the corpse, I noticed some unusual healed scars. They were inside the mouth, along both the upper and lower gingival sulcus. At first I thought they might be the result of an old beating or car accident. But as I examined them, I could see the scars were too precise for that. I found a similar, symmetrical set of scars on the other side of the mouth. At this point, I realized they were the result of surgery: specifically, reconstructive facial surgery.”

“Cheek and chin implants?” Dr. Lu said.

“Yes. X-rays and CAT scans bore this out. In addition, the imaging showed plates — titanium, as it turned out — fixed to the jawbone.”

Dr. Lu nodded thoughtfully. “Were there any other scars? On the skull or the hip, or inside the nose?”

“When we shaved the head, we found no scars. But yes, there were intranasal incisions, and a scar on the hip, just above the iliac crest. The images I forwarded to Lieutenant D’Agosta document everything.”

“Did the autopsy turn up any anomalous findings, chemical or otherwise?” D’Agosta asked. “The man was in obvious pain before he killed himself. And he was acting more than a little crazy. He might have been poisoned.”

There was a pause. “I wish we could say with certainty. There were some very unusual compounds present in the blood that we’re still trying to analyze. The man was on the verge of renal failure; it’s possible those compounds could have caused that.”

“If you come up with anything definitive, please relay it to me via the lieutenant,” Margo said. “Also, I’d appreciate it if you could analyze the skeleton for the presence of unusual compounds as well.”

“Will do. Oh, and one other thing — the man dyed his hair. It wasn’t black, but dirty blond.”

“Thank you, Dr. Samuels. If there’s anything else, we’ll be in touch.” D’Agosta ended the conference call with the press of a button.

There was a large manila envelope on the table, and now D’Agosta slid it in Lu’s direction. “Doctor? I wonder if you could give us the benefit of your expertise.”

The plastic surgeon opened the envelope, pulled out the contents, and quickly arranged them in two piles. Margo saw that one pile contained a mug shot and morgue photographs; the other, colored X-rays and CAT scans.

Lu sorted through the photos of the man Margo recognized as the phony Professor Waldron. He held up one close-up and displayed it to the group: Margo made out the inside of a mouth, the upper gums, soft palate, and uvula clearly visible. “Dr. Samuels was correct,” Lu said, tracing his finger against a faint line just above the gum. “Notice this intraoral incision — technically named, as Dr. Samuels told you, the upper gingival sulcus.”

“And its significance?” D’Agosta asked.

Lu put down the photograph. “There are basically two kinds of plastic surgery. The first is skin work. Face-lifts, eye bag removal — procedures that make you look younger. The second kind is bony work. This is much more invasive, and is used in cases of trauma. Say you were in a car accident and had your face crushed. Bony work would attempt to correct the damage.” He waved a hand at the photographs. “Most of the procedures done to this man involved bony work.”

“And this bony work — could it be used to alter a person’s appearance?”

“Definitely. In fact, since there’s no evidence of prior trauma, I would guess that all the procedures done to this man were to alter his facial appearance.”

“Just how many operations would it take to accomplish that?”

“If the operation was sufficient to change the bony orientation — a midface advancement, for example — just one. The patient would look completely different, especially with dyed hair.”

“But it sounds as if this man had several procedures.”

Lu nodded, then picked up and showed them another picture. Margo recognized it, with some disgust, as a close-up of the inside of a hairy nose. “See the intranasal incision? It’s well hidden, but visible if you know what to look for. The doctor used that incision to introduce silicone into the nose, no doubt to make it look taller.” He flipped through the other pictures. “The upper intraoral incisions, where the gum meets the sulcus, would be used to alter the cheeks — you make a cut on either side, make a pocket in the bone, slip in the implants. The lower intraoral incision, on the other hand, would have been used to add silicone to the chin, make it protrude.”

Terry Bonomo had his laptop open and was furiously typing notes as the surgeon spoke.

Margo watched D’Agosta shift in his chair. “So our friend here had his cheeks altered, his chin altered, and the height of his nose changed.” He glanced significantly in Bonomo’s direction. “Anything else?”

“Samuels mentioned titanium plates.” Lu reached for the X-rays, stood up, and walked over to a series of X-ray light boxes fixed to one wall. He snapped them on, fastened the X-rays to the glass, and examined them.

“Ah, yes,” he said. “The face was restructured by advancing the jaw.”

“Can you explain that, please?” Bonomo asked.

“It’s called a LeFort osteotomy. You essentially break and realign the face. Using the same incision in the upper gingival sulcus, you go right down to the bone, make a complete cut so it becomes mobile, and then push out the jaw. Pieces of bone from other areas of the body are added to fill up the space — usually from the patient’s skull or hip. In the case of this person, there is a scar above the iliac crest, so clearly the extra bone was taken from the hip. Once this is completed, titanium plates are used to fix the maxilla in position. You can see one of them, here.” He pointed to an X-ray.

“Jesus H. Christopher,” said Bonomo. “Sounds painful.”

“Any idea how long ago these procedures might have been done?” Margo asked.

Lu turned back to the X-rays. “It’s hard to tell. “The maxilla is fully healed — you can see the callus, here. The titanium plates haven’t been removed, but then again, that’s common. I would say at least a few years ago, maybe more.”

“I count four procedures,” D’Agosta said. “And you say these would have been enough to change the man’s looks completely?”

“Just the LeFort osteotomy would have done the job.”

“And based on the photographic, CAT scan, and X-ray evidence here, can you reverse-engineer these changes? Show us what the guy looked like before all this work?”

Lu nodded. “I can try. The fractures in the medulla, and the size of the incisions in the mucosa, are clear enough. We can work backward from there.”

“Great. Please work with Terry Bonomo here and see if we can’t get an image of this guy’s original face.” D’Agosta turned to the ID expert. “Think you can do this?”

“Hell, yeah,” Bonomo said. “If the doc here can give me specifics, it’s a cinch to modify the facial biometrics. I’ve already got wireframe and three-D composites of the perp’s head loaded into the software; now I just need to take my standard operating procedure and run it backward, so to speak.”

While Margo looked on, Dr. Lu took a seat beside Bonomo and together — hunched over the laptop — they began refiguring the face of the killer, essentially undoing the work some anonymous plastic surgeon had done years ago. Now and then Lu returned to the autopsy photographs, or the X-ray and CAT scan images, as they painstakingly adjusted various parameters in the cheeks, chin, nose, and jaw.

“Don’t forget the dirty-blond hair,” D’Agosta said.

Twenty minutes later, Bonomo hit a key on the laptop with a dramatic flourish. “Let’s give it a moment to render the image.”

Margo heard the laptop give a chirrup about thirty seconds later.

Bonomo swiveled the laptop toward Dr. Lu, who examined it a moment, then nodded. And then Bonomo turned the laptop all the way around so Margo and D’Agosta could see it.

“My God,” D’Agosta murmured.

Margo was shocked. The plastic surgeon was right — the image looked like a completely different man.

“I want you to model that from several angles,” D’Agosta told Bonomo. “Then download the rendered images into the departmental database. We’ll run the facial-recognition software against it, see if the face is anywhere out there.” He turned to Lu. “Doctor, thanks so much for your time.”

“My pleasure.”

“Margo, I’ll be back.” And without another word, he stood up and walked out of the forensic suite.

In less than twenty minutes, D’Agosta was back. His face was slightly flushed, and he was out of breath.

“Goddamn,” he told her. “We’ve got a hit. Just like that.”