Chain of Evidence

CHAPTER 15

The following day Dart, Abby, and little Lewellan Page made the forty-five-minute drive to Sheffield through a cool but gorgeous afternoon. Mac the Knife patrolled the back of the Volvo, Lewellan offering her hand to lick. The spine of mountains bearing the northern stretch of the Appalachian trail were frosted with the first hints of winter. Lewellan, who had never been out of the Bellevue Square area of north Hartford, sat quietly in the backseat, eyes wide with awe, asking a nonstop stream of questions.

Tommy Templeton was well into his fifties. Since Dart had seen him last, his hair had gone completely gray. He was a big, solid man, shaped like a barrel with legs. He had rough, hard hands that looked more like a carpenter’s than an artist’s. He had a deep voice, kind eyes, and a small scar below his lip.

Greeting the three of them at the front door of his hilltop home, he shook hands with Abby and Lewellan and admonished Dart. “Six years I’ve been up here, and you’ve never visited. You’ve called, what, once?” Not allowing Dart the opportunity to respond, he welcomed them into his home, with its antique furnishings and spectacular sixty-mile view of the rolling hills of western Connecticut. The ceilings were low and the floors creaked under foot. The living room smelled of woodsmoke and pine needles. “Teddy has made it over to fish a couple times. Doc Ray, too.”

Dart had heard about those weekends. More drinking than fishing. “Maybe I could make the next one,” Dart lied.

“What about you, Lewellan?” Templeton asked. “Do you like to fish?”

“I like fish sticks,” she replied.

They all laughed. Abby put her arm around the girl and held her closely.

A people person, Tommy Templeton’s real gift as a police artist had been his ability to make friends quickly and to coax images from the unwilling minds of his witnesses. His was the craft of instant friendships. Since he had been divorced and left the force, six years earlier, Templeton had lived alone, creating commercial art for the tourist shops in southern Maine. He painted seagulls and fishing trawlers, and he drank too much and got out too little. There was no escaping the rumor mill of HPD.

Despite the view, Tommy Templeton worked in a studio with the shades drawn because sunlight compromised his computer screens. The computer gear-two flatbed scanners, a color laser printer, and a pair of Macintoshes, occupied the tops of three doors supported by rough-wood sawhorses and steel file cabinets. Cables and wires ran between them in a confusing tangle. He had pinned various pieces of computer art, both color and black-and-white, on his walls. There were nudes, landscapes, wildlife, and three self-portraits. The images, some of them vaguely familiar to Dart, were impressive. Like many artists, Templeton carried an aura of eccentricity. There was a duck decoy wearing a pair of reading glasses in the far corner that immediately grabbed Abby’s attention. But it was the full-frontal nude that captured Lewellan’s attention.

“She’s beautiful,” the young woman said.

“She’s titled ‘Venus,”’ Tommy Templeton said proudly. “I morphed her.”

“What’s that mean?”

“She’s a composite photograph. Do you know what a composite is? It’s like pasting several photographs on top of one another, except that you can see through them. ‘Venus’ is a combination of seven different photographs. Qualities from each.”

Let’s not get into details, Dart thought, examining the Vargas-like round breasts, wide hips, narrow waist, long legs, and square shoulders. “Tom’s Fantasy Girl” seemed more appropriate, although the photographic quality of the image made this woman appear absolutely real. Knowing that she was not made the effect disarming.

“I’ll show you,” Templeton said as he sat Lewellan down into a chair in front of an oversize computer screen. Dart and Abby stepped back, allowing Templeton to take over. The man called up a file on the computer, and five vehicles appeared on-screen. Below them was an interesting-looking contraption-a cross between the space shuttle and a Porsche that on examination contained some element of each. “This is exactly what we’re going to do,” he explained. “You and me,” he said as went about scanning each of the five mug shots that Lewellan Page had identified as the man that she had seen outside of Gerald Lawrence’s apartment on the night of his hanging.

With the photographs on-screen and in front of Lewellan, he asked, “Do you recognize these, Lewellan?”

She nodded.

“We’re going to see if we can combine these into the man you saw. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Templeton talked her through a careful examination of each of the mug shots, asking her to identify exactly which feature of which shot looked most like the man she had witnessed. He began with the shape of the head; Lewellan picked the third man. Tommy Templeton placed a series of black dots around this face, omitting the hair, and then clicked a button on the mouse and connected them all. After a few mouse-controlled instructions, this same face, hairless and without ears, appeared in the empty box at the bottom of the large screen. Dragging a small black square across the screen with the mouse, he then erased the contents of the face itself, and only the shape of the head remained. This empty head looked ghostly and odd to Dart, who stood behind the two of them.

Abby’s fingers brushed against Dart’s hand, and she slipped hers into his, and they hooked together, holding hands.

“The chin’s not right,” Lewellan told the former police artist.

“Okay. Let’s change that.” He erased the chin. “Here,” he said, handing her an aluminum pen with a wire attached. “Do you want to draw it?”

She tried several times and on her fourth attempt appeared satisfied. Templeton worked with the image for a moment-his artist’s eye knowing how to improve it-at which point she declared, “That’s good. That’s real good!”

They worked together, light pen and mouse, and highlighted two different sets of eyes, each of which Lewellan felt contained something of the man she had seen. Templeton instructed the computer to merge the two. The computer then animated the evolution from photo A to photo B, stepping through a series of frames. With each successive frame, the eyes of photo A grew more similar to those in photo B. Lewellan studied each of these individual frames, selected one, and Templeton then merged these eyes into the empty face in the bottom box. This concept of ever-changing, slightly altered frames was what made morphing so effective, Dart realized. With an Identi-Kit, the witness was only given a choice of eyes number 1, eyes number 2, etc. With morphing, the features of several different faces could be made to evolve into a single face, with no one feature of the final composition exactly as it was in any of the others.

“The department should have this,” Dart let slip as the face in the bottom box slowly grew to something recognizable. Tommy Templeton’s eyes flashed darkly-the argument for better technology, among other issues, had contributed to his early retirement.

An hour later the suspect’s face had eyes, eyebrows, and hair. They took a break and stood on the porch, and Templeton smoked three cigarettes in a row. Lewellan and Tommy Templeton talked about the special effects in Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park. Dart watched a small plane make for the horizon. Abby Lang, her coat wrapped around her as a blanket, drank in the late-afternoon sun.

They resumed their work by concentrating on noses. This time, it took three successive morphings to produce a nose that satisfied Lewellan, and then only after Tommy Templeton had touched it up with a computerized “airbrush.” Dart had wandered off to study some of the artwork, and it was only as he returned to check up on their progress that he realized the eyes were familiar to him. This realization stopped him cold. The suspect still lacked a mouth and ears.

“Are you okay?” Abby asked.

It was dark out. Dart didn’t know how long he had been standing there lost in thought, but it had been at least forty or fifty minutes.

Templeton and Lewellan Page took another break to rest their eyes, and Templeton found some pretzels for them to eat. When the two went back to work at the computers, Dart and Abby took Mac for a walk. Mac walked like an arthritic boxer, hobbling along, his collar jingling.

“Do you want to spend the night tonight?” she asked. Dart had been doing more and more of that lately. They had not discussed their relationship on any serious terms, but he thought about her often, and he missed her when a couple of days passed without contact.

“I’d like that,” he said.

“Good. Me too.”

He told her he would need to drop Mac at his apartment and offered to pick: up some dinner on the way back over. She told him that she would cook chicken if he made a salad, and with that they had dinner planned. He felt a slight pang of guilt, and he missed Ginny, and it made him wonder if she had gotten any further with her attempt to compile the list for him, and how he hadn’t heard from her in a few weeks.

“You’re off somewhere,” Abby said.

“Just thinking, that’s all.”

They returned to the house in silence. She took his hand again. She wore gloves. Dart did not. “We could use more time like this,” she said.

Dart wasn’t sure how to reply to that, so he let it go. He led the dog back to the car. “How many kids grow up like Lewellan?” he asked sadly. “She had never seen the woods except on television. Her entire image of the outside world is from television. What kind of society are we creating?”

“‘Save one life, you save the world,’” she quoted.

“It’s overwhelming,” he said.

“She’ll never forget this experience,” Abby offered. “Maybe by losing Gerry Law we gain Lewellan Page.”

“I doubt it,” Dart admitted.

“Yeah,” she agreed. “Me too. But it was a nice thought.”

They reentered the house. Tommy Templeton’s voice could be heard congratulating the girl. The two, still on their break, were looking at a coffee table book of wild animal photographs.

“Are you going to look?” Lewellan asked Dart.

“Is it done?” Dart asked.

“Not quite,” Templeton asked.

Abby sat down with the girl and the book, and Templeton came over to Dart and motioned Dart out onto the deck, which produced an immediate anxiety in the detective.

Tommy Templeton’s face, part shadow, part light, looked like a mask and offered Dart a disturbed expression. “We’re getting close,” he said, though it sounded more like a warning.

“What is it, Tommy?”

“Maybe nothing.”

“What?”

“I’m not sure.”

“The face?” Dart asked.

“Yes.”

“It looks familiar,” Dart stated.

Templeton nodded. “The eyes.”

“Who?”

Templeton shook his head.

“Who, Tommy?” Dart repeated.

“Doesn’t make any sense, and besides, the rest of the face doesn’t work at all.”

“Who?”

“I can’t make it out,” he said, “but it sure as hell seems familiar to me.”

Dart nodded. “I know. The eyes.”

“Yeah. Weird, isn’t it?” the man asked.

Dart didn’t answer. He asked, “Do we trust this?”

“I do. She’s good,” came the reply, “which is not exactly what you’re asking, is it? Is this the face she saw, or is it someone she has seen since and has convinced herself otherwise? We both know the score with eyewitnesses, Joe, don’t we? They’re about as reliable as the mail. But she has a face in her head-I guarantee you that. Whether it’s real or imagined, I can’t tell you.”

Half an hour later, Templeton called Abby and Dart into his studio.

His heart pounding strongly, Dart approached the computer screen, but Templeton directed him away. “The printer,” Templeton said, pointing. “We’ve enlarged it. It’s just coming out.”

The four of them stepped up to the laser printer, where a piece of paper was being slowly ejected, upside down so that only the white of the paper showed. Dart wanted to grab it and flip it over, but he waited for it to finish printing. Templeton picked it up and turned it over.

The image was that of a face. It looked so much like a photograph that Dart briefly forgot that it was not. Lifelike and human. Dart reached out and touched the sheet of paper, feeling an incredible sense of relief.

The face was jowly, the brow strong. The high cheekbones reminded him of an Irishman. Try as he did, he could no longer make the face into that of Walter Zeller. Even the eyes looked different. He felt giddy. He felt high, as if he’d been drinking.

“There’s your man,” Templeton said, handing Dart the image.

“That’s him,” Lewellan Page confirmed.

Dart felt both confusion and happiness. It was one time he felt thrilled to be wrong about the identification of a suspect.

But his stomach rolled and his bowels loosened when, at the door, saying good-bye, Tommy Templeton leaned in close to him and whispered, “I’d like to play with this image, Joe. I’ll fax you a copy if I get anything.”

“But I thought-” Dart complained. His euphoria popped like a balloon, his objection interrupted by Templeton.

“Inside every face, there’s another face,” Templeton cautioned in a sinister tone of voice. “Call it instinct, call it a hunch … This isn’t the face that I expected.”

Abby saw the two men whispering and caught eyes with Dart, her face a knot of concern. Lewellan Page ran out to the car and opened the back door and petted the dog.

“Let me work with it,” Templeton told the detective. “I’ll give you a call.”

Leave it alone, Dart wanted to say. But he nodded, wishing that secrets could stay hidden, and that a person’s face could never change.