Unlucky 13

Chapter 71

Conklin and I were taking up space in the tech bullpen at Clapper’s forensics lab, peering over the bony shoulders and fuchsia hair of Bo Kellner, a sharp young criminalist who specialized in digital forensics.

The three frames I’d snipped from several days of surveillance footage shot at the Hayes Valley Chuck’s Prime restaurant were getting this kid all excited. Well, the frames were exciting, but Kellner was already highly enthused about his new facial-recognition program called Hunting Wolf.

He’d just installed it yesterday, and he was already being given a real-life opportunity to run Hunting Wolf through its paces. He was as excited as if he’d won the Instant Scratch-off Lotto.

I only half listened to Kellner talk about his program because I was juggling anxiety on two fronts: the upcoming ransom deadline from our friendly mechanical belly bomber and my constant thrumming, live-wire fear for the lives of Yuki and Brady.

Conklin, however, appeared to be in the present, and he wanted to get to know Bo Kellner’s new baby.

“What do you know about facial recognition?” Kellner asked Conklin.

“Pretty much what’s been produced in this lab and what I’ve seen on cop TV.”

Kellner laughed. “Okay, then. So let’s start with this.”

He inputted one of the faces from the grainy footage I’d sent to the lab twenty-four hours ago. It was a three-quarter view of a thin white man with a full beard who’d been caught on camera ordering from the menu hanging over the counter.

Kellner was saying, “If this was actual footage, Hunting Wolf could read his lips and tell you what he ordered,” when my phone chirped. I fished it out of my jacket pocket and glanced at the caller ID.

It was Cindy.

I texted her that I couldn’t talk but I’d call her later. Thinking, yes, after I had the belly bomber in my theoretical crosshairs.

Right now Belly Bomber was job one.

Kellner was saying, “So now Hunting Wolf is scanning this gray-and-white image, using algorithms that look for light and shadow and specific features, relaying that information as a face print—a unique numerical code.”

“I’m more or less following you,” Conklin said.

“Look,” Kellner said. “See the flickering at the top of the frame? The program is scanning pretty fast, but when it reaches the center of the face, the rapid movement will slow down as it tracks the features.”

Kellner rotated the face from three-quarters to a frontal view. He said, “Now I’m going to mess with the picture a little. I’m going to delete the beard and fill in the lower half of the face with what we call male physiological norms.”

Kellner moved the cursor around, twiddled with the image, and within seconds the guy with the beard was clean-shaven with a nice jawline.

Kellner said, “So now, I enter this clean face into the database and give him a name: Kellner1SFPD. We’ve gone from facial tracking to facial recognition.”

The software jiggled, locked in, and then flashed through millions of faces already stored in the database, ranging beyond the known criminal database to any matching image that had ever been downloaded onto the Internet, at the fantastic speed of thirty-six million faces a second.

But for all the cutting-edge pizzazz, there was no match.

I said, “So he’s not a known criminal, and he’s not known, period.”

“That’s right,” said Kellner. “If his image was on Facebook or any database, Hunting Wolf would send up a flare. This guy has a very low, almost nonexistent profile.”

I leaned in and said, “If you input the second face, it could match to the first. It’s still just a cold hit, but maybe we’d get a better image of this guy, right?”

“Correct,” said Kellner. “Exactly right.”

The second photo from my series was of a skinny guy wearing a dark leather jacket, knit hat, a brushy moustache, and a small soul patch.

Kellner imported it, and technological wizardry recommenced. Images flashed on the screen, stopped on the first skinny guy, now known as Kellner1SFPD, and flashed “100% MATCH.”

Kellner said, “Let’s go for a triple play.”

Skinny man number three wore a hoodie that threw a shadow over his eyes.

The mouth on number three looked different from the first two, and he had a bulge in his cheek that looked like he had food in his mouth. Kellner explained, “Could be chewing gum. That’s a time-tested method of fooling ID software. Even smiling can throw off the search function. That’s why you don’t smile for a passport ID. But don’t worry. Hunting Wolf is smarter than the guy chewing gum and wearing a hoodie.

“Watch Hunting Wolf hunt.”