Dead Guilty

Chapter 17

Neva’s frown deepened as Diane said the word haz ard, as if bracing herself for a dressing-down, but by the time Diane reached the end of the sentence, Neva simply looked puzzled.

Diane smiled. ‘‘Let me show you another room that wasn’t on the tour.’’

She picked up the skull of Green Doe and led Neva into the vault. Neva’s gaze moved over the room, resting on each piece of equipment, then on Diane.

‘‘What is this room?’’

‘‘This is where I keep my special toys.’’

Diane turned on the computer and equipment and set Green Doe on a platform in front of a machine.

‘‘This is a laser scanner. The laser reads the topogra phy of the skull as it rotates on the pedestal and gen erates a matrix of points. It looks like a wire frame on the computer screen. Other software uses a skindepth database to reconstruct and display a textur ized face.’’

Diane turned on the computer and called up an image. ‘‘This is a reconstruction I’ve already done of Ethel— Fred and Ethel are the skeletons in the corner of the lab.’’

She showed Neva the sequence of images for Ethel from the wire frame to the reconstruction of a thirty- year-old woman with dark hair and eyes, a small nose, thin lips and high cheekbones. The face had the masklike, lifeless look of a computergenerated face, but it was a remarkably detailed face.

‘‘Wow. This is some incredible software.’’

‘‘It is. It’s the absolute state of the art.’’

‘‘You want me to run it?’’

‘‘I’m assuming that if you can do the detailed sculp tures that you do, you can also draw.’’

Neva nodded. ‘‘I wanted to take art, but my parents discouraged it. They said you can’t make a living with art.’’

‘‘Well, you are about to. There are several prob lems with facial reconstructions. One is characteris tics that the bones don’t show—the shape of the eyes, lips and tip of the nose. And these are the things that trigger recognition. People recognize the tip of Karl Malden’s nose without seeing any other feature.’’

‘‘Who’s Karl Malden?’’

‘‘Someone whose nose you would recognize if you were my age. I don’t suppose you know who Jimmy Durante is either.’’

Neva held up a hand as if she held a hat, quivered, and sang ‘‘Hot-cha-cha-cha-cha!’’ in so perfect an im pression of Jimmy Durante that Diane almost fell off her chair laughing.

‘‘I used to entertain my relatives as a kid with that. Amazing what you can get by with as a kid.’’ ‘‘Your talents are apparently endless.’’

Diane shook her head and returned her attention to the computer-generated photograph of Ethel.

‘‘We could show this to Ethel’s mother and there is a good chance she wouldn’t recognize her. Her mother knew her as an animated person, with mannerisms, facial expressions, and gestures. She knew all the de tails of her daughter’s face, and this just doesn’t have all those fine details that make up the person she knew as her daughter.

‘‘However, if we were to show this to a store clerk who bagged Ethel’s groceries, he might recognize her. He may not remember what the tip of her nose looked like, but he remembers the general look of her. What we need is pictures that both a mother and an ac quaintance can recognize. What I would like you to do is take an image like this and draw a more realis tic picture.’’

Neva put her hands to her face and pressed the bridge of her nose. ‘‘Okay. I can do this.’’

‘‘It means you will have to learn the software.’’

‘‘I’m good with computers.’’

‘‘Good. Start by looking at computer-reconstruction files to with how it all works. Then we’ll do the three hanging victims. After we get a CT scan of the mummy, I’ll show you how to use the information from the scan to reconstruct his face.’’

Neva nodded.

‘‘You’ll also have to learn the bones of the skull and how the bones affect the look of the face,’’ said Diane. ‘‘And you’ll have to pay attention to other details too. Sometimes knowing things like the person walked with a pronounced limp might give you a hint Fred’s and Ethel’s familiarize yourself about how to portray a facial expression. Or if a toxi cological report on a decayed victim comes back show ing a certain kind of thyroid medication, you might guess that the victim has a bug-eyed look that is a side effect of some of those medications. A big part of this work is intuitive.’’

Diane watched her look at the skull sitting on the platform.

‘‘I’ve seen how they do those skin-depth points to make a sculpture of a face. But I’ve never understood how they know what the nose looks like.’’

‘‘You can’t know the shape of the tip. However . . .’’ Diane took the skull and sat down at a desk, mo tioning Neva to draw up a chair. ‘‘The width of the nose is indicated by the size of the nasal opening. The bridge of the nose and the nasal spine—this sharp projection at the bottom of the nasal passage— determine the length of the nose. A large nose needs a strut to hold it up. That’s what the anterior nasal spine does. If you draw a line coming off the end of the nasal bone and one coming from the nasal spine, where the lines meet gives you an idea how long the nose was. The angle of each line can suggest the tilt of the nose.’’

Neva nodded. ‘‘That makes sense.’’

‘‘Another effect of a long nasal spine is upward angling of the skin between the upper lip and the nose. Notice what happens when I pull on the lower part of my nose.’’ Diane pulled the bottom of her nose forward, stretching