He led them through a kitchen that smelled of spicy drinks with a thin overlay of weed and raw chicken meat, past a woman who resembled her husband except for the beard; she was stuffing something into a dead chicken’s butt. She said, “Cheese it, the cops.”
“Nobody’s said that since 1920,” Lucas said.
“Yeah, I know. I humbly apologize,” she said, unhumbly.
Rolvaag said, “This way…”
While the first floor of the house was somewhat tattered, the basement, at the bottom of a narrow stairs, was spotless, with a vinegary smell of photo fixer hanging in the air.
The basement floor was raised off the original concrete and was now covered with gray, engineered planks, as were the walls and ceilings. The main room was hung with black-and-white photos, cityscapes, and furnished with two computers and three printers. The largest printer was the size of a chest of drawers. A doorway with a red light above it led to a wet darkroom.
Rolvaag said, “The film wasn’t too bad. There were seven shots on it. Fuji Superia X-Tra 400. C-41, so a bit of a problem converting to digital. I had to buy some new software. You saw a lot more of that Fuji up in Canada than down here. Was the shooter Canadian?”
“Nope. No idea where she got the film,” Virgil said.
“Well, what I did was, I developed it, copied the seven shots with a digital camera. I’ve had them up on my Studio. And I made some digital prints…”
The Studio turned out to be a MacIntosh computer. Rolvaag dropped into a business chair, rattled some keys, brought up theseven shots. Three featured Doris Grandfelt, laughing, with a different man in each one, apparently in bars. The other four were of two different men, probably outside of bars, on urban streets.
“Five guys,” Lucas said, peering at the screen.
“Five, but two of them would be tough to identify,” Virgil said. “Their faces are mushy…”
“She took them in crap light with a crap camera, on a sidewalk,” Rolvaag said. “Bar light. That red neon washed everything out. The film was okay, but not great after twenty years. I sharpened them as much as reasonable, any more and you start getting artifacts…”
Virgil said, “I don’t see much of the red…” Virgil had been shooting digital photos for a half-dozen outdoor magazines, but his work was all in natural light, during the day and at twilight.
“Yeah, the red was a problem,” Rolvaag said, pushing away from the screen to talk to Virgil. “I went into Photoshop and tried adding a layer and some Caucasian coloring, but it looked like crap. What I did next was I opened up the HSL panel and dropped the red saturation to zero. I didn’t want to hit the noise reduction too hard because that’d take out the available detail in the shadows. I wanted to keep that even if it was a little messy…”
They talked more about Photoshop; to Lucas it sounded like “blah blah crap blah blah noise blah blah…”
“You did a damn good job, looking at that original and then the modified one,” Virgil said, still bent over the screen. “I oughta take a class.”
“Still can’t see the face that well,” Lucas said.
Rolvaag: “That’s what we got left. That’s it.”
“I gotta say, we might not recognize the guy if we saw him walking down the street,” Virgil said. “But if we crowdsource it, and ifsomebody knew him back then, and the context…I bet we could get some names.”
“Maybe,” Lucas said.
The actual prints were no better than the shots on the screen; Rolvaag had included sets of both the unaltered shots and the one he’d tried to clean up.
“Anyway, we got three good faces,” Lucas said, going through the prints. “And they’d be some of her last dates, so it’s something.”
“It’s a little more than that,” Virgil said. “You’re missing the interesting part.”
Lucas looked back at the images, frowned, and asked, “What?”
Virgil tapped one of the exterior photos, a narrow slice of a car visible in the background. “Remember what our shrink said? About the doctor’s car? Does this look familiar?”
Lucas looked again and said, “Holy shit.”
“It’s just a Porsche. An old 911,” Rolvaag said.
“Just a Porsche,” Lucas agreed.
—
