Nick nodded. “This program works on a different principle. Caricature.”
“What, like those sidewalk artists do?”
“Not exactly,” said Archie. “It starts with seventy-two images. You pick the six that you think have the closest resemblance to the person you saw, and it uses those six to generate another seventy-two. We do that a third time, and you pick a final six. Those are blended into one, which we fine-tune.”
“The cool thing,” said Nick, “is that these aren’t static images. They gradually morph from one face to another, exaggerating features as they go. This concentrates attention, which is supposed to trigger flashes of memory-you don’t so much remember the face as recognize it. The inventor claims it bumps up the success rate by up to twenty percent.”
“Caricature police sketches,” said McKay with a smile. “Well, considering that I’m a ventriloquist dentist, I can’t really criticize. Only in Vegas, huh?”
“No w this,” said Greg, “is a crime scene.”
He and Catherine stood at the foot of Mount Pele. It was glowing a brilliant crimson from the cone, the wax-based lava releasing the occasional blorp of heated air.
“Yeah, but we still don’t have a suspect,” said Catherine. “Not since security footage from that gas station in Oregon cleared Wornow. No way he could have gotten to Vegas in time to kill Kanamu.”
“Maybe not. But the truck he was driving-you know, the one his mysterious friend lent him and then drove off into the sunset with?-looked a lot like a 1994 Ford F150 Supercab.”
“True,” Catherine admitted. “Since we can’t find the truck, we can’t compare the treads to what we found in the desert-but we can take a close look at where Kanamu probably died. Right here.”
“Mind if I take the volcano?”
“It’s all yours, lava boy. I’ll tackle the rest of the warehouse.”
There was a small bathroom in the corner; Catherine started there. She found cleaning supplies under the sink, but the dust on them told her they hadn’t been used in some time. She lifted prints from the sink and the toilet.
There was a lounging area next to the loading dock, with a couch, a few ratty armchairs, a microwave, and a refrigerator. The fridge contained nothing but beer, soda, and a few frostbitten TV dinners in the freezer. She located a few good hairs on the couch with root tags, and a number of fibers. The depths of the couch turned up nothing but lint.
Bits of wax spatter were on almost every surface; she guessed they must have had more than one uncontrolled eruption. That worked in her favor, because wax was notoriously hard to remove-and held a fingerprint incredibly well. It looked as if someone had even turned it into a game at one point, pressing a digit into every wax droplet before it fully hardened to leave a perfect print behind. She carefully photographed each one before lifting it.
Catherine remembered a term from her research into Hawaiian mythology: Pele’s tears. They were elongated bits of hardened lava, spatter from the lifeblood of a volcano. She was looking at a man-made approximation of the same thing-but not all the spatter was random.
There was a large, roughly circular pattern at the base of the volcano. Streaks of wax led from there to the loading dock door. “I’ve got a drag trail,” she called out. “Looks like the body was moved, fake magma and all, from here to the loading bay.”
Greg had scaled the gantry and was crouched on top. “Yeah, it’s pretty visible from up here.” He reached out and grabbed a thick chain dangling from a pulley. “I’ve got tr ansfer on this chain-it’s probably how the body was moved from up here to down there.”
“There was an awful lot of wax around the body,” said Catherine. “It must have at least semi-hardened before the body was yanked out.”
“And it would have cooled from the top down. Since we found the vic’s body with his head exposed, that means he was upside down in the volcano’s cone, with his head in the wax that was still hot.”
“Greg, what shape is the wax reservoir up there? Can you tell?”
“Just a sec.” He ducked his head into an uncovered section of the volcano like a mechanic disappearing under the hood of a car, then popped back up an instant later. “It’s an inverted cone, wider at the top than the base. So when our vic was pulled loose, he would have had a roughly volcano-shaped wax plug around his body, with his head exposed.”
“Just how we found him.” She sighed. “Now all we have to do is figure out how he got there.”
“So these are the composites the EvoFIT program produced?” asked Riley. She and Nick talked as they walked across the parking lot. The sheet Nick had just handed her showed a man with long, scraggly blond hair, a wide nose and chin, and blue eyes.
“Yeah, here’s the other one.” She took the second paper and studied it; it showed an olive-skinned man with a short, dark beard and wavy black hair.
“How accurate do you think these are ?” she asked him. “I mean, this is unproven technology.”
“Better than nothing. We showed him mug shots first-anyone busted in the last year who listed no fixed address on the arrest report-but came up dry. Just because someone’s on the street doesn’t mean they’re in the system.”
“You do know there are over eleven thousand homeless people in the city, right?”
Nick unlocked the Denali and climbed into the driver’s seat. “I know. So the sooner we get going, the better.”
They started at Huntridge Circle Park, sandwiched between the north and south lanes of Maryland Parkway. Though technically closed, it still attracted many of those with no other place to go, and most of the park’s benches were being used as makeshift beds.
They made the rounds, showing the pictures to anyone who would talk to them, trying for a positive ID. A one-legged man in a long, tattered coat and a baseball cap told them he thought one of them lived on the banks of the Flamingo Wash, one of the creeks that drained the city’s runoff into Lake Mead. His name, the man said, pointing to the picture, was Buffet Bob-so called because of his habit of sneaking into buffets and cramming as much food as he could i nto his pockets.
At the wash, they had less luck. Camping overnight was prohibited, and the encampment had recently been cleared out. They tried Molasky Family Park next, another spot where the homeless congregated; there, several of the people they talked to agreed that the picture looked a lot like Buffet Bob. The other one, several of them said, resembled a Latino man named Zippo who often drank with Bob.
“Yeah, that’s them,” said a black man in his sixties without a tooth in his mouth. “Bob and Zippo, you always see ’em around together. Not for a while, though.”
“When was the last time you saw them?” asked Riley.
The toothless man shook his head. “Musta been at least a month ago. Mebbe more. They ain’t the only ones, either.”
Nick frowned. “Hold on. You say they disappeared a month ago-and so did some others? Who?”
“Lessee. Big Johnny, ain’t seen him around since then. Old Gus-”
“Gus Janikov?” asked Riley.
“Don’t know his last name,” the man said testily. “Don’t interrupt. Who else… oh, and I guess I ain’t seen Paintcan in a while, neither. Course, he could just be in jail.”
Riley gave Nick a skeptical glance. “So could any of them.”
“Don’t think so,” said the old man. “Ain’t nobody seen ’em or heard nothing. Ask around.”
“We will,” said Nick. “Thanks.”