13
Because the paper scraps found in the John Doe's pockets and tent were so numerous, Catherine had called in forensic document examiner Professor Rambar to assist Ronnie Litra, the lab's night-shift Questioned Documents tech, along with the day-shift tech, to try to find out if anything in all of those pieces of paper pointed to the dead man's identity.
The review hadn't been completed yet – Catherine thought it could take days, if not weeks – but progress had been made, and now Rambar had come to Catherine's office to summarize their findings so far. Rambar was a distinguished-looking gentleman, with thinning gray hair, a goatee, and thin glasses. He sat with his spine erect, right leg crossing the left at the knee, his fingers interlaced on his lap. Greg was there as well, leaning against a tiling cabinet, listening intently.
"I appreciate you coming in on such short notice," Catherine began.
"I'm just happy that I was available," Rambar said. "I wouldn't have wanted to miss this for anything."
"That good?"
"That… let's just say interesting. It's not every day one comes across such a trove of documents. All in all, these appear to illuminate what seems to be a very disturbed man."
"Disturbed how?" Catherine asked.
"That's a question for a psycholinguistics expert, which I can't profess to be," Rambar replied. "You could feed these documents – or a transcription of them, anyway, since it would never be able to read them as they are – into a computer and no doubt learn much more about the man who wrote them. I'm afraid I can't tell you a whole lot about him; I can only address the documents themselves."
Greg knew that in the trade, a note jotted on a crushed toilet-paper tube was still considered a document, but even so, it sounded odd to his ears to hear those bits of random paper described that way. They looked more like trash than documents – the word seemed to give them more importance than they deserved. But then again, maybe not – maybe somewhere in them was the clue that would crack the case. He'd had to find them, photograph them, and bag them in huge plastic trash bags, and he was glad that interpreting them was someone else's responsibility.
"I understand," Catherine said. "What can you tell us about them?"
"First, and perhaps most significant, virtually all of them were written by the same person. Over a period of years but definitely the same hand. I checked overall form, line features, format, to the extent that I could, and the consistency is undeniable. There are changes, of course – most handwriting changes a little, month to month and year to year. But there are also enough markers that don't change that we can tell when the same author writes two separate notes even a decade apart.
"It was harder to get a sense of content, because the sentences themselves are often disjointed, or portions are missing, torn off, or what have you. Plus, as you know, much of it was obliterated by overwriting, even charring in many cases. Still, I can tell you that the author is a male, most likely older than twenty and younger than forty. As I said, the notes themselves were written over time, so I can't narrow down the age range much more than that."
"How can you read the writing that's covered by other writing or burned?" Greg had seen it done, but he still marveled at the fact that seemingly impossible-to-read text could be deciphered.
"We can't always," Rambar admitted. "Sometimes the best we can do is to establish that something has been altered or removed. Erasure through scraping or actually eliminating layers of paper will leave rough patches, and if someone tries writing over those patches with ink, the ink will usually spread more than it would have on the original paper. Chemical erasures leave stains that can be elected through infrared luminescence, oblique lighting, and so on.
"The difficulty here," he went on, warming to his material, "was that we had overwriting – probably not deliberately obscuring the original text but simply the result of a man of limited means, making notes to himself on paper he had already used, perhaps years before, to make other notes to himself. The result is notes that might have meant something to him but only to him – to us, they simply look like confused scribbling. Again, oblique lighting, alternative light sources such as infrared or ultraviolet, and the use of filters helps, especially in those cases where the color of the layers of writing varies. If he wrote in blue ink over gray pencil, then viewing through a blue filter subtracts the blue, making the gray reasonably legible. Or as legible as this man's handwriting ever is.
"In the reverse case, pencil over ink, the pencil can be erased to reveal the ink below. That destroys the document's usefulness in court, although in this case, if the deceased wrote all of the documents himself and they're not all likely to become part of a court case – or any, since he's already dead – we can certainly do that in order to see what the underwriting says. Of course, your staff and I have made every attempt to preserve the integrity of the original documents. We've been busy photocopying those that are legible on their face and preserving the others in transparent plastic so that we're handling them no more than absolutely necessary."
"Of course," Catherine said. "The most important thing is to find any clues to his identity that they might contain, but we don't want the documents to be destroyed during analysis, if possible."
"Especially given what I had to live through to collect them," Greg added. He still felt as if he could smell the tent's interior, as if subatomic particles of it had become lodged in his nasal membranes. Which, no doubt, they had. More precisely, the chemicals causing the smell would have floated into his nose, binding with the cilia lining his nasal cavity, which would cause a nerve impulse to send the information through the olfactory cell, up the olfactory nerve fiber into the olfactory bulb, and from there to his brain. It would take a while before that all cycled out, but he didn't like thinking about tiny bits of the dead man's belongings living inside his head for any length of time. He turned his attention back to what the professor was saying.
"Yes, well, we try to be careful," Rambar said. "Then, of course, we move on to the more sophisticated techniques. Hyperspectral imaging can create true three-D images of the individual lines, allowing us to differentiate even same-colored inks or the identical ink written at different times. To examine charred documents, we stabilize them first with polyvinyl acetate, to make sure they don't flake apart in our hands – or forceps, more accurately – float them on a solution of glycerin, chloral hydrate. and alcohol, and photograph them. You'd be surprised at how much can show up if you just know the right way to look."
"I'm sure," Greg said.
"At any rate, it turns out that most of the notes are attempts to jog the writer's memory about various things or else written so that he won't forget something. Directions to a shelter or a church serving Thanksgiving meals. The day of the week he had a shower at the Y. 'Rainy today.' That sort of thing. Most of it trivial and not pointing in any obvious manner to the identity of the person who wrote them. You couldn't even go back and trace who got a free Thanksgiving dinner on such and such a date, because even on the rare occasions when he did note a specific date, he didn't write the year."
"So you're telling me that it's all useless to us?" Catherine asked.
"Nothing of the sort," Rambar said. "We've only really just started, as I said. We have a long way to go, but I wanted to tell you where we are so far, since I know there's a certain urgency. And there are a few things that are more intriguing than others, things that show up again and again."