“I’m aware of that,” Leif said. “That list just represents the groundwork.”
She looked at him. “For what?”
“With the help of your pictures, the ones I searched out — and some holo imagery I managed to dig up — I created these.”
The lists on either side disappeared. Now Leif was flanked by two men — Marcus Kovacs and Michael Steele.
“What—” Megan began.
“Three-D sims,” Leif interrupted with some satisfaction. “Life-size, so we can really start looking for similarities. By the way, did you know that Kovacs and Steele are the same height and wear the same size shoe?”
“Tell me more, Sherlock,” Megan said in a resigned kind of voice. “At least they’re wearing clothes, so I guess you didn’t find any identifying moles on somebody’s butt.”
“They tell me you can find lots of revealing pictures on the Net.” Leif grinned. “But certainly not of either of these guys.”
“Thank heaven,” Megan muttered.
Leif gave another order, and his new friends swung around to present their profiles. “It’s hard to tell because of that full beard that Kovacs wears, but I think both men have the same basic shape face and chin.”
“At least, you’d like to think so.” Megan tried to choose what she was about to say carefully. It wasn’t easy: words like silly, stupid, and crackpot came all too easily to her sometimes too-blunt tongue. “Leif, you want to find someone behind all the merde Captain Winters is going through. I might even say you’re desperate. So am I. If you can’t convince me, when I want to clear the captain, how are you going to convince Matt, or David, or…say…Captain Steadman?”
“Let me show you one other thing,” Leif begged. “Remember how bent out of shape Kovacs got in the last picture you showed me? The one where he stuck his hand over the camera lens?”
Megan felt a surge of hope. “Fingerprints?”
Leif shook his head. “Nothing but the lines on the palm — although they do match. But remember what Kovacs was doing in the picture before that?”
“Brushing his hair back—”
“So you could see his ear.” Leif murmured another command. Both sims wheeled around to face his left. “This is the side the camera-person caught.” He reached over to the make-believe Kovacs and pulled back the thick, graying mane to reveal the simulacrum’s left ear. Another command, and the sim of Mike Steele disappeared.
No, wait, Megan realized, it wasn’t gone. It had been superimposed over the Kovacs clone. The end result was sort of surprising. The lines of the men’s foreheads matched, except for the differing eyebrows. The noses were different, but the lips were the same, as far as she could tell beneath that beard.
“What am I supposed to be looking for?” she asked.
“The ears,” Leif said excitedly. “They’re supposed to be the most difficult part of the body to disguise.”
Megan peered hard at the superimposed holograms. To her surprise, the two men’s ears matched perfectly.
“It may not be a set of matching moles on their butts, but I think it’s pretty convincing.” Leif gave her a smug smile.
Megan had to admit, Leif had come up with a good presentation with the two images occupying the same space. Where their shapes disagreed, the image was misty and insubstantial. For instance, Kovacs’s beard was a gossamer gray outgrowth surrounding the equally ghostly chin of Michael Steele.
The forehead and lips — and the placement of the eyes, she now noticed — looked as concrete as if a real person stood before her.
Megan turned her attention back to those ears. They were large enough but didn’t stick out as much as, say, Agent Len Dorpff’s.
The tops of Kovacs’s and Steele’s ears were slightly pointed, giving just the hint of elf ears. The skin-covered cartilage, with its bumps, twists, and ridges, even the fleshy earlobe below, looked exactly solid. No trace of ghosting or double image betrayed any differences, standing up even to her most searching gaze.
Megan felt a little weird, peering so intently into somebody’s ear, even if it was a sim. Well, it wasn’t as if the Kovacs-Steele sim was going to turn around and yell “Boo!”
At least, it better not, she told herself, if Leif values his health.
“Amazing,” she finally said, turning to Leif. “They even seem to have the same amount of ear wax.”
More seriously, she went on. “I have no idea what the chances are of identical ears turning up on people. But I suspect it narrows the field a lot more than shoe size or blood type. And you say it’s almost impossible to disguise an ear? Where did you learn that?”
Leif’s smug expression slipped a little. “I think it was an old flatfilm movie — or was it a TV show?”
Megan sighed. “Let’s see if you can back that up with something a little more scientific. Then we’ll take your wax museum to Matt Hunter for a look-see.”
14
Leif looked back and forth between the two friends sitting in his virtual living room.
Megan looked as though she were having second thoughts about discussing the mysterious similarities between Marcus Kovacs and “Iron Mike” Steele.
And Matt Hunter acted more as though Leif were burglarizing the house instead of paying a friendly visit over the Net.
Matt must have caught Leif’s surprised look. “My parents think I’m studying,” he said. “With all the stuff I’ve been doing to help the captain — well, I really got nailed on a couple of tests.”
Leif and Megan nodded somberly. Their grades, too, had suffered as a result of all-nighter Net sessions, long-distance calls, and meetings over how to help Captain Winters.
“I know what you mean,” Megan said. “My folks are just about ready to lower the boom on me, too. Unless something looks as if it’s going to pan out, and really quickly, this will be my last full-scale shot at helping the captain for a while. I’ve got to get my grades up, or I’ll be grounded so long I’ll be collecting retirement before I can venture out again.”
Matt nodded unhappily. “Me, too. So, you two, what have you got?”
“Tell him, Leif,” Megan said.
Leif glanced at her. Yes, she was definitely getting cold feet. He’d only half-convinced her last night, and now her confidence was leaking like a soda bottle hit with a load of buckshot. Even though he’d shown her the passage in the FBI manual about ear shape being a prime identifier, and admissible in court. The usefulness of ear shape in identifying a disguised suspect was why people in mug shots and on wanted posters had their hair pulled back in the profile shot. The authorities wanted that information on record. Meg had heard, she had read, but she was obviously having a hard time believing.
Calling up his lists of similarities, Leif began his dog-and-pony show.
Megan was also right. Matt was even harder to convince than she was.
“Do I get what you’re trying to say here?” Matt said in disbelief. “You want me to believe that these two people are the same guy? Or, rather, that Marcus Kovacs is ‘Iron Mike’ Steele?”
“Let me just point out a couple of things,” Leif replied to his skeptical friend. “According to his paper trail, Marcus Kovacs is supposed to be a financial guy — what my father calls a bean-counter. Yet he’s going great guns as the head of a detective agency. That would sound like more of a job for Mike Steele, late of Net Force, trained in the special facilities at the FBI’s Quantico Academy.”
“‘Late’ is right,” Matt shot back. “Mike Steele is dead, remember? He had a Viking funeral.”