Loren Runnels’s secretary showed me into his rather swank Newport Beach office an hour later. Loren sat behind his desk with his feet up and his arms locked behind his head. Two men sat across from him. One was Rex Wilkers, the PI who had sprung me so anonymously from the jail just days before. I shook bis hand and thanked him again. Next to him, and already standing as I turned to offer my hand, was Will Fortune. We shook and I sat between them. I looked briefly at the card he gave me before sliding it into my pocket:
Fortune looked about my age, with a big frame and a big face that reminded me of pictures of young Hemingway. He had a mustache, and a pleasing combination of boyishness and manliness about him. His smile was cheerful and without irony, but his eyes were very direct and acquisitive.
Loren was his usual self: slender and silver haired, with the air of a man whose purpose in life was to live well and who was accomplishing it.
Wilkers, a stocky blond who looked like a California surfer and probably was, crossed his legs and snugged his white socks up from his athletic shoes.
“Will got in from Boise yesterday morning,” said Loren. “He’s seen the photo evidence. Rick Zant and the rest of his office were polite and helpful.”
He scooted back his chair so we could see each other more comfortably. Will Fortune did not mince words.
“I couldn’t tell much from those prints. The negatives haven’t been altered — there was no interruption of the silver halide/gelatin structure.”
I wanted more dramatic exoneration than silver halide/gelatin structure, whatever in hell that was. I was getting worked up, quickly. “Does this reek of a frame or am I just stupid? What do I have to do, Loren, prove I couldn’t have been in the cave at that precise hour before somebody sees how goddamned false and orchestrated this all is?”
“In fact, that’s one of the things we’ll try to determine,” said Fortune. “There’s just enough light in the cave for me to try a shadow analysis. I say try. It’ll be tough.”
My anger subsided just enough to wonder what this man — who got $100 of my money per hour just to sit on a plane — was talking about. “Shadow analysis?”
He nodded. “Shadows move with the sun. So there’s only two days a year when the same object in the same place will cast the same shadow. If you were somewhere else on those days, and can prove it — this evidence falls apart.”
“Well, I’m liking the sound of that,” I said.
“It will depend on the light in the cave,” he said. “I need to be there and see it, make some control photographs of my own.”
I sighed, shook my head and looked at him. “Then I take it you couldn’t tell just by looking at them that they were fake.”
“Nobody could.”
The dismal implication hung in the air. For whatever it was worth, in that moment I forgave Joe Reilly, fellow Irishman, for being unable to declare my innocence with his naked eye.
Fortune again: “And the fact that they come in a sequence on a film roll means that whoever made them didn’t arrange things for one grand-slam image that’s supposed to send you upriver for life. So, the first two things I look for if the images are visually convincing — existence of a negative and the sequential pattern from a film roll — are against us.”
“Then I’d like to hear about things three through ten you look for,” I said bitterly.
Will Fortune looked at Loren.
“Shoot,” said my lawyer.
“Physical anomalies,” said Fortune. “I’ll need my own photographs of you to find those. Optical anomalies — light source, color, focus and perspective. There wasn’t anything obvious, but that’s what my lab is for. Edge marks on the negatives — you need the camera that took the photos for that. I’ll certainly want to examine yours, and it’s our good fortune that it wasn’t on the evidence list. You’ve got one, I take it?”
“In some closet somewhere.”
“Well, it may give us what we’re looking for. I’ll need it as soon as you can get it to me. Next, we can look at the models and do some photogrammetry to see how they fit the setting. The models in this case would be you and/or the girl. Photogrammetry is a way of measuring the size of objects in an image. If the physical parameters of the cave tell us, for instance, that you, Terry Naughton, stand seven feet ten inches in height, we know we have an altered image.”
“No, I’m about three foot four, right now.”
Chuckles.
Loren leaned forward. “We can go into this later, but Rex can try to locate the girl. Expensive and not likely to succeed, to be honest with you. Anyway — back to you, Will.”
I didn’t mention that I was tracking that delightful little girl on my own, through the Midnight Ramblers chat rooms and one I. R. Shroud. It wasn’t exactly happening quickly. Something told me to keep it to myself.
“I examined those prints for sharpness irregularities — none I could argue in court because the images are all kind of hazy. Just hazy enough to hide inconsistencies. Same with the matrix of the print grain — it’s smooth enough to suggest credibility of the film. I’ll have a closer look at that later in my lab.”
There was a silence then, during which all my hope and optimism tunneled down to the person of William L. Fortune, examiner of questioned documents.
“Look,” he said with that full-cheeked boy’s grin. “We can sit here at one-fifty an hour, or you can take me to the cave and we can get on it.”
I drove. We parked on Canyon Edge, a few houses up from my former home. I got Moe out of the yard and let him come with us up the trail.
Big as Will Fortune was, he made the uphill climb easily. Moe flushed a brace of valley quail from a cactus patch near the path, and Will stopped to watch the birds zoom off low across the brush tops and vanish with a quick braking of wings.
“You hunt him?”
“No. I quit shooting things when my son died.”
Will said nothing.
“Long story,” I said.
“I’ve got a couple of German shorthairs back home. We spend about every spare second we have after pheasant and chukar and quail.”
“It’s a good thing to be doing,” I said earnestly, if absently.
We made the cave in good time. Moe plopped into the shade of a lemonadeberry tree while Will set down his bag of equipment, looked at the cave mouth, then up at the sun.
“They used a secondary light source for the shoot,” he said. “But there’s enough natural sunlight in those images to work a shadow analysis. I hope whoever made those things didn’t rearrange the cave walls just to throw us off.”
“Will, nothing would much surprise me.”
“That was supposed to be a joke.”
“I don’t get jokes.”
“I understand.”
He brought out a tape recorder and announced the date and time and location. Inside, he stood in the middle of the little rock room, turning slowly, saying nothing. He looked at the walls up close, knelt and felt the bottom. “All right,” he said, with something of the coach sending his team onto the field of play.
For the next hour he photographed the cave from every possible angle: outside, inside, with the camera at ground level and the camera raised on a telescoping tripod to just under seven feet. He shot black and white and color, prints and slides. He used six different cameras, including an ESP camera, which he explained stood for electronic still photography.
“The finished images were photographic in nature,” he said. “Taken on film with a standard 35 millimeter camera. But that doesn’t mean they started out that way. You can begin with a digitized image, like this camera takes, and turn it back into an analogue, filmic one. All you need is a film recorder. It’s important for two reasons. First, you can manipulate digital images quite easily on a good computer with Adobe software and the right Photoshop programs. If those shots of you were created from scratch — well, almost scratch — that’s how it was done. Second, DA Zant has edge marks on those negatives, and he doesn’t know it yet, but edge marks on film are like tool marks on bullets. Every gun leaves a different pattern. Well, every camera does, too. I don’t know what those edge marks tell us yet, and I won’t until I get back to my lab. But he let me see some magnifications of the negs, and I got photographic copies of the blowups. All right, it’s time for some shots of you in here, Terry. We can do a few with clothes, but after that I want you naked as Moe. Fair enough?”