Page 17

17

Barry Rolvaag lived in a big house above a ravine called Swede Hollow, which was not a place with a lot of big houses, but his was. Two stories with a front porch, swing hooks but no porch swing, gray shingle siding falling apart from old age. A two-track driveway ran to the back of the house, thirties style, from the days when people drove Model T’s. A tiny out-of-kilter garage slumped in the back, at the end of the driveway. An aging Harley softtail sat in the bed of a Ford F-150, pointed toward the street for a fast getaway; the Ford wore a bumper sticker that read “Is there life after death? Fuck with this truck and find out.”

Rolvaag came to the door with a cup of coffee in his hand. A bear-built man with a gut, square yellow teeth, and a gray beard that dropped to his chest, he popped the door and said to Virgil, “I know you. How you been?”

“Been okay. Working the Grandfelt cold case.” Virgil introduced Lucas and Rolvaag said, “Come on back.”

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 the seven 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 if somebody 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.

—

Rolvaag gave them three sets of prints, an envelope with a glassine sleeve with the original negatives, and a thumb drive with the digital photos. “I will send the bill to the usual, and I have to include the price of the software,” he said. “You guys getting anywhere with this thing? I went out to one of the true crime sites, seems like some stuff is coming up.”

They talked about that on the way up the stairs, where they said goodbye to Mrs. Rolvaag, who was skinning grapes.

Out in the truck, Lucas said, “I would have seen the car sooner or later.”

“Yeah, like next month,” Virgil said. “Man, is it possible that Klink called it? A doctor with a Porsche?”

“Possible, if unlikely,” Lucas said. “But it was one of her last recorded dates, at the end of the film roll…if they were actually dates.”

“The question is, what do we do now?” Virgil said. “If we give the photos to Jon, and he passes them on to the main team, they’ll never find the guy. They don’t have the resources. If we give them to the true-crimers, we could get crucified, but they might find him.”

Lucas said, “I think we push Jon into a crack. Tell him we want the one photo. The team can have all of them, but we get to leak the Porsche shot to the crimers. He could go for that.”

“What if he doesn’t?”

Lucas shrugged. “We give it to them anyway. Fuck a bunch of bureaucrats. If they give us any trouble, we’ll have the governor go down and chat with them.”

“And what if the governor won’t do it?”

“We’ll have Lara chat with him . The guy would sell his children for a hundred-dollar campaign donation.”

Virgil nodded. “That observation might help Jon make the correct decision, without us having to push him that far.”

“That’s what I’m thinking,” Lucas said.

—

At BCA headquarters, they didn’t have to push Duncan at all. He quickly agreed that they could release all the photos to the true-crimers, as long as they did it anonymously—and if they kept the BCA out of it.

“Hell, I’ll give it to them, keep Virgil completely out of it,” Lucas said. “My real boss is in Washington. He’ll never even hear about it.”

“Big of you,” Virgil said. To Duncan, he said, “I thought you’d resist.”

“No. Releasing them makes sense, even if some of the guys won’t like it. This is exactly the kind of stuff you might want to crowdsource,” Duncan said. “The crimers have shown they could do that. Besides, I will blame it on Lucas.”

“I was just telling Virgil that you weren’t nearly as bad an investigator as people used to say you were,” Lucas said to Duncan. And to Virgil, “Let’s call Dahlia.”

—

They called Dahlia Blair, who instantly agreed to put the photos up.

Over the next two days, several tips came in, and they identified two of the men in the most recent photos, but not the man with the Porsche.

On the third day…