Look Again - Lisa Scottoline [42]
Not everybody looks like their mom.
Ellen zoomed out to the original photo, outlined the man’s face with the mouse, then clicked. Her heart beat a little faster. The man did look a little familiar, and his smile was like Will’s, with that downturn on the right. She sipped some coffee and clicked Zoom again, enlarging his face to fill the screen. She’d hoped the blur would let her sense the general configuration of his face, but it didn’t. She set down her coffee, almost spilling it on her notes, so she moved the notebook out of the way. Sticking out from underneath was the white card with the photo of Timothy Braverman.
Hmmm.
She slid out the white card and looked at the age-progressed version of Timothy, then set the card down, went back into My Pictures, and found Will’s last school picture. She enlarged it and set it up on the screen next to the photo of the man on the beach. Then she compared the two photos—the most recent of Will with the man on the beach—taking a mental inventory:
Will, eyes blue and wide-set; Beach Man, eyes close together and blue
Will, nose, little and turned up; Beach Man, long and skinny
Will, blond hair; Beach Man, light brown hair
Will, round face; Beach Man, long, oval face
Will, normal chin; Beach Man, pointed chin
Similarities—blue eyes, lopsided smile
Ellen reviewed the list, then leaned back and eyeballed the photos from a distance. She wasn’t able to reach a conclusion, as much as she wanted to. Beach Man could be Will’s father, or maybe he was someone Amy was dating around the same time, or a random guy with a beer. Or maybe Will didn’t look that much like either of his parents. He looked like Cheryl, and that counted for something.
Ellen went back online. She clicked through to the Braverman family’s website, then captured the age-progressed photo of Timothy and saved a copy to My Pictures. She was going to put it on the screen next to Will’s and Beach Man’s, then compare all three of them when something else on the Braverman family website caught her eye.
The composite drawing of the carjacker.
On impulse, Ellen captured the composite and saved a copy to My Pictures, then uploaded it and placed it next to recent Will, age-progressed Timothy, and Beach Man—all four images in a line. She blinked, and her heart beat a little faster. She captured the composite drawing and the photo of Beach Man, then placed them side by side on their own page. The photos were different sizes, so she outlined the composite drawing and clicked Zoom to enlarge it to the approximate size of Beach Man, and clicked.
She froze. The composite drawing of the carjacker looked like Beach Man. She double-checked, and there was no doubt that they looked alike.
“Oh my God,” she said aloud, and Oreo Figaro raised his chin, his eyes angled slits disappearing into the blackness of his fur.
Ellen looked back at the screen, getting a grip. It was impossible to compare a black-and-white pencil drawing with a color photo of a flesh-and-blood man. She flashed on Will’s tracing of a horse from the other day, and it gave her an idea. She clicked Print, and her cheap plastic printer chugged to life. Then she got up and hurried downstairs, rummaged through the toy box, and ran back up with a roll of tracing paper.
The printer had spit out a copy of the composite drawing, and she took a black Sharpie and went over the lines of the carjacker’s features, blackening them so they’d be darker and thicker. Then she took the piece of tracing paper and placed it on top of the composite drawing, tracing the image onto the crinkly transparent paper, ignoring the thumping in her chest. She set the traced composite aside, slid the copy of the Beach Man photo from the printer tray, then moved her computer keyboard to the side and set the printed photo on the desk.
Then she stopped.
She wanted to know and she didn’t want to