The Crucifix Killer - Chris Carter [31]
Peter rolled his chair away from his computer. ‘All the records we have in our database are from missing persons that have been reported in by someone – family, boyfriend, whatever. People will usually bring in a picture and fill in a missing person’s report, you know the protocol. Anyway, that record is then fed into the Missing and Unidentified Persons Unit database. If no one’s reported her missing, there will be no record.’
‘Yes, but how about hospital patients, you know, Jane Doe’s?’
‘Well, those are quite rare.’
‘Yeah, but they do happen?’
‘Yes, but she needs to be either unconscious or have lost her memory. If that’s the case the hospital would usually wait anywhere between seven to fifteen days before considering the patient a proper Jane or John Doe and reporting them to us. We then compare the picture the hospital sends us with what we have in our database and check for a match. If there isn’t one the patient is then inserted into the MUPU database as unidentified. If she went missing on Friday and no one has reported her missing, that’s way too soon. If she is unconscious in a hospital somewhere or has lost her memory, you’ll have to wait until she regains consciousness, check hospital by hospital for a Jane Doe or wait up to two weeks and check back here with me.’
‘Shit!’
‘Sorry, Mark, there isn’t much I can do for you.’
‘That’s OK, thanks anyway.’
Outside the South Bureau Police Department, Culhane sat in his car pondering his options. He sure as hell wasn’t about to go on a hospital tour of LA just to find some hooker for D-King. The past weekend arrests’ report he’d requested had just been sent to his car fax machine. Six girls matched the description. Three had already made bail. He had a hunch none of the remaining girls would be the one he was looking for, but he had to check them.
It took around five minutes for the pictures to come through. As he’d suspected none of them was Jenny. There was one more thing left to do – check for a dead body.
He could try and ask for information from the Homicide Division, but there has always been animosity between Homicide and Narcotics detectives. More often than not one type of investigation would lead into the other. In LA, drugs and murder walked side by side.
Screw the Homicide division, Culhane thought. If Jenny was dead, there was only one place she’d be – the morgue.
Thirteen
The technicians at the County Department of Coroner had used a software program specially developed to reconstruct full images from partial ones. The program is similar to the ones used by film studios on the latest computer-animated motion pictures. The basics are simple – in the animation process, the designer first creates a wire frame of the character as a base and then covers it with a ‘skin’ layer. The process used by the Coroner’s technicians followed the same steps, although no wire frame was needed. Their base was the victim’s skinless face image.
This process is mostly used to re-create an image out of bone structure – a body that has been discovered in a very advanced or complete state of decomposition. In the case of last night’s victim, the process was made easier because the muscle tissue around her face was almost intact. The computer didn’t have to calculate the fullness of her cheeks or the shape of her chin and nose. It only needed to apply a skin layer over the already existing lean tissue, calculate skin age and pigmentation and Hunter and Garcia had a face.
Hunter was right, she’d been a beautiful-looking woman. Even though the computerized image made her look like a character out of the Final Fantasy video game series, Hunter could easily see the soft lines, the model-like features that made up her face.
From his car, on the way back from the Coroner’s office Hunter called Captain Bolter.
‘Hunter. Tell me something good.’
‘Well, the computer guys at the Coroner’s office managed to re-create the victim’s face using some fancy computer program, that should help us identify her.’
‘That’s good news, what else?’
‘That’s about as far as the good