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But the face was Driscoll’s, and the voice was Driscoll’s, too. He was smiling as he gave Jaelyn a glass of something dark and carbonated.
Kit had to remember to breathe. “What do you wanna bet he’s just roofied her?”
“Sucker bet,” Navarro said grimly.
The video rolled on and Jaelyn’s eyes drooped, then closed, her head lolling on the sofa’s back cushion.
Then the man with Driscoll’s face pulled a set of sparkly pink handcuffs from his back pocket. He snapped them on Jaelyn’s wrists and lowered her to the sofa.
Kit didn’t want to watch what happened next, but she kept her gaze on the screen as she bore witness to Jaelyn’s assault. So she won’t be alone, she thought, even though she knew that was foolish.
Tears burned Kit’s eyes and she blinked them away. Most of what was happening was being blocked by the back of the sofa, which was a small mercy. But they could see the man moving.
“Sonofabitch,” Navarro whispered, his voice breaking.
Kit nodded wordlessly, squeezing Ryland’s shoulder when the CSU leader shuddered out a ragged breath of his own.
The man arched his back as he finished, then shifted his body, sitting on the sofa at Jaelyn’s feet. Kit guessed he was zipping his pants back up from the way he moved. Leaving Jaelyn where she lay, he rose and approached the camera again, his body blocking the shot. Then he moved to the window, a martini glass in his hand.
The shot ended, abruptly shifting to the next clip. It was the same living room, but the shadows had changed. It was later in the day.
On the sofa, Jaelyn was stirring but appeared groggy and disoriented.
The man with Driscoll’s face reappeared, sitting on the sofa where he lifted Jaelyn so that she sat upright. He pulled the tie from his shirt collar and wrapped it around her throat while she struggled sluggishly.
Jaelyn was awake enough for him to see her fear, but not enough for her to have the strength to put up any kind of a fight. Not that she’d have been able to overpower the man. She was too small.
“Coward,” Kit whispered.
The man pulled the tie tight, holding until she finally stopped struggling.
He’d killed her.
Releasing the tie, he removed it from her neck and neatly retied it around his own, snugging up the knot. Driscoll’s face broke into a pleased grin that made Kit want to throw up.
She sat, breathing through the nausea. “Goddammit.”
He’d waited until Jaelyn had woken up to kill her. He could have done it while she was unconscious, but he hadn’t. He’d wanted to see her fear.
Ryland grabbed some tissues from the box on his desk and blew his nose before passing the box back to Kit. She wiped her own eyes and passed the box to Navarro, who did the same.
“What did we just watch?” she asked hoarsely. “It’s Driscoll’s face and voice, but that man is at least three inches shorter than Driscoll. Maybe four. Is the video faked?”
“I don’t know about all of it,” Ryland said, “but at least part of it—the man’s face—is definitely a deepfake.”
Shit. They were seeing “deepfakes” more and more frequently—videos in which one person’s face was superimposed on another person’s body. The technology was increasingly accurate, some of the fake videos nearly impossible to distinguish from the originals. The software was free and many deepfake producers needed only a fast computer and editing time to get the look they wanted.
The dangers presented by a well-done deepfake video could be disastrous. A husband seeing his wife having sex with another man? A politician saying something career-ending? A police official making a catastrophic announcement that was untrue? They could induce mass panic and violence.
It appeared that this deepfake was the commission of a real murder as well as an element of Driscoll’s fabricated life.
“How can you tell?” Navarro asked.
Ryland paused the video, the frame showing the fake Driscoll face. “Aside from the fact that this man is four inches shorter than Driscoll, the shadows on his face are all wrong. They don’t match the shadows in the room.”
Kit hadn’t even noticed. “But the rest?”
“I’d have to analyze it,” Ryland said. “The voice is dubbed, but the mouth movements match the words. I think the rest is real.”
