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“In deepfakes, the person with the replacement face starts out making a video of himself. Or herself. Fifteen, twenty minutes of mugging different expressions. That video is broken down into individual frames—thousands of frames. Those frames are analyzed by the software and matched to the face in the destination video. In our case that would have been the killer murdering our victims.”
“Okay. That’s a really good explanation, by the way, but what does that have to do with Levinson’s goatee?”
“The closer the facial details of the source—the faker—are to those of the face in the destination video, the better the result. Driscoll’s videos were good. If he was pasting his face over Levinson’s, he might have grown a goatee of the same shape.”
“But he didn’t. Driscoll was clean shaven.” She exhaled. “Okay, that makes me feel better. Thank you. How close are you to getting the background checks run?”
“Give me another half hour and I’ll have them done.”
“Same. Then we can sign out a car and pay a visit to the stuck-up folks at Orion School. I’m hoping they might have more insight on this scam artist than your friend did. If I had someone luring students to my door with any regularity, I’d work hard to identify the perpetrator.”
The door to Navarro’s office opened and Levinson emerged. He gave Kit and Connor a small wave, his smile tight as he departed.
Navarro closed his door and didn’t come out.
Kit let her sigh loose. Navarro hadn’t let his emotions dictate his investigation with respect to Levinson. That was how she should be treating Dr.Reeves.
Not Sam. He can’t be Sam anymore, even in your mind.
She looked at Connor to find him studying her carefully. “I know what we can do to try to eliminate your shrink as a suspect,” he said.
Hillcrest, California
Wednesday, April 20, 11:00 a.m.
Sam had finished his second pot of coffee and had compiled a list of five new possible victims when Siggy started growling and barking again. He’d been growling all morning, so Sam had started to dismiss it as background noise.
But this time, the growling was followed by a knock at his door.
The knock startled him, and he nearly knocked his mug over.
No more coffee for me, for real. His jitters had progressed to the shakes.
Reading dozens of missing-person reports wasn’t helping, either. Even if the runaways hadn’t been murdered, it was unlikely that many of them had landed in a safe place. His work at New Horizons made that all too clear.
Going cautiously to Joel’s front door, Sam checked the peephole and straightened abruptly. Kit McKittrick. With a man he didn’t recognize. They looked tense.
Foreboding shivered down his back as he opened the door. “Detective? How can I help you?”
She smiled at him tightly and the sense of foreboding rose to suffocate him.
“Can we come in?” she asked.
Wordlessly he stepped back, closing the door when she and the man were in Joel’s living room.
“Dr.Reeves, this is my partner, Detective Robinson.”
Oh right. Because Constantine had had a heart attack.
Robinson was a big, beefy man who wore an I-don’t-trust-you expression that gave Sam serious pause. It was like they were back to square one.
Sam wondered if he should hide Siggy, because his dog was still growling low in his throat. But that was ridiculous. He hoped.
“How can I help you?” he asked again.
Kit sighed and she sounded exhausted. Looked it, too. “May we sit down?”
He gestured to the sofa. “Go ahead.” He took the recliner but sat upright, his stomach twisted into a knot. He’d observed her for a few weeks now and something was not right. Something other than all the other shit that wasn’t right, anyway.
