Masked Prey (Lucas Davenport #30)(14)

When he pulled up to the house, the front door opened and a young woman walked barefoot down a stone walkway to the driveway. Lucas got out of the car and she stuck out a hand to shake and said, “I’m Anne-Marie, I’m Mrs. Winston’s assistant. They’re waiting for you in the tennis room.”

Anne-Marie had an attractive accent that might have been German or Dutch; and she looked German or Dutch, pretty, with short blond hair and square shoulders; she might have been a competitive swimmer. She led Lucas through a wide stone entry, down a stone-and-plank hallway past an oval living room designed for entertaining, with a huge black concert-grand piano in one corner.

They passed a couple of closed doors and finally stepped out into a semicircular room that Lucas would have called a family room, except the shelves showed off tennis trophies and the oversized windows looked out over a tennis court, which was built lower than the house so the room functioned as a gallery.

Blake and Mary Ellen Winston were sitting on a long flat couch positioned both to look over the court and to half-face another long flat couch. Anne-Marie said, “Marshal Davenport,” and turned away and left them.

Mary Ellen was a tall athletic woman with carefully colored and coifed dark hair around an oval face. She wore a high-collared white dress shirt and navy slacks, with coral-colored linen slippers that matched her lipstick. She got up and gave Lucas a tennis-callused hand to squeeze, then backed up and sat next to her son. Blake looked a little like himself, Lucas thought, when he was seventeen. Lucas hadn’t had the accoutrements, like the multimillion-dollar house, but there was a distinct resemblance.

Mary Ellen said so, to her son, with a smile: “The marshal looks more like you than your dad does.”

The kid said, “Nah. He looks meaner.”

“That’s something you develop on your own,” Lucas said, as he sat down. “If you’re gonna be a movie-maker, you’re gonna need a mean streak. If you don’t have one, you should get started on it.”

Blake, serious, lifted his eyebrows and asked, “Why is that?”

Lucas said, “Think about your basic hundred-million-dollar action movie. You’ve got to cast a lot of ugly people being stupid. Or fat ugly people. Have you ever thought about holding the auditions for those roles, about choosing the actors? How mean that must be?”

Blake put a finger to his lips and said, “No, really. I never thought about that.”



* * *



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LUCAS: “HOW DID you find the 1919 website?”

Blake explained about the face-matching software, originally developed, he thought, to detect unauthorized uses of copyrighted photographs.

“You’d have designers looking for photos for the website they were designing, and if they didn’t have a big budget, they’d steal the photos. Sometimes, for pretty big companies. Pro photographers started asking for software that would help track their photos . . . online photographs are basically enormously long strings of pixels that are unique—no two photos are exactly alike on the pixel level. You put in your string and the software looks for a matching string. Eventually, it got sophisticated enough to match faces.”

“Audrey wanted to match her face?”

Blake nodded. “Yeah. She wanted to see if her face was getting to be known. It’s not, much, there are only about a zillion girly websites doing what she’s doing, though she’s actually got some decent sponsors. Anyway, we found some headshots of her. One of them, a shot I took, was on the Nazi site. They lifted it off her blog.”

“Audrey said you had some ideas about the cameras used in the other photos.”

“Not the cameras so much as the lenses. The way the images are compressed, and the thin depth of field . . . you know about depth of field?”

“Yes, some.”

“Well, the combination of compression and thin depth of field tell you the pictures were taken with a telephoto lens. The same one, I think. All outdoors, in good light, but from long distances. To get those close-up headshots, they had to crop the photos quite a bit, then blow up what was left. That’s why they look a little grainy. If I had to guess, I’d say a decent one-inch camera with a long zoom lens. There are a lot of those around. Uh, you know about metadata?”

“Yes. Information attached to photographs, usually including camera settings and a time-and-date stamp.”

“It was stripped off the photos. I looked,” Blake said.

“Then the photographer is fairly sophisticated?”

He shrugged: “Everything you’d need to know, you could learn in an hour. So, no, he’s not necessarily sophisticated. He’d have to know about the metadata to get rid of it, but if he knew, then stripping it off is easy.”

“You know a lot about photography,” Lucas said.

“Blake had his own darkroom for film cameras, when he was twelve,” Mary Ellen said. “He and his dad built it in our basement, in Birmingham.”

“Dad said if I was serious about it, I should start with film,” Blake said. “I moved to digital pretty quick, but . . . film is good. Knowing about it.”

“How did you and Audrey start working together?”

Blake threw a quick glance at his mother and Lucas suspected he wouldn’t be getting the full story.

“We’re friends, from school,” he said. “She dated a friend of mine for a while. Then she started doing her website with, you know, selfies that she took with her iPhone. She even made phone videos of herself, really bad videos. Later she tried a real camera, a point-and-shoot that wasn’t much better. She’s smart, and she knew she had to step up her game. She knew I was into photography and video and we did a couple of shoots. She got some sponsors and started throwing a few bucks my way. Now we’ve got a thing going.”