Die Trying

photographs of those five frames. Lots of copies.”
    The tech chief nodded slowly.
    “I can give you laser prints right now,” he said.
    He punched a couple of buttons and flicked a couple of switches. Then he ducked away and booted up a computer on a desk across the room. The monitor came up with Holly leaving the dry cleaner’s counter. He clicked on a couple of menus.
    “OK,” he said. “I’m copying it to the hard disk. As a graphics file.”
    He darted back to the video bank and nudged the tape forward one frame. Came back to the desk and the computer captured the image of Holly making to push open the exit door. He repeated the process three more times. Then he printed all five graphics files on the fastest laser he had. McGrath stood and caught each sheet as it flopped into the output bin.
    “Not bad,” he said. “I like paper better than video. Like it really exists.”
    The tech chief gave him a look and peered over his shoulder.
    “Definition’s OK,” he said.
    “I want blowups,” McGrath told him.
    “No problem, now it’s in the computer,” the tech said. “That’s why the computer is better than paper.”
    He sat down and opened the fourth file. The picture of Holly and the three kidnappers in a tight knot on the sidewalk scrolled onto the screen. He clicked the mouse and pulled a tight square around the heads. Clicked again. The monitor redrew into a large blowup. The tall guy was staring straight out of the screen. The two new guys were caught at an angle, staring at Holly.
    The tech hit the print button and then he opened the fifth file. He zoomed in with the mouse and put a tight rectangle around the driver, inside the car. He printed that out, too. McGrath picked up the new sheets of paper.
    “Good,” he said. “Good as we’re going to get, anyway. Shame your damn computer can’t make them all look right at the camera.”
    “It can,” the tech chief said.
    “It can?” McGrath said. “How?”
    “In a manner of speaking,” the guy said. He touched the blowup of Holly’s face with his finger. “Suppose we wanted a face-front picture of her, right? We’d ask her to move around right in front of the camera and look right up at it. But suppose for some reason she can’t move at all. What would we do? We could move the camera, right?> Suppose you climbed up on the counter and unbolted the camera off the wall and moved it down and around a certain distance until it was right in front of her. Then you’d be seeing a face-front picture, correct?”
    “OK,” McGrath said.
    “So what we do is we calculate,” the tech said. “We calculate that if we did hypothetically move that camera right in front of her, we’d have to move it what? Say six feet downward, say ten feet to the left, and turn it through about forty degrees, and then it would be plumb face-on to her. So we get those numbers and we enter them into the program and the computer will do a kind of backward simulation, and draw us a picture, just the same as if we’d really moved the actual camera right around in front of her.”
    “You can do that?” McGrath said. “Does it work?”
    “Within its limitations,” the tech chief said. He touched the image of the nearer gunman. “This guy, for instance, he’s pretty much side-on. The computer will give us a full-face picture, no problem at all, but it’s going to be just guessing what the other side of his face looks like, right? > It’s programmed to assume the other side looks pretty much like the side it can see, with a little bit of asymmetry built in. But if the guy’s got one ear missing or something, or a big scar, it can’t tell us that.”
    “OK,” McGrath said. “So what do you need?”
    The chief tech picked up the wide shot of the group. Pointed here and there on it with a stubby forefinger.
    “Measurements,” he said. “Make them as exact as possible. I need to know the camera position relative to the doorway and the sidewalk level. I need to know the focal length of the camera lens. I need Holly’s file photograph for calibration. We know exactly what she looks like, right? I can use her for a test run. I’ll get it set up so she comes out right, then the other guys will come out right as well, assuming they’ve all got two ears and so on, like I said. And bring me a square of tile off the store’s floor and one of those smocks the counter woman was wearing.”
    “What for?” McGrath said.
    “So I can use them to decode the