The Cold Room Read Online Free PDF

not a stick of furniture, not a single picture on the walls, not even a knick-knack. She could be out of my life in the time it took to pack her clothes.
    â€˜The taking of the victim’s organs, Corbin. You suggested three possibilities: that she was a drug mule; that her organs were harvested for sale; that she was the victim of a sadistic killer. Well, I can think of a fourth possibility.’
    â€˜Which is?’
    â€˜Which is that she was pregnant and her fetus was removed to prevent a DNA test for paternity.’
    On that happy note, we retreated to our shared office in the apartment’s second bedroom. A few years before, in a moment of foolishness, I’d invested a week’s salary in a digital camera, a scanner and an ink jet printer. The camera went into permanent storage on a shelf in my closet after a photography class revealed that I was without artistic ability. But the other part of it, all those little tricks a computer can do with an image, continued to attract me. Not that I’m an expert, though I’ve spent many hundreds of hours working in Photoshop. But I’m not a hack, either.
    I began my work by scanning the best of the photos I’d taken of the victim’s face into the computer. I used a filter called Unsharp Mask, which – despite the misnomer – sharpened the Polaroid photograph considerably. Still, the image that popped up on the monitor was marred by decay, by abrasions on the chin and the nose, and by a discharge of purge fluid that stained the mouth and chin.
    Starting with the abrasions and the purge fluid, I patiently transferred skin tone from the victim’s cheeks to the affected areas until her chin and lips were virtually unmarred. Then I transferred copies of her eye sockets, nose and the tip of her chin to an underlayer, before squeezing the original photo. The victim’s face was bloated and I wanted to narrow it without also narrowing bony prominences less subject to bloating. Returning these features to the original was a fairly simple matter.
    â€˜You’re bringing her back to life, Corbin,’ Adele declared when I’d completed this phase of the job.
    I might have mentioned Lazarus at that point, but as Adele was a Sephardic Jew, I didn’t waste my breath. And there was no bringing her back to life, either. Like any murder victim, Jane Doe #4805 was beyond even simple revenge. Nevertheless, if I couldn’t restore her to life, I could make her lifelike. And that’s what I did. I made her cheeks rosy, her lips red, her eyes blue, her teeth white. I sharpened her chin, darkened her brows and restored the shadows bleached out by the Polaroid’s flash. The young woman who emerged would not have turned heads on the street. Dominated by a pronounced overbite, her chin was slightly receding, her nose long, her face small and square. A thick head of blond wavy hair had undoubtedly been her best asset, but as I styled her hair with all the attention of a Madison Avenue hairdresser, I could only guess that she’d worn it loose.
    Finally, I printed several black-and-white photos, each time sharpening the contrast. I might have printed in color, but there was no way I could be certain that the hues I’d assigned to the victim’s cheeks, lips and eyes reflected her normal coloring. Nor could I know if the evident bloating had erased any fine lines around her eyes or at the corners of her mouth. What I did know, however, by the time I finished, was that I had a likeness that would be recognized by anyone who knew her, a likeness at least as good as a police artist’s sketch. And I didn’t have to beg to get it.
    I shut down the computer, satisfied with the result. Long ago, while still in uniform, I’d set my sights on a detective’s gold shield. I was at a distinct disadvantage, which I knew at the time. Promotion to the Detective Bureau was strictly at the discretion of the bosses and your