Deja Dead Page 0,158

clear and recognizable. Perfect.

I ran to the kitchen. Let it still be here! Throwing open the cabinet doors, I rummaged through the trash under the sink.

Yes! I washed off the coffee grounds and carried the cup to the computer. My hands trembled as I spread the calipers. The upright arm of the logo B measured exactly 4 millimeters across.

Selecting the resize function in the image editor I clicked on one edge of the B on the Rue Berger cup, dragged the cursor to the far border, and clicked again. Having chosen my calibration points I told the program to resize the entire image so that the B measured exactly 4 millimeters across at that position. Instantly the picture changed dimension.

Both images were now one to one. I looked at them side by side on the computer screen. The impression Tanguay had given showed a complete dental arch, with eight teeth on each side of the midline.

Only five teeth had registered in the cheese. Bertrand was right. It was like a false start. The teeth had gripped, slid, or been retracted, then bitten a chunk from behind the mark I was now seeing.

I stared at the trail of indentations. I was sure it was an upper arch. I could see two long depressions to either side of the midline, probably the central incisors. Lateral to them were two similarly oriented but slightly shorter grooves. Farther out, on the left of the arcade, was a small, circular dent, probably made by the canine. No other teeth had registered.

I ran my sweaty palms down the sides of my shirt, arched my back, and took a deep breath.

Okay. Position.

Choosing the Effect function, I clicked on Rotate, and slowly maneuvered Tanguay’s dental impression, hoping to achieve the same orientation as the mark in the cheese. Click by click I rotated the central incisors clockwise. Forward, then backward, then forward again, a few degrees at a time, my anxiousness and clumsiness prolonging the process. It took an entire growing season, but at last I was satisfied. Tanguay’s front teeth lay at the same angle and position as their counterparts in the cheese.

Back to the Edit menu. Stitch function. I selected the cheese as the active image and the Tanguay impression as the floating image. I set the the transparency level at 30 percent, and Tanguay’s bite mark grew cloudy.

I clicked on a spot directly between Tanguay’s front teeth, and again on the corresponding gap in the cheese arcade, defining a stitch point on each image. Satisfied, I activated the Place function, and the image editor superimposed Tanguay’s bite mark directly over that in the cheese. Too opaque. The cheese trail was completely obliterated.

I raised the transparency level to 75 percent, and watched the Styrofoam dots and dashes fade to ghostly transparency. I now had a clear view of the dents and hollows in the cheese through the impression made by Tanguay.

Dear God.

I knew instantly the bites were not by the same person. No amount of manual manipulation or fine tuning of the images could alter that impression. The mouth that had bitten into the Styrofoam had not left the marks in the cheese.

Tanguay’s dental arch was too narrow, the curve at the front much tighter than that preserved in the cheese. The composite image showed a horseshoe overlying a partial semicircle.

More striking, the person eating cheese at the Rue Berger flat had an irregular break to the right of the normal midline gap, and the adjacent tooth shot off at a thirty-degree angle, making the tooth row look like a picket fence. The cheese eater had a badly chipped central incisor, and a sharply rotated lateral.

Tanguay’s teeth were even and uninterrupted. His bite showed neither of these traits. He had not bitten that cheese. Either Tanguay had entertained a guest at Rue Berger, or the Rue Berger apartment had nothing to do with Tanguay at all.

40

WHOEVER USED RUE BERGER HAD KILLED GABBY. THE GLOVES matched. The strong probability was that Tanguay was not that person. His teeth had not bitten the cheese. St. Jacques was not Tanguay.

“Who the hell are you?” I asked, my voice raspy in the silence of my empty home. Fears for Katy erupted full force. Why hadn’t she called?

I tried Ryan at home. No answer. I tried Bertrand. He’d gone. I tried the task force room. No one.

I went to the yard and peeked through the fence at the pizza parlor across the street. The alley was empty. The surveillance team had