The Inquisitor's Key (Body Farm 7)

“What’s so special about it, besides the subject matter?”

“The image is so faint, so superficial — it’s only on the surface of the fibers, not soaked in. It’s barely there at all. No brushstrokes; no snow fencing.”

“Snow fencing?”

“If you brush paint or pigment on fabric — even a really, really light coat — it piles up on one side of the fibers,” she explained, “like snow drifting against a fence. Tough to avoid that. Then there’s the way the image jumps out at you when you look at the photo negative of it. More lifelike than the positive, but more ghostly, too. So it really is an interesting mystery.”

“Especially for an artist-turned-detective, like you.”

“Absolutely. Anyhow, sitting there in that classroom that day, seeing the slides and hearing about this mystery, I got cold chills — I thought I might even throw up — because all of a sudden I knew. At the end of the class, I went up and said to Randy, ‘I know how they did it.’ He laughed and said, ‘Yeah, right.’ So I went home that night, got my friend Tyler to come over and pose for me, and I did it.”

“Did what, exactly?”

“I made an image of Tyler, on fabric, that had all the characteristics of the Shroud. It was on a linen handkerchief. It had no brushstrokes, it didn’t soak into the fibers, and when I took a photograph and looked at the negative, it had that same 3-D effect and that same ghostly look.”

“That’s amazing,” I said. “So sitting in a UT classroom one afternoon, you solved a mystery that was six hundred and fifty years old? How’d you do it — and why didn’t I pay more attention at the time?”

I could practically hear her shrug. “It wasn’t a murder case. And I was just a lowly student.”

“One thing I don’t get, Emily. I stayed up late last night researching the Shroud on the Internet, and everything I read — even recent stuff, with science in it — still claims there’s no way to duplicate that image. Have you ever sent your article to the people who say that?”

“Ha.” It wasn’t really a laugh. “I sent that article all over the place. I even demonstrated the technique, on camera, to a History Channel crew that was filming a documentary about the Shroud. The Shroudies — that’s what I call the die-hard believers — were incredibly hostile. I got hate mail: letters saying I was doomed to hell, letters calling me a Christ killer, letters threatening my life. So yeah, I’d say I described my work to some of the people who say that. And they were none too happy.”

“How’d you do it, Emily? Tell me about the technique.”

“Simple. Incredibly simple. Dust transfer. Medical illustrators use it all the time. I used it all the time, when I was a medical illustrator. You create the image on one surface, using charcoal or red ochre or—”

“Red ochre?”

“A pigment. Ferrous oxide — rust, basically. Ochre’s found in clays all over the world, in various shades. Red ochre — the best red ochre — comes from southern France.”

The hairs on the back of my neck twitched. “Southern France?”

“Yeah, somewhere down around Provence; I forget where. It was used in the cave paintings in France and Spain — fifteen, twenty, thirty thousand years ago. Dust transfer, too. Those paintings weren’t actually paintings; they were illustrations. They’d sketch the outlines of the figures — horses or bulls or whatever — with a burned stick, then rub on red ochre to add color.”

I’d thought I was excited when I first dialed Emily’s number; now, I was beside myself. I felt my hands shaking as I cradled the phone to my ear with one hand and took notes with the other. “And that’s how you made the image of your friend Tyler? You just rubbed dust onto the handkerchief?”

“Ah, no. It was a little more complicated than that. No snow fencing allowed, remember? So I added a step. I used a soft brush, dipped in dry, red-ochre powder, to dab an image of Tyler’s face onto a piece of newsprint. No outlines, just shading with dust; heavy in the high spots — the bridge of the nose, the eyebrows, and so on — and light in the low spots. I dabbed very gently, from different directions, so there wouldn’t be any strokes. Once I had a dense, smooth image, I laid the handkerchief on top and rubbed it with the back of a wooden spoon.”

“Like doing a brass rubbing?”

“Sort of, but much less pressure. So the cloth picked up only trace amounts of the pigment.”

“It wasn’t too faint to be seen?”

“You’d be surprised. It takes only a tiny, tiny bit of red ochre to stain the fabric. If you get it on your clothes, it’s tough to get out.”

“So you don’t have any trouble believing that an image created in this way could survive for hundreds of years?”

“Hell, I don’t have any trouble believing it could survive for thousands of years. Some of those cave paintings have been on the walls for thirty thousand years. The fabric of the Shroud, on the other hand: That I’m not so sure about. And if I remember right, Randy Bresee seemed doubtful that a piece of first-century linen could hold up this long.”

“But in either case — first century or fourteenth — you’re sure it’s a fake.”

“Define fake. I’m sure it’s an illustration, Dr. B — I’d stake my life on that. I think it was created during the Middle Ages. And I’ve got a pretty good idea who did it. But fake? That implies fraud or deception. And there’s a chance — a small chance, at least — that it wasn’t created to defraud or deceive.”

“I’m afraid I’m not following you, Emily.”

“Okay, this might sound far-fetched,” she said, “but just consider this scenario for a second. What if the Shroud was created in the spirit of an autopsy photo? Back in the days before photography existed. What if it was an attempt to capture a moment, to document exactly how Jesus looked when he was taken down from the cross?”

I hadn’t expected this wrinkle in the Shroud. “But you just said you thought it was made in the Middle Ages. So how could it capture a moment that happened fourteen centuries before?”

She sighed. “Okay, here’s where it gets far-fetched. Suppose there was an earlier Shroud, one that did date back to the first century. Suppose that this original Shroud gradually starts to fade and crumble. Finally, suppose that in the thirteen hundreds, a brilliant artist is commissioned to make an exact copy, to preserve the image for another thousand years.”

“Suppose pigs can fly,” I said. “You’re right; that sounds farfetched. If there was an ancient, authentic, first-century Shroud that got copied in the thirteen hundreds, what happened to it? Wouldn’t somebody have saved it, even if it was in shreds? I can’t imagine commissioning a copy but trashing the original.”

“It’s a stretch, I grant you,” she conceded. “I came up with it as a way to mesh faith with facts — the radiocarbon dating, the presence of iron oxide in the image, the good condition of the linen. It worked, sort of, for a while. Before I floated that idea, none of the Shroudies would give me the time of day.”

“And after?”

“After,

one of the Shroudie Web sites actually posted my article. Briefly. But I still got hate mail and threatening phone calls.”

“I admire your efforts to reconcile religion and science,” I said. “But I’m not convinced. Remember Occam’s razor?”

“How could I forget? You drummed it into our heads over and over. ‘The simplest explanation that fits the facts is usually correct,’ right?”

“Exactly. So what’s the simplest explanation for an image of Jesus that first surfaces in the Middle Ages — the heyday of fake relics — on fabric that C-14 labs tell us is fourteenth century? I can’t help thinking it’s a fake, created to attract pilgrims to Lirey, the French village where it appeared in 1357.”

“I know, fakery fits the facts.” She sighed. “And yeah, it’s a lot simpler than my scenario.”

“Can I circle back to something? You said you think you know who made the Shroud. Who?”

“Ah. My money’s on Giotto di Bondoni,” she said at once. “Brilliant artist. Crucial, crucial figure in the transition from medieval art to the Renaissance. Giotto’s people look real, three-dimensional, not flat and stylized like medieval icons. Late twelve hundreds, early thirteen hundreds, so the timing’s right. The style’s right, too.”

“How so?”

“One, the guy on the Shroud is long and thin, and Giotto’s figures tend to be long in the face and in the body. Two, religious art was his bread and butter, but Giotto himself was a skeptic. Three, he was a notorious prankster. Think about it: If you’re a religious artist and a religious skeptic, what would be the ultimate prank? How about faking the burial shroud of Jesus — and getting away with it? Be tough to top that, wouldn’t it?”