The Inquisitor's Key (Body Farm 7)

“But wait — if it’s a prank, doesn’t that contradict your autopsy-illustration theory?”

“I’m not head over heels in love with that theory. I offered it as an olive branch to the Shroudies. And they clubbed me over the head with it.”

“So if Giotto wasn’t copying an earlier Shroud — if he did it as a prank, or a fake, or whatever — then it’s not a likeness of Jesus, or of anybody, for that matter. He could just make up any old face, right? He wouldn’t have needed a human model.” I was asking for two reasons: I needed to lay my Avignon hypothesis to rest once and for all, and I was still intrigued by Miranda’s snuff-film theory — a theory that resembled Emily’s autopsy-photo idea, but with a sinister twist.

“Occam’s razor, Dr. B. Giotto was an artist. Artists use models. Of course there was a model.”

“But the guy in the painting—”

“It’s not a painting,” she interrupted. “It’s an illustration.”

“Okay, okay, the guy in the illustration: Would his dimensions, his stature, match the stature of the model?”

“Absolutely, if the artist was doing a life-size illustration,” she said. “A good artist can draw exactly to scale. When I was a medical illustrator, I did it all the time.”

Exactly to scale: The words sliced through my Avignon theory like a razor, parting and crumbling the hypothesis like ancient, fragile linen.

* * *

An hour later, I was sprinting up the staircase of the Hotel Diplomatic and pounding on Miranda’s door. “Miranda, Miranda, wake up!” I drummed again, louder, hoping she hadn’t sallied forth in search of coffee and breakfast.

“Jeez, what the hell? Just a second.” A moment later the door was opened by a bleary-eyed Miranda, wearing only a long T-shirt. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” I said. She glared, plucking twists of toilet paper from her ears. “Sorry, I thought for sure you’d be up already.”

“Man, I’d just gotten to sleep,” she grumbled. “Be grateful you got a room on the back side of the building. Away from the sirens and car alarms that blared all night long.” She pressed her palms against her eyes. “So, what’s up — besides you, early bird?”

“This,” I said, stepping aside to show her the Shroud, which I’d unrolled in the hallway again.

“I’m thinking Housekeeping’s gonna do some damage when they run the vacuum cleaner over that,” she said, but I could see her curiosity awakening.

“I just talked to Emily Craig.”

“Emily? In Kentucky?” I nodded. “Just now?”

“Maybe an hour ago.”

“Betcha woke her up, too, didn’t you?”

“Well, yeah. I did wake her up. But that’s not the point.”

“Might’ve been the point to Emily. Are you about to tell me what you think the point is?”

“I am. Emily was explaining how the Shroud could’ve been made. A dust-transfer illustration — like a cave painting, or a brass rubbing.” Miranda nodded, rubbing sleep from her eyes. “She thinks the Shroud was made by a medieval artist named Giotto. Giotto was—”

She fluttered a hand in the air. “Yeah, yeah, Giotto and I go way back. I minored in art history.” She pondered. “Okay, stylistically, Giotto seems plausible.”

“But Giotto’s not the point, either,” I said.

She sighed. “Anybody ever mention that you take a long damn time to get to the point?”

“I’m getting there, I’m getting there. So Emily’s going on about how a good artist can draw to scale. Exactly to scale. Which is just rubbing my nose in the fact that the Shroud guy isn’t our Avignon guy. Can’t be.”

“Because our Avignon guy’s six inches too short.”

“Right. The Shroud guy is ten percent taller. But then, after I hung up, I thought, hmm.”

“Don’t tell me, let me guess. The hmm—that’s the point.”

“Exactly the point, Miss Smarty-Pants. Because after I thought, hmm, I thought, If he can draw exactly to scale, maybe he can scale it up, too. Why not larger than life? So I found a copy shop. Hey, you know the Italian word for ‘photocopy’?” She shook her head wearily. “Fotocopia. Isn’t that great? Anyhow, I found a fotocopia shop. Look.”

I knelt and laid a photocopy over the face on the Shroud. It was a full-frontal image of the Avignon skull. I’d taken the CT scan to the fotocopia shop, enlarged it to 110 percent of actual size, and printed it on clear Mylar film. When I moved out of the way, Miranda gasped. “Oh, my God, it is him — the fit’s perfect now!”

I couldn’t help preening. “See? The hmm was important, right?”

“No shit, Sherlock. Very important.”

The effect created by the overlay was almost like X-ray vision; almost as if we were looking through the face on the Shroud and seeing the bones beneath. I’d used this technique, facial superimposition, in several cases over the years: superimposing photographs of missing persons onto skulls that turned up, seeing if the face fit the skull. Most times the fit was terrible — the eyes floated out beyond the edges of the skull, or the nose hovered in the middle of the teeth, or the skull’s chin was twice as wide as the one in the photo — but sometimes, like now, everything on the face aligned with everything on the skull.

In a court of law, facial superimposition couldn’t be used to prove an identification; it could be used only to exclude one — to say “No, that face can’t possibly fit that skull.” If the Shroud face hadn’t aligned with the Avignon skull — the scaled-up skull — I’d have concluded once and for all that the portrait in Turin and the bones in France belonged to different men. But this was a better fit than I could have imagined, and Emily Craig’s confident assertion — that a good artist can draw exactly to scale — no longer struck me as artistic license, as illustrator’s exaggeration.

I fetched my tape measure, and Miranda and I took measurements from the Shroud to compare with those from the bones. We couldn’t get as many measurements as I’d hoped, because the Shroud’s image was vague, the landmarks tough to pinpoint. It was like examining a newspaper photo through a magnifying glass: the closer you look, the less you see. Still, the few solid measurements we managed to get — overall stature, femur length, nasal breadth, nasal length — fit well, once we scaled up the bone measurements. Even the skeleton’s leggy, storklike proportions — the short trunk and long limbs — were accurately rendered on the Shroud. “Everything’s the same, just ten percent bigger,” Miranda said. “Why do you suppose he did that?”

I shrugged. “Maybe he wanted it to look more impressive.”

She laughed. “Maybe he was getting paid by the foot.”

I laughed, too. “We can probably never prove it, but I feel sure. This guy on the Shroud is our guy from the palace.”

“But who is our guy?” she said. “Is it Eckhart, or is it Jesus?”

“That, Miranda, is the million-dollar question.”

CHAPTER 14

A5 Motorway, Italian Alps

The Present

“ In-ter-esting.” Miranda was scrolling down the screen of her iPad as the car careened through a curve near the Mont Blanc Tunnel on our drive back to Avignon.

“How can you read on these roads without getting carsick? I’d’ve thrown up before we got out of Turin if I tried that.”

“It’s a gift,” she said. “I have many. Now shut up and drive. And listen. Three interest items about the Shroud. Interest item number one: In the 1990s, a prominent microscopist named Walter McCrone found red ochre in the image on the Shroud — and vermilion pigment in the so-called bloodstains.”

“That would explain why those are bright red,” I said. “I was gonna circle back to that at some point. Since when is dried blood cherry red? Every death scene I see, dried blood’s almost black.”

“Right. The point is, this microscopist McCrone seems to support Emily’s position. Interest item number two: When the Shroud first surfaced in Lirey, France, a bishop in a nearby town g

ot suspicious. He poked around, asked a lot of questions, and eventually wrote to Avignon to warn the pope that it was a fake—‘cunningly painted,’ he said — created to draw pilgrims to Lirey. What’s the catchphrase these days? ‘Faith-based tourism’? Ha. This sounds like a case of fake-based tourism.”

“Did this sleuth of a bishop happen to finger Giotto as the cunning painter?”

“He did not,” she said, “but I’m glad you asked, because that brings us to interest item number three. In June of 2011, an Italian art historian, one Luciano Buso, announced that he’d found an artist’s signature — guess whose? — hidden in the Shroud. Somewhere around the face, supposedly.” She unfastened her seat belt, and the car began beeping in alarm. She clambered out of her seat, squeezing her way into the back.

“What are you doing?”

“Getting the Shroud.” She wormed her way back to the front, belted in, and began unrolling the giant print. One end of it flopped halfway across the windshield, and I nearly ran off the road before I managed to bat it away.

“Are you crazy? There are so many better reasons to die than this.” I pulled onto the shoulder and parked.

“Sorry; it got away from me for a second there.” She hopped out of the car, laid the print on the hood, and unrolled it as far as the face. “Come help me look.” She pored over the image, squinting and frowning. “I don’t see a damn thing that looks like ‘Giotto.’ Do you?”

“No,” I said, “but that swirly bit around the eye looks kinda like a doggie.”

She retrieved her iPad from the floorboard and did further searching. “Okay, here’s the picture this art historian gave to the media. A close-up of the neck, showing the signature.” She enlarged the picture and studied the screen. “Hmm.” Then she studied our immense, high-resolution print again. “Hmmmmm.”

“Hmmmmm, what? I’m assuming the hmmmmm is important.”