“No,” Ki said. “I didn’t. I wouldn’t have been able to. They’re indistinguishable from actual pictures of someone. Good enough to fool Mirror Image. And every other program I’ve got that’s designed to reveal manipulated photos.”

“Then, how did you know?”

“It was a total stroke of luck. When I got hold of Gelfland’s college yearbook photo from the school library, I had no reason to assume it wasn’t authentic. So I scanned the internet with Mirror Image to pull up any other pics along with links to social media sites. One of them was to Schmidt’s post. The version on the right.”

“The real Stephen Gelfland photograph.”

Ki nodded. “You see when it’s logged as having been posted?”

Musil read the tag off the screenshot.

“Two hours ago,” he said.

Ki nodded again. “I clicked for the exact time and it was one fifteen. About ten minutes before I found it. It had just been put up.”

Musil looked perplexed. “I don’t understand. Where did the doctored photo come from?”

“The same place. That’s the unbelievable part. And the lucky one too,” Ki said. “Timing’s everything in life. I saw the real Gelfland face change to the fake face on-screen while I was looking at it.” He tapped the frame of his glasses. “Right before my myopic eyes.”

Ki stopped talking and waited.

Finally, Musil said, “Someone is trolling images of Stephen Gelfland and changing them into counterfeits.”

“You mean something,” Ki said, nodding. “Let it sink in. Nobody’s going to make a 24/7 career out of monitoring and changing Gelfland photos across the web. It has to be one powerful AI programmed for that single task. A dedicated Gelfland faker. Probably it cycles every few minutes or half hour or whatever. My guess is that it’s to assure somebody posing as Stephen Gelfland isn’t exposed by background checks.”

Musil was staring at him with incredulity. “The fake face must belong to the impostor,” he said. “I think he’s the man that left New Hampshire with the Stalwart.”

Ki gave another nod. “In my opinion as a humble analyst, you’re dead-on, bro. But this is way above my pay grade. I wonder who would go to the trouble of setting all this up? Who’d have the ability to do it? And why?”

Musil sat there thinking about those questions. Then he shook his head. Not a single answer had come to him.

He needed to talk to Leo Harris right away.

New Jersey

Clara was back home from Jersey half an hour before she expected the school bus to pull up with the girls. Leaving her SUV in the garage, she went straight into the kitchen to prepare their snacks. She’d baked apple peanut butter muffins the night before and had some ready-to-drink chocolate milk in the fridge.