“Now you got to take into account things like lens distortion,” she said, “and at first I thought that’s all I was seeing. But there’s something else going on. Depending on the photograph, the guy seems to be slightly different heights. Subtle—no more than half an inch difference. Here he is, standing next to the head of the World Bank. And here he is again, separate occasion, standing next to the same guy. Looks like everybody’s wearing the same shoes in both shots. Could be the heels or whatever, right? But—subtle, subtle, subtle—he’s got slightly different forearm spans. And the ratio between forearm span and femur span …” She jabbed at one of the pictures, which showed him walking alongside the prime minister of Slovenia. The outline of a bent knee was visible against his gray trousers, as was the line where the upper thigh turned at the hip. She pointed to a similar configuration in another photograph. “Same joints, different ratios,” she said, breathing deeply. “Something is deeply fucked-up.”

“Meaning what?”

She riffled through the picture book she’d bought in Budapest, and busied herself with the ruler again. Finally she spoke. “Ratio of index finger length to forefinger length. Not constant. Photographs can be flopped, but he’s not going to switch the hand he’s got his wedding band on.”

Now Janson approached the array of images. He tapped certain areas of the photographs. “Trapezium to metacarpal. That’s another index. Check it out. The ventral surface of the scapula—you can see it against his shirt. Let’s look at that ratio, too.”

With the loupe and the ruler, she continued to look for and find tiny physical variances. The length of the forefinger in relation to the middle finger, the precise length of each arm, the exact distance from chin to Adam’s apple. Skepticism melted as examples multiplied.

“The question is, Who is this man?” She shook her head bleakly.

“I think you mean the question is, Who are these men?”

She pressed her fingertips to her temples. “OK, try this on. Let’s say you wanted to take everything this guy has. You kill him, and you take his place, because you’ve somehow made yourself look identical to him, almost. Now his life is your life. What’s his is yours. It’s genius. And to make sure you can get away with it, you go on some public outings pretending to be the guy, kinda like a dress rehearsal.”

“But wouldn’t the real Peter Novak catch wind of that?”

“Maybe, maybe not. But say you also had the goods on him, somehow, knew about some secret that he had tried to bury … so you could blackmail him some kinda way. Couldn’t that make sense of it?”

“When you’ve got no good explanations, the bad ones start looking better and better.”

“I guess.” Jessie sighed.