“WE’VE TAKEN THE phone apart.”
Michael Voss plunked a four-finger-thick stack of papers onto the desk in front of Schäfer and Augustin. Beads of sweat trickled out on his bald egg, like little transparent flower buds.
“That was fast,” Schäfer said, impressed, making himself comfortable in his chair in front of the stack.
Voss and his colleagues from the Computer Forensic Investigations section had been busy investigating Lukas’s cell phone since it had been found at the Citadel two hours earlier.
Voss now pointed at the stack of papers in front of him.
“We extracted all the contents from the phone, and this is a summary of all the boy’s incoming and outgoing calls and texts over the last four months. His Google search history, photos and documents, social media profiles, streaming and search histories from Netflix, HBO, YouTube—you name it.”
“That seems pretty hefty,” Augustin remarked. “How can there be so many pages?”
“We’re talking about a kid from the online generation, so there’s page after page of searches and downloads. They don’t do much other than stare at their cell phones.”
Augustin pulled the stack of papers closer. She started flipping through, slowly, her eyes meticulously scanning the pages.
“Warcraft … war games … wizard power,” she rattled off. “Searches for role-playing gear, war games, samurai swords … Did you find anything conspicuous?” she asked, without looking up from the papers.
“We still haven’t gone through most of it yet. Like I said, we’ve been moving quickly, but so far the most interesting thing I’ve seen is the boy’s Instagram account.”
“His Instagram account?” Augustin raised a judging eyebrow and looked up at Voss. “The boy’s ten years old. Why does he have an Instagram account?”
“There’s absolutely nothing unusual about that. What is a little atypical for someone Lukas’s age is how topic-specific his posts are.”
“Topic-specific?” Schäfer asked. “What do you mean by that?”
“There’s a lot of Insta types out there,” Voss explained. “Most people upload photos of a lot of different topics to their profile: sunsets, birthdays, vacations, Halloween costumes, nature—a mix of everyday life. But there’s also a lot of Instagrammers who keep their profiles to one consistent topic. There are foodies who only share pictures of lumpfish caviar and that kind of thing. Then there are cake ladies, soccer bros, selfie girls, car nerds, fashionistas, and so on.”
“And?” Schäfer spun his index finger around in impatient circled to get him to speed up his explanation. “What does this have to do with our victim?”
“Lukas Bjerre’s Instagram profile is dedicated to …” Voss paused for effect and then point to his cheeks. “Faces!”
“I’m sorry?”
“Faces! More specifically to a phenomenon called pareidolia.”
Schäfer raised one eyebrow. “Parabolia?”
“No, this doesn’t have anything to do with parabolic antennae. It’s called par-ei-do-lia,” Voss enunciated.
“What the hell is that?”
“It’s a psychological phenomenon in which random patterns are interpreted as faces.”
Schäfer and Augustin looked at each other blankly.
“I’m sorry?” Schäfer asked running a tired hand over his eyes. “Patterns as faces?”
“Yes. So, you see a thing that doesn’t have anything to do with a face, but for some reason or other, your eye decodes it as if it did.”
Voss pulled a folder out of his bag and took out some photos, which he pushed across the desk.
“Look at this! No doubt you’re familiar with the stories about how some old lady in Colombia saw the Virgin Mary in an oil slick and believed it was a personal greeting from the powers that be. And a woman from Missouri identified Donald Trump’s face in a butter container. People claim to see the devil in a building’s façade, that kind of thing.”
Schäfer gathered up the photos.
He was aware of the stories, and even though the photo of the tub of butter clearly contained just random ripples in the churned cream, the first thing he thought of was indeed Trump’s fish mouth and billowing combover.
“No one knows what causes pareidolia,” Voss said. “But researchers think that we’re genetically programmed to decode patterns as facial features. They think it comes from back when people were running around with clubs and needed to be on their guard at all times. When you spotted someone out in the jungle, you needed to make a split-second decision: Is that a tiger or a tree trunk in the bushes over there, or what the hell is that? Basically, am I in danger?”
Voss waved his broad hands around in the air as he spoke.
“In other words, pareidolia is about being ready to fight. So we interpret some patterns as faces for the split second it takes us to recognize that, no, phew, that’s just a coconut.”
“And Lukas is—what?—a student of this phenomenon?” Schäfer asked.
“I don’t know if he has studied it, but he’s certainly interested in it.”
“Again—he’s only ten years old,” Augustin said. “How is he even aware of this face thing?”
“You don’t need to be a brain surgeon to know about it. Pareidolia has been trending on Instagram for several years. People take pictures of things that look like faces: electrical outlets, apples, the foam on a latte, clouds, manhole covers, anything at all that looks as if it has two eyes and a mouth. So no doubt Lukas just saw the phenomenon online and thought it was fun running around town finding faces with his iPhone.”
“I’m still not quite following,” Schäfer said skeptically, scratching his neck. “You said an apple? But apples don’t have eyes or mouths.”
“A perfect apple doesn’t, no. But if it’s lumpy and brown in certain spots, and those blemishes are positioned so that you’ve got a bit of a colon-hyphen-close-parentheses …” Voss drew a smiley in the air with a chubby pointer finger. “Then you’ll interpret that as a face.”
He took out his phone and typed something. Then he passed the phone to Schäfer.
“Maybe you have to see it to understand. This is Lukas’s Instagram account.”
Schäfer’s eyes slid over the screen. He slowly scrolled down with one finger.
It appeared that the account had been created nine months earlier under the profile name Facehunter8. Lukas had shared a total of 227 pictures with his 198 followers. All the pictures looked like faces, and Schäfer could suddenly see the angry eyes in an Audi RS6’s headlights, a cross-eyed octopus in a coatrack, a school backpack with the zipper open so that it looked like a big, shocked mouth.
His eyes stopped on the most recent picture on the page.
It had been uploaded two days earlier and depicted an old barn door with two round porthole-like windows staring like eyes and a metal bolt that looked like a closed mouth.
“Instagrammers use hashtags to help their posts surface to other people with similar interests,” Voss explained. “Pareidolia enthusiasts use the hashtags #iseefaces or simply #pareidolia. There’s more than a half million photos on Instagram tagged with #iseefaces.”
Schäfer zoomed in on the barn door. The picture was accompanied by the hashtags Voss had mentioned, but there were also other words. Words that made Schäfer’s gums itch.
#monster #die #satan #evil #Iwillkillyou
He ran a flat hand over his mouth and held the picture up for Voss and Augustin to see.
His gaze traveled from the one to the other.
“Where was this picture taken?”