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FACE THE TRUTH

Miller, his hair clipped high and tight around his ruddy face, his brawny frame spangled with patches and fixed with a gleaming badge, opens a small suitcase. Inside are familiar Art 101 tools: Bristol board pad, tracing paper, blue Staedtler pencils of varying hardness, kneaded erasers, shading stumps, fixative.

He’s got a scrapbook of his own drawings which, when compared to actual mug shots, are all astoundingly accurate. He has references to jog interviewees’ memories, too. A wire-bound flipbook called Identikit has images of every conceivable human facial feature and hairstyle. A separate three-ring binder, obviously decades out of date, is filled with page after page of ugly mug shots of hoodlums whose hair and dress is straight out of the ’60s and ’70s. They’re classified and subdivided to highlight various features on each glum visage: "Wide-Set Eyes" ... "Flared Nostrils" ... "Average Chins." Trouble is, people don’t much look like that anymore. So Miller also put together a homemade folder of his own, filled with photocopied magazine photos of Britney and various Backstreet Boys, to help him better draw "all the new kids, and all the new kids’ hairdos."

Like he does with every drawing, Miller affixes a piece of paper to a clipboard. With a plastic ruler, he measures out and scores a 4"-by-6" rectangle, bisecting it vertically and horizontally. An eighth of an inch up from the center line and one and three-quarter inches apart, he makes two marks: pupils. One and one-eighth inches down from the center line he notches the bottom of a nose. Five-eighths of an inch from that, a horizontal line marks a mouth. Then, his big, calloused hands grip a short stub of a pencil and start sketching delicately.

"I tell people we’re just looking for shapes," he says. "Only looking for shapes. Everybody looks different, every human being. But it all comes from the same block. Everyone. There are three different head shapes: triangular, oval — which most people seem to pick — and round. Some people have a blockhead or whatever the case may be, but that’s basically what we start with." His pencil limns a chin in gentle, elliptical arcs, seemingly delicate as an eggshell.

Features come next. And how accurately they’re drawn depends, of course, on how accurately a victim or witness noticed them in the first place. And some are more recognizable than others. "I show people ears [from Identikit] but for some reason, unless they have huge ears, long ears, they don’t know." Eyebrows too. "Unless they’re bushy or there’s something distinctive, a scar, they’ll just say basic eyebrows. People usually give you something on the nose. Or they’ll say average nose."

But, says Miller, "It’s not always about the face, believe it or not." He gives his first drawing, the guy in the puffy parka, as an example. It was the jacket that was his undoing. "We got him with just those few features — the jacket, the ears, the haircut, the nose. He could have no eyes, for all intents and purposes."

THE PENCIL IS MIGHTIER

It’s difficult to pin down precisely how many forensic artists use computers these days. Computers have obviously revolutionized law enforcement. Interconnected databases have led to countless more arrests in cases that might otherwise never have been solved. But in this area, they’re not always the best tools.

"You can tell a computer drawing right away. You see it on TV and it will be very perfect and very fake at the same time," says Miller. He points to a newspaper clipping showing two composites of the still-at-large MetroWest rapist. One is his own, drawn for the Westborough police, showing a swarthy guy with deep-set eyes, forehead worry lines, a thatch of thick hair, and a textured five-o’clock shadow. The other is computer-generated. It looks surreal, as if a pair of two-dimensional dead eyes had simply been grafted onto a formless lump of silly putty.

"This is a perfect example, awright?" he says. "What are we looking at? If you ever see that guy walking down the street, gimme a call. ’Cos I’d like to see him myself. But that’s what the computer came up with. It looks nothing like a real person."

Computers don’t sound like real people either. One aspect to a sketch artist’s craft that’s often overlooked is his or her role as a sort of de facto therapist. "Sometimes you have a female who’s been brutally raped, and just doing the drawing gives them their power back and makes them feel better, makes them feel like they’re doing something," Miller says.

The traumatic cases are tough on him. "The last rape I had was very disturbing. Even though I’m a police officer, I still have a family. And I just felt so bad for the girl. I almost cried, y’know?" And, for a moment, it seems like he might. "But, believe it or not, there are some real brave women out there. We had a girl, she was very upset in the beginning, but I had her laughing by the end of it. We just change the subject. We talk about the Red Sox. Ask what kind of music she likes, whatever the case may be. Boyfriend? Do you have kids? I just try to go off the beaten path a little. Do you want a cup of coffee? Want to go for a walk? Want to go out and get some air? Wanna draw?"

It’s not hard to picture. Miller peppers me with questions as I concoct an imaginary perpetrator, putting his face together with features picked at random. As he does, his affable nature — and his surprising affinity for alternative rock — shows forth. "Gimme a hairdo," he says. "What kind of hair did he have? Well, I’ll draw your hair. You got some sideburns going on. How old are you? What kind of music you like? Working for the Phoenix you must be an ’FNX typa guy, huh? The Killers? ‘Blister in the Sun’? That type of crap?"

I wouldn’t have pegged him for a Violent Femmes fan.

"I play that on guitar," he says. "You know why? It’s very easy to play. Real easy to sing too. Was the guy wearing a shirt, Mike?"

Yeah, uh, he was wearing a Killers T-shirt.

"A Killers T-shirt, eh?," he says, penciling in the ring of a collar. "Awright, Mr. Brightside."

He draws an earring in the guy’s right ear, penciling a little arrow off to the side to draw attention to it. Earrings can help catch a thief, but only if they’re distinctive. Otherwise, "the best thing for me, the best thing in the world is either a) a scar, or b) a tattoo. Or some kind of deformity or somethin’ bizarre."

It’s not only someone’s ability to blaze a criminal’s facial features or other quirks onto their cerebral cortex that makes a useful drawing. "I always ask people how old I am," Miller says. "I say, ‘You can’t insult me, but how old do you think I am?’ Usually, they say I’m under 40, which is nice." If they can gauge his age, their perceptions are probably trustworthy enough to work from.

But, "sometimes it doesn’t work out. I tell people right away, if it doesn’t work out it’s not your fault. It’s a very hard thing to do. I couldn’t draw my family from memory." Then again, some witnesses are very astute — and very particular. "This one girl was an art major, so she gave me a good description of the hat. It was kinda like, do you wanna do this drawing, or do you want me to do it? She was kinda all over my case. But you gotta go with the flow there."

It’s a convention among forensic artists that women make better witnesses than men. "They do tend to pay more attention to detail," Miller says. " ‘Yeah, he had a blue shirt on. A blue Aeropostale shirt. It sells for $24.95. I bought one for my boyfriend.’ "

I ask Miller if his job makes him look at faces, the ones he sees around him every day, differently.

"I’m just one of those people, and it’s part of being a police officer, I just pay attention to what’s going on," he says. "They teach you at the police academy to be constantly aware of your surroundings." When he goes to restaurants, he always sits facing the door. His wife knows not to even ask for that seat.

I ask if he thinks some faces tell a story — are intrinsically evil.

"No. That would be getting very close to profiling."

Does he try to bring feeling and emotion to his drawings, or does he try to be clinical, and just-the-facts precise?

"I just try to do the best job I can."

Does he have a favorite? A most rewarding sketch?

"They’re all rewarding," he says, fingering the first drawing he did. "This one was big because it was my first one, and they caught the guy right away. That was great. Because he was gonna kill someone. But I think the sexual assaults, y’know? When you do a drawing for a girl, and her eyes light up, and she says, ‘That’s him! How did you do that?’ That’s when you know you’re on the right course."

When he can look at a face staring back at him, detailed and lifelike through his deliberate scribbles, and the victim has that jolt of recognition, Dusty Miller knows he’s got his man.

"And then the chase is on."

Mike Miliard can be reached at mmiliard[a]phx.com.