“I thought I was to let you know only if we came up with a negative,
Commissioner. That is, if we found that the subscriber’s number had not been assigned an IP at that time in question. But there was an IP assigned, so, yes, the subject was online.”
“I see,” said Blume. “Well thanks anyhow.”
More wasted time. Pernazzo still had an alibi of sorts.
“You’re welcome. Uh-” said Rosati.
Blume caught the monosyllable. “What? Were you going to say something?”
“No. Well, yeah, I suppose I was, but it’s like so obvious I don’t need to say it.”
“Let’s pretend I’m really stupid,” said Blume.
“Everyone knows this, but having an IP number assigned to your line doesn’t prove anything. I mean he could just have left his computer connected. I leave mine on for days, sometimes.”
“Right,” said Blume. “But this guy says he was playing an online game. Did you check that out?”
“No, I wasn’t asked to look into the sites he was visiting, just whether he was connected. I mean, like, you need a magistrate to subpoena the owners of the Web site the subject was visiting to check whether he was really there,” said Rosati. “Or you could just try to persuade the Web site owners to quietly release the IPs of users at the time you’re interested in. You’d still need the backing of a magistrate, though.”
“Which makes it difficult,” said Blume. “But let’s say we checked out someone and he was online and playing at the time, that would make a pretty solid alibi, wouldn’t it?”
“Definitely,” said Rosati. “Of course it could be anyone playing the game at that address, but if the IP matches the subscriber line, then we at least know someone was there at the time playing whatever the game was.”
“Poker,” said Blume. “Thanks, for the help.”
“Poker?”
“Hold ’em Vegas or something,” said Blume. Pernazzo was shaping up to have a good alibi, if it checked out. Now he would need a subpoena on the Web site, which meant going back to Principe, or a different magistrate. It meant a lot of paperwork and the end result would probably be to strengthen Pernazzo’s alibi. There would probably be a financial record of some sort if he was winning or losing.
“If that’s what he was playing, then he could have been using a bot,” said Rosati.
“A bot?”
“A program that plays for you. It’s called a bot, as in robot. Robot-bot. See? It’s like an abbreviation…”
“Yes, I get that bit,” said Blume. “Let’s pretend I’m not stupid anymore.”
“Yeah, well. It simulates a real player. You connect, start the program, and then go and do something else. That way you can play all night without having to stay awake. You can play lots of poker tables, and a decent program will beat beginners and pull in a small amount of profit. The casinos try to crack down on users who have bots, but since they deploy them themselves, it’s impossible to immunize their systems.”
“So you could use a bot to keep playing, and you’re not even there,” said Blume. “Where would you get a program like that?”
“You can buy them ready-made, they’re not illegal or anything. Or you could use C++ programming and build one yourself. But you’d need to know something about computers to do that. Does the subject know anything about computers?”
“Yes,” said Blume. “He does.”
“This is interesting,” said Rosati, who seemed to have forgotten that he was too busy to talk. “Using a bot as an alibi. I’m sure it’s been done before, but I’ve not come across it. It would be hard to prove. I’d be interested in hearing how this works out. Let me know, would you?”
“Sure thing,” said Blume. He felt an adrenaline rush. He was on to something.
Blume hung up and turned on his computer. For the next forty minutes, he queried the public records database, seeing what he could find about Pernazzo. Serena had been his mother’s name, and she had died three months ago.
Pernazzo had a driver’s license on which he had lost two points, an ID card, residence at the address where he lived. His declared income was pathetically low. His tax code corresponded to his given name. He now had a brief entry in the courthouse records as a result of his arrest at the dog fight.
He had no convictions. His birth certificate was dated 1978. His mother was registered as unmarried, the name of the father as “not given” and paternity “not acknowledged.”
Blume thought about the name plaque on the door. Pernazzo and T. Vercetti. He looked up Vercetti in the public records database, and was surprised to get zero results. He checked again, typing carefully with his one good hand.
No results found. Zero. Vercetti was a nonexistent name.
Blume tried “Vercelli” and found thirty-three entries for the municipality of Rome. But the name he saw had not been Vercelli. He tried Vercetti again, and again got no results.
Blume logged off the police intranet and went to the Google home page. With his middle finger, he slowly tapped in the name “Vercetti” in the search box and hit return. He leaned forward so quickly to look at what came up on the screen that he felt a pain shoot across his neck. Showing 1-10 of 765,000 results, said the page. The very first in the list displayed the name Tommy Vercetti. T. Vercetti. The name Pernazzo had on his door plaque.
Blume clicked on the link, and read:
Thomas “Tommy” Vercetti (voiced by Ray Liotta) is a fictional character in the Grand Theft Auto video game series. He serves as the protagonist, anti-hero and playable character in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, where he emerges as the crime lord of his own syndicate..
Not just elves and sorcerers, then. Pernazzo liked to play other games. Blume read about Grand Theft Auto, or GTA as everyone seemed to call it. By the end of the article, he had the feeling that he might be the only person in the world not to have heard of it before.
The idea was to shoot as many people as possible and rise in the criminal underworld.
He turned off the computer. Even if he could not ask anyone or get an investigating magistrate to give him a warrant, Blume was going back to Pernazzo. But as he stood up, the door to his office opened, and in stepped D’Amico.
30
A week in complete charge of the PR surrounding the stalled Clemente case had left D’Amico looking neater than ever. The whiteness of the French-cuff shirt peeking from under the shimmering gray of a finely cut high- buttoned jacked with peaked lapels was, frankly, a triumph.
Blume suddenly felt everything he owned was dirty and old. He sat down again.
“There you are!” said D’Amico, with the voice of an adult who has been playing hide-and-seek with a child. He stepped across the room to behind where Blume was sitting, and folded his arms on the swivel chair, so that he was looking down on the crown of Blume’s head.
“Maria Grazia is the investigating magistrate in charge of the Clemente-Ferrucci case. We’re treating it as one thing now,” he told the back of Blume’s head.
Blume half-turned backward toward D’Amico, but it hurt his neck.
“Move. You’re making me nervous back there.”
D’Amico came back around the desk, took the chair opposite Blume.
“You’re making people nervous, too, Alec.”
“Am I?”
“You come in here in a parlous state, start reworking the case which you are no longer on. That makes people who lack your commitment look bad. I just tell them that’s your American work ethic. But then you go and give them a real reason to be ner vous by meeting Sveva Romagnolo. It looked like a secret meeting, too.”
“You were watching?”
“Of course not. I am still your ex-partner, Alec. I don’t spy. But she was being watched over.”
“Watched over or just watched?”
