Crush

workout, so she did me a huge favor. My office is only a few minutes down the road.”

Vail tilted her head back and appraised Dixon. “Now I know why you wanted to ‘squeeze in’ a workout today.”

Dixon blushed. “Karen—”

“Just giving you shit,” Vail said. She stole a look around. “Jimmy with you?”

Panda glanced at the wall clock. “Should be here in a little bit.”

“I’m gonna go shower and dress. I’ll call in the pizzas so we can grab and run. Meet you out front.”

“I’ll catch up with you,” Dixon said as she bent over to wipe the bench with her towel. “I’m just gonna snag five minutes in the steam room.”

As Vail headed toward the lockers, Panda said, “You doing upper body tomorrow?”

“Who knows.” Dixon tossed the towel across her shoulder. “Work has a way of interfering. But if not tomorrow, maybe the day after.”

Panda pulled a plate off his bar and set it down. “Last minute works, too.”

Dixon’s conversation with Agbayani flashed through her thoughts. She pushed it aside. She needed to find out if there was anything in George Panda worth pursuing. “You know,” she said as she tossed her towel into the hamper, “we should schedule a time to go to dinner. I may not be able to commit to a full evening until this case breaks, but I’m sure I can get away for an hour or two.”

Panda grinned. “I’d like that.”

AS EVENING FELL ON NAPA, it was a common time for people to get in their exercise after leaving work. But John Wayne Mayfield was heading to work, in a sense—a swing shift of sorts.

He stood outside the women’s locker room, his pulse pounding. Killing someone in a public place, where anyone could walk in on you, at any time, was the ultimate challenge. The ultimate thrill.

But he would have to be careful—being discovered in the ladies’ shower and dressing area, if there were women in there, was risky at best—and irreparable at worst. If caught, he would do his best to feign surprise at his bone-headed mistake of walking into the wrong locker room. Hopefully he could sell the “stupid me” act well enough to get him out of there without a call to the authorities.

Mayfield had already scoped out the women’s lockers during a slow time when almost no one was in the gym. He was thus familiar with the layout, and, as it was, he would enter and hang an immediate left, which would take him to the steam room. Veering right would instead take him to the locker area.

He wished he’d had time to watch the door, so he could know how many women were in there. But because of the room’s layout, he’d be able to enter and turn toward the stream room without being seen by others in the vicinity. That’s where he would go first.

Seconds ticking. Pulse pounding.

Mayfield pushed through the locker room door slowly, his head down. He moved in, turned left, all the while listening. The echoing sizzle of a shower in the distance. Eyes scanning the floor around him, looking for feet—for trouble.

He strode purposely down the narrow corridor, his shoes squeaking against the wet cement floor. There it was—on his left—the glass door to the steam room. It was opaque, the view impeded by thick vapor. He pushed in. The loud hissing of the jets and dense steam deadened all noise.

The odor of eucalyptus oil stung his nose. He hated that smell. It made his throat close down.

He stood there a second, his eyes darting around, looking for a body. There—sitting on the top step—was Roxxann Dixon. He moved forward, the swirl of steam moving aside as he approached, fearful of his presence. Like she should be—would be—in a matter of seconds.

FIFTY

Brix was looking at a database onscreen with Agbayani when an instant message came through:

I told my boss what you needed and he let me leave early. still in the executive briefing center. you ready to login with roundtable?

Agbayani typed back:

you bet. give me a sec.

“Hey,” Brix said. “We’ve got Microsoft online. Have a seat and Eddie will link us all in.”

Mann, Gordon, Brix, and Lugo took their chairs while Agbayani opened Office Live Meeting and got RoundTable online.

All of the task force members appeared on the large, wall-mounted flat screen. The 360-degree panoramic camera and associated software knitted them together into a virtually seamless image.

“Cool stuff,” Lugo said.

“We’re on,” Agbayani said. “Everyone, meet Tomas Palmer, Senior Security Program Manager at Microsoft.” Agbayani made introductions of the task force members. “The way RoundTable works is that you’re all on camera in the video panorama at the bottom of the screen. Whoever is speaking loudest will appear in a close-up at the top left.” He turned back to Microsoft’s RoundTable device, a small circular unit about the size of a dollar bill, with a central telescoping extension that contained the camera. “Tomas, it’s all yours.”

“I’ve got some pretty cool technology here, so I may as well use it to show you what I’ve got so far on your document.”

“Sounds to me like an excuse to play with the new toys,” Agbayani said.

Tomas smiled. “You know it.” He sat at the far end of a long, empty conference table. Behind him was a flat panel that nearly filled the wall. “I’ve got a monitor in front of me. I’m seeing what you’re seeing on the large screen behind me.” Images popped up; Tomas flicked them aside with his fingers.

“Whoa,” Brix said, staring at the screen. “What is that?”

“Surface technology. C’mon, Eddie, you haven’t told them about Surface?”

“Another time. The documents—”

“It’s okay, bro. I can multitask. Surface is a PC that’s embedded in a tabletop with Microsoft’s touch interface. There’s no keyboard or mouse. You move things across the screen with your hands and fingers. Like the technology Hollywood envisioned in the movie, Minority Report.” He swiped his hand across the monitor. Icons whisked by and spun across the screen. He spread his fingers apart and the image in front of him instantly enlarged. “Okay, here’s the document you sent me.”

“This is the PowerPoint file, right?”

“Yeah, and now I know why you told me not to look. Bad shit there, bro. Be really cool if I could help you catch this psycho sicko.”

“It’d be more than cool. You have any luck?”

“First thing I did was to take the jpegs that are embedded in the file and applied some new technology out of Carnegie Mellon. This stuff is gonna blow your mind. The computer analyzes the image and determines where in the world it was taken.”

“There are a few photos we really need to place,” Brix said. “If you could help with that, you’ll be my new best friend.”

Tomas’s eyes swung left, then right. “Right. Well, in spite of that, I do have some answers.”

“What does it do?” Lugo asked. “Look for similar shapes and landmarks?”

“No, not landmarks. That’d be too limiting. It records the distribution of textures, colors, lines, vegetation and topography in the photo and then compares it to the database they’ve created using GPS-tagged images in Flickr.”

“The online photo album site?”

“Yup. So here’s what I’ve got. The first three photos appear to be from Albuquerque, New Mexico, the next two from Southern California and the last two from Northern California.”

“Ray,” Brix said, “when the dust settles, contact Albuquerque PD and tell them we have the killer of three of