Vail's response caught everyone off guard. They had never heard their boss so vitriolic, so openly angry.
'There's still the big question,' said Flaherty. 'How did he locate the serial killer and how does he trigger him?'
'There's somethin' we're all overlookin',' said St Claire. 'There were twenty-three other tapes admitted into evidence in the Stampler trial.'
'Twenty-three other tapes?' Vail said.
'I remember that,' Venable said. 'Don't you remember, Marty? Judge Shoat wanted to review all the tapes Dr Arrington made with Stampler to justify the agreement to send Stampler to Daisyland.'
'Hell, I forgot all about it,' said Vail. 'I never got them back.'
'Molly Arrington did,' said St Claire. 'About a week after the trial ended. She's had 'em for ten years, if she kept 'em.'
'Why wouldn't she?' Parver offered. 'Seems to me they'd be great research material.'
'Which brings up a point,' suggested Venable. 'Maybe you've been going about this problem backwards.'
'What do you mean?' Stenner asked.
'Maybe Stampler didn't locate the serial killer,' Venable answered. 'Maybe the killer came to him.'
'What say, Raymond?' Terry asked. 'Want to go down to the commissary, eat with the inmates once before you leave?'
'I've gone ten years without eating with them,' Vulpes answered, 'why break my string now? I'll wait until we get downtown, have a hot fudge sundae and a hot dog.'
Terry laughed. 'You and your hot fudge sundaes. Gotta lock the door behind me. Y'know, rules.'
'Sure. What's one more hour, more or less. Besides, I got to pack up my tools.'
'Right. I'm proud of you, Raymond.'
'Thanks, Terry. I'm going to miss you.'
'Me, too.' He laughed. 'Hell, you're the only one I can talk to around here, gives me an answer that makes any sense. I'll bring you back a Coke.'
'Thanks.'
Terry pulled the gate closed behind him and key-locked it. Vulpes listened to his footsteps fade down the hallway. He opened one of the cabinets in the repair shop, took out a VCR, and put it on his worktable. He then took a small screwdriver and removed four screws from each side of the machine's cover and slid it off. He placed the cover on its side, so as to obscure the machine from the doorway.
He looked across the quadrangle at the purchasing office opposite his window. It was a small office run by three women. Two of them were standing in the doorway. The third, Verna Mableton, was pacing back and forth in front of the windows, talking on her portable phone. She waved the other two women on and they left. She sat on the corner of her desk and kept talking.
Vulpes watched her without any expression. Occasionally he glanced at the door to the repair shop.
Inside the VCR was a small, handmade computer. It was six inches long, four inches wide, and two inches deep and looked like a small keyboard with a tiny, oblong digital-readout screen above the keys. Beside it was a black box, three inches square and two inches deep. He took the two units out, laid them on the desk, and monitored the door while he attached the black box to the minicomputer with a two-inch piece of telephone wire.
Vulpes was proud of the minicomputer. It was basically a modem with a keyboard and he had made it from scratch. He was even prouder of the transmission box. He had waited patiently for more than a year until one of the purchasing department's computers had gone down. He suggested waiting until Saturday to repair it, when nobody was in the office. The guard had waited outside, sitting in the sun. Vulpes had dismantled the portable phone and sketched the circuitry. It had taken him five months, getting a piece at a time with his regular orders so they wouldn't become suspicious, to get the materials he needed. It took another four months to duplicate the radio phone in the purchasing office. Basically it was nothing more than a dialling device for the modem.
