computer, leaning forward with his forearms on his thighs. And his left leg was jiggling. That was the tipoff, that nervous leg.
Sitting beside St Claire was Ben Meyer, who was as tall and lean as St Claire was short and stubby. Meyer had a long, intense face and a shock of black hair, and he was dressed, as was his custom, in a pinstriped suit, white shirt, and sombre tie. St Claire, as was
Meyer, at thirty-two, was the resident computer expert and had designed the elabourate system that hooked the DA's office with HITS, the Homicide Investigation and Tracking System that linked police departments all over the country. St Claire, who was fifty-two, had, during his twenty-eight years in law enforcement, tracked moonshiners in Georgia and Tennessee, wetbacks along the Texican border, illegal gun smugglers out of Canada, illegal aliens in the barrios of Los Angeles and San Diego, and some of the meanest wanted crooks in the country when he was with the US Marshal's Service.
Meyer was a specialist in fraud. It was Meyer who had first detected discrepancies that had brought down two city councilmen for misappropriating funds and accepting kickbacks. Later, in his dramatic closing argument, Meyer had won the case with an impassioned plea for the rights of the taxpayers. St Claire was a hunch player, a man who had a natural instinct for link analysis - putting together seemingly disparate facts and projecting them into a single conclusion. Most criminal investigators plotted the links on paper and in computers, connecting bits and pieces of information until they began to form patterns or relationships. St Claire did it in his head, as if he could close his eyes and see the entire graph plotted out on the backs of his eyelids. He also had a phenomenal memory for crime facts. Once he heard, read, or saw a crime item he never forgot it.
When Meyer and St Claire got together, it meant trouble. Vail ignored Naomi, who was motioning for him to come to his office, and stood behind Meyer and St Claire.
'Here's what I got in mind,' St Claire said. 'I wanna cross-match missing people and unsolved homicides, then see if we have any overlap in dates. Can we do that?'
'State level?'
'Yeah, to start with. Exclude this county for the time being.'
'Nothing to it,' Meyer said, his fingers clicking on the computer keyboard.
'What the hell're you two up to?' Vail asked.
Hunch,' St Claire said, still watching the screen. His blue eyes glittered behind wire-rimmed glasses that kept sliding down to the end of his nose.
'Everybody's got a hunch. I had to listen to Abel's hunches all the way through breakfast. A hunch about what?'
'About this new thing,' St Claire said.
'What new thing?'
St Claire's upper lip bulged with a wad of snuff. Without taking his eyes off the big screen of the computer, he spat delicately into a silver baby cup he carried at all times for just that purpose.
'The landfill murders,' he said. 'We're trying to get a leg up on it.'
'Well, Eckling's got seven days before we officially enter the case.'
'Cold trail by then.'
'Let's wait until Okimoto tells us something,' Vail said.
'That could be a couple days,' St Claire said. 'I just wanna run some ideas through the computer network. No big thing.'
'Who says they were murdered, anyway?' Meyer said.
'Hell,' said St Claire, dropping another dollop of snuff into his baby cup and smiling, 'it's too good not to be murder.'
'What's your caseload, Ben?' asked Vail.
'Four.'
'And you're playing with this thing?'
'I don't know how to run this gadget,' St Claire complained.
Vail decided to humour him. 'You can have the whiz kid here until after lunch,' he said. 'Then Meyer's back on his cases.'
'Can't do much in three hours,' St Claire groaned.
'Then you better hurry.'
Naomi finally walked across the office and grabbed Vail by the arm. She pointed across the room to Yancey's office.
'He called ten minutes ago. I told him…'
