The telephone rang and Jess beat her to the handset.
“You’ve reached the marvelous Ellie Hatcher… Oh, you’re just the man I’d like to talk to. I hope you know how lucky you are to be working with my sister.”
Ellie smacked him on the arm and grabbed the phone. “Sorry, Flann. My brother got out of the butterfly net.”
“I just got a call from ballistics. They got a cold hit. The gun that killed Caroline Hunter a year ago was used to shoot another woman nine months earlier. Our guy’s been at it longer than we thought. There’s a third victim.”
AN HOUR LATER, Charlie Dixon hung up his telephone. He was angry. He did not like bad news. Only eighteen hours earlier, the FirstDate situation appeared to be under control. NYPD’s investigation had nothing to do with him. They were chasing down some stupid theory cooked up by a detective known as a wing nut. He had gotten worked up over nothing.
Now this.
He picked up his telephone again, punched in a familiar number, and asked for his boss. He tried to calm his nerves while he listened to the Muzak.
“Mayfield.”
“I’m sorry to bother you, sir, but there’s been a development.”
“I heard. Snow by six.” Dixon’s boss had a dry way about him, even in the face of stressful developments. That trait might explain where he sat in the hierarchy. Barry Mayfield oozed confidence, able to control any situation and the people involved in it without ever changing the serious but restrained tone of his voice.
Dixon, in contrast, honestly did not have the best personality for this job. Two years ago, during a particularly unpredictable turn of events, he ripped himself an ulcer that felt as if his intestines were marinating in Tabasco. Now Dixon was thinking about that ulcer again, convinced he was starting to feel the familiar hot inside of his gut.
“It’s about FirstDate.”
“I had an inkling. Those detectives again?”
“Afraid so.”
“Did they find a way to a court order? I told you before it wasn’t worth worrying about. The chances of this leading back to you-”
“It’s something else.” The something was worse than a fishing expedition at FirstDate. “I got a call from my PD source. Flann McIlroy just requested the file on the Tatiana Chekova murder.”
“Now, that is a problem.”
PART TWO
12
ENTERING THE EIGHTH FLOOR OF ONE POLICE PLAZA, ELLIE WAS as excited as a four- year-old on Christmas morning. She was anxious to catch a first-hand look at the department’s fancy new Real Time Crime Center. It might not wear a plush red suit or sport a jolly white beard, but the center was the high-tech feather in the department’s crime-fighting cap, a vast computerized clearinghouse to link information gathered throughout the city’s many precincts. The idea was to place a wealth of databases – parole records, prior complaints, 911 calls, tattoos and aliases, criminal histories – at the fingertips of detectives, in one centralized location.
Ellie thought the location looked just as it should, like the hub of an intergalactic star chamber. She marveled at the various maps blinking from at least twenty different flat-screen televisions hanging from a single wall.
“That’s the data wall.”
Ellie turned from the screens to find a smiling woman about her own age, with shiny, straight blond hair held back from her face by a barrette.
“I’m Naomi Skura. I’ve got your partner over there.” She gestured down an aisle of cubicles, where Ellie saw Flann peering out at her.
“What am I looking at?”
“Those maps track every piece of action going down in the city right now, in real time. Every 911 call, every arrest, every call-out. If we know about it, it’s there.”
It was the twenty-first-century version of the “hot spot” policing that had made Rudy Giuliani and his crime- reducing efforts nationally famous, even before September 11. Ellie followed Naomi Skura past the data screens to a long row of cubicles, one of which held a waiting Flann McIlroy.
“Did you tell her?” Flann asked excitedly.
Naomi gave a small laugh. “I haven’t exactly had time.”
“Naomi’s one of the crime analysts here. She works her tail off making sure the databases hold what they’re supposed to.”
The blond woman interrupted to clarify. “The commissioner unveiled the center before all of the databases were up-to-date. It was a good move – makes sure all of the new information going forward is entered and accessible. But we’re still working on configuring all of the old databases so we can get maximum accessibility. One of the databases that isn’t quite up-to-date is for tracking ballistic images.”
Ellie was vaguely familiar with the technology. “That’s where they break down information about a bullet so it’s something like a fingerprint?”
Naomi nodded. “During the manufacturing process, the metal of a gun’s barrel is shaped and molded. When a bullet is subsequently fired through that barrel, the gun leaves its individual mark – a fingerprint, as you said. We used to compare bullet fragments and casings by hand, under a microscope. The idea behind ballistics tracking is to computerize the ballistic fingerprint, so comparisons can be made in a matter of milliseconds.”
“That’s amazing.”
“But,” Flann interjected, “I’ve been told it’s not a priority.”
Naomi rolled her eyes at what was obviously a familiar conversation. “Hey, in theory we could have a federal database containing the ballistic images of every gun sold in the United States. But the gun lovers say that’s too close to gun registration. We here in the socialist republic of New York don’t have a problem with that, however. We just don’t have the money.”
“Like I said, not a priority. The point is, despite all that, Naomi went out of her way for us. After I put Caroline Hunter’s case together with Amy Davis’s, I asked Naomi to run the bullet from Hunter through the database. No hits, but she told me how the database was backed up. So I put her to work looking for vics of a similar profile. If a gun was used, maybe the bullet hadn’t been tracked for ballistics yet.”
“I looked at unsolved murders of white women between the ages of twenty-five and forty, killed on the street in the last three years. Your two vics were in Manhattan, educated, upper middle class. I found a couple of similar cases, but they’re suspected domestics still under investigation. Most of the other victims were demographically dissimilar – drug users or working girls. But since Flann was ragging about our substandard ballistics tracking” – she smiled at him – “I went ahead and took the bullet information from those women and added them to the database.”
“And it paid off,” Flann said.
“I ran Hunter again and got a match. Her name was Tatiana Chekova. She was shot almost two years ago – with a. 380 semiautomatic, just like Caroline Hunter. I haven’t had it verified by human eye yet, but the computer
