most cases where it went. One account at a bank in Peterborough was used just for withdrawing large sums of hard cash.
Amanda looked over at Mike Wilson who was studying some of the details himself. “I think we might justifiably request a qualified accountant at this point.”
He ran a hand back through his hair, looking at a twisting column of numbers in one of the cubes with a perplexed expression. “I think you might be right.”
Denzil came in and grinned at the blatant despondency in the room. “Having fun?”
“Always,” Alison said sweetly.
“I have a positive result.”
Amanda sat up fast. “What?”
“The skin scrape is definitely nobody we know of. No record of that DNA in the Home Office memory core. I even squirted the problem over to Interpol. They don’t have it either. And before you ask, neither does the FBI.” He gave Wilson an affable smile. “You’ll get the bill tomorrow.”
“I live for it.”
“You want me to look elsewhere? Most countries will cooperate.”
“I think we’ll have to,” Amanda said. “After all, that DNA is our murderer. Mike?”
“I agree. Although, I’d like to suggest widening the search parameters.”
“How?”
“Organizations such as Interpol and the FBI simply store the DNA of known criminals. If it were a professional hit, I’d say search every police memory core on the planet. However, we favor the theory that this was a heat-of- the-moment killing, do we not?”
“I can go with that,” she said.
“Then our murderer is unlikely to be listed.”
“It was always a long shot, but what else can we do?” She pointed at the cubes full of financial datawork.
“If we can find a motive, we can track the murderer that way.”
“Crescent has a DNA-characteristics assembly program. I suggest we use that.”
Denzil whistled quietly. “I’m impressed.”
“I might be,” Amanda said. “If I knew what you were talking about.”
“The genes which make us what we are, are spaced out along the genome, the map of our DNA,” Mike Wilson said. “Now that we know which site designates which protein or characteristic, like hair color or shape of the ear, it’s possible to examine the genes which contribute to the facial features and see what that face will look like.”
“You mean you can give me a picture of this person?” Amanda asked.
“Essentially, yes. We can then ask Tyler’s friends and acquaintances if they recognize him…or her.” He waved a hand at the busy terminal cubes. “Got to be easier than this, quicker, too. Crescent can also run standard comparison programs with the visual images stored in our data cores, and with the security departments of all the other companies we have reciprocal arrangements with. I think you’ll find they’re considerably more extensive than the criminal records held by governments. For a start, between us, the insurance companies have copies of every driving license issued in Europe. And we already decided the murderer drove to Bisbrooke.”
Amanda studied him. This was suddenly too easy. Something was wrong, and she couldn’t define it…apart from an intuitive distrust she had for the corporate machinator. And yet, he was helping. Solving the crime, in all probability. “How long will it take?”
“If we courier a sample of the DNA over to Crescent’s lab in Oxford this evening, the program can crunch the genome overnight. We can have the picture by morning.”
“Okay. Do it.”
Amanda hated working Sundays. No way around it this week, though. And maybe, just maybe, she might get overtime, courtesy of Crescent.
When she arrived at the station there was an unusually large crowd of people in the main CID office for the time and day, uniform division as well as detectives. Alison gave Amanda a wry smile as she came in.
“The scene-of-crime team found something interesting,” she said in a low voice, suggesting conspiracy.
“No shortage of volunteers to go over this lot for us.”
“What?” Amanda asked. She edged through the group to look at the flatscreen they were all absorbed with. It was a split-screen image, three viewpoints of the main bedroom in Byrne Tyler’s apartment. Tyler himself was on the bed with a girl, their naked bodies writhing in animal passion.
Alison held up a carton full of memox crystals. “There’s a lot of them. Over sixty.”
“Okay.” Amanda walked over to the AV player and switched it off. “That’s enough. This is supposed to be a bloody police station, not a porno shop.”
They moaned, one or two jeered, but nobody actually voiced a complaint. The group broke up, filing out of the CID office with sheepish grins and locker room chuckles.
“They found three cameras in there yesterday,” Alison said. “Quite a professional recording setup. Looks like Tyler was something of an egotistical voyeur.”
“Was he recording Wednesday night?” Amanda asked sharply. At least that explained why he didn’t have a top sheet on his bed, she thought.
“No. Or at least, there was no memox of it. The AV recorder the cameras are rigged to was empty.”
“Pity.”
Alison rattled the carton. “Plenty more suspects: all the husbands and boyfriends.”
The little black cylinders rolled about. Ten-hour capacity each. Amanda found herself doing mental arithmetic. Assuming they were even half-full, Tyler had been a very busy boy. Popular, too. “Is there an index?”
“Yes.” Alison flourished a ziplock bag containing several sheets of paper. “In ink no less-I guess he didn’t want to risk this list getting burned open by a hotrod. Mostly just first names, but he got some surnames as well; and they’ve all got dates. They go back over two years. There’s quite a few personalities I recognize.”
“Okay, scan the list in to your terminal and run the names through a search program. Then see if a visual- characteristics recognition program can identify the girls we don’t have full names for. I want to know where all of them live, if they’re married or have long-term partners, parents of the younger ones, that kind of thing. Oh, and check to see if the crystals are there.”
Mike Wilson walked in past the last of the uniform division. His expression was bleak. “What did I miss?” he inquired.
“Tyler liked to record himself in bed,” Alison said. “We found the crystals.”
“Oh, shit. We’d better keep that quiet.”
Amanda frowned. Not quite the response she expected. “I was planning on it,” she said. “How did the DNA characteristics assembly go?”
He flipped open a shiny chrome Event Horizon executive cybofax and gave it an instruction. A young man’s face appeared, light brown hair, greenish eyes, a thin nose, broad mouth. There was a small digital read-out in the corner of the screen saying: 18 YEARS . It started to wind forward. The man began to change, aging. Wrinkles appeared, the cheeks and neck thickened; the hairline receded, gray streaks appeared. The display finished at eighty years, showing a wizened face with shrunken cheeks plagued by liver spots, and wisps of silver-white hair.
“Denzil was right,” Amanda said. “That’s impressive. Just how accurate is it?”
“Perfectly accurate.”
“You sound unhappy.”
“There was no positive match.”
“Are you sure?”
“Oh, we got hundreds of people who share eighty-five to ninety percent similarity. We just captured an image from every five years of his life and the computer ran a standard visual comparison reference program for each of them. In total we have access to pictures of two hundred twenty-five-million Caucasian males. Can you believe it? Nothing over ninety percent.”
Amanda couldn’t work out if she was disappointed or not. Mike Wilson had sounded so sure this was the solution, and now for all the astonishing technology and corporate data cores they had to revert to humble police work. “Give us the top twenty off your list, and we’ll start to work through them, check if they knew Tyler, alibis, the usual. English residents to start with, please.”
