The Frumious Bandersnatch

“I’ve requested a copy from Channel Four,” Corcoran said.

“Are they giving you one?” Carella asked, surprised.

“Why not?”

“Well, when I seized it as evidence, they threatened to sue the city.”

Corcoran raised his eyebrows and gave him a look intended to convey the knowledge that this was the Joint Task Force here, kiddo, this was TheSquad.

“Well, good luck,” Carella said, and shrugged, but he felt he had been reprimanded. Or perhaps warned. And he realized all at once that Lieutenant Charles Farley Corcoran did not want him on this team. He almost walked out. Something kept him there. Maybe it was the fact that Barney Loomis had requested his presence as someone he liked and trusted.

“What’s this about a walking pattern?” Endicott asked, and they all went back to reading Hooper’s report.

Apparently, the man on the left possessed a normal walking pattern. That is to say, an imaginary line drawn in the direction of his walk had run through the inner edges of his heel prints. The distance between the footprints of a man walking slowly would be about twenty-seven inches. The distance for a running man would be forty inches. A man walking fast would measure thirty-five inches between footprints. The guy on the left had been moving very fast. Thirty-three inches between footprints. But it was a normal walking pattern, and not a broken one.

The guy on the right, however—the one who’d rifle-stocked the black dancer and slapped Tamar Valparaiso—had been moving more slowly, twenty-eight inches between footprints. And his walking line indicated that he was partially leaning on his left foot and slightly dragging the right foot.

“Leaning?” Endicott said.

“Dragging?” Corcoran said.

Carella almost said “Shhhhh.”

Absent any perfectly flat footprints for the right foot,Hooper’s report went on,and given the slower gait and broken walking line, it would be safe to conclude that the suspect sustained a past injury to the right leg that manifests itself now in an existent noticeable limp.

“That’swhat it was!” Carella told them.

He was referring to what he’d noticed on the tape, but hadn’t been able to pinpoint until just this minute. None of the others knew what the hell he was talking about.

“So what do we do?” Endicott asked. “Put out a medical alert?”

“The report says ‘pastinjury,’ ” Corcoran said.

“How far in the past? Could’ve been last week.”

“A physician’s bulletin can’t hurt,” Carella said.

“You want to take care of that?” Corcoran suggested.

And all at once, Carella got it.

He was going to be the errand boy.

“What’s my role here going to be?” he asked. Flat out. Head to head.

“What would you like it to be?” Corcoran asked right back. Straight on. Toe to toe.

“I don’t want to be a gopher, that’s for sure.”

“Who says that’s what we want?”

“Whatdo you want?”

“I think it’s whatI want that counts, isn’t it?” Loomis said, stepping in. “I’mthe one those men will be contacting,I’m the one they’ll be expecting to pay the ransom, whateverthat’s going to be. If you don’t mind, gentlemen, I believe Detective Carella is as qualified as any man in this room to handle whatever may come up in the next few days. So I’d appreciate it if you didn’t assign him to running out for coffee and sandwiches.”

“I’d be happy to put out that physician’s alert,” Carella said.

“Thank you, Steve,” Loomis said.

“I’ll get someone in the cubbies to do it, don’t sweat it,” Corcoran said.

“Whoeverdoes it, let’s get itdone, ” Endicott said, reminding everyone that he was the SAC around here. “Let’s take a look at these DD reports, see if anything pops out at us. Steve, you want to walk us through?”

THE WHOLE IDEAof this thing was to keep the girl alive for forty-eight hours. That was all the time they needed.

Avery had got all the fake stuff for the gig from a man he’d done business with before, a purveyor of false identity documents like social security cards, birth certificates, divorce decrees, gun permits, college diplomas, drivers’ licenses, press credentials, and of course credit cards that actually worked when you used them. The man’s name was Benny Lu, or at least that was the name he used here in the United States, preferring the nickname to the full Benjamin Lu that was on his Hong Kong birth certificate, if even that was real. Benny had migrated to the United States four years ago, after he’d almost been busted by Hong Kong’s ICAC.

Avery had met him two and a half years ago, when he’d needed several false documents in order to casually prove to a certain rich fat lady in Palm Beach that he was, in fact, one Judson Fears of Gloucester County, Virginia, before she would let him into her luxurious waterfront mansion and incidentally her bed, the suspicious old bitch. He had later run off with $200,000 worth of her nice jewelry, thank you, but it served her right for not accepting him at face value, and besides, the jewelry was insured.

“I used to work in a Hong Kong restaurant,” Benny told him the first time they met. Benny was tall and slender, with a droll smile and eyes that always seemed amused. He had the long narrow fingers of a Flower Dancer, precious assets in the delicate operations he performed. “I was making coolie wages,” he told Avery, “until I realized I was in a position to be of valuable assistance to certain people who had need of certain information.”

Avery thought it odd that a Chinese man would use an expression like “coolie wages,” but he made no comment because he believed it was important for a person to listen carefully while he was being educated.

“This was six years ago,” Benny said, “when the economy in Japan was still very big. You had all these Japanese tourists coming to Hong Kong, spending lots and lots of money, and paying for everything with credit cards. These certain people came to me with what is called a ‘skimmer.’ What it is…”

A skimmer, Avery learned, was a battery-operated, wireless device that cost some three to five hundred dollars, and that fit easily into the inside pocket of Benny’s jacket. Whenever Benny swiped a customer’s credit card through this little machine, it read onto its very own computer chip all the data embedded in the card’s magnetic security stripe.

“I’m not just talking name, number, and expiration date,” Benny said, grinning at the simplicity of it all. “What the skimmeralso copies is the card’s verification code. This is what’s electronically forwarded from the merchant to the card company’s central computer anytime a purchase is made. The code tells the company the card is valid. Once you’ve copied that code, you have everything you need to make an exact clone of the card.”

He was still grinning three weeks ago, when Avery went to see him again. Benny Lu lived in a small development house out on Sands Spit, a half-hour drive from the city. Avery told him what he needed. A fake credit card that would enable him to rent a car…

He told Benny he’d be renting a car instead of a boat because over the years he had learned that you shouldn’t trust anyone but your mother, and maybe not even her…

…and a fake driver’s license to back up the name on the phony credit card.

“Piece of cake,” Benny Lu said, grinning.

His basement looked like a computer nerd’s hangout. Benny himself looked a little like Fu Manchu in the silk robe he was wearing, which he told Avery his sister who still lived in Hong Kong had sent him for Christmas.

“She says it’s no different under the Chinese,” he assured Avery, who didn’t give a rat’s ass about Hong Kongor the Britishor the Chinese. All he cared about was getting the stuff he needed. It was raining outside the basement windows. This was now the end of April. The kidnapping scheme had already been underway for almost two months by then.