“Five hours is a long way to drive. That’ll take you to Chattanooga. Jackson, Mississippi. Up into Illinois. Further.”
“This is my point. There are apparently a lot of people to kill within a day’s drive of Memphis, and we can’t be sure the police departments in all those cities are communicating with each other.”
He was still processing the big chunk of America that lay within easy reach of where he sat. “God. Five hours will take you to St. Louis. And think of how many states. Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Alabama, Illinois. Maybe Indiana. But St. Louis beats them all when it comes to killings.”
“Murder isn’t all that common and Windom needs enough data to work with. Thus, St. Louis.”
He looked to the northwest as if he could see St. Louis and its arched stainless-steel gateway. “What other instructions did you give your numbers-cruncher?”
“First, I asked her to filter out women who were definitely shot or knifed or basically just killed any other way besides being beaten to death. Bodies with no known cause of death? I told her to keep them in the data set. I also asked her to remove victims who were raped.”
“Wind all this back a minute, Faye. You’re putting a lot of stock in some flowers found in a few graves. It’s a big jump from a bunch of flowers to a rampaging serial killer. The odds are still hugely in favor of Frida being killed by an angry boyfriend. Like maybe one of those guys—”
He waved in the general direction of the cluster of men chatting several yards away. Linton saw him and pointedly turned his back.
“—or maybe a thief, or a rapist who didn’t have time to get what he wanted. In the grand scheme of things, people who just keep killing for no good reason are rare. Extremely rare, compared to all the regular old shitheads I deal with on a daily basis.”
She shifted herself on the bench, trying to find a cool spot of concrete and trying to think of a way to explain her logic to him. “You don’t have to agree with me. The citizens of Memphis pay you to follow your best ideas. It’s probably the most economical use of your time to go with the usual scenario. Do the people of Memphis want you to waste your time playing long shots?”
“Probably not.”
“Me? I’m just the woman you asked to be your go-between with a community that doesn’t like police officers much. Nobody’s paying me, so I can chase all the long shots I like. If I don’t break the law or get in your way, you can’t make me stop. Besides, do you really want me to?”
“Not particularly, but you can’t get insulted if I spend my own time chasing leads I believe in.”
“Shall I stop telling you about what Phyllis Windom did for me?” She waggled the phone at him. “I have news….”
“Go ahead. Give me your news that I didn’t ask for.”
“Fine. When I talked to Windom about how to massage the data, I told her to ignore bodies that were dumped, because I was only interested in victims who were buried.”
“That’s going to cut your numbers. It’s hard work to bury somebody, and a lot of killers don’t take the trouble. And also, there’s bound to be victims who get buried and we never find them. That’s why you bury people—to put them out of sight.”
“Isn’t cutting the numbers a good thing? We want to cut them down to one, right? One killer. And then we want to nail him.” Faye dragged a finger over her screen, scrolling through Windom’s massive text. “You’re right, though. It sure did cut the numbers. It cut them enough to make me think that we were headed in the right direction. I also asked her to slice the data by month, based on the victim’s estimated date of death.”
“Now you’re dreaming. You’re not always going to get that date, not if she’s been buried awhile.”
“Agreed. But Phyllis Windom is a guru of big data, especially partial data. She’s good at filling in the gaps.”
“If you say so.”
“I also asked her to go back twenty years, hoping that would give her enough data to do statistics.”
“Twenty years?” He laughed, and stretched his long legs out in front of him, crossed at the ankle. He looked like he wished very much that the concrete bench had a back. Faye certainly did. “Damn, woman. You don’t ask for much.”
“I wanted to get back to a time before this killer was active. And also, when you’re dealing with a guru of big data, you’ve gotta give her big data to work with.”
“You certainly did that.”
Faye tapped Windom’s attachment and took a look at her data. There were so many numbers. It was as if they were metastasizing on her phone’s screen, right in front of her eyes. Faye squinted at the screen, then gave up and pulled her reading glasses out of her purse.
“After that, I asked her to hand-prune the data.”
“Do what?”
“I asked her to highlight entries that looked promising, then look at the notes and use her own judgment about keeping each one.”
“Is that cool? Scientific method, double blind, and all that jazz.”
“We’re not writing a dissertation. Instinct and dumb luck work sometimes, you know.”
McDaniel laughed so hard that she thought maybe he was having a breakdown. The man had been through a lot. He stopped just as she gave him an uncomfortable “You okay?”
“So,” she continued after he pulled himself together, “hand-pruning the data. I told her that if anything in the police notes made it sound like it wasn’t our killer, because…oh, I don’t know…the victim had been dismembered and buried without her pelvis, then she should throw it out.”
“No pelvis? You still haven’t convinced me that we’re dealing with a serial killer, but you have a helluva imagination.”
“Maybe so, but Windom works cheap. And
