“Well, I can’t be there by then. I need to…” I could see Tessa straining to listen in. I rephrased what I was about to say just in case she heard me. “I need to take care of a few things. I can’t get there until one at the earliest.”
“OK. I’ll call you if I find out more.”
“OK. See ya soon.”
As I hung up, Tessa asked suspiciously, “What was all that about?”
The case had just become a little more complex, but I couldn’t get into all of it with Tessa. “I’m afraid this investigation is going to eat up some of my time today. I won’t be able to leave until tomorrow afternoon at least.”
Her eyebrows awoke. “But I thought we were staying until Friday, right?”
“That was the plan.” Before you tackle that conversation, finish up this one. “Anyway, where were we? Oh yes. I was just about to make you promise not to talk to Agent Jiang about all this are-we-seeing-each-other stuff.”
“No, you were just about to tell me if you’re seeing her. But I’ll make you a promise if you give me a straight answer.”
I collected my thoughts. “Tessa, listen, how about this: if Agent Jiang and I ever decide to move from something that’s nothing to anything that might be more than sort of something, I’ll let you know.”
“You didn’t think I followed that, but I did.”
“I believe you. Now, promise.” “I promise.”
“You promise what?”
She sighed, took a deep breath, and said, “I promise not to tell Agent Jiang how much you like her and how badly you want to start seeing her. How’s that?”
I rubbed my forehead as a cab pulled up and a tall, lean gentle-man unfolded himself from the backseat. He handed some bills to the driver and turned to face us.
Dr. Calvin Werjonic had arrived.
66
Calvin couldn’t have chosen a more unusual outfit for visiting San Diego. He was wrapped in a wafer-thin London Fog trench coat-
I’d rarely seen him wear anything else-and he wore a crumpled fedora even though they’d gone out of style forty years ago.
“Patrick, my boy!” Considering all the long talks and late nights we’d shared together over the years, a handshake didn’t seem like enough to me, but I knew Calvin wasn’t a hugger. He pumped my hand warmly. “So good to see you. And this must be the lovely Tessa Ellis?”
“Hello.”
“Patrick has told me all about you.”
“I’ll bet. He didn’t tell me so much about you, but I read about you in his two books.”
“Hmm… I fell asleep reading those sections.”
“Those were the only parts that kept me awake.”
“Eh-hem.” I handed him his coffee. “You look good, Calvin.”
“Your stepfather is a very poor liar, Tessa.”
“Well, that’s OK. I make up for it.”
“Tell me about it,” I said.
Calvin took in a deep drink of San Diego air and then gave me a quick once-over. “So Patrick, you look as fit as ever. Still doing those press-ups?”
“We call them push-ups in the states. But usually for me, it’s pull-ups.”
“Ah yes, of course.” He lifted his coffee to his lips, took a sip. I watched for a reaction. “What do you think of that coffee?
Nice, huh?”
“A bit tart for my taste, I’m afraid.” He took off the lid, poured the coffee onto the sidewalk, and dropped the cup into a nearby trash can. “Come along, then.” He started walking up the trail at a brisk clip.
Tessa saw the look on my face as I stared at the tragic coffee stain on the sidewalk. “Don’t cry, Patrick. It’d embarrass me.”
“Come, come,” said Calvin, who was already twenty meters ahead of us. “I don’t have all day.”
Calvin and I took a few minutes to catch up on each other’s lives, and then Tessa quizzed him about some of his cases. She wanted as many details as she could get as long as he stayed away from mentioning blood or dead bodies. Then he took some time to ask her about the best website for downloading ring tones, what this week’s hottest YouTube videos were, and how many friends she had listed on her Facebook page.
After about fifteen minutes, I asked Tessa if she wouldn’t mind if Calvin and I discussed some cases that involved lots of blood and shootings. Immediately she offered to wait for us up ahead at the SDAI Museum of the Living Artist, and after she was gone, Calvin said softly, “Smart girl, that one.”
“You have no idea.”
Then Calvin filled me in on some of his current consulting work with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, a little-known combat support agency that provides geospatial intelligence to the Department of Defense. The NGIA emphasizes military use of geospatial intelligence, but over the years Calvin and I have both worked with them to help find ways to integrate their GEOINT into law enforcement. However, last year I bowed out when they started pushing for an international cyberinfrastructure that would include an integrated global video array between our spy satellites, private firms, and the GEOINT of our allies.
Calvin and I had never seen eye to eye on this issue.
“But Patrick,” he said earnestly, “even now the Department of Defense is designing the next generation of satellites. By integrating current technology into the satellite systems, we will be able to zoom in close enough to read text off a document, numbers off a cell phone screen, even verify identities through retinal scans. And with laser targeting there’s been talk of-”
“Calvin, please,” I didn’t mean to sound impatient, but I’d heard all this before. “Law enforcement personnel need probable cause to stop a car, tap a phone, enter a house, search a suspect, or even follow someone home. With global video, all that would go out the window, the government could follow anyone, anywhere, anytime.
No privacy. We have a right to live our lives without someone looking over our shoulders every minute of the day. We should use technology to find the guilty, not monitor the innocent.”
“But think of it, my boy. A crime occurs, say perhaps a child is abducted, we review the global video at the time and place of the crime, then follow the offender from the scene, use live tracking, and locate him in a matter of minutes. This is the zenith of environmental criminology. It’s what we’ve been working toward for decades. It will revolutionize the investigative process.”
“We arrest voyeurs and peeping Toms, but now the NGIA is proposing creating one giant webcam for intelligence agencies all over the world so they can peek into the lives of innocent people.
I still say it’s not right. Maybe we can debate this another time. I know you need to catch your flight-”
“Yes, yes, of course.” He brushed a gaunt hand against the air as if he were erasing the words we’d just spoken to each other. “Please forgive me. Your case. Tell me about your investigation.”
Calvin quickened his pace, and I summarized the current case, changing the names and some of the details so that I wasn’t revealing information that might compromise our investigation. Calvin listened astutely, nodding at times to show that he was following what I said, and then at last he asked, “Patrick, have you explored the connection of Monday night’s fire to John Doe’s death?”
“So far all I have is the nexus of time and location.”
“Hmm. I know you don’t typically venture into motive, but has Agent Jiang plumbed your arsonist’s motivation for the previous fires?”
“Ralph assigned one of the field agents to look into the arsonist’s bank records, and she found that the man had made a twenty-five-thousand-dollar deposit within a few days of each of the previous fires. So, if you’re looking
