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 says the two guns were one and the same.”
“And the computer’s reliable?” Ellie asked.
“More so than the human eye, in fact, but the technology’s new enough that we still do it the old-fashioned way for the lawyers. Want me to send it to ballistics?”
“Does John Daly love chicken wings?”
“Who?”
“See what I mean? They go right over the head.” Flann cut his hand over his head to mark the point. “Just have ballistics call me when they’re finished.”
THE FIRST OF the three men with whom Ellie had flirted on FirstDate called himself Mr. Right. Despite the oh-so-original name, Ellie had chosen him because his etiquette was oh-so-wrong, filled with inappropriate innuendo. When Amy said she liked independent films, Mr. Right took it upon himself to ask whether she meant “snooty highbrow movies with subtitles or tastefully artistic home videos for personal use.” And then there was that comment about the picture she’d sent him of herself at Mardi Gras: “Did you show off your ta-tas?”
The traffic on the FDR was heavy this time of day, so Flann used his lights until he found them some clear road. He checked the rearview mirror before switching lanes, then asked Ellie about the other two men she’d honed in on during the previous night’s perusal of FirstDate profiles.
“A guy named Taylor. Quasi stalker. From what I can tell, Amy met him once for coffee, then blew him off. He e-mailed her a few times the next week, asking her what was wrong, insisting they had a real connection, wondering if she was afraid of commitment – that sort of thing. Then it looks like she blocked him from her account.”
“You can do that?”
“Yeah. There’s a block function on the FirstDate Web site. It’s as simple as typing in the other person’s user name, and voilà, they can’t e-mail you anymore. Taylor’s the only user name on Amy’s block list. She cut him off about a week ago, so, yeah, we’re interested in him. I also sent a flirt to a guy who calls himself Enoch.”
“Eunuch? He’s advertising a lack of balls?”
“No,” she said, laughing. “Enoch. Could be the name of his first dog for all I know. At first, he didn’t stand out. His online profile’s about as bland as you can get – one cliché after another.”
“Yeah? And what’s considered cliché in the online world?”