Diane explained to him in an e-mail that this wasn’t a child and it was too late to save her, but that the woman might have been separated from her family as a child and that it was critical for Diane to find out who she was. She didn’t tell him Clymene’s name.
He e-mailed back almost immediately and said he would look. Diane thought that he must be at his computer all the time looking for lost children. He had software whose algorithm could account for the age difference so that an adult Clymene could be matched to a child Clymene or a teenage Clymene. Software just gets more and more clever, she thought.
Next she called David. He and Neva were on their way back.
‘‘I’d like to use Arachnid,’’ she said.
David didn’t say anything for a long moment. ‘‘I suppose this is what it’s for,’’ he said.
Chapter 37
Arachnid was David’s baby. He compared it to Rosemary’s Baby.
‘‘It’s essentially evil,’’ he said.
‘‘No,’’ Diane had told him. ‘‘It is not evil. Someone could put it to evil use, but then the evil would reside in the use of it, not in the system itself.’’
Her argument fell on deaf ears because David was paranoid. He admitted it and embraced it. The irony of Arachnid was that David had created what he was afraid of. Big Brother. This was not lost on him, and he felt guilty about it. But there it was, sitting in the basement, the ultimate spider.
Diane wanted carrels in the museum for people to rent and work on scholarly things. The entire basement and subbasement were being renovated for storage vaults and work areas. The DNA lab and David were the first occupants. David rented space for his photography. He occasionally taught classes in photography in the museum, so it made sense that he should have space. He had a darkroom, a workroom, and a study. All very small, but big enough for David’s needs. Arachnid was in the study.
David was the insect and spider expert in the crime lab. If insects needed to be reared to discern time of a victim’s death, David was the one with the rearing chambers. He liked bugs. He didn’t particularly like spiders.
‘‘They just look evil,’’ he told her on many occasions. That is why he named his creation Arachnid— that and its basic function, to search the Web.
David had married search engine algorithms and face recognition algorithms. He thought it a terrible invasion of privacy, but he had done it anyway because he loved algorithms. He swore Diane to secrecy—neither Jin nor Neva knew about Arachnid.
‘‘It’s probably illegal. If it isn’t, it should be,’’ he had told Diane.
Arachnid searched the Web for images, picked out faces, and compared them with the photo to be identified. If the faces of Clymene or her sisters were anywhere on the Web, Arachnid would find them.
‘‘You know, you could make a lot of money with this software,’’ she told him.
‘‘Blood money,’’ he had said.
Diane had rolled her eyes. ‘‘You know someone is going to come up with this. It just makes sense. They probably already have.’’
‘‘I’m sure some black ops have invented it too, but it’s still evil. We can only use it for good.’’
‘‘David, you worry me sometimes,’’ Diane told him.
‘‘I worry myself,’’ he had answered.
Diane walked down to the basement and let herself into David’s space. Arachnid was sitting there looking like a sleeping cyclops. That’s what monitors looked like to Diane. Some kind of one-eyed creature. Arachnid’s monitor was black, which added to the illusion. She turned the computer on and waited. The face of a spider came on the screen and told Diane how to proceed, asking her each step if she really wanted to do this, that once it’s done, she couldn’t turn back the clock.
‘‘David,’’ she whispered, making a face, ‘‘I swear, you’re nuts.’’
She scanned Clymene’s mug shot into Arachnid and told it to search. This would take a while—possibly a long while. Diane locked up his study and left.
While she was downstairs, she went to the DNA lab. It looked like a futuristic medical facility. Everything was glass, metal, or white. Jin was sitting outside the lab at a desk with a computer.
‘‘Hey,’’ he said, pulling out a chair for her. ‘‘I’ve got the computer searching for relatives.’’ He pointed to another computer running in the corner. ‘‘Some people post their DNA to look for family and for various other reasons. I’m looking through those files too.’’ He paused while Diane sat down. ‘‘You think we’ll find her?’’
‘‘I don’t think she has a chance,’’ said Diane. ‘‘With the number of things we’re trying, one is bound to turn up something. Do you know how the detectives in White County are doing with the Rivers murder?’’
Jin shook his head and shoved his black hair behind his ears. ‘‘We’ve given them everything we found at the crime scene, which wasn’t much. I think everyone is assuming Clymene was the perp and they aren’t following any other leads. I heard you got kicked out of your apartment.’’
‘‘How did you find out?’’ she asked.
‘‘Neva called. You going to stay with Frank?’’ he asked.
‘‘For a while. I haven’t decided. I might like to get a house,’’ she said.
‘‘I think it’s a good thing,’’ said Jin. ‘‘Your neighbors are nuts. You got those people who like funerals and death memorabilia living across the hall and now you have a member of the Donner family in the basement...you need to get away from there.’’
Diane smiled. ‘‘The apartment was very small and I would like to have a yard.’’
‘‘Oh, speaking of dirt, I have the analysis of the soil on that sphinx. The region came up Egypt. Specifically in the area of Abydos. It didn’t have the amount of dust on it to suggest it had been lying around in a warehouse for fifty years. I think it was looted fairly recently. The stone face and the bust both had a mixture of dust that didn’t point to any identifiable region of the world.’’
‘‘We know the girdle was stolen from the Cairo Museum fifty years ago, and the sphinx may have been looted recently. That really doesn’t tell us anything, does it?’’ said Diane.
‘‘That the artifacts are all over the board,’’ said Jin. ‘‘I guess they were selected because they kind of look like what the documents describe. But why do it?’’
‘‘I don’t know.’’ Diane looked at her watch. ‘‘I have a meeting with the board.’’
‘‘Again?’’ said Jin.
‘‘I called it this time. I thought if I keep them upto-date they won’t get so edgy.’’
‘‘Good luck,’’ said Jin.
Diane took the elevator to the third floor and walked to the meeting room. Most everyone was there and it was still early. Must be anxious to hear the latest, she thought. Barclay looked sullen. She wondered if Vanessa had spoken with him.