I shook his hand. “Mr. Cowler, I don’t want to keep you long. I just have a couple questions about the anonymous calls reporting the double homicides on Thursday and Friday.”
“Woman who took the calls isn’t in today,” he said. “Weekends off. You know. To be with her kids.”
“Can we see if anyone else has accessed those files?”
“Sure.” He leaned his head to the side and called to a man sitting beside a pair of computer screens. “Ari, I need you to pull a couple of audio files for us.”
The guy looked like he hadn’t slept in a week. “Which ones?” His eyes remained glued to the screen on the left, which contained a panel of dispatch codes and a map of Denver with digital blips representing the current GPS location of the city’s emergency vehicles.
Cowler ambled toward the man’s desk. “Double homicides.”
Ari turned to the screen on his right and quickly scrolled through the database of the week’s digitally recorded calls. “Do you know the times?” Even though Ari looked over thirty, his face was covered with acne. The only things on his desk that showed he had a life outside of this room were a Star Trooper action figure, a Semper Fi plaque for ten years of service, and a silver ceramic dragon with outstretched wings.
I watched the call times scroll down the screen. “There.” I pointed to an entry from Thursday afternoon. “And there.” I identified the second call.
Ari tapped at the keyboard and brought up the first file. Cowler studied the screen. “Nope, reference number doesn’t show anyone else accessing the files, except the medical examiner’s office. But that’s typical for them to do before an autopsy.”
“Let’s hear the first call,” I said.
As Ari played the audio, the automated live-read transcription scrolled across the screen:
EMS: “This is 911. How-”
CALLER: “I have something to tell you. I need you to listen carefully.”
EMS: “Sir, can you tell me your name?”
CALLER: “There’s a body in Bearcroft Mine, three miles south of Idaho Springs. Take Wheelan to Piney Oaks Road. After 5.3 miles, take the dirt road to the right. It ends at the mine. I want you to send-”
EMS: “Who am I speaking with?”
CALLER: “The Rocky Mountain Violent Crimes Task Force. No one enters the mine before they do, or more people will die. You won’t find Chris, so don’t waste time looking for him.”
EMS: “Sir, are you there now? Are you in any danger-”
CALLER: “Dusk is coming. I won’t stop until the story is done. Day Four ends on Wednesday.”
EMS: “Sir-” CALL TERMINATED BY CALLER.
The second audio was similarly concise but listed Taylor’s address and Cherry Creek Reservoir as the location for the bodies.
The caller’s voice was electronically disguised, and although I couldn’t be certain, it sounded like the pitch, pauses, and cadence of the speech on both tapes matched the speech patterns of the man who’d called me earlier in the day.
However, I heard background noise on both recordings. As I was considering what it might have been, Cowler asked me, “What are you hoping to find, exactly?”
Rather than sound arrogant by listing the phonetic and intonation identifiers, I simply said, “I’m trying to listen for anything distinctive, individualized. Anything that could help us match the caller to a suspect.” Then I asked Ari to play them again.
Yes, there was definitely something there, although it was a different sound on each tape. “Do we know what those background noises are?” I asked Cowler.
“Background sounds?”
“It sounds like murmuring on the first tape and something else-I’m not sure what-on the second.”
“All right, Ryman,” Cowler said. “Let’s hear ’em one more time.” He handed me and Cheyenne headphones, grabbed a pair for himself, plugged them into the system, and then nodded for Ari Ryman to play the audio again.
After we’d listened to the calls again, we all removed our headphones and Cowler shook his head. “It can get loud in here. It just sounds like background noise from the other dispatchers. It’s probably nothing.”
If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years it’s this: when someone says “it’s probably nothing,” you should never believe him.
I knew CSU had studied the tapes, but I needed to have them analyzed a little more carefully. However, before I could request a copy of them, a call came in, and the man with the Star Trooper action figure took a quick gulp from a well-worn mug filled with gray coffee and spoke into one of his two headset microphones. “911. Please state the nature of your emergency.”
We stepped away.
Apart from the ambient noise, I didn’t notice anything unusual about the audio messages.
“Well,” Cheyenne said to me on our way to the door. “What do you think?”
I tried to hide the discouragement in my voice. “The phonemes seem to match the ones used by the man who called me earlier in the day, but with the voice distortion the caller used, I doubt I’d be able to recognize the speaker’s natural voice if I heard it. I’m still wondering how the author of the online article found out the wording from the calls.”
“So am I.”
Cowler led us to the door, and I was about to hand him my card and ask him to email me a copy of the audio files and transcriptions but realized that would just take more time-something we didn’t have. So instead I asked him if I could use one of the computers for a minute.
He shrugged. “Sure, we have one set aside for DPD use. Right over here.”
He led me to one of the empty work stations at the far end of the room.
80
After I’d taken a seat, Cowler showed me how to pull up the audio files. I clicked past the hyperlinks to the Federal Digital Database’s GPS and address locators until I came to the audio archives, then I emailed a copy of both the files and transcriptions, to myself and to Angela Knight at the FBI cybercrime division.
I added a request for Angela to run the audio for the calls through a voice spectrograph. “See if you can isolate that background noise for me,” I wrote. “And as usual, I need this ASAP. -Pat.”
I thanked Cowler, and as Cheyenne and I entered the hallway, I glanced at my watch and realized I needed to get moving if I were going to have time to grab my luggage from home, say good-bye to Tessa, and then catch my flight.
“I have to go,” I told her.
“Wait,” she said. “Swing by my car first. It’ll only take a minute. There’s something I’ve been wanting to give you.”
Amy Lynn was putting another video in for Jayson to watch when a call came through on her BlackBerry. She dug it out. “Yes?”
“They came by.” It was Ari. He sounded frantic. “What did you write?”
She turned on the television and set a box of snack crackers on the floor for the boy to eat. “Who came by?” She’d lowered her voice. “What are you talking about?”
“Some detectives. You wrote something about-”
“Just calm down. OK?” She stepped away from the television.
“I just don’t want anyone to find out that we talked.”
“I know.”
“Mommy,” Jayson said. “Can I watch-”
“Shh!” she quieted him. “You should know better than to interrupt me when I’m talking on the phone.” Then she spoke to Ari again. “I’ll do some checking, make sure there’s no way to link things to you. I’ll call you later.”
She ended the call without waiting for his reply.
And she smiled.
So, her article was stirring things up. Good.
Time to start working on the second installment.
81
Three minutes after leaving the dispatch office, I was standing beside Cheyenne’s Saturn and she was handing me the St. Francis of Assisi pendant that she’d had hanging from her rearview mirror.