‘Like whistling?’
‘Like whistling. No vibration, no identifiable frequencies.’
‘Smart motherfucker.’
‘That’s what I said.’
‘So this is the best we can do? We still don’t know what he’s saying.’
Gus smiled cynically. ‘You don’t pay me the big bucks just to give you back a tape with undecipherable whispering, do you? What I mean is that because he forced his own voice into a slow, dragging whisper, we won’t be able to clean it or alter it back to its original pitch. So even if you have a suspect, it will be very hard to get a voice match from this. And I’m pretty sure he knew that.’
‘But you’ll be able to alter it enough so we can understand what he’s saying, right?’
A confident smile came back from Gus. ‘Watch my magic.’ He went back to the digital equalizer, twisted a few more buttons and slid some more faders before loading a pitch shifter onto a separate screen. He placed a small section of the audio recording into a constant loop and worked on it for a few minutes. ‘Oh, hello,’ he said, frowning.
‘What? What?’
Gus automatically reached for the Skittles. ‘We’ve got something else. Some sort of faint hissing noise right in the background.’
‘Hissing?’
‘Yeah, something like a frying pan or maybe rain against a distant window.’ He listened to it again. His eyes went back to one of his monitors and he pulled a face. ‘Its frequency is very similar to the static noise. And that messes things up a little.’
‘Can’t you do something with all this?’ Cohen nodded at all the equipment in the studio.
‘Is today stupid-question day? Of course I can, but to properly identify it I’ll have to run it against my library of sounds.’ Gus started clicking away on his computer. ‘All that can take a while.’
Cohen checked his watch and let out a deflated breath.
‘Relax, that won’t affect me cleaning up the whispering voice. That’ll take me no time at all.’ Gus went back to his buttons and faders. A minute later he seemed satisfied. ‘I think I got it.’ He pressed play and rolled his chair away from the mixing desk.
The same whispering voice Cohen and Myers had tried so hard to decipher poured out of the loudspeakers, as clear as daylight.
Cohen’s jaw dropped as he looked at Gus.
‘Motherfucker.’
Thirty
The first thing Hunter did when he and Garcia got back to Parker Center was get a copy of all the photographs taken at Laura Mitchell’s exhibition to Brian Doyle, the IT Unit supervisor at ITD. Hunter knew that potentially every single person in those pictures was a suspect, but his immediate interest was in identifying the stranger who’d swapped phone numbers with Laura. The photograph Hunter had flagged showed a clear enough image of the stranger’s face to allow Doyle to blow it up and run it against the unified police database.
‘That laptop you called about earlier,’ Doyle said as he transferred all of the pictures to his hard drive, ‘the one that was sent to us by Missing Persons about two weeks ago, belonging to . . .’ He started searching his messy desk.
‘Laura Mitchell,’ Hunter confirmed. ‘That’s her in those pictures.’
‘Oh, OK. Anyway, we bypassed her password.’
‘What? Already?’
‘We’re fantastic, what can I say?’ Doyle smiled and Hunter pulled a face. ‘We ran a simple algorithm application against it. Her password was just a combination of the first few letters of her family name and her date of birth. Now, you said you needed to have a look at her emails?’
‘That’s right. Her mother said she’d received a few fan emails that’d scared her.’
‘Well, that won’t be easy, I’m afraid. The email application on her computer was never used,’ Doyle explained, ‘which means she didn’t download emails, she simply read them online. We checked the computer registry, and at least there she was smart. She never said “yes” when the operating system asked her if she wanted the computer to remember her password every time she logged onto her email online. Her Internet history was also automatically deleted every ten days.’
‘Her email password ain’t the same as her computer’s?’
A quick headshake.
‘How about this algorithm application you ran on her PC?’
‘It won’t work online. Internet security against email account attacks has gotten a lot tougher over the years. All the major email service providers lock you out for several hours, sometimes indefinitely if you try a certain number of incorrect passwords.’ Doyle shook his head again. ‘Also, if she didn’t keep these emails in her account, I mean, if she deleted them after she read them, which is probable since you said they scared her, then the chances of retrieving the full message is basically zero. Unless you find the email provider where the message originated from, the best you gonna get are fragments. And you’ll have to go straight to her provider – Autonet. We can’t do shit from here. You know what that means, right? Warrants and court orders and what have you. Plus, you can be searching for days, weeks . . . who knows . . . and still get zip.’
Hunter ran a hand over his face.
‘I have people going over the rest of the files on her hard drive now. I’ll let you know if we come across anything.’
Thirty-One
Whitney Myers stood still, staring at the computer screen and the audio lines as they vibrated like electrified worms. Cohen had just loaded the digital recording Gus had given him onto his computer. The once jumbled whisper she’d retrieved from Katia Kudrov’s answering machine was now as clear as daylight.
‘YOU TAKE MY BREATH AWAY . . .’ Pause. ‘WELCOME HOME, KATIA. I’VE BEEN WAITING FOR YOU. I GUESS IT’S FINALLY TIME WE MET.’
The recording was on an endless loop, playing through Cohen’s loudspeakers. After the fifth time, Myers finally tore her eyes away from the screen and hit the Esc key.
‘Gus said this is actually his voice, there’s no electronic device disguising it?’
Cohen nodded. ‘But he was clever. He used his own whisper to alter it. If he’s ever caught, we’ll never get a voice match. At least not with this recording.’
Myers stepped back from Cohen’s desk, lightly running two fingertips against her top lip. She always did that when she was thinking. She knew she had to play the recording to Leonid Kudrov when she met him at his house in two hours’ time. She had no doubt it would drive terror into an already petrified heart.
‘Do you still have my Dictaphone with all the sixty messages?’ she asked, returning to her desk and flipping through her notebook.
‘Yep, right here.’
‘OK, play the last message again.’ She paused. ‘Actually, just after the last message. What I’m interested in is the electronic answering machine voice announcing the time the message was left.’
‘Eight forty-two in the evening,’ Cohen replied automatically.
Myers’ eyebrows rose.
‘I listened to it so many times it’s etched on my brain,’ he explained.
‘You’re sure?’
‘Positive.’
Myers’ eyes returned to her notebook. ‘According to Katia’s father, he called his daughter from his cell phone at eight fifty-three that night. The call lasted four minutes and twelve seconds.’