“You mean you can give me a picture of this person?” Amanda asked.
“Essentially, yes. We can then ask Tyler's friends and acquaintances if they recognize him…or her.” He waved a hand at the busy terminal cubes. “Got to be easier than this, quicker, too. Crescent can also run standard comparison programs with the visual images stored in our data cores, and with the security departments of all the other companies we have reciprocal arrangements with. I think you'll find they're considerably more extensive than the criminal records held by governments. For a start, between us, the insurance companies have copies of every driving license issued in Europe. And we already decided the murderer drove to Bisbrooke.”
Amanda studied him. This was suddenly too easy. Something was wrong, and she couldn't define it…apart from an intuitive distrust she had for the corporate machinator. And yet, he was helping. Solving the crime, in all probability. “How long will it take?”
“If we courier a sample of the DNA over to Crescent's lab in Oxford this evening, the program can crunch the genome overnight. We can have the picture by morning.”
“Okay. Do it.”
Amanda hated working Sundays. No way around it this week, though. And maybe, just maybe, she might get overtime, courtesy of Crescent.
When she arrived at the station there was an unusually large crowd of people in the main CID office for the time and day, uniform division as well as detectives. Alison gave Amanda a wry smile as she came in.
“The scene-of-crime team found something interesting,” she said in a low voice, suggesting conspiracy. “No shortage of volunteers to go over this lot for us.”
“What?” Amanda asked. She edged through the group to look at the flatscreen they were all absorbed with. It was a split-screen image, three viewpoints of the main bedroom in Byrne Tyler's apartment. Tyler himself was on the bed with a girl, their naked bodies writhing in animal passion.
Alison held up a carton full of memox crystals. “There's a lot of them. Over sixty.”
“Okay.” Amanda walked over to the AV player and switched it off. “That's enough. This is supposed to be a bloody police station, not a porno shop.”
They moaned, one or two jeered, but nobody actually voiced a complaint. The group broke up, filing out of the CID office with sheepish grins and locker room chuckles.
“They found three cameras in there yesterday,” Alison said. “Quite a professional recording setup. Looks like Tyler was something of an egotistical voyeur.”
“Was he recording Wednesday night?” Amanda asked sharply. At least that explained why he didn't have a top sheet on his bed, she thought.
“No. Or at least, there was no memox of it. The AV recorder the cameras are rigged to was empty.”
“Pity.”
Alison rattled the carton. “Plenty more suspects: all the husbands and boyfriends.”
The little black cylinders rolled about. Ten-hour capacity each. Amanda found herself doing mental arithmetic. Assuming they were even half-full, Tyler had been a very busy boy. Popular, too. “Is there an index?”
“Yes.” Alison flourished a ziplock bag containing several sheets of paper. “In ink no less—I guess he didn't want to risk this list getting burned open by a hotrod. Mostly just first names, but he got some surnames as well; and they've all got dates. They go back over two years. There's quite a few personalities I recognize.”
“Okay, scan the list in to your terminal and run the names through a search program. Then see if a visual-characteristics recognition program can identify the girls we don't have full names for. I want to know where all of them live, if they're married or have long-term partners, parents of the younger ones, that kind of thing. Oh, and check to see if the crystals are there.”
Mike Wilson walked in past the last of the uniform division. His expression was bleak. “What did I miss?” he inquired.
“Tyler liked to record himself in bed,” Alison said. “We found the crystals.”
“Oh, shit. We'd better keep that quiet.”
Amanda frowned. Not quite the response she expected. “I was planning on it,” she said. “How did the DNA characteristics assembly go?”
He flipped open a shiny chrome Event Horizon executive cybofax and gave it an instruction. A young man's face appeared, light brown hair, greenish eyes, a thin nose, broad mouth. There was a small digital read-out in the corner of the screen saying: 18 YEARS. It started to wind forward. The man began to change, aging. Wrinkles appeared, the cheeks and neck thickened; the hairline receded, gray streaks appeared. The display finished at eighty years, showing a wizened face with shrunken cheeks plagued by liver spots, and wisps of silver-white hair.
“Denzil was right,” Amanda said. “That's impressive. Just how accurate is it?”
“Perfectly accurate.”
“You sound unhappy.”
“There was no positive match.”
“Are you sure?”
“Oh, we got hundreds of people who share eighty-five to ninety percent similarity. We just captured an image from every five years of his life and the computer ran a standard visual comparison reference program for each of them. In total we have access to pictures of two hundred twenty-five-million Caucasian males. Can you believe it? Nothing over ninety percent.”
Amanda couldn't work out if she was disappointed or not. Mike Wilson had sounded so sure this was the solution, and now for all the astonishing technology and corporate data cores they had to revert to humble police work. “Give us the top twenty off your list, and we'll start to work through them, check if they knew Tyler, alibis, the usual. English residents to start with, please.”
“Okay,” he acknowledged the request with a subdued nod. “Who the hell did this? The only way this murderer could elude our programs is with major plastic surgery, changing his appearance.”
“Someone in showbusiness, then,” Alison said brightly.
“The percentage is a lot higher among celebrities than the rest of the population. They're always improving their appearance.”
“Could be.” Uncertainty was a strong presence in his voice.
“Alison, that can be your priority,” Amanda said. “We'll turn Tyler's finances over to a professional accountant. That'll free us to interview friends and colleagues, see if any of them recognize this picture.” Her finger tapped the cybofax screen. “I'll start with the Sullivans. You concentrate on his fellow celebrities.”
Amanda was just going out the station door when she caught sight of a silhouette in the reception area, a man talking to the desk sergeant. “Greg?”
Greg Mandel turned round. His eyes narrowed for a second, then he grinned. “Amanda Patterson, right? Detective sergeant?”
She shook the hand he offered. “Detective, now.”
“Congratulations.”
“Thanks. So what are you doing here?”
“Checking on a vehicle accident. One of Eleanor's family was hurt.”
“Oh, I'm sorry. Any luck?”
“None at all.”
“Yeah, well, you know how the police force works. Traffic doesn't get the highest priority these days. Want me to pull any strings?”
“No. That's okay, thanks. I guess CID's pretty busy with the Tyler case. I saw it on the news.”
“Yeah. It's my case, too.” She glanced from Greg back to Mike Wilson who was standing waiting politely. Asking never hurt, she thought, and she'd had a reasonable relationship with Greg during an earlier case when he'd been appointed as a special adviser to Oakham's CID. “Look, Greg, I realize this probably isn't the best time to ask you, but the Tyler case is really a ball-breaker for me. We're hitting a lot of stone walls.”