“I don’t have anything to hide.” Joe stroked Edison’s floppy ears. They were both much calmer.
“The first rule of a criminal attorney is that you never let your client talk to the police.” Daniel fiddled with his shirt cuffs. “Ever.”
“I’m not a criminal, and you’re not a criminal lawyer.”
“You hired me to give you advice. I can tell you right now that it’s never in your best interest to talk to the police. Remember how they say ‘anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law’?”
“So?”
“Notice how they don’t say it can be used for you?” Daniel’s voice was low and conversational. No one in the lobby so much as glanced at them. “Mr. Goldstone will report the crime and keep your name confidential.”
Joe had been raised in a circus, and it had been drilled into him that he could never trust the police, that people in authority would always rule against you. Maybe the old rules were right. Maybe his time in the world of pure numbers had made him naïve.
“You said on the phone that you can’t give the police a description because you never saw him and that you can’t identify his voice because he was whispering. There is nothing you can tell them that will help you, and a lot that could harm you.”
Joe had to agree.
Chapter 11
Vivian marched up the stone stairs to the lobby, looking for trouble. She didn’t find any. She recognized the short concierge from her last visit. The freckled teenage girl working Starbucks didn’t look like a killer. The lobby was otherwise empty, except for her employer, Daniel Rossi, and the man he was talking to. She could see only the back of his head, then he turned slightly, and she recognized him. Joe Tesla.
She checked out the second floor, or at least as much of it as was visible through the atrium. No one stood along the glass dividers that overlooked the first floor. It was too early to see much activity here. She’d been woken from a sound sleep just a few minutes before, swiped deodorant under her arms, jumped into her clothes, and caught a cab straight here. Mr. Rossi had said that it was urgent.
Mr. Rossi resembled an older George Clooney, and usually traded on it, but this morning his perfect salt-and-pepper hair was disheveled. Tesla, on the other hand, looked flat-out terrible. He’d been pale last time she saw him, but now he was practically ghostly. It made sense, since he didn’t go outside, but it looked creepy, almost supernatural.
To make matters worse, he didn’t just look like a ghost, he looked like he’d seen a ghost. His eyes were wide, he was jiggling his knee, and he petted the dog at his side over and over with little jerky movements. He was very different from the confident man she’d followed six months before.
She moved into Mr. Rossi’s line of sight, but where Tesla couldn’t see her. She’d wait there until Mr. Rossi gave her a signal to approach. In the meantime, she scanned the lobby again. A freshly shaved businessman in a blue suit exited the elevators and headed to the escalator. He held a gleaming black briefcase in one hand, carelessly, as if the contents weren’t that important. Otherwise, no movement.
Mr. Rossi nodded to her, and she walked over to be introduced.
Tesla had a firm handshake, and he paused for a second when he met her eyes. He scrutinized her face for a second longer than usual, as if he recognized her. Did he? He’d been pretty messed up when she’d met him, barely able to walk.
“I’m assigning you Ms. Torres,” Mr. Rossi said. “For close protection.”
Tesla’s eyes narrowed. “You think that I need a bodyguard?”
“I think one would not come amiss,” Mr. Rossi answered. “And I’d advise you to move back into a room at the Hyatt for a few days while this matter is resolved.”
What matter? She’d only heard that she was to meet Mr. Rossi here and provide security for a client. She hadn’t known who it would be until she saw Mr. Tesla, and she still didn’t know why, just that it was urgent.
“I appreciate your concern, but I’m not moving back up here,” Tesla said.
Mr. Rossi smiled his lawyer smile that gave nothing away. “Very well. But do please let Ms. Torres accompany you, at least for the next twenty-four hours.”
Tesla looked as if he wanted to argue, but he nodded. “Let’s get breakfast.”
Mr. Rossi begged off, and she and Tesla and the dog headed out for Grand Central Terminal — a tough place to provide protection.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather eat here?” she asked. “Or somewhere more secluded?”
“No,” Tesla said shortly.
They ended up in the food court at the Tri Tip Grill for breakfast, where Tesla didn’t bat an eyelash when she ordered steak and eggs. Lots of men acted surprised to see a woman eat. Tesla ordered steak and eggs, too, and a double steak, rare, for the dog. Privileges of being a millionaire’s pet.
She kept her eyes moving around the crowded room. Unless an attacker came toward them in slow motion, she’d have trouble spotting him until he was right on top of Tesla. Still, she searched for people who looked at them too long, people with suspicious bulges under their arms that might be guns, men who moved like they had military or law enforcement training.
Vivian was no good at small talk, but she figured she’d better give it a try. “Mr. Rossi says you’re related to Nikola Tesla.”
“On my father’s side. A couple of generations back.” His mouth pursed as if he didn’t want to talk about it.
The plates arrived — no more small talk necessary. The waiter seemed to know the dog and put his plate straight on the floor.
“I didn’t know that they served dogs here,” she said.
“He’s not a regular dog,” Tesla said. “He’s a psychiatric service animal.”
A bad conversational trail to go down. “I hear your company makes facial-recognition software. How does that work?”
His shoulders relaxed fractionally. At last, a safe topic of conversation. “We compare pictures in databases to pictures out in the world to match them up.”
“Surveillance camera pictures are usually pretty unclear,” she said. “How can you recognize a face in them enough to make a match?”
“We use many different factors.” He ran his knife across the egg yolk. “First, we measure the distance between your features — how far apart your eyes are, how deep your eye sockets are, how long your jaw is, in millimeters, stuff like that — and we use the information to create a faceprint.”
“Are those numbers unique?” She touched her jaw.
“Yes,” he said. “If we get a good 3-D image, a faceprint is as unique as a fingerprint. But good 3-D images are hard to come by, so we can’t rely on having them. After we get the measurements, we map the surface and texture of your skin. With that data, and algorithms I developed for rotating faces if the subject isn’t looking into the camera at the right angle, we can tell you apart from your identical twin. Every time.”
Vivian took a long sip of coffee. “So much for all those twin movies.”
He smiled. “That’s a big market for us, identifying twins in movies.”
“I bet.”
She concentrated on her steak for a while before speaking again. “So, you reduce the human face to numbers?”
“If you break it down far enough, everything is numbers.”
“And you’re good with numbers?”
“I see them in my head, as colors, and I can move them around.” His eyes shifted past hers, as if he didn’t want to admit it. “It’s called synesthesia.”
“Cool!” She’d never heard of it.
He gave her the kind of shy smile she hadn’t expected to see from a millionaire.