And all the voices had one other thing in common: Here in the city resided countless unexculpated murders. The files of victims that lay silent and unanswered in D.C., as with each major American city in the nation, finding voice, would drown out the living, she imagined. Hardly a new story- not enough manpower to begin to do the job.
However, Jessica had been working with Lew Clemmens on an electronic answer to give true voice to the dead of D.C., and if successful, to carry the plan to other major cities throughout the country and possibly abroad. She had modeled her idea on a Houston Police Department program called COMIT, run by a Cherokee Indian detective named Lucas Stonecoat with whom her friend Kim Desinor had successfully worked a case. As a result, Jessica felt confident that very soon ancient necrofiles nationwide would be placed on computer files, and any one of them could be accessed from anywhere in the country. This would save countless hours and manpower.
However-and there always was a however-it had proven a tedious process, and still some 60 percent of D.C. 's cold files had as yet to be revived in this fashion; the 40 percent that had been scanned to disk and transcribed onto the Washington Police mainframe database under USA- COMIT had not been read by anyone human, except for Lew Clemmens. For the time being, it had been for electronic eyes only. Today they could plug in key words to flag any cases that might now be solved via DNA evidence, new fingerprinting techniques, photographic imaging, or any other new technology. In many ways, the tide was turning in favor of the crime fighters and away from the criminals, thanks to modem scientific police and forensic detection. Once the old file transfers were completed, anyone anywhere in the world who might be working a cold case could conceivably do searches for unsolved murder investigations, which might now be reassessed on grounds of new technologies designed to combat crime.
The trouble was the sheer number of cold cases. Any death investigation with moss on it could benefit from current scientific knowledge and techniques not available to earlier law enforcement-an unpleasant fact shared by every police agency in the world. Jessica imagined a time- traveling modern medical examiner who might go back to significant moments to unravel mysteries surrounding deaths that, at the time, could not be solved, from Jack-the-Ripper to Lizzie Borden. The thought recalled a fascinating book that her mentor, Dr. Asa Holcraft, had insisted she must read when only a fledgling student in his classes. The book was Century of the Detective by Jurgen Thorwald, a fascinating attempt to survey the history of crime detection and the science that had built up around it. The book put a great deal into perspective, not the least being the question of guilt or innocence of a man convicted at a time when animal blood and human blood could not be separately identified, a time when there was no microscopic evidence since there was no microscope, a time before fingerprinting was discovered as a viable crime-fighting tool.
Jessica had stepped away from the window, the sadly anemic rain, and her thoughts. She held her hand against her chest, an acidic pain rising there to threaten her. Her team so far had uncovered nothing new, and the case was stalemating quickly. She walked out of her temporary office and into an adjacent one where Lew Clemmens sat at a state- of-the-art computer, working away.
Jessica joked with Clemmens about the notion of a time- traveling crime fighter, since Lew had earlier talked up a blue streak about some TV program named Time-COP with the same premise.
“ Hell, even Jack-the-Ripper could be discovered with the new technologies,” Lew Clemmens said over his shoulder as he worked at the screen. She thought them finished with the subject then, but Lew kept up chatter about the idea.
Lew, like her, had set up shop in D.C. at Santiva's insistence. She now went to stand over his hefty shoulder, where the young man worked at bringing Jessica caseload information lifted from the courthouse where DeCampe had worked.
“ Old Jack wouldn't stand a chance against the crime- fighting tools we have today,” Lew said.
“ Can't argue with you there,” she agreed, her mind now set on the present, on the DeCampe case, which had seen zero progress so far.
Clemmens continued, adding, “Imagine if we could go back in time and hand over our crime-fighting tools to London authorities when the Ripper was at large and taunting police.”
Jessica knew how Lew's mind raced with two and sometimes three subjects at once, and while he worked on the DeCampe case, he could sit about and talk on another topic as if his brain simply partitioned off the separate jobs needing to be done. He was amazing for this.
Clemmens continued, “Yeah… if even they'd had only a laser blue light to follow the blood trail, they would have caught the guy. History's most infamous serial killer.”
“ Are you kidding?” she finally asked, a bit miffed. 'Today, Jack's career would have been cut extremely short. The man left a slime trail as wide and as obvious as a walrus dragging his ass over a mud puddle.”
Lew looked young enough to be delivering Jessica's newspaper. He hardly looks the part of a fellow whose job touches so many lives, she thought. “Still, if Jack were alive today,” countered Lew, “he'd know to be a hell of a lot more tidy, wouldn't you say? I mean like the creep that got hold of Judge DeCampe?”
Jessica liked Lew's enthusiasm for a subject he warmed up to-war-pathing over it, as Lew professed an Ojibwa heritage along with his flinty Irish looks. As the young man's eyes-reflected in the computer screen-lit up green and luminous, he said, 'Today's serial killer has more readily available information at his disposal about what we know and how we work.” Lew's fingers seemed to operate independently over the keys. “Thanks to the TLC channel. Still, crime makes you stupid; I've heard you say it time and again. Jack isn't necessarily more intelligent today than he was in 1872 when he killed that string of prostitutes in White chapel.”
Jessica smiled at this. “I'm telling you, today the Ripper would be apprehended.”
“ Only because of the poor condition of criminal detection in his day, he was never caught. If he were alive today, Jack would have to bone up big time,” countered Lew.
Jessica snickered and added, “Yeah, you're right. Today's criminal can and sometimes does study criminology right alongside the criminologist. I take your point.”
“ And they gain much of their information off the Internet, from FBI public relations officers, from police bulletins, law enforcement gazettes, Ann Rule and other true crime books, as well as novels and films depicting criminal behavior, police procedure, profiling, and crime-scene detection. Ever read The Handyman or the Decoy series?”
“ Price of a free and open society; price of democracy: freedom and access to information.” Jessica snatched an office chair and wheeled it to a stop beside Lew, and she slipped into it, groaning at a spasm of pain that cut knifelike through her back. “Like a double-edged sword,” she agreed.
Lew glanced at her, wondering if she meant the pain in her lower back, evidenced by Jessica's grimace, or if she meant the double edge of freedom. He snatched at the back of his neck as if to rip some pain of his own from it, and then he continued downloading cases which had been tried by Maureen DeCampe.
The printer was abuzz with information spewing forth. Jessica picked up a stack of papers and said, “Damn, we're going to need an army of readers. I'll have to put together a small task force to review DeCampe's cases.” Still, she began reading, scanning, hoping to light on something useful, a verdict, a name, a clue of any sort.