The Friday-evening phone message had been bothering her all weekend and the first thing Paige did when she arrived at work Tuesday morning was call the security office.
“Just transfer the message down here to me, Paige. I’ll take care of it,” Joe Connelly instructed.
“I’m sorry I didn’t save those other calls, Mr. Connelly,” Paige apologized. “They always sounded harmless before this one.”
“Don’t worry about it. If this guy is really dangerous, he’ll call again. When he does, let me know and transfer the messages to me. And, Paige, make sure you mark down what time the calls come in. Be as exact as possible. There could be dozens of other calls coming into the Broadcast Center at any time. It helps a lot to have a precise time.”
Connelly had saved hundreds of calls over the years, but he girded himself to begin the painstaking procedure to determine who this latest caller was. Executing a successful phone trap was not as easy as it looked on Law and Order.
It was simple enough to order the trap but increasingly more difficult to pull it off. There were very few “hard wire” telephone lines anymore. Satellites, prepaid phone cards, cellular accounts, unlisted and blocked numbers, had made tracing much more complicated. The phone companies had outsmarted themselves.
The security chief gave Eliza’s assistant a few minutes to transfer the call and then he played it back to hear for himself.
“I love you, Eliza. And I can’t live without you.”
If this had been the first call, Connelly would have waited awhile to see what developed. But Paige said she recognized the voice as a man who had been calling every day for two weeks.
Aberrant behavior escalates. The dictum was etched in Connelly’s mind.
He dialed the police department and made a complaint on behalf of Eliza Blake.
The wheels were set in motion. A complaint number and detective were assigned and the Unlawful Calls Bureau, located in Boston, gave Eliza’s call a case number.
The phone company would install the “equipment” on the line, setting up an enormously complicated computer program to intercept data pertaining to the calls. To do this sort of thing in a private home was relatively simple. In a place such as the KEY Broadcast Center, with its Centrex system . . . wow!
The Broadcast Center’s central number didn’t really exist. It was in limbo until the call was transferred somewhere. The operators sat at six consoles with six trunk lines each, thirty-six lines in all, spreading out to various trees throughout the company. Once a call was transferred by the operator to a specific extension, the call was not on the operator’s line anymore, making it a nightmare to track.
Connelly swiveled around to his computer to start a new file on this latest threat. As he entered the information, he wished that Paige Tintle had saved those first calls, the ones that had come in during the late-night hours. Not as many calls came into the building late at night, making tracking easier.
If this guy was going to start calling during the busiest hours at the Broadcast Center, he could take months to track down.