LVMPD Detective Carl “Big Swede” Hansen casually surveyed the new-release shelves at the Vegas Video store in the seedy strip mall. At the counter his partner, Len Traver, listened with growing impatience as the teenage clerk explained once again why he couldn’t provide the information the two cops wanted.
“Like I said, mister, if you give me a name or a membership number, I can enter it in the computer and tell you right away if that person’s ever rented those movies,” said the clerk, a long-haired beanpole with a severe case of adolescent acne. “Or I can print out separate lists of who’s rented each movie. But you’d have to correlate the lists yourself.”
“How long would these lists be?”
“Hey, man, a popular movie like Seven, we’d have maybe fifty copies on the shelf to start with. And each copy would be rented out, you know, like about a hundred times.”
“Jesus Christ, that’s five thousand names,” Detective Traver said glumly. Then he brightened, remembering the suggestion Frank Marshall had given them before they left. “How about just the past month? Can you narrow the list down to customers who have taken out the movie over the past month only?”
“I don’t think so. Lemme check.” The kid pecked on his computer keyboard while the policeman drummed his fingers impatiently on the counter. “Nah. There’s no field to isolate rentals by date. Maybe you better talk to head office.”
“Hey, Swede, come here a minute,” Traver called to his partner. “We got problems.”
Hansen ambled over with a movie in his hand. “Look what I found, Len. I didn’t know it was in the stores yet. Ingrid’s been dyin’ to see this—”
“Never mind that,” his partner returned testily. “This guy says the best they can do is give us everybody who’s ever rented the movies—on separate lists. You know, thousands and thousands of names. He says they can’t isolate them by date. And this is only one store. You know how many freakin’ video outlets there are in Vegas?”
It was almost midnight at the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department on Spring Mountain Road.
By the time Morris Jaworski had listened to the Druperman tape for the thirtieth time, every word was burned into his brain. Ensconced in the audio room with a group of technicians and specialists, the police scientist was at once pleased and frustrated—pleased because their profiler had confirmed that the caller was definitely not the writer of the letters, thus validating their earlier assumption that Thanatos was made up of at least two people; frustrated because all attempts to trace the call had so far met with failure.
Jaworski tossed his Styrofoam cup into the trash basket, atop the remnants of the pizza that the department had provided by way of compensation for the enforced overtime. “Let’s recap what we know,” he said, not bothering to conceal his tiredness from the others. It had been a long day. “Christie, why don’t you start?”
The young audio technician referred to her notes. “There isn’t much on the graphs we can use to identify the speaker. Their filtering device was quite efficient. As David said, the pauses before each reply represent the time their signal took to reach us through a number of relays.
“However, we do know one thing for certain: the caller is definitely a native U.S. English speaker. His use of American colloquialisms and obscenities proves that beyond a doubt.
“Also, there’s that extraneous noise on the tape, just at the end. It could be RF interference—or it could be something else. I’ll scope it out more thoroughly tomorrow, but right now I’m bushed, Sergeant.” She closed her notebook and looked up at Jaworski.
“I understand, Christie, and thanks; we won’t be here much longer. Warren, how about the profile on our caller?”
“We faxed a transcript of the conversation earlier this evening to Lyman Schiff, the dialect specialist at UNLV. Since there was no recognizable speech to actually listen to, Dr. Schiff said a printout would do. He just got back to me. I’m sure none of us wants to hear the rationale for his
conclusions at this late hour?” Warren looked up at Jaworski, who shook his head. “Good. I’ll cut to the chase. The subject is a male in his forties or fifties, reasonably well educated, probably from the Midwest originally. He appears to be a good judge of character and may well be some kind of professional scam artist. The surprising thing about the doctor’s report is that he doesn’t believe the man is a killer.” The specialist paused. “But Lyman says this is only a preliminary report and he’ll analyze the transcript more closely tomorrow. Considering the lateness of the hour and the short notice, this is all he can give us for now.”
Jaworski did not appear impressed. “Except for the part about the subject’s not being a killer, I don’t think there’s much in Schiff’s report we couldn’t have figured out for ourselves. But … it’s a start.” He yawned and stretched. “Okay, David, your turn. Let’s hear the bad news from the trace team one more time.”
A bespectacled technician wiped his glasses and shuffled to his feet. “Bad news is right,” he reported. “All we know is that the call was routed to the Sprint switch off the Internet. We’ve traced it back to AOL, but that’s as far as we can get. Beyond that, it could have come from anywhere in the world—from Australia or from the next room; we just don’t know. And, of course, you can’t get a phone dump from these Internet service providers, because they don’t keep records.”
“That’s too bad, David. But … now that we know how they did it, would we have more success tracing the next call—if there is one?”
“I doubt it, Sarge. These dudes are sharp. They go to incredible lengths to cover their tracks.”
A momentary silence enveloped the room. Sergeant Morris Jaworski looked around at the others, stood up, and reached for his jacket. “All right, everybody, I guess that’s it for tonight. Let’s go home and get some sleep. It’s going to be a busy weekend.”