After transferring the video to my thumb drive, I swap disks and start working on Alison Lister’s kidnapper. The video is bad and I’m not optimistic we’ll be able to identify the make, let alone the model. The truck is just too far away, the resolution is too poor, and the only view is from the side. A portion of the front and rear can be seen at an angle, but few details are revealed. Regardless, I transfer the video.
Plucking the thumb drive from the USB slot, I pause just long enough to check my voice mail: two messages, Mom reminding me about the family picnic in July and my optometrist telling me I’m overdue for an exam.
“I’m heading to the S.O.,” I tell Diane as I pause in her doorway. “I need to see if Dex can ID Leonardo’s car, plus I have the video from Redding.”
“It’s the sheriff’s office, not the S.O.,” Diane replies without looking up. “Just because we work for the government doesn’t mean we have to assign acronyms to everything.”
“S.O.,” I whisper. “S.O.”
An eight-by-ten color photo sits on top of a manila folder at the edge of Diane’s desk. I recognize it immediately. I should; I took it two years ago at Washoe Lake. Picking it up, I stare at the pattern fashioned from rocks in the high desert soil. “I see Jimmy already talked to you.”
Diane nods. “I should have a list for you later this afternoon.”
I place the photo back on her desk, on top of the manila folder. “We have two. I’m betting we find more, making this guy a serial.”
“I hope you’re wrong.”
I tap the photo twice. “He left his calling card; what kind of sick bastard does that? He’s marking his conquests, maybe keeping score.” Diane meets my gaze and I give a curt nod. “He’s a serial; you’ll see.”
*
Dexter Allen’s office at the Whatcom County Sheriff’s Office is a cluttered hole in the basement of the crumbling county jail. Half-buried in the ground with only a handful of windows that look up at the sidewalk outside, the administrative offices of the sheriff’s office are decrepit and worn. The walls are worn, the structural concrete is worn, the floor tiles are worn—even the air is worn, stagnant from poor circulation.
The texture of the ceiling tiles is mismatched due to their constant replacement as various liquids leak down from the jail above: gray water from the jail shower, soapy water from the jail kitchen, and questionable water from the jail toilets, which are frequently and intentionally stuffed with jail toilet paper to cause an overflow.
These internal rainstorms are frequent enough that the shelves in the archives room down the hall are carefully and constantly covered in heavy plastic to protect the original case reports. Sometimes the liquid is clear, other times it’s brown. In one case, brown chunks spilled out onto a desk in the Detectives Division, prompting several detectives to collect the sample for analysis, convinced that the inmates were now defecating on them by proxy.
Dex pays little mind to the crumbling edifice.
Surrounded by his monitors, he crunches data, reviews case reports, and sips Diet Pepsi. The only decoration in the bland office consists of several Civil War paintings on the wall and his diplomas from the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, and the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. He laughingly calls himself a relic of the Cold War, but after seventeen years as a Russian linguist, then intelligence analyst, and finally as a project manager for various “operations” at the Office of Naval Intelligence, he somehow landed this unlikely position as a crime analyst with the sheriff’s office.
He’s on the phone when I walk into his office and plop down in a chair. I only half-listen to the call, something about a wanted burglary suspect hiding out in a house near Maple Falls. No doubt he’s talking to one of the deputies, maybe a detective, but certainly someone keen on getting their hands on the suspect.
The call ends and Dex shoots me a grin.
“Diane said you’d be stopping by. So … how’s Heather?”
“Oh, shut up.”
He chuckles; I’m glad my misery provides joy for so many people. Handing him the thumb drive, I say, “I need a little FVA.”
Forensic vehicle analysis, or FVA, is an analytical process developed by Dex over years and made real in the form of a photo database. The idea came to him after too many blurry surveillance images crossed his desk: an armed robbery showing only the vehicle’s taillights, a rape where the only clue was the image of the front corner of a truck as it pulled into a parking space just off-camera, a homicide with only nighttime images of a passing SUV.
Faced with this onslaught of consistently bad imagery, he did what every good analyst does: He changed the game. Dex doesn’t think outside the box, he redefines it.
When I first heard about FVA two years ago, I called him an out-of-the-box thinker, meaning it as a compliment. He smiled and shook his head. “There is no box.” When I gave him a questioning look, he said, “The idea of thinking machines was once way outside the box, right? Yet now computers are as mainstream as TV, radio, and the printing press—they’re right in the middle of the box with everything else we take for granted day in and day out; therefore there is no box, just vision and actualization.”
He tapped the side of his head with his index finger: “Computer visualized”—then he tapped the CPU on the floor next to his desk—“computer actualized.”
I remember telling him he sounded like a Zen version of Tony Robbins; he just laughed.
Plugging the thumb drive into the USB port, Dex starts a frame-separation program, then selects the video from Bellis Fair and opens it in the program. “Say when,” he murmurs as he fast-forwards through the video clip.