Death Match

by Lincoln Child

“Junk mail outfits have some of the most sophisticated data algorithms around. It isn’t the untargeted bulk people think. Same with telemarketers. Anyway, all this data on you is collected and stored. Stored forever. Our problem isn’t getting enough data: we usually gather too much.”

  “It’s like Big Brother.”

  “Perhaps it seems that way,” said Mauchly. “But with our help, hundreds of thousands of clients have found happiness. And now we might also stop a murderer.”

  There was a knock on the door; Tara rose from the keyboard to open it. A man in a lab coat handed her an ivory-colored folder. Tara thanked him, closed the door, and opened the folder. She stared at the contents a minute.

  “Shit,” she said under her breath.

  “What is it?” Mauchly asked.

  She handed him the folder wordlessly. Mauchly glanced at it a minute. Then he turned to Lash.

  “Our team ran a facial recognition search through our archive of surveillance images,” he said. “We already knew Groesch was around Flagstaff when the Thorpes died, so Tara limited the search to his whereabouts the night of the Wilners’ deaths. The search picked up these images.”

  He handed some photographs to Lash. “Here he is, at an ATM at 3:12 p.m. And here again, running a traffic light at 4:05. And again, buying cigarettes at a liquor store at 4:49. Again at 5:45, shopping for jeans.”

  Lash looked at the photos. They were glossy eight-by-tens, similar to the SOC evidence photos he’d seen at the Bureau. The resolution was remarkably good, and there was no mistaking the blond man with the handlebar moustache for anybody but James Groesch.

  He handed back the pictures with mounting excitement. “Go on.”

  Mauchly pointed to a stamped label on the outside of the folder: MASSAPEQUA, INNER RING, 9/24/04.

  As quickly as it had come, the excitement died away. “So he was in Massapequa while the Wilners bled out in Larchmont,” Lash said.

  Mauchly nodded.

  Lash heaved a sigh. He glanced at the clock: it was just ten-thirty.

  “What now?” he asked.

  But he already knew the answer. Now came their last potential suspect. Gary Handerling. Eden’s own.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I t shouldn’t take long to clear Handerling,” Mauchly said. “Our background checks and psych batteries for prospective employees are even more exhaustive than for clients. I’m a little surprised Liza even flagged him.” The air of disappointment in the office was almost palpable.

  “What’s the procedure?” Lash asked. He sipped his espresso, found it cold, drained it anyway.

  “We have passive monitoring devices in every workstation and cubicle. Keystroke loggers, so forth. It’s no secret, they’re more a preventive measure than anything.” Mauchly opened a different file: a thin manila folder containing only a few sheets. “Gary Joseph Handerling. Thirty-three years old. Formerly employed as data technician for a Poughkeepsie bank. Currently resides in Yonkers. Divorced, no children. Background check turned up nothing except some visits to his high school guidance counselor after breaking up with his first girlfriend.”

  Tara chuckled.

  “Passed his psych evaluation within the nominal benchmarks. Scored high on his leadership and opportunistic scales. Hired by Eden in June of 2001 and put on a revolving internship. Worked six months in Systems Support. Transferred to Data Gathering in January 2002. Finished his internship by moving to Data Scrubbing in August. Given good marks on all performance reviews. Singled out for his high level of motivation and his interest in learning more about the company.”

  A damn Eagle Scout, thought Lash.

  “Became head of his scrub crew last February. Eligible for promotion out of Data Scrubbing, but seems happy in his position.” Mauchly raised his eyes toward Lash. “Fit any profile you know of?” His voice was tinged with a whisper of irony.

  Lash felt defeated. “Not really. Some sociopaths are remarkably good at hiding in plain sight. Look at Ted Bundy. The guy’s age, race, marital status jibe with an organized serial killer. But the consistent employment history goes against the profile. Then again, nothing about these deaths is standard.” He thought a moment. “Is he up to date on his car payments and credit cards? Organized serial killers can be obsessive about not missing payments, not sticking out.”

  Mauchly looked back at the folder. “Tara, can you check the credit agencies, cross-check with the DMV records?”

  “Sure. What’s his SSN?”

  “200-66-2984.”

  “Just a moment.” Tara tapped at the keys. “Everything spic-and-span. No late charges on any cards, going back eighteen months. Car payments up to date.”

  Mauchly nodded.

  “Pretty decent driving record, too. Only two points on his license.”

  “How’d he get those?” Lash asked, more out of habit than any real curiosity.

  “Speeding ticket, probably. Let me check WICAPS.”

  The room fell silent save for the patter of keystrokes.

  “Yup,” Tara said after a moment. “Excessive speed in a residential zone. Recent, too: September 24.”

  “September 24,” Lash repeated. “That was the day—”

  But Tara interrupted. “The location was Larchmont.”

  Larchmont.

  “That was the day the Wilners died,” Lash finished.

  For a second, the office was still as the three exchanged glances. Then Mauchly spoke.

  “Tara,” he said in a very quiet voice. “Can you secure this terminal? I don’t want anybody looking over our shoulder.”

  Tara turned back to the keyboard, typed a series of commands. “You’ve got it.”

  “Let’s start with his credit card records,” Mauchly said. “See if he’s been anywhere interesting in the last month.” His voice remained slow, almost sleepy.

  “Interfacing with Instifax now.” More typing. “He’s been a busy little boy. Lots of restaurant bills, mostly in the city and lower Westchester. Strange: a couple of motel charges, too. One in Pelham, another in New Rochelle.” She looked up. “Why would he be paying for motel rooms fifteen minutes from his apartment?”

  “Keep going,” Mauchly said.

  “Here’s a recent plane ticket: Air Northern. Car rental of just over a hundred bucks. Another lodging charge for one Dew Drop Inne. And here’s an Amtrak charge, too. And what looks like an advance hotel reservation for this coming weekend.”

  “Where?”

  “Just a minute. Burlingame, Massachusetts.”

  “Get onto EasyTrak. Let’s check out those tickets.”

  “On it.” Tara paused, waiting for her screen to refresh. “The plane ticket was a round trip to Phoenix. Leaving La Guardia September 15, returning September 17.”

  “The Thorpes died on September 17,” Mauchly said. “You mentioned a Dew Drop Inne. Where’s that located?”

  The staccato hammer of keys. “Flagstaff, Arizona.”

  Lash felt an electric tingle.

  Slowly, almost casually, Mauchly stood up and came around the table. “Can you bring up the keystroke logs for Handerling’s terminal over, say, the past three weeks?”

  Lash found himself standing and, like Mauchly, approaching the screen.

  “Here we are,” Tara said. Lash saw a torrent of data scroll up the screen: every keystroke Handerling’s typed over the last fifteen business days.

  “Run it through the sniffer.” Mauchly glanced at Lash. “We’ll pass it through an intelligent filter, look for anything he typed that seems suspicious.”

  “The way the government combs email and phone calls, looking for terrorists?”

  “They license the technology from us.”

  “Nothing out of place,” Tara said after a moment. “Sniffer comes up clean.”

  “What job did you say this guy has?” Lash asked.

  “Data Scrub handles the secure archiving of client data, post-processing.”

  “Post-processing. You mean, once a match is made.”


  “That’s correct.”

  “And you said he has a leadership position. Could that give him access to sensitive, personal data?”

  “We slice client data across several scrub teams to minimize such access. It’s theoretically possible. But if he’d been snooping around, it would have shown up in his keystroke logs.”

  “Could he have accessed the data from a different terminal?”

  “Terminals are coded by identity bracelet. If he’d used a different terminal, we’d know about it.”

  The room fell silent. Mauchly stared at the screen, arms folded across his chest.

  “Tara,” he said. “Run frequency analysis against the keystrokes. See if he deviated from his normal work at any time.”

  “Give me a minute.” The screen refreshed, and a series of parallel columns appeared: dates, times, obscure acronyms meaningless to Lash.

  “Nothing stands out,” Tara said after a moment. “It all seems routine.”

  Lash found himself holding his breath. Was it going to happen again: would they find themselves at the threshold of a breakthrough, only to reach another dead end?

  “If anything, too routine,” Tara added.

  “How so?” Mauchly asked.

  “Well, look at this. Each day, from precisely 2:30 to 2:45, the exact same commands are repeated.”

  “What’s unusual about that? It could be some daily activity, like freshening an archive.”

  “Even those vary a little: new datasets, different backup locations. But here, even the volume names are the same.”

  Mauchly peered at the screen for a long moment. “You’re right. For fifteen minutes each day, the keystrokes are precisely identical.”

  “And they’re typed at precisely the same time each day.” Tara pointed at the screen. “Down to the second. How likely is that?”

  “So what’s it mean?” Lash asked.

  Mauchly glanced at him. “Our employees know their work is monitored. Handerling knows that if he tried anything obvious—like disabling the keystroke logger, for instance—he’d come under immediate attention. Looks like he’s found a way to throw up a smokescreen, perhaps run a macro of innocuous commands while he’s actually doing something else.”

  “He may have found a vulnerability in the system,” said Tara. “Some loophole or flaw he’s exploiting.”

  “So is there some way we can see what he was really up to during those fifteen minutes?” Lash asked.

  “No,” said Mauchly.

  “Yes,” said Tara.

  They looked at her.

  “Maybe. We also use video cameras to take screen captures of all management terminals, right? They’re infrequent, and random. But maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  She typed a fresh flurry of commands, then paused. “Looks like there’s been only one recent screen capture from Handerling’s terminal during that fifteen-minute block. On September 13.”

  “Can you print it out, please?” Mauchly asked.

  She moused a few commands and the printer on the desk began to hum. Mauchly grabbed the sheet as it fed out and they looked at the blurred image:

  EDEN—PROPRIETARY AND CONFIDENTIAL

  RESULTS OF SQL QUERY AGAINST DATASET A$4719

  OPERATOR: UNKNOWN

  TIME: 14:38:02.98 SEPT 13 04

  CPU CYCLES: 23054

  END QUERY

  “Oh, Jesus,” Tara breathed.

  “Those other names,” Lash said. “Supercouples?”

  Mauchly nodded. “All six to date.”

  But Lash barely heard him. His mind was racing now. Serial killers are creatures of habit . . .

  Staring at the list, he remembered something—something chilling.

  “You mentioned an Amtrak ticket,” he said to Tara. “And an advance motel reservation?”

  Tara’s eyes suddenly widened. She turned back to the keyboard.

  “A reservation on the Acela to Boston. This coming Friday morning.”

  “And the motel location?”

  “Burlingame, Massachusetts.”

  Mauchly stepped away from the terminal. The dispassionate demeanor was gone. “Tara, I want you to get a record of Handerling’s phone calls. Both from his desk and his apartment. Will you do that?”

  Tara nodded, picked up the phone.

  “Thank you.” Mauchly started for the door, turned back. “Now, Dr. Lash, you’ll have to excuse me. There are several things I need to do.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  I n many ways, the scene was like the others: the room in disarray, the mirrors broken, the bedroom curtains swept back as if inviting the night to witness the outrage. And yet in others it was very, very different. The woman lay in an embarrassment of blood, flowing from the ruined body in a terrible corona. And in the merciless glare of the crime lights the walls shone white, naked, devoid of any scrawled messages.

  Captain Masterton glanced up from the corpse. His face had the pinched look of a cop under pressure from all directions.

  “I was wondering when you’d get here, Lash. Say hello to victim number three. Helen Martin, aged thirty-two.”

  Masterton kept staring at him. He seemed about to make another biting comment on the thinness of Lash’s profile. But he merely shook his head in disgust.

  “Christ, Lash, you’re like a zombie. Every time I see you, you look a little worse.”

  “We’ll go into that some other time. How long has she been dead?”

  “Less than an hour.”

  “Any indication of rape? Vaginal penetration?”

  “The ME’s on his way, but there doesn’t appear to be any. No signs of a burglary gone wrong, either. Just like the others. But we caught a bit of a break this time. A neighbor called in the commotion. No description of a vehicle, but we’ve already got cars stationed at major intersections, freeway on-ramps. Maybe we’ll catch a break.”

  The crime scene was still so fresh the local cops were just beginning to work it: snapping photos, dusting for prints, chalking the body. He stood there, staring down at the body. There it was again: that maddening sense that everything was out of place. It was like a jigsaw puzzle with the wrong pictures pasted onto the pieces. It didn’t fit, and even when it did it didn’t look right. He knew, because he’d been putting it together and taking it apart in his mind, over and over and over, for days. It was like a fire burning in his head, consuming all his thoughts, devouring his sleep.

  The body was brutalized in what was clearly a blitz attack. That was the hallmark of a socially defective killer. And yet the house was secluded, backing up on woods, private: this was no crime of opportunity, no blitz attack. And then there were the broken mirrors, which normally indicated a killer’s discomfort with creating such a scene. But such killers also covered their victims, hid their faces: this woman was naked, her limbs arranged with a ghastly provocativeness. And yet again this crime was not about sex. It was not about robbery. And this time, there was not even the ritual halo of severed toes and fingertips to lend a compulsive taint to the murder.

  To build a profile, you had to get into the head of the murderer, ask questions. What had happened in this room? Why did it happen this particular way? Even mass-murderers had their twisted logic. But there was no logic here, no foundation on which to build an understanding.

  His eyes traveled over the walls of the bedroom. In the previous two murders, they had been covered with rambling, half-coherent rants: a bloody mélange of contradiction.

  This time, the walls were blank.

  Why?

  His eyes stopped on the big picture window facing the woods behind the house. As before, the blinds were thrown wide, revealing a pane of black that reflected the sodium lights back at him. It was hard to be sure in the painful glare, but he thought he could make out faint smudges on the glass, black upon black.

  “Masterton. Can you direct those lights away from the window?”

  The ME had just arrived, and the captain had moved across the room to confer
with him. He looked over.

  “What was that, Lash?”

  “Those lights there, by the window. Turn them this way.”

  Masterton shrugged, spoke to Ahearn, his second in command.

  As the glare of the light hit him, the window fell into shadow. He stepped forward, Masterton following now. High up on the glass, a few large words were scrawled in bloody finger-paint:

  I’ve got what I need now. Thank you.

  “Oh, shit,” he murmured.

  “He’s done,” Masterton said, coming up, Detective Ahearn at his shoulder. “Thank God, Lash. It’s finished.”

  “No,” he replied. “No, it’s not. It’s just beginning . . .”

  Lash sat up in bed, wide awake, waiting for the memories to fade. He glanced at the clock: half past one. He stood up, then hesitated, sinking back to the side of the bed.

  Four nights in a row, with perhaps as many hours of sleep to show for all of them. He couldn’t afford to show up at Eden semiconscious; not tomorrow, he couldn’t.

  He rose again and—without giving himself a chance to reconsider—went to the bathroom, pulled out the box of Seconal, grabbed a small handful, and washed them down with a mouthful of water. Then he returned to bed, arranged the covers carefully, and gradually slipped into dark dreams.

  It was the sound of church bells that woke him; the bells of his wedding, pealing from the dust-bleached mission of Carmel-by-the-Sea. And yet the bells were too loud somehow, and they went on and on, refusing to stop.

  Lash forced his eyes open, realized it was the telephone. When he sat up, the room reeled. Closing his eyes, he lay back once again, feeling blindly for the phone.

  “Yes,” he said, voice thick.

  “Dr. Christopher Lash?”

  “Yeah.”

  “This is Ken Trotwood from New Olympia Savings and Loan.”

  Lash forced his eyes open again, glanced at the clock. “Do you know what time—”

  “I know it’s early, Dr. Lash. I’m very sorry. But we haven’t been able to reach you any other way. You haven’t responded to our letters or calls.”

  “What are you talking about?”