91
Rune Alignment
Chapter 34
"Are you telling me these are recordings of a man jerking off?" Louise Kilgore was the head transcriptionist at One Police Plaza, one of the best in the five boroughs. She looked like an apple-pie-baking grandma – short, plump, the color of toast done just right, with a silver bun; she was well into her sixties.
"Uh, yes, actually," said Bobby fighting a laugh. "I've listened to the calls, Louise, and they are pretty rough. They are disgusting. Louise, it is perfectly all right if you don't want to listen to these. It's not a problem."
Louise looked up at the tall detective, he's a good-looking man, she thought. "Are you kidding? Give me that disc. This has to be better than porn." She snatched the disc and walked away. "Give me a couple hours," she yelled over her shoulder. Bobby laughed out loud.
"I'd like to get started on this right away. I don't want to wait for the transcriptions." Huang said into the phone. "How soon can I get a copy of the disc?"
"We've got one with your name on it," Sledge told him. "Do you want to come get it or should we send it over?"
"I'll come there. I want to talk with Detective Goren. Will he be around?"
Sledge answered with, "I'll make sure he knows you're on your way." Sledge hung up and walked over to Bobby's desk. He stood there while Bobby continued writing, ignoring him. Sledge felt his anger rising. You son-of-a-bitch, he thought. "Huang is on his way over to pick up his copy of the calls. He wants to see you when he gets here."
Bobby continued writing, and then said, without looking up, "Yeah."
Bishop met Eames at the coffee pot, "Edward wants to go over his work from Saturday. Think you and Goren can meet us in the conference room in ten?"
"Sure. Edward did a good job correlating the time and distances. He was fast, too. I had no idea he could work like that. He's usually joking around and looking for ways to piss off Bobby."
"So, how was your date?" Bishop asked as they left the coffee room.
"What? How did you . . .?" Eames sputtered.
"Oh, come on Alex. It is so obvious, from both of you. Listen to yourself – 'good job, so fast." You keep looking at each other, finding reasons to have private chats, standing close. You two act like you're in junior high."
Eames thought a moment. "You can tell, huh?"
"As if you wore a sign."
"Bobby, come on, we're going to meet Bishop and Sledge in the conference room. He wants to explain the mapping he did."
Bobby didn't react or answer, but he closed his portfolio and stood up, taking his folder with him.
"And, Bobby, be nice."
He closed his eyes and shook his head, "No promises."
Deakins saw the four heading to the conference room and joined them.
"This is what I've gotten so far from the calls on the professor's cell." Sledge pointed to four columns of number combinations written on a sheet of chart paper on the wall. "The caller made sixteen calls between eight fifty and eleven nineteen Thursday night. That's two hours and forty-nine minutes. These last ten, the ones bracketed here, are the ones that we have messages for. The first six, these, were bumped because her phone only holds ten messages."
"This column indicates the time of each call. This column is the length of each call; each one is seventy-two to ninety seconds long; ninety seconds is the time allotted for each message. This column is the phone number where each call originated. The calls came from four pay phones. This column indicates the distance between each phone. The phones lie within a twenty- to twenty-five block area.
"As you see, the times of the calls appear random – some calls coming right after each other, some with nearly twenty minutes between. When you correlate the locations, distances and times, this is what you get. . ." Sledge moved to the street map and pointed to the four pins with lines running between them.
"Explain what those pins and numbered arrows with numbers mean," Deakins asked.
"The caller was driving between pay phones, making the calls during those two and a half plus hours. He made two to six calls in a row from some phones. I'm thinking he needed to finish doing himself and ninety seconds wasn't enough time, so he kept calling back, sharing his handiwork out loud until he ejaculated and then moved on to the next phone. The arrows indicate which pay phone he went to next after each call. The number next to the arrow indicates the sequence. I checked with the phone company and sure enough, each of these pay phones is a car side phone. He was sitting in his car painting the flag pole."
Eames and Bishop shook their heads at the last comment.
"Good work. That was a lot of data to organize. Keep that chart and map in case we need it for trial if this goes that far," Deakins offered.
"Uh, one suggestion, though," Bobby said, "The column of phone numbers and the column of length of calls should be transposed. It is more a more logical, progressive delivery of information to know the time and place rather than the time and duration." His hands had indicated the switch he offered and he ended looking directly at Sledge.
Sledge looked back at him and thought, You asshole.
Deakins just shook his head.
Bobby had been sitting, stretched out in the chair at the end of the table, right elbow resting on the table, holding up his head with his thumb under his chin. The first call came in right after we got to the coffee shop, he thought, that was the one that Gleason answered and then turned off her phone. He made the last call right before we left. Could he have followed us?
"Where are we on the messages on her home phone?" Eames asked.
"I called Carver's office and a warrant will be ready this afternoon. I thought I would pick it up and run it over to the phone company. We'll probably have the messages tomorrow some time," Sledge reported.
"What about the redirect line? Any messages come in over the weekend?" asked Bishop.
Bobby sat up and said, "Uh, yeah; or, no actually. Jerry said twenty-four calls were made, but no messages were left."
"I wonder why," said Eames.
"Jerry said that with the redirect technology they use in his lab, which is apparently two generations old, a caller will hear a faint click on some land lines. He thinks that's what happened and it spooked the caller. The caller couldn't help himself, though, couldn't not call, and continued trying, despite the click. Nevertheless, he was savvy enough not to leave a message. Jerry was gathering the phone numbers from those calls; he'll send them up when he's done. I suspect they will be from the same pay phones, perhaps additional ones."
"Well, it's a good thing the professor's land line got plugged back in," Sledge said, looking directly at Bobby. "She had unplugged it in her fear," he said, speaking to Deakins. "I wonder how she knew it had to be plugged in?" The smirk in his voice was obvious.
Everyone looked at Bobby, waiting to see what he would do.
"It got taken care of. Ok?" he answered, picking up his portfolio and heading for his desk.
Everyone had returned to their tasks when Deakins stepped from his office and shouted, "Listen up everyone." Every person stopped what they were doing, turned and looked at the boss, "Shots were fired at the university. Get there."